On dull stretches during these anniversary trips, we’ve found it helps to point out places along the way, little things we pass together in the car: rest stops, Waffle Houses, personalized license plates. Graveyards, road kill, churches with services just letting out.
Once we saw a bride and groom emerge from the gloom of ceremony and into the sunlight holding hands, looking, for all the world, like they weren’t sure how they got there, or what they were doing, or whether their eyes would ever adjust. Remember how they squinted? Remember how we waved but they didn’t wave back, and we agreed that it was because they couldn’t see us, or that maybe they just didn’t want to let go of each other’s hands, they were holding so tight? I said, “Were we ever that young?” but maybe what I meant a little was “Were we ever that in love?” and you, you said, “No, not never,” but it wasn’t clear which question you weren’t answering.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-09-02 16:34:002022-02-25 17:17:16“The Love Poems of Virginia,” by Scott Challener (Poetry ’08)
Evy was standing in the corner of Ethan’s backyard in the middle of six girls shedding their bikinis, joining in the echoes of slurry shrieking ssssso funny and are we doing thisssok letsgoletsgo. The last cup of sweet red juice had made her head that certain heavy, shrouded her in a layer of protection she’d been aiming for all night, and she said heyyissmystraps, cansomeonedo my untie me? And then she felt the release of her own bikini, and the rise of a wild giggle, the grip of another girl’s hand, her elbow jerking forward, and then she was submerged in the pool, she was nightswimming cold and exposed, only skin and water where usually she felt the stretch of tight fabric.
Her eyes opened under water, trails of cloudy bubbles and the backyard spotlight surrounding the tangle of limbs and skin, then she surfaced and saw every guy (eyes, all wide eyes and fuck yeahs) at the edge of the pool, looking at the girls’ distorted bodies through the water before they all plunged in, flinging their own trunks away like flags of surrender, and her ears cleared out and let in the rise and fall of girlshrieks and chatter and the deep boyvoices crested and fell, and she felt another body next to her then space when it kicked away, and she pushed off and dove under again, while the bodies churned up choppy rising water.
NIN: I’m stunned by how close these speakers feel as I read your work. What would you say is the role of vulnerability in your poetry, and how did you come to define what vulnerability looks like in your work?
TB: In order for there to be vulnerability, there has to be some inherent sense of consequence. In other words, there must be knowledge that something valuable is at stake. This is the task I always charge my poems with: there must be something (a way of life for instance) the speakers within the poems are not afraid to lose in the name of feeling whole and human. It’s also why I am drawn to the lyric mode. Within the lyric mode, a problem or question becomes the engine behind the poem; the motor that keeps the machine of the poem chugging along. Ellen Bryant Voigt, in The Flexible Lyric, considers the lyric as being that mode in which much of the narrative happens beyond the poem. The lyric poem is simply an event along that narrative line—I am paraphrasing of course. Anyway, this is why I am drawn to desire and its penchant for an elliptical and obsessive logic. The act of desire is an act of grief. In desire, one feels something was lost when in fact they never possessed the object in the first place. Perhaps that closeness you hear, Noor, emanates from the open and shameless embrace of obsession that exists in the poems, but I want to say more.
One of the ways that I envision this book operating is as theater. In Detroit, one of my favorite theaters is the Slipstream Theater Initiative. The building is nothing fancy: a storefront that’s been refashioned into a black box theater. What gets me each time I see one of its productions is that they use the space differently each time. In a standard proscenium theater, one has a ticket that corresponds to a seat number located along the house’s floor. With Slipstream, I never know how I am to move through the space and what will be asked of me. In Fantasia, I mean the poems to make such demands on the reader by using myself, or the lyricized self in the book, as a conduit. Looking at the book’s approach to point of view, the membrane between “you” and “I” is very delicate. What I mean is the roles of subject and observer get fuzzy. The reader, I hope, experiences that sense of closeness to the speakers and the events happening. When the poems call out my name, it is also a placeholder for “your” name. With all of that said, I (as the poet) have as much at stake as the reader has invested in the poems. Although the book employs various personae and voices, it really is a kind of self-portrait that relies on the reader to complete. I think all of this too aids that sensation of vulnerability.
Count Giulio Vincenzo Zannini was conspicuously beautiful – when he entered a room, you could feel the air skip a beat. Almond-brown skin and features so fine they could have been carved by Michelangelo. He was born in Rome on July 13, 1900, but Mom always said he was better suited to the Renaissance.
I first met Uncle when I was four years old and he was already in his sixties. He and Mom’s older sister, Aunt Zosia, lived in a penthouse apartment near the catacombs of Sant’Agnese in Rome, one of those grand high-ceilinged affairs that make you feel like you are about three feet tall, as I probably was at the time. Even in the sizzling heat of summer, the marble floors were always cool and slick on your bare feet, and I stayed close to them, cowed by the enormity of the world around me.
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For days we may not speak more than a few words to anyone but each other. We leave the hotel in the cool morning and come back sweaty, drained of energy, to stand
before a huge cage of parakeets, watching them quickstep sideways along their long stick-perches. Courting? Fighting? When we wash our hands we turn the water brown as a flooded field.
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Jeff O told us that he and Brian H split after watching Chasing Amy and getting into a fight—by then I was pretty much over my crush on Jeff O and I was kind of off and on living with Steve K who I was sort of ready to break up with so I deliberately rented Chasing Amy for us to watch and then broke up with him (but it had nothing to do with the movie).
I remember I drove to the corner gas station and called Ricky (never Rick) my best friend to tell him and he said to meet him and Matt M (my other best friend) for a drink so we could recap (I had had a crush on Matt M I think before and after this).
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Karolina Waclawiak: In reading your stories, I get a sense that a lot of your characters are women who feel like they’re ghosts in their own lives. They haven’t quite found their way into their own lives, they haven’t taken traditional paths. It feels in conversation with my character Evelyn’s own journey to navigate alternative life paths and being unsuccessful. I’m curious why you find these kinds of characters interesting to write about? These sort of never-do-wells.
Laura van den Berg: A straight-forward answer would be to say I’m drawn to sources of tension. For a lot of these characters, the story is finding them at moments where they have misperceived something pretty significant about their own reality.
I think we all have moments where something we’ve perceived is revealed as false. And that can be a very destabilizing experience. I was interested in looking at that with these women—in some cases, the misapprehension is destabilizing in a way that is not destructive. In other ways, the misapprehension is more serious or more destructive. What happens when a foundational perspective is upended or disrupted?
KW: It feels like it’s almost an investigation into the ways that we cope. And the lies we construct for ourselves. And not necessarily lies, again, I feel like there are negative connotations to that, but looking at our coping mechanisms and what works for us until it doesn’t is a really interesting way to look at how people move through the world.
Evelyn’s reaching this critical age where she’s constructed ways of coping and moving through her life that felt like, “OK, I can do this. This is functional.” But so much of the way we function is dysfunctional at a certain point. Having an about-face in your life to find healthier coping mechanisms is really difficult. A lot of people don’t do it. This book is about Evelyn facing herself and facing her coping mechanisms and saying, “How do I want to move forward in the next phase of my life, if the ways I’ve moved through the world are really unsustainable in the long-term?”
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Poets have reported various triggers for poems—sounds, scents, etc. What triggers a poem for you?
For me, a poem almost always begins with an image, something that catches my eye—a weird tree, a hawk swooping low across the hood of my car, something out of the ordinary. I jot it in an image journal, or just bring the image straight to a notebook or to the computer, and begin describing. It’s by getting as deeply and accurately as possible into an image through description that other things begin to open up for me, discoveries are made, and things I had no idea I’d be writing about begin to show up. That doesn’t always happen, of course, but it’s like a thunderhead rolling in when it does. It’s what keeps me coming back.
For instance, with my poem “Fledgling,” I was weeding in the garden one day when I noticed a robin fledging on the ground by a tomato cage and I realized that that little bird was out of its nest, maybe for the first time, learning to fly. What an exciting time, the beginning of everything new for this little bird.
I left my weeding and came in the house to begin describing what I’d just seen. Suddenly I found myself writing about something that had happened to me way back when I was at what could be called the “fledgling stage” of my own life. I’d had no idea the poem would turn that way when I first started writing. I was just trying to document the cool experience of seeing that little speckled fledgling up close.
Personal discovery is part of it for you, then. Anything else?
Oh, yes! Let me quote Thomas Merton here since I believe he explained this part of the writing process for a person of faith in such a beautiful way:
“The earliest [church] fathers knew that all things, as such, are symbolic by their very being and nature, and all talk of something beyond themselves. Their meaning is not something we impose upon them, but a mystery which we can discover in them, if we have the eyes to look with.” (Selected Poems of Thomas Merton)
Isn’t that lovely? That’s my prayer now—Lord, give me the eyes to look with!
During undergrad at Purdue, I took dendrology (the study of trees), tree physiology, and several urban forestry classes. When people asked why, as a creative writer, I wanted to study trees, I told them that I studied trees not only in the hope of writing better poems, but also in hope of better understanding the mind of their Creator. As a person of faith, spiritual insight is something I’m hoping for every time I write.
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