For me, the aspiring poet, this fact struck an ominous chord of self-doubt. Could I even be a poet? Was such a vocation even possible?

Happily, in college, I learned there were in fact living poets still writing poems, and I took a special interest in their lives. Before I would read a poetry collection, I invariably checked the index to make sure there was only a birth year, hyphen, and blank space after the author’s name. If there was a death year, the book was likely to remain on the shelf.

In 2003, I moved from Washington State to Pennsylvania to pursue an MFA in poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. Shortly after my arrival in Steel City, a new acquaintance recommended a poet to me. “You should be reading Denise Duhamel,” she said, with an air of authority. “She writes about everything you care about, and there’s no pretense—just really good poems.”

I remember my eyebrows arching with suspicion. “Is she alive?” I wanted to know.

Nancy smiled at me. “Very much so.”

I started reading Denise Duhamel’s poetry a full decade ago, and I never stopped. She may be the only poet about whom I can say that I have read everything and then read it all again. When I hear a line buzzing around in my head like, for instance, “believing, even then, in all kinds of answers” or, “It was just the alabaster moon, a little girl, and a young woman,” odds are, the line is from a Duhamel poem. Over time, her words, questions, and images have become part of the soundtrack playing in my mind.

I began teaching Denise’s poetry collection, Kinky, in 2006, in an Introduction to Feminist Studies course at Carlow University. Since then, I have continued to teach her work in Contemporary American Literature, Creative Writing, and Gender and Sexuality Studies courses, always to resounding positive response from my students. “We thought poetry was boring!” they say. “We thought poetry was hard to understand.” Sometimes students confide in me that they, too, used to believe that all the great poets had already lived and died. Yet here is Denise Duhamel—youthful, spirited, inspiring—a woman in the prime of life writing at the height of her powers.

Denise Duhamel’s poems have been reprinted in more than one hundred anthologies and textbooks, including nine volumes of Best American Poetry, and her individual poems have appeared in more than three hundred literary journals. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she is professor of poetry at Florida International University in Miami.

Last year, in a stroke of outrageous serendipity, I joined the FIU faculty in Creative Writing, where Denise is now my colleague, my faculty mentor, and my friend. She remains not only one of the most inspirational and influential poets writing today, but one of the liveliest women and writers I am lucky to know.

***

The Rumpus: Over the last twenty-five years, since the release of your first chapbook Heaven and Heck in 1988, you have published eleven books of poetry, five chapbooks, and six collaborative poetry projects. You are not only an immensely prolific poet, but your poetry leaves the reader with the strong impression of someone who is always questioning, always seeking, always open to the world around you. Is there any topic you intentionally shy away from in your work, or a topic that you perhaps unconsciously avoid?

Denise Duhamel: Julie, that is a great question. Though it does seem like I have written an immense amount of work, over the years I have pushed the pause button. I have poems that I haven’t sent out for publication, mostly based on political/social issues.  I just felt too unsure of myself—and afraid I’d hurt the wrong people. Not that a poem can “hurt” someone the same way a physical blow can or even a mean remark can…I just felt unsure that my tone would be taken the right way and/or unsure of my own writing, that I couldn’t maintain the tone I wanted. These aren’t exactly failed poems—I have a lot of those that remain unpublished!—but just poems that haunt me a bit.

I don’t know if there are topics that I unconsciously avoid, but as soon as they pop up in my writing, I try to take on those topics, whether or not I publish the poems.

Rumpus: Are there poems you can write now that you couldn’t have written ten years ago, twenty years ago, or vice versa?

Duhamel: I think some of my earliest work is actually more challenging in terms of subject matter than what I write now. I had no idea, when I was writing early on, that my poems would be published or read by anyone, never mind people I knew or would meet.  I just wrote urgently—naïvely, I suppose, looking back. Now that my poems have a better chance of ending up in print, I am more circumspect. This is not to say I censor myself—I still write what I need to write—but I can’t deny that something has changed when I think about sending work out. Maybe it’s just growing older and feeling more responsible to the world.

On the flip side, I have more fun with sheer language now. I have internalized more in terms of craft. Twenty years ago I couldn’t have written the poems I now write, since I just didn’t have the technical chops to do so.

Rumpus: How has your process of poetry-making evolved over the years? What have been the constants in your life as a writer?

Duhamel: I started wanting desperately to say something, to make a point, to be heard—and I still feel that way. Free verse served me best when I embarked on poetry.

Over the years, I became more and more interested in the forms and techniques in which things could be said. I came to writing traditional formal poetry quite late. I remember wanting to take a sonnet class with Joan Larkin at Sarah Lawrence in the late 1980s and then chickened out at the last minute. She had published an amazing crown, “Blackout Sonnets” (in her book A Long Sound), and I recognized the way she was invigorating and enlarging the form. I wanted to learn how to write like she did, but I was so afraid of failure that I wound up becoming her fan instead of her student. I continued to read formidable formalists, like Marilyn Hacker and Molly Peacock, but couldn’t bring myself to try to even rhyme. I finally learned form through my collaborations with Maureen Seaton. We often played exquisite corpse, and she wanted to write exquisite corpse sonnets and pantoums. Maybe because I only had to come up with half of the lines, I wasn’t as afraid. Maureen gave me some training wheels. After writing with her, I was able to approach form on my own. In addition to writing in received forms, I have also had fun making up forms—Möbius strips and visual poems, particularly.

What has stayed true in my life as a writer is my dedication to writing—I try to write every day, no matter what—and the joy that writing has given me. I know writers for whom the act of writing is a necessary chore. They suffer to write great work. I am very lucky that for me writing is a delight.

Rumpus: Do you have an ideal or imagined reader you are speaking to when you write?

Duhamel: Yes…I am speaking to other women, usually younger than I am. That is not to say those are the actual readers of my work, but I picture such women in my head. Maybe they are my “poetry” daughters.

Rumpus: Poet Jean Valentine has written about you: “She chose poetry but she could have chosen music videos or comic strips: Denise Duhamel is wildly satiric, and we are blessed by this true and fierce mirror of our straight gate.” Why do you think you chose poetry? Or did poetry choose you?

Duhamel: As a teenager, I loved acting, painting, photography, and making films with my friend’s Super 8 camera.  But I always loved writing the best. I chose writing even before I knew poetry was available to me. (Until I was an undergraduate in college, I’d never read a contemporary poet—only poets who had died—and in some mind blip I assumed there just weren’t any poets anymore.)  I always wanted to be some kind of writer—I wrote plays and songs and “books” before I realized living and breathing people still wrote poems.

Rumpus: If you weren’t a poet and a professor of poetry, who would you be?

Duhamel: Jean Valentine may be right—I might have been a maker of comic strips or music videos. I remember my friends and I making music videos before there were music videos, before MTV. My favorite was one my high school friend Nancy made about Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?”—at the end she quick-cut the “actress” rocking a baby, with the same actress in the same position rocking a bottle of booze—no easy task as this was before editing machines. This song and Nancy’s image was my first true understanding of existentialism.

I also could see myself as a stand-up comedian, a fashion designer (for people of all sizes), a hairdresser, an earnest and eventually burnt-out politician, or the owner of a small bistro. But I fear that, without poetry, I would have simply been going through the motions, feeling like Peggy Lee in the song. But since I became a poet, I answer Peggy Lee’s question, “Is that all there is?” with a big “No!  There is poetry…”

Rumpus: Who/what have been the biggest influences on your own work as poet?

Duhamel: Jean Valentine and Jane Cooper were my professors at Sarah Lawrence College—and they were uncompromised in their art. They gave me models of how to live one’s life as a poet. I also studied with Michael Burkard and Thomas Lux, both of whom instilled a love of poetry of all kinds and were encouraging as any mentors I could hope for.

As to the reading of other poets, there are many influences—the short list would include Sharon Olds, Ai, Albert Goldbarth, Frank O’Hara, Edward Field, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. I also spent quite a bit of time at the Nuyorican Poets Café in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The spoken word community was significant in making me want to write accessible and urgent poems. Bob Holman, in particular, was an impressive figure.

Many of my peers (in terms, roughly, of age or generation) also are important for the possibilities they display in their work. I’m thinking specifically of David Trinidad, Tim Seibles, Dorianne Laux, Kim Addonizio, Nin Andrews, Terrance Hayes, and Tony Hoagland.

Rumpus: I remember reading once that Robert Frost was asked if he had to choose which poem from his entire body of work came closest to saying everything he needed to say, what poem would it be? Frost chose “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” What poem from your own canon would you choose?

Duhamel: Robert Frost is a lot better at this than I am, but here goes: I choose “Playa Naturista.”

Rumpus: I don’t know if Robert Frost was asked a follow-up question, but I wonder if you could say a little more about why you chose this poem.  “Playa Naturista,” as I recall, features the lines I love:

My husband and I slip out of our bottoms
and run like Adam and Eve, if
Adam smoked Dunhills and Eve
wore Ray-Bans.

Duhamel: Many of my poems up until “Playa Naturista” were concerned with body image—women’s in particular—and a speaker who was a little more than obsessed. The speaker in “Playa Naturista” is nude, as are all the people around her. There is a connection to these many imperfect bodies, and a gratitude and celebration of her body and others and the natural world.

Rumpus: In “Old Love Poems,” a poignant and powerful poem from your new book Blowout, your speaker begins:

I can burn the pictures, but not the poems
since I published them in books, which are on shelves
in libraries and in people’s homes. Once my cousin told me
not to write anything down because the words would be there forever
to remind me of the fool I once was.

Are there any poems from your body of work that you regret writing/publishing?

Duhamel: Not really. Ultimately, I think “my cousin” was wrong. Writing is performative—and while, yes, the words in essence will be there “forever,” poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event. The “truth” is the poem itself.  Just because someone writes a poem about a feeling she has does not mean that the feeling will stay forever. The truth of the emotion of the poem remains, even if the particular truth of the poet changes.

Rumpus: What do you wish you had known as a young poet just starting out? If you could give your former self one morsel of advice, what would it be?

Duhamel: While poetry was less professionalized than it is now, I still had this urge to win prizes and see my work in magazines, to get an “A,” as though poetry could be graded. I wish I had been more patient and less frantic about getting published. My advice to my younger self would have been, “Chill. Concentrate on the poems. Everything else will work itself out.”

Rumpus: One poem from Blowout that I especially love is an emulation of Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You” titled “Having a Diet Coke with You.”  In this poem, as in many poems from Blowout, you raise important meta-questions about the nature of poetry and the relationship between art and life:

because some things I want to be just for us
and there it is I suppose the problem
with all narrative post confessional transgressive poetry
whatever this kind of poetry is referred to as in this moment
how to keep loyal to the art without being disloyal
to the love and what to tell and what to hold back

This excerpt alone makes me wonder about a number of things. How do you classify your own poetry? Are there any classifications of your work that you would object to?

Duhamel: I have no idea, actually, where I fit in, in terms of poetry camps. At AWP conferences, I have been on panels about humor, collaboration, visual poetry, confessional poetry, gender, and the body, as well as tributes to Edward Field and Albert Goldbarth. I felt at home on all of them—most poets straddle more than one school. And unlike Woody Allen, I would be happy to be part of any (poetry) club that would have me.

Recently I have been reading about The New Sincerity. Jesse Thorn wrote a manifesto that includes these sentences “…’Be More Awesome.’ Our lifestyle: ‘Maximum Fun.’ Throw caution to the wind, friend, and live The New Sincerity.” I am, I guess, The Old Sincerity.

Rumpus: What have you figured out about keeping “loyal to the art without being disloyal to the love”?

Duhamel: I am still figuring it out—but I can tell you this. If you are my friend and say to me, “Please don’t write about this,” I won’t. I don’t think I could have agreed to that twenty years ago and would have been only able to say, “I’ll try my best not to!” I remember going to a poetry panel in the mid-1990s, and someone asked if Sharon Olds might be part of a cultural nexus that included talks shows like those hosted by Phil Donahue and Oprah. The audience just sort of giggled and the panel didn’t address the question, but I do think there is something to that notion. Not that Olds herself watched such shows—I have no idea if she did or not. But the question asked by the audience member suggested that there was something in the zeitgeist that allowed for and accommodated disclosure.

My students rarely wrote about personal topics when I first started teaching, but now they are more forthcoming with seemingly personal details. There is less embarrassment around certain issues. We have come far from the days of the first confessional poets. In 1959, M.L. Rosenthal actually referred to Lowell’s Life Studies as a “as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal.” I can’t imagine any reviewer writing that about a book of poems today, although I suppose TMI has made it into our lexicon for a reason. Reality TV takes this notion even further. Viewers follow “real” people, not only when they are in crisis or giving birth, but also as they do the most mundane things.

Rumpus: When I think about Blowout as a whole, I realize there is a lot of love in this book—loss of love, longing for love, letting go of love, discovering of love anew. You conclude one poem, “Fourth Grade Boyfriend,” with the line, “So what if he couldn’t dance? That was love.” In another, called “Sleep Seeds,” you write: “Back then, before I met you, /I thought gross.  Now I think love.” Did you begin writing Blowout with love in mind?

Duhamel: I didn’t conceive of Blowout as a book until after all the poems were written. I had been writing a lot of poems about love and loss, unsure what I would do with them. After my marriage ended, I had an urge to skip that part of my life completely in terms of poetry, not publish anything at all about it. I had failed another human being, and I wanted that part of the past in some sort of box (and not necessarily the box a prose poem makes). I had a fleeing notion that if I was going to write about this particular heartache at all, it would be a memoir making fun of Eat, Love, Pray, a book I found decidedly unhelpful and rather insulting to those of us who had to work for a living and get on with life.

I had pulled together some poems about that time for an e-chapbook, How It Will End, and I thought, “Okay, that’s that.” So when I tried to put poems together for the book that would become Blowout, I thought it would broadly be about romantic love, cultural expectations, and a speaker’s limitations. I included poems about early love and middle-aged love. The book’s first drafts made absolutely no sense because the most obvious poems were missing. It was only when I added the more tragic poems that the book started to take shape. The title comes from a poem that mentions a blowout (a party) but also carries the associations of a blowout, a sudden rupture in a car’s front tire. My friend reminded me last night that you can also ask for a blowout at the hairdresser, a term I hadn’t intended, but that, in a strange way, works too.

Rumpus: Bruce Beasley, another poet whose work I admire, said once in a graduate workshop, that we only write about six things our whole lives or in any given project. What would you say are the six things you are writing about in Blowout? (Or feel free to tweak the number as needed.) Are these the same things you have written about in your larger body of work, or have new topics/themes emerged in this book?

Duhamel: Bruce Beasley is right! Though I might have only five. When I was putting together Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems, I was sure I would have trouble segueing from the selections from one book to the next, as I thought I had written about so many different things—fairy tales, folklore, Barbie dolls, and more personal narratives. But the truth was I’d written about the same obsessions over and over again, just using different modes of access. The big ones, of course: love and death. I think my three others are: feminism, class, and violence (macro and micro). These were present in my first books and are also present in Blowout.

Rumpus: Some hallmarks of your work include its playful and accessible language, feminist sensibility, engagement with popular culture, and laugh-out-loud humor, all of which are characteristic of the poems in Blowout.  I also notice in this book in particular a number of cinematic references—for instance, the film An Unmarried Woman, with Jill Clayburgh, appears in two poems and provides the title for one, and another poem, “You Don’t Get to Tell Me What to Do Ever Again,” takes its title from a central character in the film, American Beauty.  How have movies influenced your life and shaped your poetry?

Duhamel: Frank O’Hara writes it best in “Ave Maria:”

Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to
it’s true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images…

Mine is a soul that has indeed grown in that darkness. I love going to movie theaters, even in the era of movies on-demand and Netflix. When you are in a movie theater, no one can reach you by phone or other means. (I play by the rules and shut off my cell.) It is the only place I can think of where you can—and, in fact, are encouraged!—to eat in the dark without shame. In almost every book I’ve written, there is a reference to a movie—legendary films, actors and actresses, and forgotten made-for-TV movies. The leaps poems make are not unlike the cuts in a film. The miniature and avant-garde prose poets have perhaps the most obvious ties to film, as a prose poem in its shape is not unlike a movie screen.

Visual media is the dominant art form in our present day culture, whereas poetry is, at best, a proxy. Yet poetry and film are both “dream factories.” One of my favorite stories about Gertrude Stein (though it may be apocryphal) is that she and Charlie Chaplin met and talked about cinema and its possibilities.

Rumpus: Another of my favorite poems from Blowout is called “My Strip Club,” which was also reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2011. I find this poem laugh-out-loud funny—subversively so:

In my strip club
the girls crawl on stage
wearing overalls
and turtlenecks
then slowly pull on
gloves, ski masks
and hiking boots.
As the music slows,
they lick the pole
and for a tantalizing second
their tongues stick
because it’s so cold.
They zip up parkas
and tie tight bows
under their hoods.
A big spender
can take one of my girls
into a back room
where he can clamp
on her snowshoes.

I’m curious as to how the idea of “My Strip Club” came about, and how you decided on its placement in this book, where many of the other poems are more explicitly autobiographical and rooted in lived experience.

Duhamel: I wrote the first draft of this poem with my class during one our writing exercises. I can’t remember the prompt I’d given, but I was specifically thinking of two things, which I started writing about, though neither ever made it into the final poem. The first was an article I’d read about a Pole Dance Doll that may have been issued in 2008 by an Asian toy company to sell to off-price retailers, and I cite this in my comments in The Best American Poetry 2011. This doll was not a novelty item for adults meant to titillate—it was actually a child’s toy. A traditional-looking doll came with two accessories—a blinking stripper pole and disco ball. There was such an outcry in the blogosphere about the Pole Dance Doll’s inappropriateness that I didn’t have much to add. Some writers pondered—and hoped—that the toy was a Photoshopped hoax. Still, a similar toy, a Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit, was pulled from Tesco shelves in Britain in 2006.

I began to think about the extent to which nude and semi-nude female bodies are commonplace in our present day culture and how young girls might be affected. I wondered if, at some point, this bombardment of images could possibly get boring and that concealing—rather than revealing—would awaken sexual desire. I don’t think that will ever be the case, of course, but I was intrigued to write a poem in which dressing was just as erotic as undressing.

I had also recently revisited Diane Wakowski’s “Belly Dancer,” which has an interesting take on the erotic performer.  The speaker of this persona poem asserts about her audience:

…most of the women frown, or look away, or laugh stiffly…
The psychologists would say they are afraid of themselves, somehow.
Perhaps awakening too much desire—
that their men could never satisfy?

Wakowski’s poem ends with an indictment of the men who “simper and leer”:

They do not realize how I scorn them;
or how I dance for their frightened,
unawakened, sweet
women.

The third and final section of Blowout begins with three short poems, as many of the poems in the second section are quite long. “My Strip Club” and the other two are like little flowers popping up after a long winter.

Rumpus: “My Strip Club” is decidedly shorter than many poems in Blowout, with its beautiful, tightly enjambed lines. Other poems, like “Take Out, 2008,” “Recession Commandments,” and “Having a Diet Coke with You,” are poems of length, size, and endurance.  And there are also some signature Duhamel prose poems, like “Worst Case Scenario.” Could you talk a little about your relationship with the line?

Duhamel: I love the line and all it can do—reverse the meaning of the line before; speed up or slow down a reader; serve as the pause before a punch line. I actually made a long one-lined poem called “The Line,” that I wrote out by hand with a silver Sharpie onto a typewriter ribbon. This visual poem is experienced by spooling the ribbon through the typewriter.

When Ka-Ching! was published, I asked the designer at University of Pittsburgh Press that some of the prose poems (which started out as a visual poetry project, poems on the back of play money) be printed sideways in the book so that they could retain the shape of the bills. I am interested in the confines of the page and busting through/off the page as well. A writer must let go of the line when writing prose poems, which brings its own pleasures.

The “biggest” poems I ever made are based on the psychological principal of the “Johari Window:” what the self freely shares with others; what the self hides from others; what others hide from the self; and what is unknown to the self and others. I constructed prose poems to “fit” on four sides of Venetian blinds. I made a prototype of the blinds, printing out the poem on vellum and attaching text to the blinds’ slats. Readers/viewers can “open” and “close” the blinds to reveal and withhold information contained on the poem on the other side.

Rumpus: You conclude the poem “Take Out, 2008,” with the lines, “Still, I am trying harder, faster. Still, I am trying to learn the art.” What’s next for you, Denise Duhamel?  Personally?  Poetically?  What are you most eager to learn?

Duhamel: I would like someday to write really good prose—pages of it in a row that make sense and have a plot of sorts. I would like to go to the Galapagos Islands and see a Blue-footed Booby. I am open to squeezing in whatever I can in this wonderful life. Instead of asking, “Is that all there is?” I seem, lately, to be always saying, “Wow!”

Related Posts:

• The Switching Yard by Jan Beatty
• Theophobia by Bruce Beasley
• Looking For the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• Butch Geography by Stacey Waite
• From Computer Geek to Children’s Poet Laureate

As a reader, you can also count on this poet’s sharp vision and incisive voice, struggling to name what she sees. For instance, while riding “the San Joaquin Line/ between Modesto & Merced,” our itinerant speaker observes “a young couple playing cards/ across the aisle” and marvels “does she know the way/ he looks at her is what people spend lives/ looking for?” Later, from the California Zephyr, she reports, “We’re coming out of nowhere into the next nowhere” and then reveals slowly, “This train makes me think of my birth father,/ the smooth glide through nowhere,/ alive in Boston, how I walk around in his nothingness./ How I look like him but don’t know him.” While riding the dirt line to Winnipeg through the province of Manitoba, she tells us how “the sky’s/ blue-dark with the trees going back to their night souls” and wonders “Is anyone else on this train tonight looking for ghosts?”

Here, in this title poem of the collection, the speaker names herself a “ghost explorer returning, looking for blood.” Watch how she follows that trail of blood, how she fearlessly opens and reopens the wounds that small, primal word conceals. Blood is everywhere as the speaker imagines her parents—“two bodies slammed together/ […] and I was made,/and in the making the blood ran”; as she studies the light “from a signal,/ shooting the whole traincar bloody red”; as she predicts, “Tomorrow in the open I will be legion—/ you will see me bleeding from every pore,/ a woman in the switching/yard.”

The last slash here between “switching” and “yard” does not indicate a line break in the original text of the poem. It marks something else, a pattern Beatty repeats throughout the collection so that certain words or phrases become linked, inseparable, as if they were joining arms in a Red Rover game where Tidy Conclusions and Easy Reductions have been “sent over” and subsequently repelled. A comma would indicate a series, a progression or elaboration on an idea, but these forward slashes are hard lines drawn at an angle, implying force, resistance, an unwillingness to choose. This is a speaker looking for a life line in her blood lines, a speaker who has considered the “so much under us unsaid” and the “great relief to not say” but has chosen to say it anyway, all of it, the possible words and ways of naming pain that pile upon each other like platelets: “the lone bulb in the garage/the hammering/ the goddammit/ the silence.” All ways of naming truth suddenly leveled—equally right, equally hard, equally not enough.

Joyce Carol Oates writes of the “prism of technique” that allows us “to speak the unspeakable.” I think Beatty’s slashes are part of the violent, skillful technique that allows her speaker to voice, and more than voice—to instantiate divisions within herself—“I’m at home when I’m not at home/ in all the buried stories,” “me, arsonist, burning down the house of them/with me inside.” And because this speaker can allow into language such keen self-awareness as “Some days I’m oceanic in my ambivalence,” I want to follow her outside of herself, too, speaking back to that larger world, speaking back even to Best American Poetry: “Your sonnet is impotent,” she says, “and I have a hard-on.”

Beatty’s speaker asks American Poetry, “Are you kidding me? […] I’m bored to death—is anyone alive out there?” She is, of course, the answer to her own question. These poems aren’t manicured, aren’t neatly coiffed. They aren’t the tidy, safe, gilded poems most frequently anthologized. When we see the world through this speaker’s eyes, we see first what is jagged and gritty and fractured, perhaps beyond repair; we recognize “the wrecking ball in all of us.” For William Carlos Williams, it was saxifrage, a flower that split the rocks. For Beatty, it’s something more like a handsaw welded to a chisel—a handsaw/chisel perhaps. Our speaker tells us there is “nothing as beautiful as a split rail fence,” a “split tree,” “all the hearts splitting, the rantings, the fright of it.”

When Beatty’s speaker raises her handsaw/chisel and splits rocks in her poems, I promise you this: there are jewels inside these geodes, large unexpected crystals, bright and rare. Inside you will find the angry, tender, perfect “brokenness of a highway dream,” but also a “lake full with glacial water,” and even “an old forest road.”

Related Posts:

• Theophobia by Bruce Beasley
• Looking For the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• Butch Geography by Stacey Waite
• Poems Retrieved by Frank O’Hara
• Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White

I recently immersed myself in the poet’s newest collection, Theophobia, this time while sprawled in the late autumn sun a few feet from the Atlantic Ocean. This setting seemed apropos, as there is a tidal force at work in these poems. They rush toward the reader with frenetic intensity, then slowly recede, leaving us drenched in language that is working at its highest level, language riding meaning the way foam crests a wave.

For instance:

He’d always secretly wondered why if is was
the present tense they always called it
the verb-to-be, as if it hadn’t yet arrived,
and if that was what led to all
its present
tension.

Or:

Me and You
are like heterographs:
the difference, say,
between the sound of the g in God
and the one in naught.

Or:

All’s
serioburlesque & subcelestial.
& all these manic
enigmas of the banal

The history of emergency starts within.

Beasley’s poems are powered by the twin engines of disorientation and illumination. There is no light wading here, only deep plunging, the exigencies of the rip tide palpable for reader and writer alike. In one of my favorite poems, “The Scale By Which the Mapped Concerns the Map,” the speaker pleads:

Then say
to me something

I can’t expect, or negotiate-
against, or boundary-draw:

draw me a map wherein

no legend’s legible, or needed.

The poems in this book proffer such unexpecteds, such non-negotiables. Beasley speaks directly to the territories he cannot define or contain—faith, doubt, knowledge, fear, and that ultimate ambiguity, God. In so doing, his meta-articulations give form to the seemingly formless:

Verb
in the flame, anonymous

and obliquitous be thy name.

One such form appears by name in the poem, “Year’s End Paradoxography.” Perhaps anticipating our furrowed brows, Beasley provides a definition:

paradoxography: an ancient literary genre composed of lists of occurrences considered bizarre, abnormal, portentous, miraculous, and inexplicable.

Through prodigious juxtapositions of secular and spiritual language, the reader hears anew the bizarre commandments of contemporary times:

Wait, the gas cap warns
me, until the hissing stops.

Take, the medicine bottle advises,
until distress
subsides.

If you’d like to talk to a live person, just say “live person”

These adopted phrases take on new and haunting meaning in their postmodern context:

Explorer has encountered
an unexpected error
and needs to close.

Beasley’s poems, catalyzed by that “[l]ittle uncancellable voice of 4 A.M.,” speak of and to our riddled language in its native tongue. These are vexed incantations, skeptical psalms, troubled proverbs:

O terra infirma. The confirmation
code will confirm—
on earth or heaven—
no transaction.

At one point, Beasley ponders, “Are there extralexical elements here, and if so, how are they to be/written?”

But the strong, residual current of this text seems to insist on the primacy, and perhaps the totality, of the lexical. For all our euphemisms,

She said oh for zero, she said
my set for her breasts and his package for her lover’s genitalia.

and all our analogies,

As cervix to vagina, so the Law’s
letter, to its spirit.

and all the inevitable misunderstandings of our speech,

As a kid I always thought it went
Our Father which aren’t
In heaven, and sat
staring at His stained-glass throne, wondering
where instead He were.

language is also our only viable means for navigating experience, consciousness, and the What-May-Lie-Beyond:

I’m not sure I got
that: did that sign
say God is nowhere
or God is now here,
or both?

Despite his enormous intellect, Bruce Beasley is remarkably humble. This humility is never more apparent than in the poem, “Self-Portrait in Ink,” where the reader glimpses Beasley’s perspective on his own poetic vocation:

so, go
little poem, little

ink-smudge-on-fingertip
&-print, mimicker

& camouflage,
self-getaway, cloud-

scribble, write
out my dissipating

name on the water,
emptied sac of self-illusive ink.

This is not a poet who announces himself from the mountain with a megaphone, “Come, gather ‘round, and I will share with you my wisdom.” Rather, this is a poet who whispers wisely, “Come, follow me on this pilgrimage. We will leave no stone unturned, and under each, we are certain to find another question.”

Beneath his Notes at the volume’s end, Beasley has added, “As if the exegesis could ever cease.” Thankfully, as long as Beasley continues to write—by which I mean to probe and plumb and push the outer boundaries of the craft—it never will.

Related Posts:

• The Switching Yard by Jan Beatty
• Looking For the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• Butch Geography by Stacey Waite
• Poems Retrieved by Frank O’Hara
• Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White

And of course poets have been engaged in the self-referential arts since long before memoir was a recognized genre. Who are the poet-memoirists among us?

My bright and eager graduate students at Florida International University name many poets who write lyric and narrative memoirs arranged in lines and stanzas instead of sentences and paragraphs. Some of the poet-memoirists they name have graduated from our MFA program. One was this year’s inaugural poet, Richard Blanco.

After reading Blanco’s most recent book, Looking for The Gulf Motel, I am struck by how this poet moves beyond the merely self-referential into the truest and hardest work a memoirist can do—plumbing both the depths and the reliability of memory itself.

Take, for instance, the haunting refrain from Blanco’s title poem, “There should be nothing here I don’t remember…” The italics suggest the urgency of recollection, while the ellipses suggest the inherent incompleteness of this task. In these poems, Blanco scours his memory of the past, committed to its artful resurrection:

My brother and I should still be playing Parcheesi,
my father should still be alive, slow dancing
with my mother on the sliding-glass balcony
of the Gulf Motel. No music, only the waves
keeping time, a song only their minds hear
ten-thousand nights back to their life in Cuba.
My mother’s face should still be resting against
his bare chest like the moon resting on the sea,
the stars should still be turning around them.

At the same time, in this poem, the repetition of the word should reveals the speaker’s anger at loss, his longing for a past that survives into the present. “I should still be eight years old/ dazzled by seashells and how many seconds/ I hold my breath underwater—but I’m not,” the speaker says, his long dash like a startled wake from a dream. “I am thirty-eight, driving up Collier Boulevard,/looking for The Gulf Motel, for everything/ that should still be, but isn’t.” We understand now as readers that The Gulf Motel is a metonym, proxy for all that remains only in memory. The poem closes with what might be read as a memoirist’s rallying cry: “I want to find The Gulf Motel exactly as it was/ and pretend for a moment, nothing lost is lost.”

Why write memoir unless you wish to somehow un-lose your greatest loss?

In one of my favorite poems from the collection, “Of Consequence, Inconsequently,” Blanco reaches for another of the memoirist’s most valuable tools: imagination. He writes:

A bearded shepherd in a gray wool vest,
a beret lowered to his brow, that’s how
my blood has always imagined the man
who was my great-grandfather, his eyes
hazel, I was told once.

Blanco describes his ancestors who he cannot remember—men and women living before he was
born—telling the reader, “I can only imagine.” Yet he can do more, as all memoirists can. He can remember and imagine, and he can also wonder at what might have been:

But what if they’d never met, what color

would my eyes be? Who would I be now
had they gone to Johannesburg instead,
or Maracaibo, or not left Sevilla at all?
Into what seas would I have cast thoughts,
what other cities would I’ve drowned in?

Memoirists don’t only recall and recreate; they speculate about the past and draw their own conclusions. Blanco tells his readers confidingly, the words soft in our ears like a whisper:

I’d like to believe I’ve willed every detail
of my life, but I’m a consequence, a drop
of rain, a seed fallen by chance, here

in the middle of a story I don’t know,
having to finish it and call it my own.

Why write memoir unless you wish to somehow finish the impossible story of your life?

My undergraduates tell me you must be very sad or very troubled to write a memoir. Either that, or something terribly exciting must have happened to you, they say.

“Some memoirs are like that,” I reply. “Some memoirs read like action movies—lots of car chases and steamy love scenes. But some are quiet, contemplative. The memoirist seeks to understand a younger version of himself or laments the passing of someone beloved.”

In “Love as if Love,” Blanco explores sexual orientation, not as something static, but as a form of self-knowledge that evolves over time: “Before I dared kiss a man, I kissed/ Elizabeth,” he tells us. “She sang/until I wasn’t afraid of her loose hair,/ the scent of lilacs creased in her neck,/ her small bones in the space between her breasts, until I dared undress her.” There is such tenderness in this poem, and such curiosity toward both of them, the “woman old enough to know songs/ I didn’t” and the way this younger self held Elizabeth in his arms, “loving her as if I could love her.”

In the final poems of the book, Blanco embraces what seems the memoirist’s universal penchant for mourning and homage. All memoirs, I believe, are elegies in some form to the past, to the fallibility of memory and the burden of mortality. Blanco’s titles reflect his turn toward requiem: “Remembering What Tia Noelia Can’t,” “Unspoken Elegy for Tia Cucha,” “Burning in the Rain,” “Place of Mind,” and “Since Unfinished.” How true to the nature of memoir that Blanco concludes with a poem that addresses the inability to capture it all, to get everything down and everything right. Here he introduces a new refrain—“I’ve been writing this since”—and the since leaps backward and forward in time to these “forever works-in-progress,” Blanco’s life and poems, and Blanco’s life-in-poems, both of which are always full and always incomplete.

As a reader, I want to give a good and true answer when Blanco speaks to Cousin Elena but seems also to be speaking to me:

Tell me
it’s true, we’re everything we remember,
tell me memories never fail us, tell me
we take them with us, that I’ll take you
with me, and you’ll take me with you.

Why write memoir unless you accept that some promises cannot be made, some questions cannot be answered?

Related Posts:

• The Switching Yard by Jan Beatty
• Theophobia by Bruce Beasley
• Butch Geography by Stacey Waite
• Poems Retrieved by Frank O’Hara
• Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White

Waite’s work is not new to me, in that I have read and marveled over and grappled with and taught Waite’s previous chapbooks, choke (Thorngate Road, 2004), love poem to androgyny (Main Street Rag, 2006), and the lake has no saint (Tupelo Press, 2010). At the same time, Waite’s work is always new to me, as in fresh, as in innovative, as in infinitely recursive and self-reflexive. The speaker distrusts easy trajectories from Point A to Point B, as much as the speaker distrusts easy trajectories from boy to man, from girl to woman.

That distrust, and the intricacies of language it necessitates, is exemplified by a poem like “The Kind of Man I Am at the DMV.” The poem begins:

Mommy, that man is a girl, says the boy
pointing his finger, like a narrow spotlight,
targeting the center of my back, his kid-hand
learning to assert what he sees, his kid-hand
learning the failure of gender’s tidy little story
about itself.

After the prosody of the lines and the elegance of the enjambments, I notice the hyper-gender of a word like “Mommy” juxtaposed beside the gender neutrality of a word like “kid-hand.” I hear this poem in conversation with an earlier poem from Waite’s canon, where the speaker tells how “[w]e all love [androgyny] to begin with./ Then something happens. We become/ a mother who races down the steps/ to cover our daughter (who is riding her bike/ topless) with a plaid blanket.”

That metaphorical mother is also this literal mother who tells her son at the DMV, “Of course he’s not,” then changes the subject. That mother who wants to believe in “gender’s tidy little story” is a version of the same mother who appears in “On the Occasion of Being Mistaken for a Man by a Waiter While Having Breakfast with My Mother,” the one who “starts scraping the black burnt off her toast” and chewing her eggs “like they are lint from the screen in [the] dryer.” All of these mothers are the same mother Waite reminds us we have all already become when we insist that gender must be a box to check, that one or this other.

How can a poem like this end? I wonder. After all, in a case of multitudinous identities, there is no single pronoun to suture the story closed. Knowing this, Waite embraces the assumed contradictions between man and girl, boy and woman, and allows the poem to float, even to glide, within and between them, like water around rocks:

The kind
of man I am is a girl, the kind of man
I am is pushups-on-the-basement-floor,
is chest-bound-tight-against-himself,
is thick-gripping-hands-to-the-wheel
when the kind of man I am drives away
from the boy who will become a boy,
except for now, while he’s still a girl-voice,
a girl-face, a hairless arm, a powerless hand.
That boy is a girl, that man who is a girl
thinks to himself as he pulls out of the lot,
his girl eyes shining in the Midwest sun.

You could call Butch Geography a bildungsroman, and you would be right. The poet-speaker comes of age learning “No one knows what I can do” and “Sometimes the world/ is too small for a kid like me.” You could call Butch Geography a kunstlerroman, an artist’s coming of age, and you would be right. It’s one thing, after all, to discover as a ten-year-old catcher on the baseball team that “[t]hey’re all watching the girl with no balls.” But there is an important turn in the next line when the speaker tells us, “I’m watching her, too.” This is the first poem in the collection, and already our speaker is exploring the power of ekstasis, the ability to step outside the self in order to perceive the self more fully. Later, our grown speaker will tell us, “I am still making love to the same woman./I have finally learned that she is not a poem.” Art and life are derivations of each other, never duplicates.

You could even call Butch Geography a meditation on the body, and you would be right. Our speaker muses “on the question of Prince,/his small erotic body, his long hair falling/around his shoulders like a black scarf.” Our speaker falls in love for the first time and recalls, “Back then, our bodies/were rendered speechless.” Our speaker contemplates “shots of estrogen,/ which will surge through my body like electric shocks” and “some piece of herself/ that has been swallowed by the jaws of testosterone.” In a poem called “Explication: Intersexual,” which is not an explication at all but an acknowledgment of the extraordinary liminal spaces of embodiment, the speaker writes/sings/mourns/reflects:

Take, for instance, my body,
always the flag at half-mast,
or carving initials,
the wind’s leave of absence,
someone saying what are you,
photographs and their edges.

Open this book, unfold this map; I dare you. Inside you will find series of poems within poems, recollections that begin “On the Occasion of Being Mistaken…” and epistles addressed “Dear Gender.” You will find a pair of “Self-Portraits,” a pair of “Poems for my First Girlfriend,” a pair of letters “To a Woman Who Has Never Been My Lover.” Stacey Waite is a poet in conversation with anyone who will listen, a poet whose voice is as “alive, and inevitable” as the body s/he sings, and “survival,” Waite reminds us, is “the anthem/ of those places we’ve always been.”

Related Posts:

• The Switching Yard by Jan Beatty
• Theophobia by Bruce Beasley
• Looking For the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
• Poems Retrieved by Frank O’Hara
• Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White