“Making Manuscripts: An Irregularly Braided Conversation,” featuring Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (Poetry ’05) and Annie Kim (Poetry ’09)

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet, a 2005 graduate, was recently featured in the DMQ Review. Read an excerpt of Stonestreet’s conversation with 2009 graduate and poet Annie Kim below:

Making Manuscripts: An Irregularly Braided Conversation

LGS: When I was first trying to put a pile of my poems together in a manuscript—I’m not much of a crier, but I tried and tried, and I cried every time. Really. It became very clear that I had no idea what I was doing. How did these poems talk to each other? Did they even belong together? Did I even have anything to say? I had been thinking in terms of individual poems for so long, and there was no obvious form or narrative to tie them together. Or that’s what I thought. Now I believe that, as I insist to students when I teach, you may feel like there’s nothing connecting your poems, but each of them comes from the same consciousness. You have obsessions, and ways of thinking and perceiving the world, of making patterns; that is inescapable. And so those poems do talk to each other, more than you realize—they can’t not. Your job is to find out how.

The last semester of my MFA, I studied with Marianne Boruch, who is brilliant. I wanted to understand ordering poems, so she had me map out the flow of a bunch of first books. It was like following a trail through the forest with a magnifying glass, just mapping step by step. And I was suddenly able to order my work. In retrospect, that jibes with how I’ve ended up making anything I write. I try to get out of my own way and trust my internal compass. Eventually, it’s time to figure out what’s going on, what this new thing wants to be. I sort of reverse-engineer that understanding—being open to what’s working, finding the energy. Can the poem strike that spark elsewhere? And if I’m editing someone else’s manuscript, or teaching, then I also need to translate that intuitive process into a discussion of craft, without being overly prescriptive or killing the mystery. 

AK: I do that reverse-engineering, too. You said two things I want to touch on. The first is the idea that everything that comes out of us as poems is related. I firmly believe that. And I think that more than anything else we’ll probably talk about, that intuition, that trust, is crucial. Because if it comes out of you from a genuine place versus, say, “I have to fulfill a promise that someone’s given me,” everything is going to be related.

How they relate is a big piece. But for me, it’s also about the arc of the manuscript and the eventual “so what?,” the “what happened next?” 


LGS: Yes. And that can happen outside what we usually think of as narrative; it’s more like mapping movement of thinking and feeling, how a consciousness evolves over the course of the book.


AK: Right. I don’t know if “clarity” is the right word for me here, but it’s making that pencil line darker and darker. Making more and more of a contour so that consciousness becomes more developed on the page, more real.


LGS: Self-aware but not self-conscious. We’ve talked about therapy before—how you get that deepening understanding over time. There can be similar movement through a book of poems, even if the aim of the book is different.

Having struggled so much with what eventually became Tulips, Water, Ash, I was nervous about putting together the manuscript of The Greenhouse. But it was such a different experience. All that practice and analysis Marianne had me do had soaked in and fermented. I’d finally ordered the earlier book in a way that worked; maybe I could do it again. And The Greenhouse had a strong chronological element—all the poems at least touch on the intense early years of parenting, which gave me a default to push against. I listened to my intuition, and there was something there to hear. And when I backed up and tried to figure out why I had made certain choices, they still made sense. 

So I’ve just finished the manuscript of Annihilation, and I’m at a stage of casting about, seeing if anything happens. For me, that can mean very little happening for a long time. I mean, I’m still putting notes in my journal and dumping them into a folder and not looking at them. Eventually, I have to trust that something new will happen, and I will write actual poems again, and they will be somehow different from my old work, and I can follow their threads to make more poems. This gets less stressful each time, since it somehow happened before, right?

Read the conversation in its entirety here: https://www.dmqreview.com/stonestreetkim-spring21

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“Finding the Note,” by Robert Thomas (Poetry ’02)

Poetry alum Robert Thomas was recently featured in the DMQ Review. Read an excerpt of Thomas’s essay, “Finding the Note,” below:

Finding the Note

If you want to be an artist, is it condemning yourself to mediocrity even to think about craft? That’s the question that came to mind when I was asked to write something about craft. Craft is what those academic MFA types worry about, not real artists, isn’t it? As Allen Ginsberg famously said, “First thought, best thought.” But we can see this romantic thought embraced long before the Beats. One of the most damning remarks ever made about craft was in a letter by Keats: “If Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.”

Nevertheless, we may be grateful that Keats revised “The Eve of St. Agnes” so that instead of the embarrassment of watching Madeline “unclasp her bosom jewels” and “loosen her bursting bodice” (yes, that was Keats’ first draft!), she “unclasps her warmèd jewels” and “loosens her fragrant bodice”—changes that enhance not only the sensuality but the precision of the images, even if the bursting bodice came as naturally to Keats as leaves to a tree.

*

In 1997 Dustin Hoffman received the Golden Globe lifetime achievement award, and in his acceptance speech he talked about an artist’s craft:

I remember being in a hotel room in 1967 in San Francisco one night and I’m flipping the TV dials after doing all this promoting all day long, and there is this little old Jewish guy with a bald head sitting at a piano in his living room and he’s being interviewed. And I suddenly realize I’m looking at Igor Stravinsky, the great Russian-American composer.

The interviewer is saying to him, “So Mr. Stravinsky, what is the greatest moment for you? Is it when you finally write your symphony?” And Stravinsky says, “No, No, No.” He sounds like a New York cab driver. “Is it when you’ve heard it played the first time by a symphony?” And he says, “No, no, no.” “What about opening night when they premier it and herald it as being one of the great works of the 20th century?” And he says, “No, no, no.” “So what is the greatest moment for you?”

He’s there sitting at the piano with some music on the thing there and he says, “I’m sitting here at the piano all day long, and for three, four hours I’m trying to find a note. I can’t find the note, and I’m going bum bum … bum Bum … bum BUM for three hours. Finally after three hours I find that note. Bum bum! That’s the moment. There is nothing like it. That’s everything.” So I started crying ….

That’s a perfect description of craft in the service of art. The art, after all, is in knowing which note is the note. But it must be done without becoming too obsessive. I once had a fantasy that if only my brain was a computer that could scan the entire Oxford English Dictionary in a fraction of a second, then writing would simply be a matter of picking out the perfect word to follow the last word, then picking out the perfect word to follow that one (perhaps Keats’ warmèd jewels).

Read the essay in its entirety here: https://www.dmqreview.com/robertthomas-spring21

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“Oh, Maria,” by Ethna McKiernan (Poetry ’04)

Poetry alum Ethna McKiernan was recently featured in the Innisfree Poetry Journal. Read an excerpt of “Oh, Maria” below:

Oh, Maria

One Thursday at Homeless Services

More days than I’d like
I remember Maria staggering toward me
into the lobby and dying in my arms—
how I was wrong to think we needed to call Detox
rather than the ambulance, how she couldn’t, except
with wild eyes, speak, but shook
and shook and shook.  
The bright lights of the lobby
made me dizzy.    
Maria slumped against me
and I yelled for water, water, someone get water,
but when I held the glass to her lips,
her fingers pushed mine away
and she began to choke.
I just didn’t get how fast
she was slipping away, how
I should have yelled for more help
and put her on the floor to do CPR,
if I remembered, God help me, how.
No pulse, but I kept holding her.

Read the poem in its entirety here: http://authormark.com/artman2/publish/Innisfree_32ETHNA_MCKIERNEN.shtml

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“Gig Economy,” by Margaret Ray (Poetry ’20)

“Gig Economy,” a poem by 2020 graduate Margaret Ray, was recently featured in Scoundrel Time. Read an excerpt below:

Gig Economy

I am a person you can pay to outsource
the in-person trolling of your long-distance nemeses.
On Monday, I got paid enough to buy a sandwich
for side-eyeing someone at a coffee shop.  Yesterday,
it was knocking someone’s ice cream onto the sidewalk
and then yelling “Mike says have a great day!”
while I made my escape. Today I have a pricey one.
Enough money for a fancy meal to call and cancel
Ubers until my client’s nemesis picks me up,
then boo them while they drive me
a single city block, at rush hour.
It can be hard to maintain a constant,
seething rage from a great distance.  Outrage
is knee-jerk, but rage is personal.  I provide
an important service.  The app makes sure to warn users
about how revenge can never satisfy.

Read the poem in its entirety here: https://scoundreltime.com/gig-economy/

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“The Way Things Are Supposed to Be,” by Daye Phillippo (Poetry ’14)

2014 poetry alum Daye Phillippo was recently featured in Flying Island. Read an excerpt of her poem “The Way Things Are Supposed to Be” below:

The Way Things Are Supposed to Be

Come, walk with me, friend, out to the mailbox

   the way we used to walk together when I lived

across the road. Older sister-friend who graduated 

   from high school, year I was born, and who still lives 

there, widowed and unable to walk much of anywhere, 

   anymore, but who can still go with me on the phone. 

I walk and listen while you tell me about your latest

   doctor’s visit, and that you saw the red fox again, skimming 

across your backyard, and that your first husband is  

   back in your life, a blessing who brings you groceries, 

and rubs your aching back. And I tell you what I see—

   the deer tracks cut deep in the stone-sand 

shoveled to patch the potholes in the gravel drive. 

Read the poem in its entirety here: http://www.flyingislandjournal.org/2021/02/the-way-things-are-supposed-to-be-poem.html

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“What’s Brittle,” by Noah Stetzer (Poetry ’14)

Poetry alum Noah Stetzer was recently featured in Scoundrel Time. Read an excerpt of “What’s Brittle” below:

What’s Brittle

That place where
it breaks—the faint
hairline crack

that snakes
its spider web
lines out in all

directions, jigsawing
sharp pieces out
of what was once

just a single thing:
a window
I have looked through

forgetting the glass.
The oak seen
for weeks at the top

of the commons
this morning
we found felled…

Read the poem in its entirety here: https://scoundreltime.com/whats-brittle/

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“Beach,” by Monica Youn

The New Yorker recently featured a series of poems by poetry faculty member Monica Youn. Read an excerpt of one of these poems, “Beach,” below:

Beach

she’s tacky with lipstick

kisses she’s smeared with unctuous

brags envious mutters cling to her

like limp lace hankies charged with

static she flees to the beach she

scrubs herself with saltwater with

sand her peerless lustre shines

unmarred her scouring only serves

to polish it to a serener sheen she

sheathes herself in a tawny coat…

Read the poem series in its entirety here: https://www.newyorker.com/books/poems/study-of-two-figures-dr-seuss-chrysanthemum-pearl

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“Funicular,” by Rebecca Foust (Poetry ’10)

“Funicular,” a poem by 2010 graduate Rebecca Foust, was recently featured in Tikkun. Read an excerpt below:

Funicular

On seeing Gaudi’s model in the Sagrada Familia

Oh merciful God, please don’t let me die
before I’ve used Gaudi’s model in a poem
that can outwit art like he cheated gravity
& math, bags of birdshot hung plumb
to suspend & subvert verticality

Read the poem in its entirety here: https://www.tikkun.org/blog/2020/10/12/funicular/

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Abby Wender (Poetry ’18) reads from “Reliquary”

2018 poetry graduate Abby Wender was recently featured in DMQ Review’s digital salon. See Wender read from her book of poetry, Reliquary, at the link below:

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“Men I Hate: The Stasi Men,” by Lynette D’Amico (Fiction ’13)

Lynette D’Amico, a 2013 fiction graduate, was recently featured in Guernica. Read an excerpt of D’Amico’s essay below:

Men I Hate: The Stasi Men

All the dogs in Berlin had the same face. A wiry, bearded face with intelligent eyes and perked ears. None of the dogs paid me the slightest bit of attention even though I was so dog hungry, missing our Labradoodle and yellow Lab back home in Boston. The German dogs trotted with purpose and never veered from the path to chase a duck or leap into the water or bark to say hi or keep away. This is what it means to be a good dog in Berlin.

It was 2018 and my husband and I were living in Berlin, where he was on an academic fellowship and I was there as “spouse of.” My position relegated me to the outer circle of the big-headed fellows, which was fine with me. It was part of the story of our relationship—he was a front guy, I preferred to watch the scene around me. We were also there to try and put our marriage back together following my husband’s gender transition from a queer woman to a man, which began two years earlier, in 2016. How would it be to live someplace where nobody knew our specific relationship history or had known us in a previous incarnation as a queer couple? Were we still a queer couple? The hope was that in a setting where somebody was cooking and cleaning for us, we would stop fighting about whose turn it was to vacuum and what’s for dinner and get to the big fights, such as, were we going to stay married?

We were living in Wannsee, a southwestern suburb of Berlin, on the River Havel. While there, I visited the late summer garden at the Liebermann-Villa, the summer residence of the painter Max Liebermann, on a tour with a cohort of fellows. A small birch allée leads to Lake Wannsee and features prominently in many of Liebermann’s paintings. There is a bronze otter fountain, purple cabbages planted among the dahlias, a rose arbor. It is an artist’s garden, with vivid colors and crafted views. After Liebermann died in 1935, the house was confiscated by the Nazis. I wandered nearly next door to the House of the Wannsee Conference, an imposing villa that now operates as a museum, where, in 1942, in an eighty-five-minute meeting, fifteen men decided “the final solution to the Jewish question,” and then were served lunch and drank cognac.

* * *

At the Table

At the obligatory group dinner every night, a dreamy Italian German waiter pulled out the chairs for all the women and poured endless glasses of wine with his hand over his heart. I felt lit up in the spotlight of his beautiful service. He was soft-spoken and had a delicious accent. He greeted me with warmth and eagerness, anticipated my needs, and spoke to me as though he were kissing my hand. He was my favorite. My husband sat with his elbows on the table, chatting up his fellow fellows about digital philosophy and Balkan politics and the fifteenth-century Ottoman empire.

“To reduce a gender transition to being in the wrong flesh bag in my experience is problematic…”

“If the condemned recanted, the person was strangled before the fire was lit—a mercy execution.”

“…neoliberalism is about the individual, not the group!”

My husband was the first trans person to be selected as a fellow for this program, to sit at this table. His award had been publicized, which mostly preempted the need for him to introduce himself as trans, which he had no hesitation about doing. It did happen, more than once, though, that when he described living as a “white, Midwestern girl from a small town in Indiana for fifty years,” an audience member didn’t recognize the signifier—the bearded, burly guy in the designer glasses—as the signified. “Who was the middle-aged woman from Indiana you were talking about?” he was asked.

* * *

The Questions We Carried

There were two single women among the fellows. When I wanted to get my girl on, we sneaked cigarettes and complimented each other’s wardrobe selections. “I love your shoes!” “I love your shoes!” My husband called them my lesbian girlfriends. They were my favorites.

My husband liked to dress in streetwear and overpriced sneakers. He was peppy and happy and filled with joy. Before the transition, he never sweated. In Berlin, he sweat and sweat like a hairy sweating man. He was proud of his sweat. “Look at this sweat,” he said at the dinner table, happily sweating.

As conversations went on around me, I nodded agreeably left and right, chewing and swallowing my German meaty meat meals—pink boar’s meat ravioli, twice-cooked venison, mussels with fennel and blood oranges, lamb’s lettuce with grape and bacon vinaigrette. If anybody asked me anything directly, I panicked into muteness.

“Your husband says you like to cook; maybe you can take a cooking class during your time in Berlin.”

“Perhaps you are interested in cheese culture?”

“What are the ruins of capitalism?”

Every table conversation felt like an interview for a job I was not going to get.

My husband’s question for me was, could I love a man, specifically, him? I had the same question for myself. I mean, you love the person, not a body, not a gender, and what did it matter after nearly twenty years together? People stay married for all kinds of reasons. My husband and I had a joint bank account. We shared an aesthetic sensibility, except for my disdain for streetwear and sneakers. We were both Italian. We weren’t going to break up, were we?

Read the essay in its entirety here: https://www.guernicamag.com/men-i-hate-the-stasi-men/

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