“Nautical Twilight,” a poem by poetry alum Jen Ryan Onken, was recently featured on The Night Heron Barks. Read an excerpt below:
Nautical Twilight
But when below decks Jason
tried to stitch his lips to mine
the sun was still twelve degrees
under the slipknot of dawn.
By the Equinox, he’d cast
himself off from the moored
hull of the horizon…
Read the poem in its entirety here: https://nightheronbarks.com/fall-2020/jen-ryan-onken/
2020 fiction graduate Daniel Tam-Claiborne was recently featured on LitHub. Read an excerpt of his essay below:
The stories we tell about ourselves say a lot about how we’d like to be seen. Here’s mine:
Before it was the Pacific heir to the American century, China was an apparition lodged in the back of my throat. My mother, whose family fled China following the Japanese invasion in the mid-20th century, grew up in Cuba and came to America when she was six years old. She married—and, not long after, divorced—my father, an Anglo-American Jew, and I grew up the eldest of two children in a shared one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, New York.
My identity as Chinese American has long been central to my “origin story,” but the truth is, there is an inherent tension between who I espouse to be and the person I am. For anyone who identifies as mixed race, this tension is all too familiar: being too much of one thing, too little of something else. Being mixed race means only ever having partial authority, and the very nature of my heritage has had the unintended effect of leading me to double down on race as a marker of identity. In other words, race is the primary lens through which I would want me, the protagonist of my own life, to be read.
POC and marginalized writers often wrestle with an obligation to present race in their prose and have historically been seen as “writing on behalf” of their identity. I wanted to understand how other contemporary Asian American writers grapple with marking identity, and especially race, in their characters through choices in dialect or speech, and what, if anything, they can teach us about how Asian Americans can use their voice today.
Read the rest of the essay here: https://lithub.com/navigating-crisis-on-asian-american-solidarity-in-a-post-covid-america/
2017 poetry alum Amanda Newell recently interviewed Reginald Dwayne Betts (Poetry ’10) for Plume Poetry. An excerpt of the interivew with Betts, who just wrote for the New York Times, can be found below:
AN: Since you mention the “tension between what we intend work to do and what it actually does,” I wonder if you might comment on the idea that writers shouldn’t veer from the lane or lanes of their own experience. I’m talking specifically about persona poems which attempt to embody the voice of the/an other, but in so doing, draw widespread criticism for appropriating that voice rather than speaking from it.
Does it ultimately depend on the dynamics of who is writing from what voice—and whether the assumed persona is working to destabilize traditional power structures as opposed to reinforcing them? Is the answer not to try because failing means further marginalizing that voice? And where does that, then, leave the imagination? How can we have meaningful conversation around this issue, especially when it involves matters of race?
RDB: A few minutes ago I finished reading Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country. A novel, the book does a lot of important historical and emotional work around how Black folks in America have historically confronted racism. It’s a good book. Kind of science fiction, but running right alongside this country’s history, using art to dramatize the lasting effects — and getting a good number of things in there, from lynching to redlining to the economic legacy of slavery. And it’s all done quite seamlessly. Oh yeah, Ruff is white.
When people do it right, we have no need to answer questions about what lanes folks should be in. The question, the way we deal with it, is always about how we castigate people for getting it wrong. Maybe that’s legit. But that doesn’t change the reality: get it right and you got it right.
The novelist has more practice with this. More experience believing the job is about seeing others. Maybe the poet, the contemporary poet, in a world of narrative first-person poems and lyric “I”s, believes that the voice always has to be them. But if that’s the case, the poet is robbed over their superpower: their ability to notice and distill a world — not their ability to notice and distill their world. Such a selfish move, I think, it would be if poets believed that every “I” needed to be them. And frankly, I don’t even think of it as persona. For me, persona is when you are naming and acknowledging and making it clear that the voice is specific, locatable, as opposed to just a speaker that isn’t named, one that becomes, if the writer does it right, the reader, every reader, each time they utter the word, “I.” while they read your work.
So I guess I’m saying write what you want, all of it, and be whoever you want to be on the page, because otherwise what art might do is constrained. And that would be sad.
You can read the interview in its entirety here: https://plumepoetry.com/reginald-dwayne-betts-on-art-poetry-the-particular-fucked-up-parts-of-incarceration-and-the-multitudes-of-i/
An excerpt from Chapter 1 of Whereabouts…
As annoyed as she was with her mother, when the afternoon of the visitation at the funeral home arrived, Missy discovered somebody new to put in the crosshairs of her misplaced, post-mortem anger—Asa M. Floyd, mortician and proprietor of Floyd Funeral Home.
Missy hated him the moment he opened his mouth and began to explain to her and her mother his personal theory of grief. He paced in front of them, his chest puffed out beneath a perfectly pressed gray suit, his fingers tracing the sharp lapels like they were stitched with Braille, his voice booming like an FM deejay. Asa was not a tall man, but his syrup-smooth, bass-clef voice added inches to him.
“Grief,” Asa Floyd said, “begins in the veritable seat of our emotions. And where would that be, you ask?” He paused, but no one did, indeed, ask. “In our hearts. Hasn’t a thing to do with the brain. You cannot attempt to rationalize grief. You can only let it run its true and unalterable course. Trust me, ladies. Grief and I have become quite close over the years. I toil daily on the front lines in the battle against grief.”
His voice poured out so thick and meaningless, Missy imagined she could grab the sounds from the air and squeeze them between her fingers like Play-Doh. Her mother sniffled into a linen hanky. Missy squeezed her elbow to remind her she wasn’t going through this alone. She smelled the breath mints her mother had gobbled in the parking lot just minutes before. They sat side by side on a stiff couch in Asa’s office, the walls painted the color of dusk, the room filled with thin, brittle air, the type you might breathe at the top of a mountain. Around them, Asa’s credentials floated on the wall, framed shadows on the tongue-and-groove paneling.
Asa Floyd appeared nationally certified in every possible method of disposing of the dead. He embalmed. He burned. He buried. He could even legally stack the dead in cold storage in the event of natural disasters and acts of God—other than the definitive God-like act of striking one dead, of course. And he was the only person in Kingstree who could handle all aspects of departing the earth. If you died in Kingstree and you happened to be white, you were at the mercy of Asa Floyd.
“However,” he continued with his presentation, “the course of grief is often a confusing treacherous path. I am, at times like these, your guide. I can help you through the twists and turns. In this hell you’ve been thrust, I am your . . . Virgil.”
“Bless you.” Missy’s mother wrestled the words from her lips. “Thank you so much, Virgil.”
She cut her eyes at her mother wondering if she really believed Asa had changed his name. Missy possessed a foggy, junior-English-class idea who Virgil was and what he might have to do with her father’s massive heart attack. She didn’t really care. She had questions to ask. What had been done to her father, and what would become of her and her mother now that he was gone? But she didn’t want the answers to come through Asa Floyd’s teeth, didn’t want those taffy-like sounds aimed at her.
Missy’s mind whirred, consumed with the thought of seeing her father one last time. What would be his final look? What look would she offer back to him? She wondered how she should act, what she would say. She was seventeen now, the age where outward appearances trumped any other brand of anxiety.
The strangest thing she did before coming to the funeral home was to stare at her reflection in the mirror, waiting for some hint of her daddy to pop out. She was so much her mother’s daughter—the high cheekbones and brown eyes. She hoped, at least, what her daddy had bequeathed her still floated around inside, carried by blood or bone or spirit.
What she really wanted was the opportunity to spit directly in the eye of death—or maybe catch it napping on the face of her daddy—and smile. Her father would appreciate that kind of spunk in his girl. Missy Belue wanted to prove to everyone that bothered to look or to ask that she could take whatever life heaped out, including death, and keep rolling along, bruised at worst, but with her head up. Her daddy would like that.
She knew people would be watching her say her goodbyes. They’d be watching Mona as well. That’s what funerals were for, to see how sadly the living danced when death struck close to home.
Lee Sharkey (poetry ’91) passed away earlier this month at the age of 75. She was the author of Calendars of Fire (Tupelo Press, 2013) and three other full-length collections. Her poems appeared in Crazyhorse, Field, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, and Seattle Review, and she served as coeditor of the Beloit Poetry Journal.
Across a long career as a writer and publisher, her recognitions included the Abraham Sutzkever Centennial Translation Prize, the Maine Arts Commission’s Fellowship in Literary Arts, the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance’s Distinguished Achievement Award, the RHINO Editor’s Prize, the Shadowgraph Poetry Prize, and Zone 3’s Rainmaker Award in Poetry.
Lee Sharkey recently completed a final volume of poems, “I Will Not Name It Except to Say.” Tupelo Press will publish the book in 2021.
Poetry faculty member Dana Levin recently wrote for the Paris Review blog regarding Glück’s recent Nobel Prize. Read an excerpt below:
My friend Mark texted me at 6:18 A.M. yesterday: Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize! All morning, I found myself doing something I hadn’t done much, since the pandemic hit this horrid election year: joyscrolling.
Such recognition for a life in art! That life had changed mine, too: the minute, twenty-two years ago, that Louise plucked my first book manuscript from the submission pile for the APR/Honickman Prize.
One year after that, in 1999, I met her for the first time at a reading in Santa Fe. I tapped her shoulder and introduced myself. She enveloped me in the warmest, beariest hug—it seemed improbable that such a hug could come from so petite a person. Grasping my arms, she leaned back and took me in: “You are not at all what I expected—who would have thought such a sunny personality could write such devastating poems!”
It was a compliment of a high order, and one that troubled me for days. Was there some split between my self in the world and my self on the page? Louise seemed to me to be exactly herself, everywhere: in life and in art. Confounding, difficult task! So few truly accomplish it.
Louise had a mysterious capacity to change her aesthetic approach and still create poems that were unmistakably hers. I asked her about it once, and she said she would give herself little assignments, when she started writing again, after long silence. With Vita Nova, she thought: I never use repetition or questions; thus, every poem has to include one of each. She might not keep them all in every poem as a book developed, but such assignments—simple and formal in nature—propelled her into a new way of sounding exactly like herself.
Read the reflection in its entirety here: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/10/09/dont-get-comfortable/
2006 poetry graduate Beverley Bie Brahic was recently featured on the Scottish Poetry Library Podcast and had a poem featured in The New Criterion. Read an excerpt of “Next to nothing” below:
Next to nothing
Ambling back from the bottle dump
I glimpse my neighbor, busy
Under a honeysuckle’s winter thatch.
Summer in February, we agree—
But should we rejoice or be scared?
She’s picking the grey-green leaves
From a sheaf of dried verbena,
Replenishing her tin of bedtime teas:
Verbena leaves that weigh next to nothing.
Read the poem in its entirety here: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/10/next-to-nothing
Noah Stetzer, a 2014 poetry alum, recently had two poems featured in the Green Mountain Review. Read an excerpt of “Proof of Life” below:
Proof of Life
Here a green tree moving in the sun here
the sun cartwheeling overhead here birds
newborn in a nest here dappled shadows
blinker off and on here the sidewalk flash
of light and dark here the grass up to no
good here the street asleep on the job here
the curb barely makes it through the day here
the crack where the root pushed up here the mud
Read the poem (and “Men at Night,” an additional poem by Stetzer) in its entirety here: http://greenmountainsreview.com/two-poems-57/
2018 graduate Megan Pinto recently had two poems featured in AAWW. Read an excerpt of “Original Sin” below:
Original Sin
One night after rehearsal, I searched
my mother’s closet. The assignment was to dress
in your character’s best. I knew better
than to take my mother’s things, but I stole
a nude lipstick and her silk blue blouse.
It had ruffles down the center, like a kind of spine
but softer. Like something trying to bloom.
Read the poem (and “Spring,” an additional poem by Pinto) here: https://aaww.org/original-sin-two-poems-by-megan-pinto/
Alumna Victoria Korth recently won the Montreal International Poetry Prize for her poem “Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center.” Read an excerpt below:
Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center
One needs to be a little lost to find it
on a Dutchess County knoll. Building 85
still stands. Look it up. Or better, go yourself.
Its lower story windows broken, boarded,
but the other thirteen floors appear intact enough
to taunt the empty village outside its gates
with State employment. Our lives, that “campus”
and my journeying, have crossed: first as a child,
and later as a doctor who made some kinds of work done there
my habit, my profession, and today, when heading home
from Danbury in the snow, with no one quite expecting me.
I turned off at Wingdale, followed ditches lined with cow vetch
dropping on the downside of a sudden rise. There:
bakery, laundry, low-slung dorms, brick housing
for unlicensed pharmacists, a minor stadium, and, hidden
in the trees, burial ground with rotting gate and lettered arch—
patients abandoned to the place—every inch dissolving,
stripped of flashing, grizzling with mineral ooze.
Read the poem in its entirety here: https://www.montrealpoetryprize.com/2020-competition-1
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