One of them grants you the ability to forecast the future; another wrenches your tongue from your mouth, changes you into a bird precisely because you have been given this gift. The gods are generous
in this way. I learned to avoid danger, avoid fear, avoid excitement, these the very triggers that prompt my wings from their resting place deep inside. And so, I avoided fights, avoided everything really. In the locker room, I avoided other boys,
all the while intently studying that space between their shoulder blades, patiently looking for the tell-tale signs, looking to find even one other boy like me, the wings buried but there nonetheless. I studied them from a distance.
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This or That: Simultaneity in John O’Hara’s BUTTERFIELD 8
When I wrote in third person, it was in third-person close. The concerns of simultaneity didn’t occupy much of my attention. There may be a flaw in my thinking here, but my reasoning was that because the world was seen by a focalizing character, other characters were subservient to the primary consciousness. We understand through inference that other characters are perceiving at the same time, other things are happening, but we are only privy to the perceptions of the one. Those other consciousnesses could only be suggested through the direct discourse of dialogue or through an action (or reaction). I didn’t think I had to evoke simultaneity, it sort of happened. That was until I began to move away from third-person close and used narrators that were more omniscient.
When the omniscience changes, becomes more editorial, the need to deal with the mechanics of stage-managing more than one character suddenly leaps out as a concern. Reading Butterfield 8, I started thinking about simultaneity and how language, by definition sequential, somehow evokes things happening at the same time. How is the effect managed? The novel showed me several kinds of simultaneity and/or the sequential which are worth looking at.
John O’Hara’s novel opens this way: “On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York, awoke much too early for her night before.” The opening establishes a time marker and we meet one of the principals, Gloria. We follow her as she rounds up what’s left of her clothing, steals a mink coat then takes a cab where the section finishes a few pages later: “At the corner of Madison the driver almost struck a man and girl, and the man yelled and the driver yelled back. ‘Go on, spit in their eye,’ called Gloria.” Then after a space break, we get: “in the same neighborhood another girl was sitting at one end of a rather long refectory table.” I first thought that one incident had occurred and concluded, and another was beginning—pure sequence. But only a few pages later we have:
At Madison Avenue they were almost struck by a huge Paramount taxi, and when Jimmy swore at the driver, the driver said, “Go on, I’ll spit in your eye.” And both Isabel and Jimmy distinctly heard the lone passenger, a girl in a fur coat, call to the driver: “Go on, spit in their eye.” The cab beat the light and sped south in Madison.
This is the same near-collision from another angle of refraction. What I thought was sequence turns out to be (also) simultaneity. It’s like two trajectories whose paths cross in an X. The moment with the girl at the refectory table turns out not to be happening afterward but happening at the same time. O’Hara makes us figure this out rather than signal with some transitional device like “meanwhile” or “at the same time.” The effect is to disrupt our sense of conventional time.
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When they started me at last on combination therapy, they warned about a body and its immune system free again to fix itself with an overwhelming response: my mouth blistered with ulcers as my body rushed to catch up with all its infections. I went looking for the opposite of explosion and not implosion, not another kind of destruction. In my mind I saw time-lapse films that show slow growth at record speed.
It used to be Herb Lily had my number but now that I have his when local lobstermen call 442-8531 looking for alewives at five in the morning, it takes me three or four rings to answer no, I’m not married, you’ve dialed the wrong number what time is it this isn’t the water department.
“Good Food,” an essay by 2016 fiction graduate Boyce Upholt, was recently featured in Guernica. Read an excerpt below:
Good Food
I am a food writer—or at least a writer who sometimes delves into food—and, like most food writers, I began as an eater. As a seven-year-old I fell in love with fresh-caught seafood, whole fish grilled beachside in Costa Rica. Later, it was fresh churros dipped in thick hot chocolate in Andalucía. My family kept giant tubs of Vermont-fresh maple syrup in our basement for Saturday pancakes.
Food was an adventure, a quick dip into other ways of living. I was particularly attracted to what I saw as authenticity. At some point in my pre-teen years, I discovered a cowboy-themed barbecue warehouse near our home in suburban Connecticut called W.B. Cody’s. It became my consistent choice for birthdays and other formal occasions After a platter of smoked pork ribs, I always ordered its signature dessert, a lump of ice cream dusted in a layer of cinnamon so thick it looked like a baked potato. Soon, under the tutelage of my travel-loving father, I embarked on my first food quest, sampling all the state’s best-reviewed barbecue restaurants.
I dredged up this memory as proof of my blue-collar taste in food, and as a hedge against my white-collar privilege. Then, trying to factcheck my memories of W.B. Cody’s, I came across a twenty-five-year-old interview with its owners. “This is no yippy-ki-yay cowboy,” one said. “It’s meant to be for the Easterner.” Barbecue ribs in suburban Connecticut? The only person I was fooling was myself. What I was really learning was the thrill of the chase.
TQ: You have been, in one way or another, working on this material for decades. How did the poem itself, as we have it, cohere?
ETG: I began the poems in the fall of 2013. I have notes from early 2014 that suggest an arc or purpose, but by early 2015 I had lost my way. No map or spell worked: The Missing couldn’t be found or summoned. What the soldiers went through was no longer accessible to us, or to our imagination—at least if the “we” is civilian. And nothing, absolutely nothing, could ensure one’s safety on that ground.
At that bleak, aimless, and disoriented moment I had a single, stark, important dream and spoke with John Peck about it. He drew an analogy to Jung’s conversations with the Dead at the end of The Red Book (which, as you might imagine, scared the living daylights out of me). The most important thing he said was that, whatever it was that connected me with The Missing, that connection had been forty years in the making, and I could not walk away from them. “So what am I to do?” I asked. “Keep reading, keep writing, keep walking the ground. It will come to you,” he said.
He was correct. In April 2017, after two weeks in Flanders, I woke one morning in Paris and realized that even though (a) The Missing could not be found or summoned, and (b) no words (e.g., a manual or amulet) could keep them safe, I knew that while the poem(s) were happening in language, while The Missing were spoken of in the moment of space-time that lyric creates, The Missing were both present and safe.
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Poetry faculty member Marianne Boruch recently had an essay featured on Harriet, a Poetry Foundation blog. Read an excerpt below:
photo by Will Dunlap
Adverbs or Not
Since lockdown and now its loosening at the end of May, the governors declaring for good or ill their phases for opening stores and restaurants a sliver then halfsies then full-faced as the moon, I’ve been dreaming madly. Not just that, but the dreams come strangely, rarely sweetly, mostly horribly. Also deeply deeply deeply is how I sleep these nights. Note the big LY trailing behind so many words in these last two sentences, doing its job to connote and drum up meaning via a sideways glance.
To calm myself, I’ve looked into the adverb as institution, not mere linguistic flourish. This curious part of speech is defined in my Catholic grade school’s Voyages in English as if we were on murky waters, staring up at dim stars, while any adverb worth its verb drives our boat of dreams, and fine-tunes. Whoever the author-guardians explaining away those voyages were, they got emphatic about one thing: adverbs answer questions. Of time –”when, how often?”(again, before, earlier, soon, now). Or “place”(above, away, below, down, overhead).Then “degree” comes into it, “how much or how little” (almost, quite, rather, very).
Most dramatically a world is nuanced by that polite but bullying ly tacked on as an ending syllable. “Adverbs of manner,” my old textbook calls them in its “CLASSIFICATION OF ADVERBS” (easily, fervently, quickly, thoroughly). All happy states of being, more or less. But how about suspiciously, gruesomely, unbelievably, hopelessly? Or broken-heartedly? Who knew a book about the wiles and ways of English published in 1951 (and still hauled out when I hit 8th grade, 11 years later) would be all about dodging the full fate of young learners? And maybe that’s good to do, upbeat as hope because it is hope. After all, the planet does keep spinning—to invoke a popular soap opera of the era, As the World Turns, loved by my mother who liked to watch it over a lunch of canned peaches and cottage cheese…
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My dad was twenty-five years old when he saw a man die. He didn’t hear or see the slate roof fall, but he heard Bonsell Robinson scream. It happened in 1967 inside the Beatrice Coal Mine in Keen Mountain, Virginia, where my dad worked. He was just starting out, five years into a job he would do for the rest of his work life.
At the time of the roof collapse, my dad was a buggyman. His job—to make sure the buggies, or shuttle cars, that carried coal to the beltline were full. He had just moved up to buggyman from stoper (“stow-per”), one of the deadliest jobs in an underground mine. The stoper stands up wooden posts and drills bolts into the slate roof to keep it from caving in, so the excavation can advance deeper into the seam. It takes two men to do the work. Together they auger into the rock above them using a tool that looks like an upside down jackhammer.
My dad was glad to get off the stoper job. Not only is it one of the most dangerous, it’s also one of the hardest. It’s the position given to miners newly hired, or new to a mine, to see if they’re tough enough to survive.
To survive in the mine, Dad had to get used to working deep inside the earth. He had grown accustomed to crouching in dark, narrow tunnels and listening to the rumble of bedrock, like distant thunder, as it shifted and settled around him. He was used to sloshing through cold, standing water and breathing in air dirty with coal and rock dust. What he wasn’t familiar with was the primal sound of a man dying.
The day the roof caved in, midway through the third shift, Dad had been spelled out by another miner so he could eat his dinner. Mom used to pack his bucket with an Armor Treet meat sandwich, a thermos of black coffee, Vienna sausages, a Little Debbie snack cake and a tin of Del Monte fruit cocktail. That day, he found a dry place to sit and ate with three other miners, 100 feet away from where the stopers were setting timbers, when Bonsell Robinson screamed—an animal sound, like the yelp of a dog when it’s been kicked.
Dad and the other men rushed over to find Bonsell pinned to the ground, his chest and waist crushed under a rock the size of an armchair and weighing thousands of pounds. The other stoper wasn’t touched.
The entire Beatrice mine shut down for twenty-four hours so state and federal authorities could investigate. All the miners climbed into the mantrip, the railcar that carried them back to the surface, and the machines sat idle. Dad drove home on barren, pre-dawn roads unable to stop thinking about what he had seen. And heard.
Beatrice reopened the next day for business as usual. Because somebody had to do Bonsell Robinson’s job, the foreman tapped the last man to work as a stoper—my dad. It was one of the hardest shifts he ever pulled.
Fifty years later, I ask him why.
He sighs. How do you describe how it feels to step into a dead man’s shoes?
I imagine the fear he must have felt. I wonder if he prayed to God to keep him safe. Did he bury himself in the work until it was over? Did he feel like he was playing Russian roulette?
My dad is not a man who talks easily about his feelings, but the death has never left him. He can still see Bonsell Robinson crushed under that big slab of slate. He can still hear him scream.
There’s something else my dad won’t ever forget. A few days before he was killed, Bonsell Robinson got religion. When the men ate their dinner together, deep inside that dark mine, all Bonsell wanted to talk about was getting saved.
As if he knew death was coming for him any minute.
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