As befitting the first movements of an origin story, Skin Shift opens with the apocryphally titled “Orange Colored Sky,” a poem that serves to introduce some of the poet’s obsessions, namely with femininity, mythology and childhood. Hittinger writes:

Hittinger sees Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman, as a model for his own blossoming femininity, and thus goes about mimicking Lynda Carter, who portrayed the character on television, with the accoutrements of his childhood bedroom. All this interest in Wonder Woman stems from the grace and ease of her metamorphosis from normal woman to super woman—the speaker of the poem craves the same transformation, both for its ease and for the final product. Superheroes are considered to be the modern equivalent to mythological figures in some circles, and Wonder Woman, whose mythology is indelibly linked with the Greek Pantheon (she’s the daughter of Hippolyta in the comics) seems like an appropriate to guide the speaker’s nascent queer urges from a “leaning toward” into a “learning toward.”

If the young speaker of Hittinger’s first poem wants to transform into Wonder Woman, to harness her power, it comes as no surprise that one of the poet’s chief modes of writing is through persona. This tendency to dive into the skins of others helps us to parse the book’s title—Skin Shift isn’t simply about transforming from human to superhuman, it’s about shifting into another flesh altogether. The movement can be horizontal as much as it is vertical. Some of the personas adopted by Hittinger’s speakers include an astronomer, an ornithologist, a geologist, and an alchemist. The poet enjoys stepping into their skins because they offer both a specialized eye and subject, and a way to “Laugh. Clear the jam. [And] Start again.” Other poems in the book—such as “Circe’s Letterpress” and “Samson in Reverse”—collapse the distance between biography and persona, mimicking some of the impetus behind Skin Shift’s opening poem, but no other poems collapse this distance as effectively as the poems in the book’s third section, “Narcissus Resists.”

“Narcissus Resists” is split up into five smaller sections, each headed by five “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” poems, and containing three poems that each start with the letter “C,” the lone exception being the fifth “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” poem, which ends the third section. It seems to be no accident that all the poems in this section are fourteen lines long, though they do not bare the qualities (meter, rhyme) of traditional sonnets, they seem inflected (or provoked) by the spirit of the “sonnets” in Henri Cole’s Middle Earth and Blackbird and Wolf. These “sonnets” are far more naked in their content than Cole’s, recounting the troubled adventures of Hittinger’s Narcissus, a young gay man who idolizes a Madonna-like pop star and hosts an online strip show. These poems cleverly repurpose both pop culture and the myth of the Greek figure, exploring the way shifting from one skin into another can be destructive. In “Metamorphosis of Narcissus IV,” Hittinger explores the collective ire of Narcissus’s spurned suitor:

Transformation isn’t a key to self-discovery for Narcissus, it’s a way of avoiding himself and the havoc he’s wreaked, intentional or not, in the lives of others. Narcissus wants to escape, his guilt manifesting in this ghost dog image, but cannot because Narcissus, much as he might resist, only sees himself. The poems in Skin Shift do not shy away from the implications of shifting from one’s skin to another—they do not indulge in the fantasy such role change can bring, but also in the ways shifting can feed into revising history, denying the reality that the self imposes, or as a means for coping with trauma. Hittinger’s poems are ambitious in their scope and in how artfully they balance raw emotional language with thoughtfully constructed conceits. Ultimately its hard not to find another skin for yourself nestled somewhere between these pages.

Related Posts:

• Fair Copy by Rebecca Hazelton
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover
• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams
• Easy Math by Lauren Shapiro

In “Poem Capitalism” she describes how she practices

this thing I call Objectless
Objectivism. Like: I face the thing, but also
am the thing—so we aren’t. Once, I was content to find
the marble hollow. Filled with a giant star. Now

laved in grease, I rub again against
that dry nubbin in the great warehouse Archyron—(this is not
some reference you’re supposed to get, it’s just this
weird feeling I had.) The yellow frame darkens. I live

in the light but perish in the industrial warehouse,
under the specter of marriage, of hip. Again I wrote
a meaningless poem! and left me
with all the burden of meaning. He died, and she—

We carried her through

Following John Berryman’s lead, Ted Berrigan, in both life and “the poems” succinctly nailed the riff “he died” (“dear Berrigan. He died/ Back to books. I read.” Berrigan’s “Sonnet #2”) Božičević drops in the reference, but then goes further, opening up the question of what about her? And, with the help of claiming a plurality, i.e. “we”, takes the poem beyond where they left off, into a further doorway. Carrying (in fact, rescuing) the speaker of the poem, the body itself, away from the trap that consumed both previous male poets, in life as well as in the work.

Not that death isn’t seemingly everywhere for Božičević. Born in Croatia in 1977, Božičević has been on the fringes at least—if not in the middle of—violent war torn situations. I don’t feel it is poetic fancy when she writes in “Casual Elegy for Luka Skračić”: “I / study from Luka’s textbooks, later he / gets blown up walking to film school, Luka / dies for his art.”

Božičević’s poems are diatribes that refuse become didactic. She’s too busy interrogating herself as much as she is the world, for the poem to slide into meeting easy expectations. In “War on a Lunchbreak” her own gendered sexuality, and that of her friends and the larger society, alongside her past history and current nationality status, caught up between her homeland and her adopted United States, surges to the surface as she reflects upon the hellish clerical job she’s stuck working just to get by. She asks, “What’s war?”

Eternal countrylessness.
Lady poets writing about cock,
not thinking about gender. My friends married in Vegas
to good-ol’-boys or hipster drummers, just ‘cos they can, or
when I contemplate
starving myself
so I’d be “the bomb,” or. I’m sorry
I keep tossing and turning. My livelihood here

depends on people who’ve never tasted
war, and act offended when one leaves work
on time. Not that I ever lay hiding

dying in a ditch, but if I had, I think I’d
know much about dry grass, the incredible value of it:
Simply to see the stalks
move would be enough.

I’d like to have time to type this,
but all day long they’re looking over my shoulder.

Where the poems in Rise in the Fallmay appear to be going in search of death, Božičević is in fact only drawing attention towards realizing life. These poems are affirming her concern with how to live, what’s required, where to find it. As dark as the subject matter gets at times, the over-riding encouragement that this is life, get on with it, is ever just as insistent. Be brave is the message. There’s nothing to fear once you look at things head on.

I think I nod at the true death: when from a moving train
I see a house in the morning sun
and it casts a shadow on the ground, an inquiry
and I think “Crisp inquiry”
& go on to work, perfumed of it—that’s the kind of death
I’m talking about.

An angle of light. Believe in it. I believe in the light and the disorder of the word
repeated until quote Meaning unquote leeches out of it. And that’s
what I wanted to do with dame Death, for you:
repeat it until you’re all, What? D-E-A-T-H? ‘Cause Amy
that’s all it is, a word, material in the way the lake moves through the trees
is material, that is: insofar, not at all.
Because we haven’t yet swum in it. See what I mean?
(“Death, Is All”)

Božičević does not mince words. “I’ll tell you straight up: / you don’t get to talk about Mayakovsky: / take that skateboard and go back to the suburbs. And talk about them.” (“About Mayakovsky”) It is totally great to have poems by a relatively young poet so directly address everyday reality while remaining free of pretension. There’s no placating search after any
specific lingo of MFA craft or other academic jargon. Božičević is all-poet, crystal clear about what she wants to say and who her audience is. The humor is rampant. After reading, “A Poem for You” it’s ridiculously difficult (if you could manage it before) to ever look at any My Little Pony with a straight face again:

I want to write a nice long poem for all you straight girls.
Your religion’s rose and glass castles
hold no place for me, I’m out of my princess phase.
Your pink pony wants to fuck you
She’s limp with longing from being
always touched and hollow,
comb-tugged right out of her field:

Oh I’m too tired to worship at your kittenish emptiness.
For years my emptiness echoed into yours: Oh Hai!
For years I’ve been your pony, and I wanted to fuck you

without your pink dress, the glitter and the organs,
all colorless—

But Božičević is not at all just about putting down “straight girls”. As she goes on to say, “I’m over it.” The poem continues unfolding, complicating its own intentions which are, and never should be, entirely clear.

I love someone now, she’s teaching a class,
she had a bad dream & threw the lotion
at the hurtful door, and I love her, there’s nothing hollow there.
There’s no void in the straight girls either, not really.

This yard is in you, ladies,
green and monn-lit, where you prance like difficult adult Bambis:
that’s not desperate, that’s beauty. I only wanted
to have my fill, as I fill her:

undo you first, then balance out the void in a weighted way
so then you’ll know: How
do you do a Barbie?
With meaning. Women, I’ll defend
your beauty

when no-one else will: when you’re lacerated with IVs
and wrinkles, I’ll say how I filled you with Awwww.
When you’re a crazy-eyed teen who hears voices & sings them
out at an American Idol
audition, a sparrow

aping the starsong ringtone–
I’ll get it. I love you when you’re not quite right.

Božičević opens the possibility that poets might strive to be heroes. Not necessarily ‘saving the day’ kind of heroes, but heroes nonetheless.

Look
at any object & see
the shimmer of philosophers playing inside…And they’re
what you want. And it takes a show-off, sacred whore
you say you don’t
believe in, but ecto-drool over, to make
them emanate: and I don’t got that, babe. I’m sitting here,
wet from my run and
know that somewhere among these ducks and squirrels and,
reflected in the car hood, ducks
and leaf silhouettes
is a way for me to manage
the pain of:
all I ever wanted was to serve.
(“We’re the Aliens We’ve Been Looking For”)

That’s not to say that Božičević doesn’t call ‘Bullshit’ on playing out that role. Still, she does both get the girl and is the girl. Plus, she writes it down always telling it straight. No apologies. She’s not expecting anything further from poetry than the opportunity of the poem itself.

Related Posts:

• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover
• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams
• Easy Math by Lauren Shapiro
• Collected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo

If pith is the mode of the automaton and the worker bee, then Desolation: Souvenir, Hoover’s latest work, puts smoke in the hive. His work is the interruption to the monotony of habituation, deadly as Schlovsky claims. It calls attention to the anemic patterns of habit, using pain and courage to carve through.

Though Hoover is relatively prolific, his writing is capable of traversing, if not discovering within itself, new measures of emotional depth and conceptual difficulty. The entire volume of his published work should be the call to invent new concepts in the prizing of poetic superheroes that acknowledges the sustained lift of a long-fighting heavy weight. Scars and blows all gorgeously legible.

Desolation: Souvenir starts at the point where language fails (as maybe it is supposed to if it is to show it is capable of meaning anything that would touch us): the death of a child. The brief poems piece aphorisms into elegy. The awkward junctures function as attempts at connection, solace, that instead show the gaps – of what is unknown, of what is suffering, of what’s been lost. In “the dream and now a field,” Hoover’s speaker identifies the “vain remedy” of language in the aftermath of emotional evacuation: “the consolations pour/ those unseen wither/ thinking’s like a wind/ tying knots in twine” (14).

These elegies are not only for the loss of a person, but address the sense of impermanence inherent in language in the moment it seeks to comfort, to close a gap or cover an open wound. Hoover writes in “and what is last in us”: “touch is a form of speech/close your eyes to imagine/open them to remember/forms are firm, shapes shift” (29). Where the contradictions do not result in a zero sum, instead verify the irrational logic of the heart suffering what is ultimately unthinkable, impossible.

The language is colloquial; occasionally literary references crop up, and then recede back into the subtle mixture of short lines, references to the personal and to cycles of earth, and transient, lithe meditations on the nature of words, and reality.

In a short section at the end of the book, called “The Windows (The Actual Acts)” Hoover spends twenty four pages on an exercise which seems to be for the purpose of trying to get language to be something real. They are propositions. If propositions are meant to illustrate the things of the world that are, and that can be said, all else is nonsense. In “The Windows” Hoover is carving even more depth to his unnamed speaker. In a move to fix language to say and to be what is, to imply permanence, and, therefore, the propositions function to claim the unchangeable immortal truths of the world. They are a gorgeous defense to the metaphysics and splayed logic of language when confronted by death.

Hoover’s propositions, however, shape what is with humor and a lush bleed of the illogical into what is: “A new species of clam being eaten by a new species of bird./ And there’s no new man to record it./ To imagine a world is to clean it./ Hard to conceive of a dirty new world.” And, here he leaves us, in a dirty new world – with perfect half-finished lives, sentences, thoughts, and sort of made beds. Where people and words suffer and die, or survive and maybe get shocked hard enough into having to be something new.

Related Posts:

• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams
• Easy Math by Lauren Shapiro
• Collected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo

I suppose, one thinks about this sort of thing often when one is bleeding poems into existence. One thinks about the trials, sure. But there are also the utter absurdities. Writing lines? Writing stanzas? Shaping metaphor into an argument, or argument into a metaphor? And then writing without hope of knowing what it is you’re going to get to, get at? And then getting lost! Bad judgment indeed.

And then the further absurdity: Trying to figure out what it is you’ve experienced or understood and making that into something else — a poem? The whole process can be a series of bad judgments. Something like:

“Robert Penn Warren’s Definition of Poetry”

A poem?
Could be.
Bad judgment —
Probably.

But what if there were some way to figure out what kind of poet you are? To improve the judgment?

Isaiah Berlin’s frame of the hedgehog and the fox is sometimes useful. The metaphor, which was the tittle of Berlin’s 1950s essay on Tolstoy and the styles of other writers, is a reference to a fragment by the Greek poet Archilochus, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Berlin divides writers into the two categories. Hedgehogs filter their experience and literary output through a single frame, a defining idea, a unitary vision. Think of Dante, think of Nietzsche, think of Roth, think of Faulkner, think of Merwin, think of Adrienne Rich and Emily Dickinson and Milosz. Foxes, on the other hand, utilize an array of objectives and materials. No single idea is of interest. Think of Shakespeare, think of J.C. Oates, think of Billy Collins, think of John Ashbery and Eudora Welty.

Put the circular you into the corresponding hedgehog or fox circle (rather than try to put a circular you into a hedgehog or fox square), and you might be be able to sort out what you have written, are writing, and might write in the future. And just live with that. Well, by that I mean, thrive there. Embrace it. It’d be good judgment.

Here’s another test. Have a look at this painting by the pre-Raphaelite English painter, John William Waterhouse:

“The Lady of Shalott” depicts of scene from Tennyson’s poem. There’s unrequited love! There’s Camelot! There’s a lady locked in a tower! It’s those Saturdays of yore collapsed on a couch reading adventure poetry while it’s raining outside.

But also look closely at the painting. Aside from its ekphrastic foundation, look at the expression on the woman’s face. The general despair of her mouth, the dis-allegience with reality in the eyes, the urgency of the body toward some kind of action. Are these the kinds of themes your writing entertains? Too, take a look at the smaller details: the two blown-out candles, the meek lantern, the domestic bedding in the non-domestic vessel, the high light of liberty in the upper right that can’t be reached that must be meant as a contrast with the lower right blackness under the boat of the river, the awaiting suicidal darkness. And finally, the little chain clasped delicately around her right hand. Are these the kind of delicacies that are revered in your writing? Do you write with a depictionist’s sense of precision? Especially for the image?

Or consider these two paintings by Pablo Picasso: “Maia au Bateau” and “The Weeping Woman.”

Do these images more accurately reflect the sort of poetry you write? In the boat painting, I see not, as in the Whitehouse, a woman in despair inside a boat, but a woman holding a toy boat who has become so triangulated she has blended into the boat itself. (In the Waterhouse, the woman is distinct from the boat, no?)

Look closely at the landscape, too. There really isn’t any. It’s an interior, it’s a carpet, with a corresponding wall not just resembling the room but blanketing it into darkness so that there is no differentiation of space, of time, of qualities of actual living. And the multi-colored fragmentary distorted face is concurrent with the boat’s angles. All the particulars are blended into the other particulars. Pile on upon pile on. Everything distorted into a singular tapestry.

Or in the weeping painting: Are we not meant to have the woman’s pain transferred literally into us? Is this the sort of breaking down of barriers between, let’s call it now, reader and writer that you’re after in your poems? Do you want the figures in your poems to be sanctified or sacrificed? Do you want them to be real or hyper-real? Do you care if they have past lives or are they figurations tearing themselves into pieces and tearing themselves both into and out of an idea?

Are you writing for depiction or for transformation? Or for distortion? Or for absolute pure utterance?

Filter your own writing through the one (the Waterhouse) or the other (the Picasso), and you’ll go a long way to sorting out what kind of poet you are, have been, and can be.

I’ll say, too, it’s not an all or nothing sort of proposition. You’re not all depiction or all distortion. Just as you are not all hedgehog or all fox.

Writers have tendencies, leanings, urges, predispositions. No need to hide from them. It would be bad judgement to try.

When you recognize who you are as a poet and what your ambitions are, you enter the larger art of poetry and all of its thousands of years of development as a fellow participant and not as an mere observer. You scissor yourself into the art’s very consciousness. You stitch yourself into its multi-traditions that enhance your poems and which you in turn bring freshness to, bring contemporaneity to, and bring your singular voice to. This is the communion that can help differentiate your poems inside the art of poetry.

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I don’t mean to suggest that Adams employs trickery. Quite the contrary — her writing is specific (without being limiting) and straightforward (without offering a conclusive narrative). In the opening stanza of the section “Winter Came” she writes:

This was the year I deserved the winter,
and when it came there was nothing
I could say—
I could not send it back.

It had come for me.

There is nothing hidden here; Adams is not playing games with her reader. She shoots straight from the hip, and her aim is true.

It is difficult not to imagine the “I” in these poems as Adams herself, although one never knows. Perhaps, like the many versions of Jane Doe that we meet in the title section of the book, the “I” is many versions of Adams. Perhaps the “I” is entirely other from the writer (though I am more doubtful than usual of this).

The “I” in Forty-One Jane Doe’s takes on identities. She is Pandora, opening the box: “It was me. There was no lock or key. I just asked, ‘Shall I?’/And the stars fell out.” In the first section of the collection, aptly titled “A Mystery Story,” she is a detective, investigating the weather. She is alternately knowing and wondering, known and unknown.

What is clear throughout is the presence of a narrator, serving not as lecturer or advisor to the reader but as guide and interrogator. The “I” addresses the reader directly in the section “Technologies”: “My body./Reader,/he strokes it in letters” and “Reader, you and I have been lashed/by the weather. We’ve been let down.” A few pages later, the “I” questions the reader, asking “Do you know mathematical beauty, reader?” and then acknowledges itself:

It is an act of extreme egotism to believe
that my being [here]changes the city.
Disrupts it so.
A windbreak. A shadow caster.
My breath catches. Extends.

Self or selfless,
I am in the way.

Whoever she is, the “I” in Adams’ poetry is aware, of herself and of everything she encounters. She is as inquisitive as she is introspective — Forty-One Jane Doe’s is a book of investigation, of questioning. “Why must the body insist?” asks the narrator in a later section of the book. But as we’ve already been told, “The detective/she leaves it to you.”

There are clues that serve both to clarify and to confuse. “The first clue is snowflakes,” but also, “The first clue is wide-eyed.” There are hand-delivered clues and clues made of “paper/wrapped.” There are hints and evidence. And, “Some days there are no clues/other than the patterns of migrating birds.”

There are windows. Pandora gives her box an intentional window “[t]o become perceptible; to be expressed; to permit passage; to make manifest. Maybe for all these reasons. It caught a cluster, a bee and a thistle; the spindle of a watch balance. The sun on the tip of a matchstick.” Later on, there is an accidental window, an unintentional aperture as “the ceiling collapsed,/the roof opened to reveal the sky/yawning back at me—.”

And, of course, there are the Janes. The title section begins, “There are Janes for everyday./And there are sometime Janes.” There are recognizable, apparent Janes and there are hidden Janes. The Janes are distinct and unique, but crowd them “in a graffitied bathroom stall” and “they would all be dialing the same number.”

Adams shifts back and forth between the plural and singular in this section. The many Janes sometimes coalesce into one Jane:

Mornings, Jane tries to look so tall,
no matter what she’s carrying.
She strides down the wooden train platform, one hand
holding her skirt against the breeze, the other clutching.

And then are split apart into multiples again:

One day there were high rise office buildings
and tenements and grids
and alleyways sunk under with rain water.
And then the Janes came with them.

Above all else, the Janes are aware: “One Jane Doe remember burying / Jane Doe in the sand. There is a moment, she says,/when you know what you are doing / is wrong, but you do it anyway.” This is a poetry concerned with the specificities of the universe, of nature, of science and of the body, of love and of pain. The Janes are aware, the “I” is aware, and Adams is aware.

Forty-One Jane Doe’s closes, fittingly, with a question:

If you know the end,
if the day has already come
and another begun for you
can you tell me of it,
so I may know
what to look for?

Like I said, this poetry is magic. Ultimately, Adams challenges her readers to observe intensely the world around us, to decide for ourselves which particulars are clues to be deciphered and which questions are asking for our answers.

(Note: Three short films, created in tandem with the writing, accompany Forty-One Jane Doe’s. The images presented in these films serve to reinforce and inform the poems. I’d recommend reading the book in its entirety prior to viewing the films.)

Related Posts:

• The Moon and Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph Cornell by Kristina Marie Darling
• Counterpart by Elizabeth Robinson
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• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover

I entered the book from its first pages, drawn in and distracted from my own private pain by Orr’s play of language down the page. Orr’s short lines run up against his long sentences. The brief poems are only momentary intervals within their long sequences. He has something both simple and complex to say. I think I think something about what I am to think, and then Orr asks me to think again. I think I think something about what I am to feel, and then Orr asks me to think again.

Love overwhelms us.

Or death takes

One more
Of those.
We cherish most.

Where else?

Where else can we go? (68)

Immediately I copied these lines out of the book and passed them along. For these lines, alone, I could have chosen River Inside the River to discuss in this month’s club. But this book shows us that nothing, no matter how singular or solitary, really stands alone, and so it is not just for these lines that I selected this book.

I often say that reading poetry, and writing it, means taking part in a long conversation, one that has been going on around us all along. We can jump in with our own way of seeing things, sharing in the dialogue for awhile. Then we, and so much of what we love, will be gone. River Inside the River reminds us these things are true, both the long running conversation and the brevity of our time in its midst. This book acknowledges the frailty and continuity of mortals and their words.

Starting with Adam and Eve and their simultaneously immediate and eternal loss, Orr pulls at the root of all heart ache. “To Speak,” “To See, “To Write,” “To Name”: These are the titles of the first five poems in the book, taking us to the base representation of the verbs, before the complications of tense and time and case. Soon enough, though, in the book’s sixth poem, when the worm fails to appear for the grand naming ceremony in Eden, “a dark shroud” (17) is stitched through the cycle, and even this careful design begins to be corrupted. How quickly Orr brings us to the point. “The book said: everything perishes,” he writes in a later poem. “The Book said: that’s why we sing” (89).

In the collection’s three sequences, “Eden and After,” “The City of Poetry,” and “River Inside the River,” Orr balances the need to say things newly against the impossibility of saying anything new. He gives beauty reign equal to anguish. In the middle of “The City of Poetry,” just after he he asks where else we can go, in the face of love and loss, besides the city of poetry, Orr writes, “If you’re halfway honest, I’m sure/They’ll tell you this city, like the human heart,/ Contains it all–spun sugar and gossamer,/But also deepest grief and even horror” (69). The book deals with loss, yes. The book confronts Orr’s own difficult history, and also our nation’s, and also the world’s. But the book also talks about love and hope, the spaces we’ve created, through imagination and determination, where we can rest and love and grow to be ourselves. The book talks about the “Mother’s House” and how that is just another name for the transformative power of verse.

Despite or maybe because of the length of each cycle, the individual poems in this collection are spare, often as short as eight or twelve lines. Most made up of three or four beats, and some as little as one. Why go on and on?

River inside the river.
World within the world.

All we have is words

To reveal the rose
That the rose obscures. (124)

We all know what happened in Eden and afterward, so why go on? We all know that people we love will die, that love can corrupt us, that humans are hard on each other time and time again. Why go on? Why rehash, at length the old familiar song? Except that we need, sometimes, often perhaps, to know we are part of something larger than ourselves alone. Except that the writing brings us to something new. The words can “reveal the rose/That the rose obscures.” At times in this collection we run across familiar forms (Oh look, a villanelle!) and names as familiar as Shakespeare, Sappho, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Neruda, and we see them as we always saw them, but yet we see them new. Those poets, like so many people, are lost to us. Those old forms are past their prime, and even the new forms are made up of nothing that’s new. I could be devastated by all of this so easily, but I am not. I turned to this book because I wanted the busy work of reading poetry, the distraction of working through words, but Orr reminds us that poetry is alchemy. In the process of reading about grief and beauty and people and forms I knew, Orr introduced something that made everything altogether new.

“I’m an old man/ Made young again/ By the poems I love,” writes Orr as he closes “The City of Poetry.” I could go on and on quoting lines and stanzas from this collection, evidence to support my admiration for this book which is, in turn, evidence to support the need for poetry. I could go on and on quoting moments when Orr has reminded me, newly, what it is I always knew. I could go on and on, talking you through this book, but I won’t. You’ll need to take this journey on your own.

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There is another thing that kind of made me laugh at myself: I continued to pay attention because Richard Blanco is a fine, fine-looking man. Dem arms. Seriously.

Look, perhaps we should have more open lusting for poets, yeah? If that is someone’s gateway into a poet’s work, then so be it. We all need more poetry in our lives.

All right, now that I’ve got all that off my chest, can I also tell you that I really enjoy Looking for The Gulf Motel? Yes, I do. Truly. It hits all my thematic hot spots — love, lust, and loneliness. Blanco revels in memory and intimacy, and much like Tracy K. Smith’s poetry, his work makes me want to bed down and stay.

Because my parents come from Florida — Miami, more specifically — and because I still visit my maternal grandmother in Port St. Lucie (which is more on the central coast), I feel at home reading about Florida. I’ve never lived there, but I imagine the familiarity I have is similar to what Blanco feels about Cuba, minus the political upheaval.

We click beers — Viva Cuba — though
I want to believe I’d hate my life here

from “Poem Between Havana and Varadero”

And I think I’d hate to live in central Florida, though I could grow to love Miami. My mom still likes to tell the story of taking me to a Cuban restaurant, and how the waitstaff was so amused by this baby with a giant, blond-fuzzed head, who would shovel in all the black beans she could get her hands on. Even though I barely remember my last trip to Miami at nine years old, I don’t think I’d feel like a tourist. (For one thing, I’d be busy eating all the properly cooked platanos in sight and would therefore be unconcerned with other matters.)

Everything I am is here still, sitting
with my grandfather on lawn chairs
watching plum sunsets and the clouds
of his tabaco vanishing into the wind,
into the chirp of crickets echoing back
from stars that haven’t moved since
I first saw them, and the moon not yet
replaced by the glow of the city’s lights

from “Sitting on My Mother’s Porch in Westchester, Florida”

Motel is not all about Cuba and Florida, but about identity, and about feeling comfortable with our desires. Whether we know we will be at home farther north, or that we do not fit the tidy traditional narrative our families imagined, Blanco has the words. I loved his poems about his romantic relationships, and “we were no good at that kind of talk, / remember? We had no language for / those mysteries: two men consumed / with one another.” (“Cheers to Hyakutake”)

There’s also an underlying anxiety with the desire to sometimes be someone else — to be the specific someone another needs. Is he supposed to be his father? Is there another him somewhere out there in another parallel universe? And the biggest question of all: “Why have you been sad all your life?” (“Birthday Portrait”)

To be honest, I don’t know what I love most about Looking for The Gulf Motel because it’s just all so true. What I don’t understand about people who get so turned off by the concept of the Other, as though their poor little brains cannot possibly process anything deviating from what’s in front of their noses, is that we’re really not so different. We all want to be loved, desired, and not so sad. We have complicated relationships, romantic and familial, and it’s not so scary to say so. Richard Blanco is a treasure, his words a salve, and he fills me with the best sort of yearning. Most of all, he makes me want to get to work.

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All across America, men are inventing
the steam engine while women sew
the faces of presidents into quilts.
If a whistle is left alone in the forest
it may restore a measure of silence
to the world. Television
reminds me of a math problem
I got wrong on the SAT. Come on, Kathy says,
can’t you just enjoy it for once? By now we know
who patented the steam engine,
but think of all the men who tinkered around,
helping to invent it. Kathy is like one
of their wives, knitting a scarf
out of peach wool. Kathy, I say,
feeling a burst of goodwill,
I’ll give you all my collectibles.
Thanks, she says. I’ll take the John Lennon
dinnerware set for eight. As I walk home
to get it, the world looks like
a Brueghel painting and all the trees
are sending off beautiful
little equations into the air.

Let’s note at the start that the first law of thermodynamics is that energy is constant, just so we’re all on the same page. So: what’s going down here? I think a compelling argument could be made that ultimately Shapiro’s speaker’s exploding the idea of individual tasks (“think of all the men who tinkered around, / helping to invent it”), which is why the title’s significant: if energy’s not lost, then all the work done, in a big enough context, leads to every development. Maybe that’s a bullshitty metaphysical stretch, but it seems, at least according to this poem, sort of reasonable. Aside from that aspect, the poem’s fairly thick with what’d have to be called philosophical stuff: the half-joke about something in a forest and who’d hear it comes in for revision, this time as something to “restore a measure of silence / to the world,” and television—that greatest pleasure-giver, that narcotic of light and laughtrack—”reminds me of a math problem / I got wrong on the SAT.” Whatever you decide that those lines mean, they’re trying in their way to bend and tweak things —just look at the fact that the linebreak turns television from a math problem into a math problem the speaker got wrong.

And, of course, there’s math: math in the bit about TV, and math at the poem’s end, and it’s those equations I want to focus on for a second. Because, of course: regardless of the poem’s title or ideas, that’s just a beautiful image, the notion of trees “sending off beautiful / little equations into the air.” It’s just gorgeous, which is the other thing to note: Lauren Shapiro makes gorgeous poetry, and there are lines in this book that’ll stun—you’ll dogear every sixth page or so. But take a second to humor the possibility that there’s more going on: if the poem’s about energy being constant, and if the poem addresses notions of somthing’s invention coming not just from the Eureka-shouting discoverer but from everyone who tinkered up to the discovery, and if the poem ends with this gorgeous image or idea of trees offering/transmitting equations—literally things for other people to solve, or try to solve, anyway—that surely all adds up to something, yes? Maybe that’s an optimistic read, but I finished that poem sort of stunned at the potential Shapiro was seemingly offering: that the world is, as she says in the book’s title, Easy Math.

Here’s another—here’s “ESL Students” from early on in the book’s first quadrant of poems.

They ask, Why is it in the car but on the bus?
I turn up my hands and give them a pained expression.
There is a moment of quiet anger. Then they pop
open their blouses and the buttons fall
like foreign coins to the floor.
They stand on the desks. They kick the air.
We’re sick of this bullshit, they say.
I am very still. I look them in the eyes.
We’ve show you our tits! they shout.
Yes, I say quietly, and begin to unbotton my cardigan.
The class is silent. For some time we stand there naked,
they on their desks and me in front of the blackboard.
Then Maoki says, There is a difference scene
in every room in the world.
Our clothes are but the lint of a passing era, says Hana.
I will light a candle and watch the prayer moths
circle the room like used napkins, says Oui.
I don’t speak. A shadow passes over the left
side of my chest. Then the bell rings.

I won’t go through and nerdily take apart this one, but just look for a second at what Shapiro’s pulling off: these students don’t understand, or are frustrated by, the weird inconsistencies in language—they’re frustrated that the coding system of meaning is fucked or flawed. Fair enough, obviously. And in response, they get naked. Play along however you like, but it’s hard not to feel like they’re begging for language to reveal (at its best, shouldn’t language be perfectly transparent—shouldn’t I be able to say I feel good and have that be 100% clear to anyone I talk to? Isn’t one of the big crap deals of language the ambiguity, the way it fails?), and when they realize this new language (ESL students) won’t, they reveal themselves, like a dare: here’s what we’ll do, not language, do your part. Maybe that’s a drastic misread. But then it gets even weirder and cooler, with three students offering these strange lines toward the end, and what’s the teacher do? Doesn’t speak. Take the poem however you want: the drama enacted in it has to have something to do not just with communication, but with the ease of communication, with what we expect systems (math or language) to provide for us if we offer our dilligence.

I want to make clear, too: it’s possible the book is in fact doing none of this stuff, and it’s just a very good debut collection of poetry with sharply memorable lines (“When I reach out for you, there’s a tiny genie / in my right ear saying, Go! and an enormous / elephant in my left saying, What the fuck / are you thinking, you little shit?” from “First Man Gets the Oyster, Second Man Gets the Shell”; “I’ve always wanted to be the softest piece / in the chess set. I’ve always known / there never was a soft piece in the chess set.” in “A to Z”). Easy Math is, as far as I can tell, a really beautiful scattering, an attempt to find sense and sustenance (emotional, aesthetic, whatever). Such of course could be said about lots of books, but the big value in Easy Math that I can find is how it doesn’t quite solve, doesn’t quite offer anything as simple as closure. The last line in her poem “Dominoes” applies well to the experience of reading this book and being forced to reconsider the world around you, the one you’re trying to fix, or escape with books, or whatever: “Why couldn’t you see any beauty in that?”

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Born in 1934 to Italian immigrants, Ceravolo got an engineering degree, served in the Army and wrote ardent, engaged poetry until shortly before his death from a brain tumor in 1988. He studied with Kenneth Koch, and won the first Frank O’Hara Prize for Spring In This World of Poor Mutts. He was always considered something of a “poet’s poet,” appreciated with detailed loyalty by writers who felt hugely grateful to have been introduced to his work. Collected Poems is the banquet with all the courses to validate their enthusiasm.

Koch called a Ceravolo poem “an amazing perceptual archaeology,” and that’s a good place to begin, with its engagement of what one senses (perceives), and also what one must dig for. Ceravolo’s combinations of words, line spacing and the music they make both amaze and stop breath.

“Passion for the Sky,” from the O’Hara Prize volume, gives a brief glimpse of how so much comes together with so little :

It is a flawless love poem, for the person who is loved and for other offerings night holds.

There is an almost relentless urgency in every line, demanding a level of being awake that could be enervating, but miraculously isn’t. With Ceravolo reading becomes both energizing and, more often than not, a time-out to praise, as well as a respite from surroundings. “Dive in!” I want to shout in response to “Inland:”

This poem makes me think of Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart,” as do other Ceravolo poems, in part because, deliberately avoiding stardom, he lived in mundane Bloomfield, New Jersey, where typical Springsteen fans lead lives of unheralded emotions . Bloomfield is close enough to New York to satisfy many appetites, and Ceravolo was an eager consumer, admiring Ted Berrigan and absorbing the grit and rough beauties that the area had to offer. He was also not completely immune to the lure of surface glitter, and posed for Francesco Scavullo, the lens master best known for glamming up Cosmopolitan Magazine for many years. The Wesleyan staff was wise to use one of Scavullo’s smoldering portraits for the cover of this book, as a way help hook a new generation on a talent that ranks with the best that American letters has to offer.

“End of the World” could be about any place, including the industrial parts of New Jersey not far from where Ceravolo lived and worked :

This is the kind of poem that makes me ache over the fact that Ceravolo is not with us to share a bill with Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Ed Roberson and other living masters. His physicality is ever-present, sometimes with the plain elegance of “Lethal Sonnet:’’

Ceravolo was a man of many parts, laboring to unite a whole and to do it with integrity. Engineering is an occupation that has more room for poetry (think precision, dedication, symmetry, and a lust for questions and answers ) than one might immediately assume. He made room to fall in love, to marry and have children and be attentive to those he loved. He fed his muse in ways that honor the sacred without ever crossing the line into a slackness that bruises the raw holiness he sought, found and celebrated. Sometimes his short poems say it best :

“Vision.”
Sacrifice love and record position
The goats balance
On beautiful mountains.

“Promontory”
At dawn whatever light
returns, my heart
becomes quicker and quicker
in the night.

He was also wounded by events beyond his control, taking them in as if they were his own, as if suffering for them could somehow heal individuals ripped apart by the decisions of others. “Lament #2 for Lebanon” is too long to quote in full, but like almost everything in this collection, shows bravery, balance, and pure art:

Tomorrow night before the winds blow down
the hungry trees : they’re swaying in the mist,
I want to stop this grove from filling.
Stars in our sleep ride the massacre
in corners of destruction’s nest.
Suns of chords
like dialysis or death.
unknown
Oh Lebanon
land of wood,
defoliated dreams, decapitated screams.
land of wood
Like a pawn you lie
in the middle of the beast,
in the midst of an
old land of sorrows
of controversy crossing the soul.
A dark walk in the desert!
A scorched memory’s toll!

The entire piece is about twice what you see here, and is, like every word in this volume, (including David Lehman’s rigorously appreciative introduction) a “scorched memory” and well worth the price, the toll of time spent with this incendiary material.

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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!”

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