Poetry faculty member Daisy Fried was recent featured in On the Seawall. Read an excerpt of Fried’s poem “Hate Barrel,” a poem after Baudelaire, below:
The organizers of the 2022 Summer Virtual Goddard/Warren Wilson Alumni Conference (“Wally Camp”) are happy to announce that the conference date has been set! Clear your calendars for Wednesday, July 13 through Sunday, July 17.
As with the last three conferences, it will be hosted via Zoom. We’re sorry that we can’t meet in person this year, but the vagaries of the pandemic continue to make that unworkable.
On May 3 we will send out a registration form, and you will have between then and June 5 to submit it. In the meantime, work up your manuscripts; dream up your classes, caucuses, and bookshops; and get ready to rally with Wallies!
If you’re new or have forgotten how a Virtual Wally Conference operates, see the Wally Camp website at to get an idea of what it was like last year. (The 2021 website will be taken down in April.) https://sites.google.com/view/wallycamp/
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1992 poetry alum Cheryl Baldi was recently featured in One Art. Read an excerpt of Baldi’s poem “Later” below:
Later
We speak in whispers, move in silence from room to room, listen to the oxygen’s steady pump, moisture bubbling through the tubes. Three days unresponsive. I sit with her until someone else comes in. Years from now I will remember these moments, the counter scattered with crumbs from half eaten sandwiches, the tide low, winds calm…
I’ve been told I was coaxed to life—jolted, shocked, pumped. Some days, I remember the muted glare of hospital light, tubes, and wires. Other days, I hear the whisper of nurses’ feet as if they’re just in the other room. Stories of my birth lurk in every corner of the house until they become tangled with my own memories. Night after night, my mother slept next to me. Me, her half-formed baby glinting in the incubator. Let God take her, the Baptist doctor advised. No, my mother snapped. Me, her half-formed baby. Undo me, unwish me, unmake me.
TWO SIGNS FLANK the corner of Foster and Ashland and tell me that I’m beautiful. They tell you that too. They’re democratic, meant for everyone.
One is on the old Trumbull Elementary marquee, the school closed now, a casualty of the mayor’s 2013 public ed blitzkrieg, and the marquee, once like the town crier, dispensing news and notifying parents of the next local school council meeting, repurposed for fashionable positivism: you are beautiful. Even the typography is democratic, all lower case.
The other, across the street — bigger, the outsize letters affixed to a chain-link fence enclosing the Swedish Museum’s parking lot — is in cahoots.
you are beautiful.
It’s inescapable.
That’s how I feel, stopped at the light, catching sight of first one and then the other. Hemmed in by these converging signs, this suspicious sentiment. Or maybe the suspicion is all mine. What is this public treacle? I balk at being forced to feel good by signs put up by feel-good public artists. It’s coercion with a smile.
When I mentioned the you are beautiful signage to my friend M. — who’d seen it as well, in another part of the city, this time against the backdrop of Lake Michigan — she said it felt like a prayer.
I much prefer this New Yorker cartoon I come across a few days later. It seems like a well-timed act of cultural providence for those who favor the scouring effects of reality to the desperate fakery of well-meaning pablum. The cartoon is set in Times Square. Throngs of tourists — many of whom are taking pictures with their outstretched cell phones or tablets, devices raised in salute to self, kitsch, food, money — are dwarfed by the manic commercialism surrounding them. Everyone is jammed together, seen from the back, assembled like a congregation in worship of the Square, except for one guy turned away from the mainstage and stuffing an oversized sandwich in his mouth. Screens reign; even the empty square of somebody’s backpack looks like a laptop. The signs — all but McDonald’s, whose arches dominate — dispense with the corporate signifiers of the stores and cut right to the chase. You’re too fat/You’re ugly/You’re hungry!/You’re thirsty/Eat now/Eat more/You’re horny/You’re poor/You’re very ugly/Be less ugly/Boobs/Escape/Spend more $/Just Fat/You’re still ugly/You are dumb. A cab’s top light gets in on it too: Eat. The packaging has been ripped off, the messages relentless. Warning, insult, mockery, yearning. An American flag flies overhead. We don’t know what we’re buying but we do.
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Thinking of My Wife as a Child By The Sea, While We Clean Mussels Together
A poem for Sunday
Before prising keel worms off the backs of mussels, we have to tap them with a knife, when good sense, fear, life, shuts their lips. I do chop the lemongrass. I do close the lid. Their bodies inside are soft. It hurts me to do it, but not for long. We bring the shell-clatter after to the loch with our dog and son…
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Cynthia Dewi Oka
Brian S: As I wrote in my piece introducing Fire Is Not a Country as the Poetry Book Club’s November selection, I was drawn to the theme of fire—in the title as well as in so many of the poems. Can you talk some about the centrality of that image to your work?
Cynthia Dewi Oka: That’s a great question, Brian. Similarly to you, I was brought up in a very religious family, and fire as a purifying and divine element was a major theme throughout my childhood, mostly used to inspire fear and obedience. But fire was also a constant in my environment. This is kind of dark, but church burnings were quite regular when I was growing up in Indonesia, as well as trash fires dotting the night.
Kimberly Sailor: Hello! Cynthia, I loved this book. Or rather, “love,” to be active about it, because I think about your poems quite a bit. I would love to know more about your choice to include the “interludes.” As writers, we’re taught to make sure everything fits, that everything is tidy… did you question your process with these interludes?
When I first read the title, I presumed it meant living in a world on fire is no way to live.
Cynthia Dewi Oka: Kimberly, yes! Both in the way we imagine fire as a destructive and purifying force.
The interludes were an important element of the creative process for me when I was finalizing the manuscript.
I was feeling at that point, limited and exhausted by poetic techniques. I was also thinking about the people I wanted to engage, who are in fact central figures in the book—like my mother, for instance, or my son, to whom the book is dedicated. Writing in screenplay form allowed me to both expand the frame of the book, as well as to create a more collaborative, interactive space within the book. It was important to me to be able to engage the people in the communities I write from, for whom poetry is not necessarily an accessible form.
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WHEN ROXANA GOT HOME, she heard voices in the kitchen, and when she hung her keys by the door and carried her shopping into the room, she saw a new face — and the world’s hammer struck destiny’s gong or the opposite, destiny’s hammer struck the world’s gong. Either way, at that moment everything changed. One could say it was as if she’d sustained an electric shock that brought her body to the limit of its electrical capacity; or as if the planet had suddenly changed direction, which made her head spin. One could also say that the earth broke open and hellfire blazed up her legs, or the heavens opened and divine rays of light blinded her. A comet struck earth; the ice cracked wide under her feet; she had been hurled into a new universe; Albert Speer’s Schwerbelastungskörper had fallen on her head —
something of that sort. Put simply, in the instant she saw the new face, a guillotine was released, its knife making a precise cut that marked an epoch of her life. From then on there was a before and after, and she would always know the exact moment in which her life had been radically altered: when I came home after shopping, he sat in the kitchen, and from then on everything was different.
“Hello, here you are,” was what greeted her. “Roxana, this is Josh.” He stood up immediately (“Josh, this is Roxana”), beamed at her and held out his hand to pull her from the before into the after. But it was not so easy to grasp that hand — nothing was normal now and even the smallest action required careful thought and planning before it could be undertaken.
First she needed to put down her groceries. And for that she had to turn away from this new person, and that took some time because she wanted nothing more from life than to look at that face forever. With effort, she spun around to put her bag on the counter between the stove and refrigerator. At last her hands were free, and she turned and took his hand, which pulled her safely and definitively into the hereafter — which quickly changed into the never-ending present.
“Hello,” he said, “I’m Josh.”
“Hello,” she said, “Roxana. My pleasure.” She didn’t let go of his hand immediately in order to completely absorb the face that everything now would depend on. And yet she couldn’t see the face clearly as it was a bit too near for her age-related, weak eyesight. So she let go of his hand and put her glasses on to study it exactly. She saw all his pores, lines, hair, and bumpy skin very distinctly. But that didn’t help a bit, it was just a face. Except it tunneled through her to a place that she hadn’t known was still there. She took the glasses off and Josh’s face changed back into a young prince’s.
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A girl glues a mustard seed to white draft paper. She steps back to admire her work. This is my origin story, she announces to her art teacher who will never understand her. Later, she adds blue-eyed grasses and black hawthorn.
She steps back to admire her work. This is my origin story. Chatter about the timid, rootless girl fills the halls. Later, she adds: Blue-eyed grasses + black hawthorn = my body. In my gut, that’s where alfalfa sprawls.
