January 5, 2015

William Trowbridge

BATTLEGROUND

It showed the War was as my father said:
boredom flanked by terror, a matter of keeping
low and not freezing. You wore your helmet

square, he said, not “at some stupid angle,
like that draft dodger Wayne,” who died
so photogenically in The Sands of Iwo Jima.

Those nights I heard shouts from the dark
of my parents’ room, he was back down
in his foxhole, barking orders, taking the fire

that followed him from France and Germany,
then slipped into the house, where it hunkered
in the rafters and thrived on ambush. We kept

our helmets on, my mother and I,
but there was no cover, and our helmets
always tilted. He’d lump us with the ones

he called “JohnDoes,” useless, lazy.
We needed to straighten up and fly right,
pick it up, chop chop, not get “nervous

in the service.” We’d duck down like G.I.s
where German snipers might be crouched
in haylofts, their breaths held for the clean shot.

“Bang,” my father said, “the dead went down,
some like dying swans, some like puppets
with their strings cut.” I wanted to hear more,

but he’d change the subject, talk about
the Pennant, the Cards’ shaky odds, how Musial
was worth the whole JohnDoe lot of them.

from Rattle #44, Summer 2014

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William Trowbridge: “One day while studying for my PhD comps, I came across a group of Howard Nemerov poems in the old Brinnin and Read anthology. I was bitten, seriously bitten, couldn’t stop going back to them—their music, their intelligence, their electrical charge. And then I wrote a poem. That afternoon, I was, to use a John Crowe Ransom word, ‘transmogrified’ from a budding scholar into a seedling poet. But I had neither the time nor the money to go through an MFA program. So, after graduation and in my ‘spare time’ from teaching, I continued my poetry-writing education in the college of monkey-see-monkey-do, happily learning from the poems of great, hand-picked tutors. I still attend.” (website)

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July 1, 2014

A CONVERSATION WITH RON KOERTGE

Pasadena, California
July 3, 2013

Ron Koertge teaches at Hamline University in their low-residency MFA program for Children’s Writing. A prolific writer, he has published widely in such seminal magazines as Kayak and Poetry Now. Sumac Press issued The Father Poems in 1973, which was followed by many more books of poetry including Fever (Red Hen Press, 2007), Indigo (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Lies, Knives and Girls in Red Dresses (Candlewick Press, 2012). He is a contributor to many anthologies, such as Billy Collins’ Poetry 180 and Kirby & Hamby’s Seriously Funny. Koertge also writes fiction for teenagers, including many novels-in-verse: The Brimstone Journals, Stoner & Spaz, Strays, Shakespeare Bats Cleanup, and Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs. All were honored by the American Library Association and two received PEN awards. He is the recipient of grants from the NEA and the California Arts Council, and has poems in two volumes of Best American Poetry. His newest collection is The Ogre’s Wife. He lives in South Pasadena, California.
ronkoertge.com

__________

GREEN: Okay, let’s officially start. It’s July 3rd at Ron … how do you say it, Koertge?

KOERTGE: KUR-chee. But nobody really knows. It’s an old German name and it should rhyme with Goethe if it’s pronounced right, but who’s going to do that? So the name was anglicized over and over and over. It is not a pretty name. [Green laughs] I have that problem about my name, how difficult it is to pronounce.

GREEN: Well, Tim Green’s pretty easy. [laughs] So we’re here at your house, which—I have to mention, it’s where Halloween was filmed—

KOERTGE: One of the scenes from Halloween, where Jamie Lee Curtis comes down the stairs and walks around holding a pumpkin and sits on this little concrete stool. Nothing indoors. And we didn’t know when we moved here—

GREEN: Oh, really? You just happened to find out? When the people showed up …

KOERTGE: [laughter obscures] … holding pumpkins, holy crap! We had two choices—my wife’s nicer than I am, in general. The whole enterprise made me cranky at first. And then I thought, that isn’t going to get me anyplace; I may as well just embrace it. So Bianca got a picture of Jamie Lee Curtis and the phony pumpkins and invited people to use them, and I’ve gotten into that.

GREEN: You grew up in Illinois, and then Arizona for grad school—how did you end up here; what drew you?

KOERTGE: Well, you know Gerry Locklin? Gerry and I were in grad school together. So he got a job for one year at Cal State LA and then he moved to Cal State Long Beach. Well, while he was at Cal State LA, his office mate—her husband was the head of the department at PCC, and she casually mentioned to Gerry that her husband was looking for a teacher. I wrote to him—his name was Woody Olson—and he said, “You know this isn’t really a job search, but if you come out to see your friend, call me.” Well, you know, I left that night. [both laugh] Because I didn’t have a job. And I didn’t know what a good job it was. It was just so serendipitous. I interviewed casually with a guy named Frank Hammond and he called that night and offered me the job. 

GREEN: Wow. And you taught all sorts of things, right? Composition, literature …

KOERTGE: I taught everything. When I was a young teacher I wanted to teach the classics and Shakespeare and stuff. Then I got a little older and wiser and I started to like teaching remedial composition—one, because it was easy and I’m lazy, and I had time to write; I wasn’t knocking myself out reading Pope’s Essay on Man or anything. But I really started to like teaching basic composition. I could go in there and they couldn’t write—much less a graceful sentence, they couldn’t write a real sentence. I can go in, I can teach them in a traditional way, subject, verbs, what a preposition is used for. And what you had to go through is the first four or five weeks—I was older then, I’d be 50 when I started this—and I go in and I was their worst nightmare. I was the mostly bald, fairly old white guy, and I had African-American students, I had Hispanic students, I had students in and out of jail, in and out of the army, and these were some tough customers. The first few weeks are hard and then I convince them that traditional writing, called college writing, was like another language. And the joke that I used, which you’re welcome to use or not, is I would tell them, “I don’t want you going to one of your parties saying ‘To whom does this AK-47 belong?’” [Green laughs] 

This classroom situation was not Edenic, it wasn’t a picnic, but mostly, they got it. And it was so funny because I roamed the room and I sat by them and I would make physical contact; I would go from student to student, work on these little paragraphs, and they’d say to me, “Jesus Christ, this fucking comma’s killing me,” and I’d say, “Yeah, I know, it’s hard,” and, “Here’s what you do; you can maybe move this verb around.” So I loved the last decade of teaching—I always like teaching, but I loved the last eight or ten years. I taught remedial writing and a poetry writing workshop at night. It was just gravy. It was really nice.

GREEN: That’s great. Did you like teaching poetry too?

KOERTGE: I did, I did. And you know what, I went in there one night—I always went in on Monday night—and I went in there, and I don’t know why this happened, my ego had a hard-on or something, but my ego said, “Welcome to English-8, Writing Poetry.” Then my ego asked, “How many of you came to work with me?” And not a hand. [both laugh] And so I rallied, you know, and I said, “Let’s just see what we’ve got,” and I started. My reputation didn’t make any difference to them; they weren’t impressed by that. They liked it that I published, when I showed them the books, but they usually asked, “How much money did you make from those?”

GREEN: Did they want to get published too?

KOERTGE: Oh, absolutely. And for many of them—Dorianne Laux said this about Oregon I think when she was up there—I was just in their way; their attitude was, “This nitpicking about half-rhyme is driving me crazy.” But in the main, it was such a heterogeneous group, you know, older, gay, lesbian, African-American, Hispanic, white, and at least one eighteen-year-old who’s baked every night. But we almost always had a great time. I still hear from them. 

GREEN: Do you think poetry can be taught to anybody, or do you think there’s some innate trait that makes a poet?

KOERTGE: I’ve answered this before, but I always like to answer things in different ways, because I don’t want to hear myself be boring to myself. [both laugh] So this answer is, yeah sure. I think anybody can write a sonnet because it’s formulaic, but I can tell the people who have a little gift. And I can tell the smaller gift from the larger gift, because people who are gifted, they just really started to sing, and the other ones are just kind of—remember the old Fred Astaire … you’re not old enough, the old Fred Astaire dance studio and they’d have the—

GREEN: Footprints …

KOERTGE: Yeah, and anybody could follow the footprints, but somebody with a little gift has a sense of when to half-rhyme “love” and bother with “dove.”

GREEN: So do you think that gift is musical, like the sense of—

KOERTGE: I do think it’s musical. If I were a musician, and I’m far from being one, I would have a really good ear, because I’ve got it for poetry and I’ve got it for prose.

GREEN: I know you write a lot of different styles—sestinas and sonnets. Is that something you set out to do? Like when you sit down and write a poem, do you say, “I want to write a sestina today?”

KOERTGE: Some days I do. I’m a—I’m almost less than blue collar, I’m like no collar. My parents were really, really, really poor. I mean, we were living in—I was born in 1940, so in 1948 or so, I’ll bet we were living on $9,000 a year. My mom worked, even as a child. So, you know, I come from that background where everybody worked. So I write every day.

GREEN: Seven days a week?

KOERTGE: Seven days a week. Holidays. I try to write when I’m sick, but I kind of can’t. If there’s a point, it’s that my mind churns at night. My wife goes to work at eight; she’s a counselor at PCC, and I’m by myself with that useless cat over there. So Buddy and I go upstairs and if my mind’s been churning then I’m going to work on something and if not, I’ll take a form and I’ll try that.

GREEN: So those are kind of exercises to …

KOERTGE: They’re kind of exercises. I don’t know if this is interesting to the interview or not, but I write fiction for middle grade—

GREEN: Yeah, definitely, I want to talk about that.

KOERTGE: Yeah, middle grade readers and teenagers, and some of it is kind of transgressive, not the middle grade so much. But I wrote two books, one called Shakespeare Bats Cleanup and Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs. And Shakespeare’s a kid, a fourteen-year-old boy, who loves baseball and poetry. Over the course of those two middle-grade novels, I got to use every form of poetry known to man, because my narrator had a girlfriend and they would trade poems. And I wrote the sestina and I wrote the villanelle and I wrote the haiku and I wrote the sonnet and I wrote the pastoral; the two kids just worked their way through, like going down the menu in a restaurant. So if I hadn’t had the practice on these days when my mind wasn’t churning, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. And although I love writing poetry, those novels were worth $30,000 each.

GREEN: Really? Wow.

KOERTGE: Lot of money for “poetry.”

GREEN: How is the reception for having a verse novel for young adults? That’s not something young adults come across very often. 

KOERTGE: It is probably my most well-known book, except for Stoner & Spaz, which every kid likes. They can’t keep it in the libraries because kids steal it [Green laughs] and the libraries don’t have any money so they don’t re-buy it. Those two Shakespeare books of mine are very popular novels. 

GREEN: Do you think the kids—

KOERTGE: They like them because they’re short.

GREEN: [laughs] Yeah. Do you think they notice or care about the forms, or do you think that’s just incidental and it’s something they’re only absorbing subconsciously?

KOERTGE: You know, it depends on who their teacher is. If they’re like a theme or content teacher, it’s the story, but if they want to teach some poetry, that’s possible, too. Teachers are really good to young adult writers. I’ll get like 30 letters in one big envelope from the teachers, and students write me, you know, “Dear Mr. Koertge …” and they say great things: “Thank God this was so short,” or “You probably aren’t the best poet I’ve ever read, but these are pretty good.” [Green laughs] They’re just so fucking honest! [laughs] And I write them back.

GREEN: What age level is this?

KOERTGE: The age level is probably fourteen through fifteen. And the myth—if not the myth then the accepted wisdom—is that kids read two years ahead of their own age, so if you’re twelve you’ll read about fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds, something like that. Stoner & Spaz, which is so profane, full of dope references, obviously—maybe sixteen and up. 

GREEN: Do teachers teach these books in their classes?

KOERTGE: They don’t teach Stoner & Spaz very often [laughs], but they do teach the Shakespeare books. I wrote a book named Strays about a foster kid; it’s a story that gets taught a lot, but teachers use it like an adjunct to a block on What’s It Like To Be Different—as in what would it be like to be in the foster care system? And the funny thing is, I made all that stuff up. I never do research.

GREEN: Never, at all?

KOERTGE: Well, Wikipedia! And can we trust that? 

GREEN: Of course!

KOERTGE: Yeah, of course! I’ll tell you, the Stoner & Spaz story, when it was out—it’s ten years old now—so I’m doing a telephone interview with the BBC, and they’re in England and they’ve got some woman in Australia and they’ve got me and they’ve got a counselor for the physically disabled. And we talk about the book and the woman says to me, the counselor, “Well, Ron, you’ve really managed to make lemonade out of the lemon.” And I said, “Well, what lemon is that?” And she said, “Well, your disability.” And I said, “Oh, but I’m not disabled.” And she said, “Ron. Don’t be ashamed.” [both laugh] So I said, “Okay, I’ll just hobble over to the window and throw myself out.” 

GREEN: So how did you get into writing young adult novels? That was relatively recent, right?

KOERTGE: Well, no, I mean, I wish. I didn’t start until I was 40, so I’ve been doing it 33 years. But I got into it by failing. I wrote one novel for grown-ups—Norton published it—and it was a pretty good novel called The Boogeyman, and then I wrote two more. So I was really stoked about The Boogeyman; it was the beginning of my bright career. Three or four years later, two more novels—not a nibble. So I’m talking to a friend of mine named Merrill Joan Gerber who was then a young adult novelist. I was also divorced at the time and I was running around, I was drinking, I was chasing women, and just generally behaving badly. And she said to me, “You know, Ron, you’re such a child, you should write for adolescent boys.” [Green laughs] And instead of getting my feelings hurt, I thought, “Yeah, absolutely.” Because I’m just a smart-ass. So I went to this library [gestures across the street], to the young adult section, which I did not know existed, took out a couple of books, read them, and literally thought, “Fuck, I can do better than this.” And I could. I sat down and revised one of the failures of the grown-up novels, sent it to my agent, he sent it out, rejected once, taken a second time, and I’ve never had a rejection since.

GREEN: Wow. 

KOERTGE: That’s extraordinary. I don’t know if I believe in this stuff or not, but clearly I’m meant—I’m either meant to write for this age group, or I’ve just found a niche that suits me, I don’t know.

GREEN: Well, it seems like it. But what do you think about those adult novels, do you think they just didn’t have the lucky break? It’s so random …

KOERTGE: You know, Tim, I’m afraid that the first novel was like the story of everybody’s first novel. It was very autobiographical. I’m not a really smart person, but I’m glib, and I’m witty, so it was very funny. And I mean, I knew how to write. But I think that was the novel I had in me, but the other two: nada. Now this novel just knocked me out. [holds up Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake] You know this novel?

GREEN: No, I haven’t read it.

KOERTGE: Yeah, I really admire people like Aimee Bender. She’s so good that she’s just way out of my league. I’m happy to do what I can do.

GREEN: Well, that’s great. The first poem I read that really stuck to me of yours was that “Do You Have Advice for Those of Us Just Starting Out?” Just the irreverence of it, and the sense of joy at writing …

KOERTGE: That’s the one that ends in the library, isn’t it?

GREEN: Yeah, the little boy building stacks with the books that everybody else takes so seriously. What’s the seriousness of your writing? Can you be light and also be serious at the same time?

KOERTGE: I don’t know. I mean, a parfait is two different flavors—why can’t I be a parfait? Why can’t I be light and serious at the same time? But I am not a serious person. I don’t take hardly anything seriously. I’m kind of a chatterbox. The unkind word for clever is glib, and I am glib. Partly I have really a hard time taking things seriously, and I don’t suffer fools gladly. I see so much pretentiousness in the poetry world.

GREEN: Oh, definitely.

KOERTGE: Oh, for God’s sake. I mean, if I hear one more person read a poem like this: “Tonight. In the garden. My grandfather. And I. A pear tree.” Fuck, shoot me now. [Green laughs] 

GREEN: That reminds me of a poem I just read in your new book that’s coming out by the time this interview’s out.

KOERTGE: Ogre’s Wife.

GREEN: Yeah, Ogre’s Wife, the poem with the typos in the pretentious poems—you know, “The night was full of dorkness …” [both laugh] And that is the best part of it. 

KOERTGE: “The panting on the wall …” Yeah.

GREEN: Where do you think that pretentiousness comes from? Why do so many poets write like that?

KOERTGE: Let’s guess together, and I’m happy to do it, but most people think poetry is a serious art, and they take themselves seriously. And I don’t know, I was brought up on T.S. Eliot and Roethke and it didn’t influence me. Why would those guys tilt other people toward high seriousness? But don’t you see it everywhere? What do you think it is?

GREEN: Oh … I think people just learn what they think poetry is and they’re writing not for themselves but to publish, and so they’re modeling themselves after that style, and I think it just repeats itself.

KOERTGE: I think it does, because you and I know what’s called “the MFA poem”—you go to a program and all those fucking poems look the same.

GREEN: Yeah, exactly. And the thing is, the worst poems we get are from the Ph.D. professors—

KOERTGE: Oh, my God.

GREEN: And it’s just all like that—why would anybody want to read it?

KOERTGE: Or go to a reading and listen to it.

GREEN: Unless you want to be them, and then you see this person being held up and so you want to write like that person and then it just continues. 

KOERTGE: Years ago—do you know Jack Grapes?

GREEN: Yeah, I took one of his workshops.

KOERTGE: Jack Grapes said to me, “You know, Ron,” he said, “You’re pretty good at this. You just don’t know how to play the game.” He said, “You’ve got to go to the readings of people who are above you at the moment. Let’s say you’re a B-list poet—you’ve got to go to the B+, the A- and the A readings,” he said, “and then those below you will come to your reading.” And I said, “I don’t want some B- son of a bitch coming to my reading.” [Green laughs] So I was never really good at so-called “playing the game.” 

GREEN: I feel the same way, and that’s kind of what Rattle’s all about, too; we do our own thing and ignore that whole hierarchy.

KOERTGE: Oh, Rattle’s very irreverent. I remember, when I was kind of in the mix more than I am now, people fretting over who would read at Beyond Baroque. So you go to Beyond Baroque and it’s this funky little house, wonderful sound system, and they put on so many fucking programs there’s about nine people in the audience every night. [Green laughs] What’s the anxiety level here about, you know? Because there are two kinds of poets: Those who like to write and those who like to have written. I like to write.

GREEN: What about the ones who like to have won awards? [laughs]

KOERTGE: Oh, there are those too. You know, I had an NEA and I was stunned when that came through, really stunned. And the rest of them—Guggenheim, no chance, Whiting, no chance. Dick Shelton told me once—he was at Arizona when I was; he’s a pretty good poet and a very decent guy. And he said to me, “You know, you’re never going to get anywhere if you just keep trying to be funny.” And I said, “That’s probably good advice.”

GREEN: But what’s the point of writing for the five people who judge the Guggenheim? 

KOERTGE: Actually tell me who they are and I’ll do it! [both laugh]

GREEN: It’s just something I’ve been trying to figure out for ten years!

KOERTGE: I know, I’ve been trying for 25 years.

GREEN: Most of your early books were poetry and then you dove into the young adult, but you still write the poetry. How do you decide what to write? 

KOERTGE: I’m an old Platonist, so I think I’m a doorway between the infinite and the finite. I just—this sounds like a little California woo-woo—but I just try to be the open door. I just try to really be available. And if I’m writing the young adult novels, then I really can’t write any poetry—my mind just, it works every night on its own. And writing fiction, I do four pages a day, every day. It doesn’t have to be good in the first draft. But I need something; I need 150 pages I can work with. So that’s all my mind wants to do. 

And my life is really simple. My wife and I get up at five, we have a walk together, you know, speed-walk, come back, maybe do a little yoga, she goes to work, I go to work, and four pages later I either go to the movies or I go to the races—I love the races. And I’m happy to see my wife when she comes home and we usually sit on the porch and have a drink and I could do that pretty much every day. It seems like a really sweet life to me. 

GREEN: And the writing—

KOERTGE: I’m done at noon. Punch in at eight … I need a lunch bucket and a thermos. [Green laughs] Yeah, when I get the four pages, I’m done. I mean, there are days I just can’t, but some days I get six pages. I love to turn out the product, I really do. I like to see things on paper, I’m not a theorist. My feeling is this: I don’t know why I have this gift, I don’t know where it came from, what God or gods, but I don’t think it should be disregarded; I think it should be paid attention to. So I read, of course, but—

GREEN: But it’s more fun to write.

KOERTGE: It’s more fun to write. Singers and musicians, they play and sing every day. Me too. I play and sing every day. 

GREEN: You mentioned—it must have been something I read, but you talk about the mysterious “something” that brought characters together for Stoner & Spaz

KOERTGE: Oh, my God. Yeah …

GREEN: Like they appeared in the same way. But what do you think that “something” is that brought them? 

KOERTGE: I don’t have any … I mean, it’s serendipity, or it’s an enormous blessing, a real gift from, I don’t know, Zeus or Yahweh, whomever you want to worship. You know the story?

GREEN: Yeah, but tell it for the readers …

KOERTGE: Well, I’d written this book, and I forget the title, it wasn’t Stoner & Spaz, it was, I don’t know, something else, and it was about a rich boy alienated from his peers by his wealth and he bumps into this stoner girl so you can guess what happens next: conflict/resolution. And I’m sitting up in the studio upstairs and I can see across to the library. A guy who works there, who has cerebral palsy, a guy whom I know, walked from his car to the bus, and I was thinking, “Oh gee, I wonder what if this kid in the book, what if he had CP?” And then I thought, “Oh, I don’t want to rewrite this.” [Green laughs] So that day or the next, I get in my car; I’m done writing and I’m on my way to the races and it’s a one way street so I’m at the corner of Carrows and the gas station and I stopped for a light. And some kid I had never seen before or after, a kid with CP, limps in front of my car and I just, I looked up and I said, “Fine.” Don’t show me another disabled kid! [both laugh] And I came home and I wrote eight or ten pages of the beginning, sent it to my editor, and she said, “Oh, this is much more interesting.” So she said, “Take some time with it and rewrite the book. Love, Liz.” Easy for her to say! But it was astonishing. 

GREEN: And do you think that actually came from anywhere, or …

KOERTGE: I have no idea. But what a coincidence.

GREEN: And that happens with so many things, so many tiny moments that could change the entire direction of our lives.

KOERTGE: It really does. In this book Strays, this boy, he’s in foster care pretty much overnight; his parents are killed. And his parents had a pet shop; he’s been around animals all of his life. And I’m stuck in this book. He’s on the Gold Line; he’s suddenly in the foster home and he’s going back to his neighborhood because he’s all fucked up. And he sees a dog, a blind guy’s dog—and I ran up against this scene time and time again—and then one morning the dog turns and talks to him, and I thought, “Oh, yes,” and it just propelled me through the rest of the book. And I don’t know if those animals actually talk or if my narrator’s spirit is so crushed by the death of his parents that he’s constantly hallucinating. I don’t know. But geez I wrote funny lines coming out of this animal’s mouth! Really funny lines. So, I don’t know. But it happens to me a lot. Haven’t you ever been—you write?

GREEN: Yeah.

KOERTGE: Haven’t you been writing and you’re up against the bottom of a poem—I pick up a lot of other people’s poetry and eat it just while I’m working—and suddenly two or three things come together, the hair on your arms stands up, and you have a poem.

GREEN: Well, for me, it’s kind of like trying to get a kite to fly or something, and it catches the wind and then it’s its own thing, you know.

KOERTGE: That’s right. But sometimes you have to run a long way.

GREEN: Exactly. Or you throw it in the air and pretend it’s flying but it doesn’t work. [laughs]

KOERTGE: That’s a good simile. It is like trying to get a kite up. 

GREEN: Let’s talk about your feelings on websites and promotion. I read an article in The Wall Street Journal where you were mentioned saying that you don’t like having a website or a Twitter account.

KOERTGE: I don’t.

GREEN: But you have a website now.

KOERTGE: I do, and I have a Twitter account.

GREEN: Do you update it yourself?

KOERTGE: No. [both laugh] I have a guy. 

GREEN: So what do you think of that kind of social media?

KOERTGE: It just bores the shit out of me. I just think it’s a big suck ass waste of time and I cannot make myself get behind it. 

GREEN: Yeah. Well, it’s part of the whole game now. I think it’s the new game of marketing yourself, and part of the hierarchy. That was the old game; this is the new one of how many Twitter followers you can have. 

KOERTGE: I’m sure it is. And talk about a degradation of perfectly decent words: “Like.” And “friend.” I just find that offensive. I can’t do it. So, I’ve got a guy. [Green laughs] I don’t know how to post a picture on Twitter. I just don’t give much of a fuck. 

GREEN: But you did a blog tour—that’s what this article is about—you wrote for blogs; it seemed like you were enjoying it …

KOERTGE: Well, I paid for that, you know. My publicist set that up. It was an experiment. One of the books, I don’t remember which one, maybe it was one of the Shakespeare books—two women who were former Houghton editors started a publicity firm, so you pay them and they publicize for you, and they set up a blog tour. It’s hard to quantify those things, but when it was all over I couldn’t see any difference from sales or anything else. And the reason that I got behind the tour was, if I’m going to do it I’m going to do it as well as I can. It’s writing; I’m not going to write poorly. So I’m going to try to be witty. If somebody wants to give me ten minutes of their time, I don’t want to waste their time. But I’m not going to do it again.

GREEN: For me, it seems like just another way of giving art to people. 

KOERTGE: I agree. It’s just not my cup of oolong. [both laugh] I’ve had students who just literally said to me—like with the Minnesota program, the MFA students sent me packets of their work, and more than one has said, “I’m just so addicted to Facebook, I’m sorry this is late.” 

GREEN: [laughs] Wow. 

KOERTGE: You know, wake up! Come on. So I want the time that I want. I try to keep my big round head as empty as possible—I don’t watch television; I can’t read trash because it’s toxic for me, it infects me.

GREEN: It’s like picking up a dialect. 

KOERTGE: Oh, my God, yeah. And one of the reasons I love the races is, I go out there, it has nothing to do with writing. These guys I sit with—all of us in our 70s, and we’re just a bunch of—

GREEN: Are they writers, too?

KOERTGE: Oh, fuck no. One guy’s a surveyor for the city, one is a plumber. The thing is, I don’t know their last names and I’ve sat with them for 25 years. All we talk about is the horses, and it’s such a relief. So, like I said, I write, I do that. I’m glad to see the evening come. I like talking to my wife; I have friends like anybody else. 

GREEN: And you don’t think you need to go out and have a lot of different experiences to inspire your writing?

KOERTGE: I make shit up. I make it all up!

GREEN: [laughs] Where do you get your ideas, though?

KOERTGE: Oh, they come to me. I’m available. 

GREEN: Uh-huh. The open door.

KOERTGE: Students don’t understand that. They don’t make themselves available; they’re trying so hard. I mean, it’s like constipation—you try that hard, your butt hurts. Maybe don’t put that in the article.

GREEN: [laughs] We’re putting the whole thing in!

KOERTGE: I don’t care, great! Put it all in, let’s piss some people off. But they really do, they’re so anxious. I think, “Open the door and stand back.”

GREEN: Well, that’s another thing you see as an editor, the workshopped poem, where they just try to cram it in from every different angle and it becomes a big mess.

KOERTGE: Yeah. You know the Billy Collins poem about workshops? It’s a great poem. In every stanza there’s stuff that you’ve seen before in workshops. He’s such a sweet-natured guy. But me, I would be nastier about it; I’d hurt somebody’s feelings.

GREEN: So how did you avoid those pitfalls as a workshop teacher? I see the problem with workshops as, there’s just twelve cooks in the kitchen and everybody wants to put their own spice in …

KOERTGE: Yeah, but that’s just a matter of—it’s almost like personal integrity; in a workshop you learn who not to listen to. For the finals I’d have everybody come in and talk to me, sometimes as much as a half an hour, and I would give up the last three classes and just take time with students. And I’m very frank with them at that point, and I would say something like, “I know that you value Francine,” for example, “but she has nothing to offer you. Don’t listen to her. That’s crazy.” And, “Your gift is this.” I could suss out, often, what a student was good at, and what direction he or she should take. Some should be formalists, and I would tell them that. Some probably shouldn’t write poetry; they should probably write what’s called creative non-fiction—they had a really long loose style but a real strong sense of narrative that would propel the story, and they were basically writing stories anyway and calling it poetry, so I would give them that advice. I was never mean, I don’t get paid to be mean, but I was always frank and most of the time they really took it well. I would hear ten years later—they would say, “You probably don’t remember me but …” and they would repeat things that I said to them. 

GREEN: Wow.

KOERTGE: Teaching was wonderful in that sense, to have an effect on somebody who doesn’t forget it, and have it be useful. I don’t think it gets better than that. 

GREEN: Do you miss it now or are you glad that you could retire …

KOERTGE: I don’t miss it; I don’t miss the PCC teaching. The Hamline thing, that MFA program, is satisfying. That’s enough for me. We meet twice a year—it’s cold as hell in January, but I like the students, I like the teachers. Their names won’t matter to you—Gary Schmidt, Jean Yang, Kate DiCamillo—but in that part of my business, you can’t be around better people. And the money’s not bad!

GREEN: Let’s talk about Shakespeare Bats Clean-up a little bit. Did you set out to write a baseball book?

KOERTGE: I did, and I’ll tell you why. This is one of those little—it isn’t as powerful as the Stoner & Spaz story, but my wife and I, we went to all of the Triple-A parks …

GREEN: Really? The entire country?

KOERTGE: Oh, no, no, in California. I’ve been to most of the racetracks in the country. A buddy I knew from New York and I do that. But my wife and I were up in the high desert—I forget the name of the park, but it’s up toward Victorville. And we were sitting, and watching the game, obviously, and there’s a father and son down by the third base dug-out, right, and the kid is writing something and the father keeps trying to make him stop writing. And I said to Bianca, “You know, I wonder if there isn’t a book in this.” And there was. Kid who loves baseball and he loves writing. 

GREEN: And the story is—didn’t he break his arm so he couldn’t play?

KOERTGE: He got mono. He couldn’t play for a while, he was sick, and so he began to write more, and his dad brought him a journal. And those are the kinds of—I’m going to give a lecture at Hamline called “Cartography as Character.” I make maps sometimes—

GREEN: Physical maps?

KOERTGE: Physical maps on a piece of paper, yeah. Like for Stoner & Spaz, which took place in South Pasadena, I made a real map. And in this lecture—we’re straying here, Tim, so bring me back if you can—in this lecture, I’m going to talk about how I wrote Stoner & Spaz and how I gave the city a different texture by making things up—like I put in a clapboard church that isn’t there, but was 125 years old, compared to the Catholic church where they spent millions of dollars, which should’ve gone to the poor.

GREEN: Of course.

KOERTGE: Yeah, Jesus. Compared to that. So even though I knew the little city, the map really helped. Like, for example, three houses away from where Ben lives, I made up a couple with a disabled child that the mother takes out in one of those wheelchair stroller things. That’s never in the novel. But I wanted Ben, when he left the house, to see another disabled boy or person, just to remind him that he’s in better shape than that.

GREEN: And it’s not in the novel? You don’t mention it whatsoever?

KOERTGE: Not at all. No. 

GREEN: It’s just in your head, this world that you’ve created.

KOERTGE: It’s all in my head. I’ve made up this new world. I made up different neighbors that he would see that aren’t in the novel. 

GREEN: Do you write this down on a map?

KOERTGE: Yeah, wait, I’ll show it to you. Here’s the map. [Koertge picks up a hand-drawn map from the table]

GREEN: Oh, so this is the town.

KOERTGE: This is the town. The Rialto is down there. Here’s where he just about lives because he loves movies so much. The Gilmans have the child and the $500 jogging stroller. The Martins are 70 years old; they never turned up in the novel. There’s a real group home there. There aren’t these bungalows, but that is where Colleen lives. And this is all the people who were in the bungalows: there’s a stripper, there’s a biker, and an itinerant preacher—and the itinerant preacher in my mind walks through this novel all the time ranting. But he’s not in the book.

GREEN: It’s not in the book.

KOERTGE: Not in the book, no. Here’s the hundred-year-old church. The library is right there. It just, it gave that book so much texture for me. 

GREEN: A lot of the poems in your books are written in persona. So many voices just pop off the page as someone different from you. Does that map-making play into how you develop those characters, or do the voices just speak to you?

KOERTGE: The voices just speak to me. I would never make a map for a poem, or even a book of poems. I do it for the novels, but they’re different. And I’ve only been doing it—I didn’t do it for either of the Shakespeare books—I just sort of didn’t have to. But if I’m thinking that the book is too gossamer, too thin, then I want to get some texture, and the map will almost always do it. 

GREEN: There’s a sense when you’re writing that your head is creating this one little thing, whatever you’re looking at, that’s the eye of the writer, and nothing else exists, so having a textured reality, off-camera so to speak …

KOERTGE: It really is off-camera.

GREEN: Yeah, that’s interesting. Let me backtrack a little bit. How did you get into writing in the first place? When did you know that you wanted to become a writer?

KOERTGE: You know, I didn’t know that I wanted to become a writer. It was almost the only thing that I was any good at. In high school, I was an average looking kid, with an average looking girlfriend, and I played the average clarinet in the average band. But I had an encouraging high school teacher. When I went to college, the first two years were hard, and I’m not really bright, and so I struggled the first two years of college. But then I became an English major and it was better and it was easier for me and I could take creative writing classes. So I would be twenty by that time. When I took creative writing classes and I saw men, especially, interested in poetry, it knocked my socks off. Because in the little town that I’m from, Collinsville, if you were a man and you talked about poetry, somebody would just kick your ass all the way around the football field, because you were a faggot, you were gay, you were queerer than queer. So I went to U of I, which stunned me. I mean, I had fucking hayseeds in my hair; I was such a naïve person. I go to U of I and it’s halls of ivy—I mean, it’s a Big Ten college. So I get in these classes and there are these young men who take poetry seriously and I thought, “Holy crap.” And a teacher there also encouraged me. And when I went to grad school and met Gerry Locklin, he was an enormous influence on me. He took poetry seriously. He’s been pater familias to hundreds of students, and he was to me. I remember, he was writing then—they were called “little magazines” in those days; I didn’t know what an independent magazine was—and I think he showed me Marvin Malone’s Wormwood Review. And, you know, kind of like my story about reading an adult novel and saying, “Oh I could do that,” when I saw the poems in Wormwood Review I said to him, “These are great, they’re funny and they’re dirty.” And he said, “If you want to write a couple and show them to me …” And I wrote a parody of a D.H. Lawrence poem, and he said, “This is hilarious,” then he told me what to do, the self-addressed stamped envelope, and I just did it. I was thrilled; it was thrilling to have poems taken.

GREEN: It sounds like it’s just the thing that you’ve had the most fun with your whole life.

KOERTGE: It was something I enjoyed my whole life. I’ll tell you though, too, there was a little bit of a hanging-onto-a-life-preserver quality. I clung to writing poems, in a way, for something that would keep me afloat, because you can run with poets; you can run with other writers. When I came to L.A., it was a big community. I met Charles Webb, I met Suzanne Lummis, I met Dennis Cooper, I met Amy Gerstler. Amy’s a fucking genius, I love her work. And I was in the mix, you know, in the soup. So, it had meant a lot to me to be able to have something that people at readings thought was fun to listen to, thought was valuable. 

GREEN: Did you ever worry about how to make money?

KOERTGE: I had a teaching job.

GREEN: But before that, did you plan on, “I’m going to be a writer no matter what even if I have to live in the studio apartment in …”

KOERTGE: I never had those thoughts. Isn’t that funny? I don’t plan well, and I was—what’s the old phrase—at sixes and sevens, or between a rock and a hard place, or something—my last semester at graduate school. If I hadn’t gotten the PCC job by chance, I don’t know what I would’ve done. But I did. And I never thought like a writer, in the way that you said, which is, you know, I’ll do it no matter what. Remember I don’t take things seriously.

GREEN: You just couldn’t take it seriously?

KOERTGE: Couldn’t take it seriously. Did you know I wrote for television?

GREEN: No, I didn’t know that, actually. What did you write for?

KOERTGE: Hill Street Blues. Right at the end of the run.

GREEN: Oh, really? Wow.

KOERTGE: Yeah, what a complicated … I’ll try to make this really short.

GREEN: No, people will be interested.

KOERTGE: A trainer of thoroughbreds at Santa Anita turned up at my night poetry class. He’s a really interesting guy, really bright guy. I helped get him into law school in his 40s. So he and I became friends. He was the trainer for David Milch’s horses, David Milch the guy who ran Hill Street. David wanted Darrel to write something but Darrel was way too busy. Darrel took me into Mary Tyler Moore Studios when he talked to David. David wasn’t happy about that; he was really a volatile guy. But long story short, Darrel dropped out and I stayed on. And I stayed on because—those big series, they have the years mapped out, so he didn’t need me for that, and he had really good writers on staff, but what he needed were little bits and pieces. And I remember him saying to me, “Can you think of something we can do in the station? We’ve had a plumber come in, we’ve had a robot, we’ve had this, we’ve had that.” And I said “I’ll see what I can do.” So the new character those last years was—I forget her name, maybe Russo but I forget—the sexy cop, the woman. So I had this little bit where—I remember telling my wife this—they had like a ready-room, where the cops could get snacks and stuff. So my idea was that Russo, the sexy cop, would come over to the snack machine and whenever it saw her it would just ejaculate snacks [Green laughs] because she was so fucking hot. And anybody else, they just kept putting money in. The guy cops would see this happening and they would go try to get a candy bar and beat on it and swear at it. So I went into the Polo Lounge one Saturday or Sunday morning and pitched this thing to David, and it just killed him. He loved it. And on that, I got into that business.

GREEN: Writing for TV is such a collaborative process, right—so did you write a certain scene every once in a while?

KOERTGE: He gave me a show of my own.

GREEN: Oh, really? I always imagined there’s a team, a room full of people …

KOERTGE: Well, there is, and this story is not over. I wasn’t really on the team. I did join the Writers Guild, and I was part of the mix, but I wasn’t in on the writing-room. I had my show, maybe six from the end—everybody knew the series was going to end. They burned through a lot of writers. So I wrote my show, and David helped me. He was very, very bright and enormously generous, and he gave me advice. Then I rewrote it, and I took it into him the final time and he was a really fast reader and he said, “This is terrific.” He said, “But I want you to know, it’s mine now.” You know, “It’s mine.” And I said, “Fine.” So it comes on TV—and I know when, somebody called me from the studio—and maybe less than half of mine was left, and what he had written was way better than what I had—and mine was good. He was just … that’s his reputation, just a fucking genius. He was more volatile before he got sick. He was in the hospital and that made him able to write the Jimmy Smitts dying episode which was just wonderful. And then I was talking to another guy—John Romano was working for Milch. He wrote a very good—do you know the movie The Third Miracle?

GREEN: No.

KOERTGE: You should rent The Third Miracle; it’s Romano’s movie. And I said to him when the series was over, “What do you think I should do?” because John was not crazy or coked up or anything of the sort; he was just a steady, stand-up guy. And he said “You know, Ron, you’re 46; that’s a little old to get into this business.” And he said, “Do you like to teach?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “You can write down the center of the page.” That’s a great phrase, isn’t it? He said, “You can do it, but it’s not going to be easy.” And I thought, “Boy, I don’t know.” And I’d made a bunch of money. But I’ve never been too impressed by money. I’ve always had enough. So I didn’t go on; I went back to teaching. I mean, isn’t that odd, though: the trainer, the horses, the poetry class, the Milch connection.

GREEN: Yeah. Well, those things, so much is chance; that’s just how the world works.

KOERTGE: How the world works. And the television job—I mean, friends of mine have a hundred scripts in their closet. They think I’m crazy. They said, “You joined the guild?” I said, “I had to join the guild, I didn’t want to join the guild!” I didn’t particularly. I had to. That’s why people—I give advice to students that they have to go out there; they can’t sit home. But if you do go out and get into parasitic networking shit—boy, that just makes me want to go up in the morning and write all by myself. Because you can feel yourself being used. They shake your hand and look over your shoulder at the next guy, and when they know you know somebody they want you to do them a favor, and it’s just, oh my God.

GREEN: It’s exhausting, too.

KOERTGE: It really is tiring, that’s a great word. I don’t have enough energy for that. I take a nap every day as it is.

GREEN: So what do you have in the works now? What are your plans for the next decade?

KOERTGE: I’ve got a book of flash fiction coming out from Red Hen a year from now. I’m kind of between things at the moment. I’ve made some mistakes and I don’t usually make mistakes. I wrote 80 pages of something that I thought might go to Liz Bicknell, my young adult editor, and every page was a different character’s name and the way he or she died. So everybody in the goddamn book is dead. [Green laughs] There’s no through line. What was I thinking! 

GREEN: Maybe you could have a cricket that’s always watching in the background …

KOERTGE: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. And then—I almost never do this, I did about a hundred pages of a book that—I liked some of it, I liked it enough to work on it, but I got into it and I thought, “Oh no, I’ve made a mistake.” I set it in another foster home with foster parents who are way too much like the ones in Strays; I know where this is going. So what I’ve got left from that is probably 25 pages. I’ve got to throw 75 away. So I’m kind of standing in the doorway at the moment with one leg out, right? Or my fly open. “I’m ready, I’m available!” [Green laughs] 

GREEN: It sounds like you just love writing and do whatever comes to you without worrying too much.

KOERTGE: I tend to do that. And like I said, without being in any sense of the word wealthy, I’ve always had enough money, so I never had to push to get the novel in to get the money to pay the bills. That’s never been necessary. So that’s like backdrop, like background. The money’s there, so I don’t have to worry about that.

GREEN: So it’s about noon—have you written your four pages yet? 

KOERTGE: I did two this morning, I had to go to the dentist, and I’ll do two after you leave. I’m not a good afternoon writer but I’ll drink some coffee or something. And actually what I’m writing now is worth a thousand dollars. It’s a short story for an anthology about secrets. And I’ll get those pages today, and then I’ll go stand in the doorway, you know, wearing an attractive outfit, see if I can’t get the muse to drop by for a little cuddle. [both laugh]

GREEN: That’s great. Thanks so much, Ron, really a pleasure.

KOERTGE: Oh, you’re welcome, thank you.

from Rattle #42, Winter 2013

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January 1, 2013

Thomas Dorsett

THE PLEASURES OF AGE

Du Nachbar Gott
—Rilke

So what if the neighbors hate you?
(In my case it’s worse: they pass
without saying a word. What joy
that this stains still vulnerable cells

as much as light drizzle scars stones!)
Nothing matters; that’s why I still work.
Poems none read, translations none want;
I’m prodigious as Nature is with her seeds

and almost as indifferent. Some land on rock,
others on thin soil; yet even if a few sprout
and delight, fame won’t cure uncommon colds
and I’ll still walk to the store with a limp.

(Bach is the music One plays in black holes.
This makes no sense to those below sixty
and the odd useless for whom it’s a “fact”
are Cain-strangers.) False-God-fearing neighbors,

if I lay shattered on the kitchen floor,
none of you would help me with the pieces,
yet I’m not shattered at all; I read,
write, play Mozart on the piano;

A good old age—an oxymoron?
One breaks down. One becomes whole.
One travels less. One travels more
via one’s own private jet, a good book.

Is a leaf on a swept sidewalk lonely?
Silence is gregarious; no, I’m not alone
for Somebody listens with infinite gravity;
my Neighbor forever the day I am crushed.

from Rattle #37, Summer 2012

__________

Thomas Dorsett: “One afternoon, over 40 years ago, I got on the subway on my way to the New School in New York City. I had signed up for a course in poetry taught by the great Jose Garcia Villa. My brother had warned me that he often severely criticized student work. I was very nervous. A little while later, he read some student poems and, true to form, demolished them. Then he came to mine. After reading it, he looked up, and asked Thomas Dorsett to identify himself. I stood up—Here it comes, I thought; my poem must be especially bad. ‘You will become a poet,’ he said. I just stared in amazement until he told me to sit down. That night I thought that I must do something on the side so I can afford to eat. So I became a physician, too. After 60, I added a third ‘p’ and have become an avid amateur pianist.”

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October 20, 2010

Review by Dean Rader Some Odd Afternoon by Sally Ashton

SOME ODD AFTERNOON
by Sally Ashton

BlazeVox [books]
303 Bedford Ave.
Buffalo, NY 14216
IBSN 9781935402817
2010, 93 pp., $16.00
www.blazevox.org

In “Ander Alert,” Ander Monson’s winky essay about Googling other Anders, Monson discovers, paradoxically, that unearthing his namesakes actually makes him feel more alone, his significance diffused. “The more Anders we run across,” he muses, “the less Ander begins to mean, to sound in the hollows of the mouth.” For Sally Ashton on the other hand, self-Googling serves as a portal into various modes of identity which multiply and accrue. The entire second section of her new book is called “In Which I Google Sally Ashton,” and not-paradoxically, the poems within it explore the many Sally Ashtons the poet encounters, the most compelling of which is an African American slave born in Kentucky in 1845. But there are others, and the tension (and difference) between those Sally Ashtons and this Sally Ashton can serve as a kind of metaphor for the main questions the poet poses in her new collection, Some Odd Afternoon—what is it we find when we find the self?

Ashton goes looking for the self in both high and low places—the poetry of Emily Dickinson, her own past, other Sally Ashtons, the stars, maps, and the hinterlands of memory. But, Ashton is leery of places. She seeks the self through seeking, through the act of finding. Wallace Stevens asks the same of poetry in the opening lines of his fabulous “Of Modern Poetry”: “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.” Like Stevens, Ashton turns to the act of poetry as a means of locating that which the self needs in order to come to terms with its own selfness.

This is nothing new for the contemporary poet, but what makes these poems unusual is the form they take (which is itself a form of seeking). A solid half of the poems in Some Odd Afternoon are prose poems, while about another quarter are comprised of one-line sentences, while the remaining quarter are standard poems written in verses and stanzas (usually tercets or couplets). For many poets, form is linked to identity. Consider C. K. Williams’ stretched lines, Jorie Graham’s dropped lines, William Carlos Williams’ clipped feet, Stevens’ penchant for the qualification in apposition. But, like the many Sally Ashtons Google ferrets out, Ashton’s poetic identity takes many shapes, speaks in many voices, and embodies many identities. For her, fluidity of form—not consistency of form— is part of identify formation.

In general, prose poetry shies away from the formalist lens; its formlessness a beguiling beard that protects it from the critical paparazzi. If, as Charles Wright and others have suggested, the poetic line is a single unit of thought, the prose poet does not enjoy the luxury of form as a default organizer of ideas. Or of breath. Or halts. Or movements. Lines, line breaks, enjambments, stanzas and stanza breaks are the motherboard of poetry—without them, a poem can look like a tangle of wires. Where, the reader might ask, does the poet want me to stop? Where am I supposed to place emphasis? Is there a protagonist? Why isn’t this flash fiction?

Ashton makes this ambiguity her friend; she uses prose’s narrativy to take the pressure off of line making, opting instead for story-making.

Consider the opening lines—wait, scratch that—sentences of “Snowfall”: “The furnace knows something. The thermostat on the wall registers complaints. Snow cloud blots out the sky one shade darker than the ground. I can’t write by snowlight and covet lamps cushions, must build a fire, this house the animal I live inside like some kind of parasite worked in to its intestines most unwilling to leave.” Despite the lack of “line” we still hear and feel the heavy iambs in the first two sentences, and we know that iambs and snowfall are supposed to lull us. So they do. But by sentence three we encounter a run-on. We expect a period where a comma is. We expect a period where there is none. And suddenly, grammar, not line, has lifted the poem to a new register. However, we feel it internally before we see it visually. Since we can’t see a stanza break ahead of us, we don’t always know when the unit of thought will end. It’s a bit like walking a path with sunglasses on; you can kind of see your way, but not really. In this case, the two short sentences that begin the poem set us up for that long one, and we get sort of lost in it as it moseys along. And we love it.

One reason we love it is because the semiotics of prose indicate story. This is not the case with verse. So, we are prepared to be narrated to in a prose poem. Ashton takes advantage of this in a good way. She allows her poems to be stories. Mostly, they are stories of release, of escape, of liberation. In the title poem, for instance, Emily Dickinson, mired in starchy old Amherst, daydreams about visiting Italy. On the other hand, a poem like “The Map” begs the reader to believe that it just might be about an intergalactic romance! “She loved that he called her earthling, how she felt utterly alien yet most human in that same instant.” And then there are poems that go meta—that remind the reader he is not experiencing life but text, as in “Donkeys”: “I don’t remember if this happened or not but let’s say it did and you were there.” This poem gets its energy from poetry’s secret history of orality. We don’t always like to talk about that now in the age of print and text and visuality, but this poem’s poetry is found in the voice of narrative: “What did you say that I said that made us laugh and laugh until soda did shoot out our nostrils? It’s on the tip . . . you were there, I know it, whether either of you would ever admit it. I see every detail like ten minutes ago.”

As I was writing this review, I decided to reformat some of the sentences above as verse just to see how Ashton’s poetics would look as sound as more “formal” verse. Here is an example:

I don’t remember

If this happened

Or not but let’s say

It did and you were there.

As verse, it feels lazy, but, as prose, this opening line is sort of exciting. In verse, I actually feel more like I’m reading a journal entry; whereas as the opening sentence of a prose poem, this line prepares me for a fun story set in a poetic land that I have never visited but know well.

The final poem in the collection, “How To,” functions as an ars prose poetica. Of course, it contains advice on living (what doesn’t?) but it also contains advice on how to make poetry out of the story of our lives. Or, is it advice on how to make a story out of the poetry of our lives? “Don’t waste a feeling. Or a story. Or a way to worry. A minute . A birdsong. Not even one shade of green. Promise the crows anything.” Ashton’s inability to waste experience makes her a good chronicler of the human interior condition and good poet.

Some Odd Afternoon won’t please all readers. Some won’t like the prose poetry; others won’t like the line poems; and still others won’t appreciate the occasionally jarring shifts from prose poem to verse poem to line poem. These readers won’t know if Ashton is a “prose poet,” or a “traditional poet” or an “experimental poet,” so they won’t really know what’s going on with her project, and they will find her plurality of voices discordant.

They can have that.

Most others will see Ashton’s plurality as democratic. Despite her references to Dickinson, Ashton is, after all, strangely Whitmanian in her desire to modulate her poetic voice so that any reader might find herself on the same frequency as the poet. Do the Ashtons contradict themselves? Very well, they contradict themselves. The many Ashtons Google give us are vast; the many poems Ashton gives us contain multitudes.

____________

Dean Rader reviews regularly for the San Francisco Chronicle and most recently for The Rumpus. His own recently released book of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize.

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October 30, 2010

Review by James BentonParable of Hide and Seek by Chad Sweeney

PARABLE OF HIDE AND SEEK
by Chad Sweeney

Alice James Books
238 Main Street
Farmington, ME 04938
ISBN 978-1-882295
2010, 88 pp., $15.95
www.alicejamesbooks.org

The Eiffel Tower makes a kind of appearance: glass is a conduit; houses, doors, and tunnels frame it; and music divides night from day in this remarkable collection of sonically rich and imagistically arresting poems. Page after page, I found myself making little gasping sounds in response to Sweeney’s deft exercises in the field of negative space. The repeating motifs include glass (six appearances), houses (eight appearances), doors (five), the division of night and day (five), and music (seven). These unify the collection subtly, though they are not the main point. Instead, they serve as framework, or as the wake by which we know of the passage of a ship.

Things are not what they seem here, and that is by design. Images defy conventional treatment, their metaphorical usage often occupying an ambiguous role in the implication complex between tenor and vehicle. OK, that deserves some explanation, because watching Sweeny turn the visual and the abstract on its head turns out to be a singular pleasure. We often read poems wherein the metaphor works in one direction: from a signifier outward toward its signified through a set of point-by-point correspondences. This collection complicates the process, however. Vehicle not only informs tenor, but tenor also informs vehicle in a bi-directional dynamic like a river pushing and pulling against the ocean tide. Take for example “Diurne,” which is quoted here in its entirety:

I listen to my heartbeat
on the radio, 89.6 A.M.,
a prolapse then a whimper.

It’s fear and something else—
black milk,
static from a sermon.

My house arrives
through the internet
its corners landing everywhere.

to be red night
watched carefully by Bedouins,
to be a comma

between two really important
clauses.
A man in a parking lot

has a feeling of dread.
In the memory of that day
I can’t keep the wind it its box.

Everything in this poem is inverted: milk is black; a.m. and p.m. conflate with AM and FM; the house arrives through the internet, not the other way around; the heartbeat is prolapsed. Is it a vase, or are they faces? Field and ground trade places in a slippery oscillation, which forms both the content of the book and its method. Yet Sweeney is most interested in “the comma/between two really important/clauses,” the zone between a thing and its counterpart that defines two simultaneous yet disparate identities. Poem after poem reveals its core by writing its remnants so that the reader comes to understanding indirectly. When that understanding lands, the effect is completely satisfying.

This is not to suggest that craft overwhelms content, rather that craft and content operate sympathetically with one another toward an ontological center that exceeds them both. The result is a collection of fresh, often brilliant images that draw the reader back to the beginning of the poem and then deep into the poet’s unique vision of the world. Examples are everywhere. From “The Piano Teacher”:

A music box wound too tightly will explode,
playing its song all at once.

From “Wind Beneath the Skin”:

Weather watches me for signs
of change.

From “Another Novel”:

I try Roshachs

but the doctor only shows me
silhouettes of famous gangsters.

And best of all, from the title poem:

I hid as a darkness
diminished by a torch.

It is easy enough for a poet to offer up bland theoretical statements concerning the relationship between field and ground in poetry, or to rehash some Derridian commonplace, break it up into lines, and call it deep. It is quite another thing to generate fresh and startling imagery and to tell compelling stories using language that adroitly performs these linguistic relationships without resorting to pseudo-philosophical jabber. This book successfully avoids pedantry altogether, removes the focus of the poetry from the writer, and turns it outward onto the world. The (now) old guard has finally given way to a poet, and perhaps even to a way of writing lyric poetry, unencumbered by self-consciousness and self-importance. These poems do not talk about language theory; they put theory to direct, practical use.

Sweeney’s witness to fatherhood, “Little Wet Monster,” is a stunning departure from the ordinary, and an excellent example of theory put to practice. How many poems have we all read in which the speaker celebrates the birth of a beloved child? And how many of those poems escape the pitfall of sentimentality? Surely the odds favor sentimentality, but not here. Beginning with the title, three short words, the poet gives us the visceral and the repugnant tempered by tenderness. It could be merely ironic, but wait. Seen in the context of field and ground in which the whole collection participates, he also gives us the potentially sentimental held to account by the visceral. These tiny remnants of language supply a complete narrative before the poem even begins. The poem itself straddles the dividing line between the two emotions without taking up permanent residence in either. It is a verbal tour de force. Tempted as I am to quote from this poem, individual lines don’t do justice to the whole, and frankly, the reader is best served by experiencing this poem first hand.

The final two poems, “Holy Holy,” and “Loggia Document,” serve as a kind of ars poetica to the collection. The first tends toward the overt, proclaiming:

For me speech is
a way of touching,
a rummaging under
for what’s not meant […]

This helps us know how to read lines like, “Everywhere I went/the maps were more accurate/than the land,” which is to say the poet asks us to participate with him in the Derridian, not as an intellectual exercise, but as the genuine experience of the real world.

The second closes the collection in what is by now a familiar performative voice:

I’ve knelt in the twilight of idols.
I’ve chipped my teeth
on the bright water.

After spending an afternoon immersed in Parable of Hide and Seek these chipped teeth amount to a well-earned celebration.

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June 18, 2011

Richard Brostoff

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN POETRY AND PSYCHOLOGY

Blake, in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, embraces an inversion of our conventional beliefs: “It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devil’s account is that the Messiah fell & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.” What poetry may refer to as the abyss, our wilderness or wild, psychology more likely refers to as the unconscious. Poetry offers psychology its own perspective on the reaches of this realm, a unique repository not only of energy, but also of imagery, metaphor, paradox, inversion, contradiction, and often enough, beauty. Rather than a territory to be conquered, poetry valorizes and embraces the resources of the unconscious; it celebrates rather than subdues its creative genius. The poem invites our fascinated commerce with our deep world beneath the world; it invites us to linger in the sensory experience of its inhabiting. Stay awhile, it says.

Often enough, having entered an underworld, the poem suggests: you were here once, lived here, knew this, and the sense of discovery is a bit like walking into that odd, half-ruined city below the city in Rome—sitting there all the time waiting to be recovered, entered and explored in all its strangeness. At other times our underground world opens like a brief visitation. As Jane Hirshfield has written: “There are openings in our lives/ of which we know nothing./ Through them/ the belled herds travel at will,/ long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.” (Hirshfield, 3)

The psychological view comes to us from Freud, who believed the unconscious was a realm to be journeyed to, conquered and tamed. If Freud’s early ambition was to be a military general, he found, ironically, not an external front but an internal frontier to be subdued. For Freud, the domain of aggressive and libidinal impulses was largely instinctual, and unconscious energies were, at best, to be sublimated. If psychoanalysis’ methods allowed entrance to this unseen world, it was not to linger and bring back its wisdom, but, through insight, to make conscious and therefore colonize its foreignness and potentially dangerous energy: “the therapeutic effort of psycho-analysis…is to strengthen the ego, to widen its field of vision, and so to extend its organization so that it can take over new portions of the id. Where id was, there shall be ego.” (Freud, 80) Freud’s extraordinary discovery of an alternate, secret world inside each of us is often underappreciated, the idea having become integrated into our cultural ideology. Yet, while disturbances of the psyche, a kind of overflow of the “id,” can lead to dis-ease, excess or psychosis, Freud may have nonetheless undervalued the unique resources of the void or abyss, of chaos, of strangeness itself.

Of course the terrain of poetry is not one of unstructured wilderness; it insists, much like psychology, on the ordering, structuring principle of craft (in some ways analogous to the ego or analyst), which holds, with form, in dynamic tension the disorder and storm force of the abyss. In the vessel of language, irreducible metaphor and structure, poetry holds in suspension contradiction and paradox, our conflicts and wild energies; it achieves a dynamic balance between the visible and invisible worlds, surface and depth, valorizing neither at the expense of the other.

On the surface of things, of course, the mediating presence of language is the essential medium of psychotherapy as well as poetry. If one wants to understand the life of another realm, another country, and communicate with those who live there, one must become conversant in their language. Poetry offers a less abstract, more sensory, Anglo-Saxon directness—a language of the body, as opposed to a more conceptual, Latinate language. At worst, the intellectual language of psychoanalysis serves as an obstacle course to feeling. When I return to my psychotherapy office in the afternoon, after writing a poem in the morning, my mind is more fluent and at ease with trope. As is true for our dream life, image and metaphor suggest an older, primal means of understanding and representing the world, a language in themselves. The practice of writing facilitates the metaphormaking facility of imagination (that sixth sense, as Emerson suggested), which has its roots planted in the unconscious. Like a traveler in a foreign country, one becomes immersed in its odd expressions and syntax, conversant with the illogical logic of its ways, entranced with its strange linguistic fauna and flora. Falling into the rabbit hole of imagination, into my shadow world certain mornings, warms up my ability to speak the dialect of the place, and therefore aids me as a therapist in speaking more directly to another’s wilderness, to the precincts of the heart. It aids in piercing the elaborate web of resistances and defenses on the borders of the deep life, in piercing the veil of our everyday lives.

Still, poetry is entranced not only with the strangeness and signification of our deep life’s language, but with the materiality of verbal surfaces, texture and tone, sonic life—the music of its making. I believe the psychologist is enlivened, steadied in his or her joint journey with a client by this simultaneous appreciation for the surface—the “manifest content” of the patient’s associations as well as its “latent content,” to use the language Freud used to discuss the interpretation of dreams. Close attention to verbal construction, to rhythm and the orchestrations of sound—to the aesthetic surfaces of a patient’s “productions”—energizes the journey, and, often enough, offers a portal to the interiors. Curiosity, deep attention, appreciation for the forms of our expressions—these are crucial values of the poet no less than the therapist. Fascination with the surface draws us in, invites us to “know the world more magnificently,” as Jane Hirshfield has said of poetry, and is the hook that draws us into depth.

Yet if a fascination with “surfaces” remains an energizing value of poetry, and a potential source of illumination for psychology, no less important is poetry’s comfort with uncertainty. Poetry, like the unconscious, is a domain of “ands” rather than “ors,” tolerates and even valorizes contradiction, drift and counter drift; it multiplies its meanings, embraces difference, remains comfortable with its elusiveness, its mystery. “Do I contradict myself, very well, then I contradict myself,” as Whitman wrote. How much room there is for multiple truths, for the slipperiness of truth, its fragmentary nature, its penchant toward inversion. Poetry is as likely to gesture toward or deconstruct its own assertions as to finally insist on them. Psychology interprets; poetry leans into its truths. It “tells it slant,” as Emily Dickinson said. Poetry is less likely to offer an overarching interpretation of its images and associations. The poet surrenders to his or her journey of discovery, without restless hankering after final truths; he practices, as Keats called it, “negative capability.” Poetry therefore keeps one humble as a therapist, suspicious of too much didacticism, definitive or final truth—suspicious of the one who, finally, knows. It’s not that the therapist or analyst wants to deconstruct him or herself, or fail to offer guidance and interpretation, or surrender the authority at best earned through study and experience, but rather to be wary, and to allow some of the values of poetry to penetrate the inevitable fault lines of his or her psychological and conceptual terrain.

One central aspect of that psychotherapeutic terrain and its framework remains Freud’s suggestion that the therapist be a kind of blank slate onto which the patient might project pieces of him or herself or his or her past. Analysts have therefore traditionally attempted to remain reasonably silent. Elsewhere Freud advises the analyst to have the objectivity and distance of a surgeon. The risk is in becoming absent, a kind of absentee landlord of the patient’s psychic real estate. When I attended my first analytic conference in medical school in the late seventies, I was surprised to find the central discovery of several papers presented that afternoon was that the analyst’s real presence mattered, that there were in fact two people in the room.

Poetry has served as a kind of model for me in this regard, because one of its central impulses is toward presence: it seeks to embody itself in the moment of its activation as it is read, to embody and unfold itself in voice, breath, and rhythm, and in the particularity of the world. Rather than beginning with an overarching interpretive frame as psychology does, poetry begins in specificity. It feeds the phenomenal world through the eye of its needle, takes up residence, and seeks to waken itself. While it searches out “insight” as well, it does so as a flowering on the taproot and stalk of its inhabiting presence. Poetry reminds me to lean into my inhabiting presence as a therapist, as well as to keep building toward understanding from the ground up, from specificity, from “the thing itself ” as Williams said; it reminds me not to be overly attached to what Nietzsche calls a “reification” of our ideas and interpretive frame. “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove,” the therapeutic hour, like the poem, “must ride on its own melting,” as Frost would have it, finding its own pathway and “law” as it goes.

Of course one might equally well outline the multiple ways psychology illuminates, even nurtures the poet and the poem. Certainly, psychology’s conceptual framework and methods, its lens, can be extraordinarily helpful in interpreting image and metaphor, the “associations” of an early draft, and therefore help the author find a poem’s “focus.” It can be terrifically helpful for writer’s block, or helping the poem “come out,” to say all it needs to say, or to understand and overcome, or perhaps embrace its resistances, or to understand the poem’s “transference” to an audience. But I mean only to be suggestive here. These ideas are for another essay.

A larger question remains: To what extent can poetry and psychotherapy mutually illuminate the shadows of the other? In a dialogue between poet and psychologist, how often might one attempt to dominate or colonize the conceptual or artistic domain of the other, or is it possible for each to engage in mutual, concentrated listening, allowing the brightness of the other to expand the realm of his or her awareness? What remains critical is to find a mutually empowering manner of relating in which neither dominates, but nudges one another toward their distinct, sometimes mysterious selves. At best they might throw one another into relief, clarify their respective resources, their particular “genius.” Science has taught us when two ecosystems meet and overlap, land and ocean for instance, sudden fresh pockets of life appear, new niches where life might be nurtured. Similarly, when two disciplines meet, such as poetry and psychology, one might hope they settle into a long-lasting relationship in which the vital contribution of each creates new forms of understanding, as well as the rich unfolding of the other.

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WORKS CITED

Hirshfield, Jane. “The Envoy,” Given Sugar, Given Salt (Perennial, 2002).

Freud, Sigmund. “Lecture 31,” New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Standard Edition of the Complete Works of SigmundFreud (Hogarth Press, 1932).

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Richard Brostoff is a psychiatrist and has worked in the mental health field for over 25 years. He studied literature at Bennington College and Brandeis, and medicine at Duke and Harvard. His literary work has appeared in Texas Review, Atlanta Review, Gulf Stream, Confrontation, Permafrost, Wisconsin Review, Magma (London), Verse Daily, and many other journals. His chapbook, Momentum, was published by La Vita Poetica. In 2000, Brostoff was awarded the grand prize at the AEI International Poetry Festival, and in 2003 was editor’s choice for the Robert Penn Warren Award. He also received an international publication award from the Atlanta Review and was a finalist for the Iowa Review Poetry Prize in 2010.

from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

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September 9, 2011

Mark Terrill

A POEM FOR PARKING LOTS

We’re pulling into the mostly empty parking lot in back of the pet store in Itzehoe on a gray north-German Wednesday afternoon & over in the corner of the lot is a young man sitting on a curb with a rucksack at his feet drinking a bottle of beer—maybe some homeless guy—or a Polish laborer killing time between odd jobs—but right now just part of the setting & I nose the car into a parking place & out of nowhere you start saying how actually it’s a good thing that we all get old & die & that life eventually comes to an end because as you get older & are faced with the ongoing prospect of your own slow decay & the falling away of friends & loved ones it becomes ever more apparent just what’s actually in store for you & the thought of dying is no longer fraught with fear & grief but something more like a relief & even something you could gradually start to look forward to & as we get out of the car I’m thinking hey wow this is pretty heavy & profound for a quick stop in Itzehoe to pick up a couple of spare reflective collars for the cats but then yeah why not & if not now when? & wasn’t I thinking the very same thing just the other day? & I say yeah everyone needs something to look forward to & as I’m locking the car & turning toward the back entrance of the pet store I hear you saying that’s a nice little piece of property there & I turn to where you’re looking & see this empty lot wedged between the back lots & gardens of the surrounding buildings & houses & the whole lot is totally overgrown with nettles & blackberries & weeds & ivy which is crawling up the trunks of the trees all totally neglected & forlorn & yet it’s also a perfect picture of nature just left on its own & somehow reassuring in its own weird way & not without a certain morbid charm & suddenly I see how it ties in exactly with what you were just saying—although maybe not even intentionally—& then even the guy sitting there waiting on the curb with his Zen-like aplomb seems to be a part of the entire metaphysically charged scenario that I’ve suddenly been thrust into with all these signs & signifiers of time & age & what happens to everyone & everything in the interim & I say yeah it is & we turn & head toward the door of the pet store because it’s autumn now & the days are getting shorter & the cats are running around out there crossing the street in the darkness & besides all this other stuff we’ve still got their safety to think about too.

from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

__________

Mark Terrill: “I was washing the dishes in the kitchen when this poem suddenly started coming in, like a radio transmission from somewhere else, although it was obviously driven by a memory of the previous day. I quickly dried my hands and sat down at the computer and started typing the words at roughly the same speed they were coming in. A few moments later I had the finished poem, a transcript of sorts, which is basically unaltered. There’s just no substitute for stream-of-consciousness spontaneity, assuming your receiver is on and working.”

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