Poetry - Page 2

Into the Void’s 2020 Pushcart Prize Nominees

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The fabled Pushcart Prize . . . one day an Into the Void contributor will win one. And we’re feeling pretty great about the 2020 award because of the six astounding pieces we’re nominating for it. Congratulations and best of luck to our six nominees for The Pushcart Prize 2020! It’s excruciatingly difficult whittling down the top six pieces of the year across all the writing categories. These nominated pieces were chosen in an effort to represent fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction, but also because, more than any others, they showcase the limitless power that concise and carefully chosen language has to illuminate, inspire, and transform. Above all, these pieces remind us what it is to be—in all its terror and glory—human.

•    “Tongue Twister” by Dianne Scott (fiction), Issue #11, Jan. 2019
•    “First Edition” by Mark Keane (fiction), Issue #13, July 2019
•    “Needles” by Don McLellan (fiction), Issue #14, Oct. 2019
•    “Levies” by Ellis Scott (creative nonfiction), Issue #14, Oct. 2019
•    “Dark and Day” by Kami Westhoff (poetry), Issue #12, Apr. 2019
•    “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder 309.81 (F43.10)” (poetry) by Joshua Hilderbrand, Issue #12, Apr. 2019


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The Coarse Grind: Part 14

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You grabbed my hand and we fell into it
like a daydream or a fever…

My friend died of complications due to drug use last April. I flew home to bury him even though I’d just wrapped an East Coast jaunt with Philadelphia’s Psalmships. I was back home in Texas when I found out, up to my elbows in the 10 pages of the CORE grant application. How many of these deaths have I had in my life, the seemingly senseless kind, since I graduated High School almost thirty years ago? Too many to count. My friend was dealing with some darkness I didn’t know about, in ways that anyone from my hometown is familiar with. It seemed like there was an overdose every year after graduating high school, but we’re all getting on. You’d think that dying of an overdose would be unlikely at this point in our lives. These kinds of tragedies should’ve sorted themselves by now, shouldn’t they? A self-inflicted death is shocking no matter when, I just thought we were over that, commissioned and engaged with our own lives, lives we built from out of the grips of small town America. He’s gone now and it’s tragic and we’re all to follow him down to dust but even if we make it, we’ll all be turning our chips in after 12 summers pass.

The parroting and bluster of outrage culture by news media and the consumer, and even the inane and droll posting and reporting from our own lives, fame worship, enthrallment with the ego above all, War, murder, the post plunder of post-industrial America, any and every self-realization and unkink of our personalities, our families, our husbands and wives and children we’re giving this world to—none of it will make a damn when the world temperature climbs. Yet we go on. I do. I get in my car every day, drive to the shop with my serving whites hung on the suicide handles of a 2009 Honda Element. I bartend corporates, serve the rich and deliver up to thirty lunches to Hill Country. The older I get the more I understand that it’s all in service to myself. I’ve less illusions about that than ever. I’m in it, this hulking machine lurching ever forward to the days when the oxygen in the very air we breathe will be at a premium. I’m working for the man and that man is me as giant masses of ice buckle at the seams in the warming winters and the sun burns on above us closer than it’s ever been before. I’m not sure what I’ll do with myself this summer or how I could ever live down doing six thousand miles to the southern tip of the Eastern Bloc and back last year. I know I’ll have to get my shit together, whatever that means, but it will no doubt involve capitalism and reprising my role as a wage earner and tax payer to the sinking Empire of America but don’t too wise—once it’s gone it won’t matter. If I’ve got any salt left I’ll take it back overseas, work just as hard but live well with the Dutch or as an English teacher in Vietnam, upping my blues harp playing and Yoga practice as 12 summers pass.

Morose, eh Good Reader? Cynicism is a copout and it’s all the rage. Between laziness and futility what’s the difference? If there’s fighting in the street and you get the call, will you answer? Would you have stood down the armed guard at Kent State? Take a firehose to the face, police dogs, tear gas—or would you do it their way? Would you knock on doors and canvas the dying towns in the too-hot spring? Will you organize and get on the horn and get heard? There may be no difference between cynicism and laziness except this—the cynic knows it’ll come to no end so he’s paralyzed. The lazy doesn’t care if it will but he’s just as immobile and anyway it won’t matter by the time 12 summers pass.

To further make this column egregiously odious and black I’ll bring it back to the only thing that really matters to me and that is myself. I’m paralyzed and I’ve got my reasons. My habits and disease, said cynicism, anger and worse—a futility that takes my wind and an insight slightly above the curve of the MAGA red hats and the other side. The other side used to be you and me but right and wrong were never really nailed down were they? As long as war isn’t murder and the suffering of another is not our own we’ll only be held to a dubious morality. The dubious morality of a country built on slavery is its own potent harbinger but the arrogance of consumption and terminal greed of the corporation are what will clip links from the food chain and make the whole world tumble, diaphanously down, which it will, bet—and not long after 12 summers pass. I’m caught somewhere between futile and useless. I spend inside or outside of 14% of my life with my neck bent to a screen and investing in a world that only exists in the mind. Social media engages my complicity while it sells my identity to any and every bidder. This is only one of the ways my life is fucked and the world is too, but I can change. That’s all I can do, as hard as it is—write daily, exercise and BE with them, really be with them, as exhausting as that is. We are all we have and our work, too. You and I share this time here, with this column, and to me that is everything. It puts a slant on the doom and tumult, it lets a little light get in for to see and to plan the next jaunt. I’ve got to get back out on the road and see you again my Friend—hold you in my arms, look in your eyes, tell you I love you and beg you not to die, please, at least not before 12 summers pass.

JIM TRAINER’S POEM OF THE WEEK

JIM TRAINER’S LATEST COLLECTION OF POETRY AND PROSE

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The Coarse Grind: Part 13: The Burning Creed

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The past is the past and it’s here to stay . . .
—Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Christmas Eve 1995 I slept in Cromwell Park. It was cold but I had a sleeping bag.  It was what it was. The 2-3 months that followed though, in the winter of my twentieth year, were touch and go man.  The roots of a deep-seated trauma I wouldn’t live down for over twenty years. Until yesterday. I was out, doing my corporate lunch gig when I got a text for a bartending position.  We went back and forth and eventually the offer was rescinded. That’s when I realized. Asking for $15 an hour isn’t a life or death situation, man. Everything’s gonna be alright. I’ve heard it said.  I’ve seen it believed. I got it then, from my head to my gut, and it was a game-changer. I made my last delivery and headed home, fortified with this revelation. You could even say I relaxed. It changed everything and put me at ease.  It ended a twenty-three year long panic attack that was my employment history. Employment, getting by and surviving had me scrapping and feral and anyway devoting precious bandwidth to work that didn’t even pay a living wage. I was working for the money and to support my Art but I was working so I wouldn’t end up outdoors. This isn’t to say I’m free now or that I won’t hate putting wherever I’m at with this column down, and heading back out on the road with 2 hot bags and an iPhone this morning.  It’s just that I’m relaxed now, imagine that, and I loosened my grip the tiniest bit, cleared some space in my brain and am better devoting it to the real work–which is getting words to page.

You’ve got to keep working.  Working and writing and publishing—and getting words to page. Write bad. Write good. Rhyme couplets for goddesses or detail your failing libido in blog form. But get words to page. Amass a body of work. Get words to page, rip it out the reel and throw it on the pile. Make that pile heavy, a stack of paper with words on the page so heavy it tips the scales and catapults you into the wild thin air of a creative life.  This body of work is also a living thing inside you at all times. It sits square in your brain when you’re sitting in a brown office and haggling with the company over dollars per hour. It’s a world and a refuge you’ll want to head back to, once you leave Babylon behind, get off the highway and pull in, take off your workshirt and get the world off your neck.  It’s that important, and more—it’s your why of life and that why will sear through any motherfucking how.  Ask Father Friedrich or Philip Levine.  Fyodor or Rollins, Fran Lebowitz or Patti Smith.  Invest yourself in the life and these luminaries will be in your company.  You’ll be standing on the shoulders of giants and it’s not just that your heart will roar so great and loud it’ll strike the world to reckoning with you and the peculiar fecund of your love but that your heart will be the world.  This has been it, for me Good Reader, the burning credo I’ve culled from the spells of witchy women who took me into their thrall and sway, from poets who yelled down the centuries at me while they delivered the U.S. mail or steered a city bus, from writers who stripped calf torsos for dollars and cents in the American Century—artists all who stood in front of their work so the firing squad would only take them out and leave their truth, bare and standing there, in the light of day and for the world to see.  

You’ve got to keep publishing.  Self-publishing or on their dime but you know where I stand.  Cut the pages by hand and glue the spine. Be like Justin Arnold and by hook or by crook manifest your work in book form.  Give it mass. Give it weight. Give it a shape you can hold in your hand. A book is indisputable proof that you have fulfilled your destiny.  The 5 collections I’ve published are hard proof. Every poem in each collection is a record and a document of me, sitting in front of my machine, doing the work, being the writer I always wanted to be—and getting words to page.  Those 5 collections are my why manifest. They’re not just the why of my life, they are why I’m a writer. Why when people ask what I do I tell them I write. I get words to page. I write the truth, mine, and no one else’s. But I don’t tell them that.  I tell them I’m a writer.  I’m a born poet and a punkrocker, a romantic with a bad attitude and a heart many sizes too big but I don’t say that . . . I just say I’m a writer. I get words to page but when they ask me I tell them I’m a writer. Unless they’re paying $15 an hour then I’ll be whoever they want me to be.

VOX POPULI VOX DEI.

JIM TRAINER’S POEM OF THE WEEK

JIM TRAINER’S LATEST COLLECTION OF POETRY AND PROSE



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The Coarse Grind: Part 12

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Journalism is a Ticket to Ride, to get personally involved in the same news other people watch on TV—which is nice, but it won’t pay the rent, and people who can’t pay their rent in the ‘80s are going to be in trouble. We are into a very nasty decade, a brutal Darwinian crunch that will not be a happy time for free-lancers.

Indeed. The time has come to write books—or even movies, for those who can keep a straight face. Because there is money in these things and there is no money in journalism.

But there is action, and action is an easy thing to get hooked on. It is a nice thing to know that you can pick up a phone and be off to anywhere in the world that interests you—on twenty-four hours’ notice, and especially on somebody else’s tab.
—Hunter S. Thompson

What is Personal Journalism? That’s a question I don’t feel eminently qualified to describe. I’m a practitioner, and a purveyor, but any succinct definition of a burgeoning genre could only stifle its growth. As the spirit wanes the form appears. Indeed. That’s from one of Personal Journalism’s progenitors, Charles Bukowski. I suppose I could delve in, a little deeper anyway, explain by example and at least continue to practice the form, whether or not you buy. Which is my motivation for this post—the market for it, if you will, but as you’ll see, Personal Journalism doesn’t exactly cater to its audience. I’m in my apartment, with my legs up. It’s a lazy way to write but writing nonetheless. I can hear the rain out there, coming down in a sheet on a brutish grey day, early in the year. My heat kicks on and with a cup of dark roast beside me, I won’t have to move for hours. These are the facts in Personal Journalism and the story is the inner works. I’m the main character here and my reporting is as, if not more, important than what I’m reporting on. In this case it’s trying to come to grips with what this form is and anyway what’s going on in my head against the backdrop of what I’m actually doing. (Musing on my heroes and line of work while sipping coffee with my legs up, writing and passing some long, lithe hours without a word to anyone.) Take “Antiguan Blues,” for example—it was less about the kind people and God’s own arms length of sky over a 500-year-old cobblestoned village resting beneath two active volcanoes below the Tropic of Cancer, and more about the fact I was travel-logged, fagged and coming down with the flu or recovering from it and anyway suffering with a raging case of IBS. I was in a foreign country. The operative subject is the “I” and not “foreign country.”

Hard news concerns itself with the facts. But the New Century has dragged us through the looking glass. When the leader of the free world is proven to have told thousands of lies, and his claims of “fake news” are fake news, Personal Journalism is of great and crucial value. The podcast format, and real talk from real people, has put the final nails to the coffin of the stoic and out of touch, coat-and-tie newscaster. News media has gone soft and the fourth estate is only entertainment now. As human beings we tend to believe what people say anyway and now the fourth wall is gone. We can get the word out on the street from anywhere in the world and virtually hang with neighbors and friends like Joe Rogan and Tim Heidecker to listen to what they have to say. They’re not giving us facts, although they can, the point is we’re not listening for facts but a personalized, experientially verified truth. The truth is slippery and the objective authority of hard news is neither. The New Century has taken us through the looking glass and authenticity is a hall of mirrors. The internet changed everything and news media has stooped too low to compete to be of any lasting value.

I report on me. It’s the only thing my ADD-rattled mind can hold onto. Blogging can be about putting out fires and writing, for me, is a psychological release valve. I should be doing 600 words every day, instead of every week, and covering something besides myself, that’s fact-driven, every night—if I want to be as great as my writing heroes. Hunter Thompson might’ve come into the world fully-formed and egregiously angry but the hours upon hours and days upon days he spent typing on a Selectric II are what made his wit intractable and biting and his work completely singular and untouchable. That’s exactly what I got into this business for, Good Reader. The power I want to yield comes from here—within walls, behind a locked door, solitary and alone—the writing desk, my armory and throne. Point is I took Thompson’s lead and put myself in the middle of the action. The action, though, for an introverted poet largely in my own head and overwhelmed by the masses and utterly alien to the things they work their whole lives for, goes down on the inner landscape, in the Night Kitchen and in an arena of Self. I can’t tell if it’s good for me or if I’m only carving another line on my own tombstone but, I like it. I suppose I have to go through my own looking glass to come to what Thompson called the Wisdom, and reach the truth on my own and in my own way. Thompson’s been credited as “the least factual, most accurate” reporter on the Campaign Trail in ’72 and I think that’s a worthy endeavor and a valiant goal besides. In a world mired and lost or heated in chase for things that won’t matter from things that really should, to take counsel with one’s self and know your own circus grounds is the only game in town. I became a Personal Journalist and the beat is me. I always wanted to be a writer and find inexhaustible inspiration writing about being one or trying to get there. It’s good work if you can find it and I most certainly have.

I hit pay dirt. The proof is in the over 62k words I’ve posted at Going For The Throat since I decided that weekly was doable and wise. There are 5 years of posts before that, too—but it should be said that the real proof is my work here, at Into the Void. The Coarse Grind, and my essay in the Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review that spawned it, better reflect the weeks I spent reporting on me pithily in blog form. I’d of done wise to sharpen my knives all those Thursdays writing about The Trouble with Grim Jim. Which is a shit way to wrap this treatise on Personal Journalism but anyway a great explanation of my raison d’être and credo. A writer writes, you’ve heard me say it before. I wish I could be out there in the territory more or even report on the things that matter to the People. It seems like journalism and Art are the only way folks down home can throw stones, really rally and roar. I’ve been out and I’ll be out again but in the meantime ain’t it good to be workin’? I know I can come through, with varying success, sure—I sometimes wonder what the fuck I’m writing about and can only imagine what the fuck you think, Good Reader. I’m sometimes happy to be obtuse though, too, and have found a great way to waste time. Your readership is astounding—I’m dealing with 50+ of you beautiful hooligans on the weekly, and in 2019 I’ll be parlaying. Bet. What’s so surprising about y’all being with me, Good Reader—I didn’t expect anyone to understand what I was going through, hating myself and hard on myself while sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way and otherwise coming through with Art, at any and every great and grisly cost. Richard Hell was right. Writing is my why. Fuck the how. We'll figure it out. May the Year of the Brown Pig bring you great fortune and happiness and in the meantime, remember—you either hang yourself or you hang it on the wall.

Ab irato,
Trainer
AUSTIN TX


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Issue 11 Contributors

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Issue 11 is out on January 25th and we’re delighted to be publishing excellent literature and art from the extremely talented writers and visual artists listed below. Included in this issue is the winning stories of the 2018 Into the Void Fiction Prize so be sure to check it out!

FICTION

Sophie Braxton
Judyth Emanuel
Paul Negri
Dianne Scott
Brendan Stephens
Kaitlin Worley Strain

CREATIVE NONFICTION

Kira Compton
Michele Faye

POETRY

Oliver Brantome
Alan Britt
Henry Crawford
Tiffany Rosamond Creed
George Franklin
Gabriel Furshong
Satoshi Iwai
Janika Oza
Daryl Sznyter
David Joez Villaverde
Kimberly L. Wright

VISUAL ART

Sara Brown
Ann-Marie Brown
Maria Danielak
Audrey Gillespie
Danielle Klebes
Evan Lawrence
Aydin Matlabi

REVIEWS

Jay C. Mims
Emma Gleeson

COLUMNS

Jim Trainer


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Poet Allison Joseph Is Profound, Funny and Authentic in ‘Confessions of a Barefaced Woman’

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“There are various levels of poetry,” Allison Joseph explains on the PBS show Connections. “Some poets are much more accessible than others. I basically am a pretty accessible poet.”

The word “accessible” can sometimes be an admonishment thrown by those who wish to protect the Ivory Tower of traditional poetry. Joseph’s latest collection Confessions of a Barefaced Woman is proof that poetry is capable of being simultaneously profound and funny, as well as technically accomplished but wholly authentic.

The poems sway from introspection to outward questioning, and in Joseph’s clear, direct sentences her themes sing. The poems about her early love of reading and writing—”In the Public Library,” “Reading Room” and “Penmanship”—are gently moving in their assured honesty, traits which continues throughout the collection. In “Adolescent Confession” the reader is confronted with the question, “In hindsight, what’s scarier than being a girl?”

After reading her experiences in “On the Subway,” “Why Men Whistle” and “On Viewing Two Different Date Rape Movies,” the answer appears clear. Joseph also explores the pressures on women to conform to a certain beauty standard in several memorable poems including the titular “Confessions of a Barefaced Woman” in which Joseph’s questioning curiosity is drawn to women who wear make-up:

I’ll admire their artistry from a distance.
Know wrinkles I never learned to mask
will etch their paths across my forehead,
around my eyes and mouth,
no second skin for me to wipe away
at day’s end, nothing to reveal.

The poet’s psychologically abusive father is dealt with in poems such as “Dinner Hour” which captures the confused fear of a child but this collection covers grander themes than the simply quotidian. In “Birth of Nation” Joseph describes her classroom introduction to the controversial film which she classes as a racial awakening:

I sat so tense no word, no joke
from my white, brainiac, whiz-kid friend
could soothe me, no lecture on historical
objectivity from my shrew-faced teacher
could calm the bitter at the back
of my throat.

The anger in her clipped words show how childhood memories crawl inside us and shape us throughout our lives.

Joseph continues to give elegant voice to the current state of racial politics by reflecting ideas being developed on the opposite side of the Atlantic by Reni Eddo-Lodge and Afua Hirsch in a poem called “Some of My Best Friends are White People.” The poem has an atmosphere of weariness as Joseph chronicles her white friends (“my secret weapons against racism”) who gently persuade her to not accept the constant micro and macro racial aggressions she experiences. They tell her “this is not business as usual” but Joseph knows better:

But it’s business in America, a country
where I can’t afford the price of my own vigilance,
monitoring the toll of racism too big a job for just one race.

Joseph goes on to write about an interaction with a racist student in “To Be Young, Not-So-Gifted, and Black,” an elegy for what she calls “The Reluctant Integrationist”:

ask her anything except how it feels
to be the one representing that race . . .

Apart from these calm but quietly raging explorations of her experience as an African-American woman, this collection is noteworthy for its humour. Joseph’s writing gets at the core of what it means to be human, including that one crucial element most poets shy away from—the absurd.

“In Praise of the Penis” is a perfect example of Joseph’s uplifting playfulness, as is “Ex-New Yorkers”:

Ex-New Yorkers
won’t ever tell that they never
actually went to MoMa or the Met,
even when the Picasso exhibit came through.

The collection overall is a joyful compendium of a passionate and vibrant life and makes a highly recommendable read for both long-time poetry lovers and those hoping to dip their toes in the perhaps intimidating waters of verse. If “Junk Food,” in which the poet risks her life on icy steps to satiate a craving for Oreos (“no substitute would do, / no supermarket brand or nearest competitor”), doesn’t make you smile then this collection isn’t for you but you would be missing out on a rich offering from a fine and self-described “quintessentially American” poet.

Buy Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen Press, 2018) here.

 




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The Coarse Grind: Part 8

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I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. The great affair is to move.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

Hence the enlightened ruler is heedful, and the good general full of caution.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War

There’s no reason I can’t have 600 words on wax by noon every day. Oh but there are, many to several niggling detail and fuckarounds of daily life that can take the mightiest and most disciplined writer out the game. You can’t prepare for chaos but you can plan on where to be when lightning strikes. That would be here, good Reader, in the War Room in the writer’s chair. With the door open to the carport, the traffic on the highway streaming by, and the coffee cool and honey-sweet. My stovetop percolator churns out the good stuff. I load it with about a cup and a half of water and three heaping tablespoons full of black Italian roast, coarsely ground. I add honey to cut its bitter zing so when it cools it’s oh so nice. I committed journalism last week and it felt right but without daily writing on the dais I’m struck as dumb at the horrors of the New Century as you are. A tremendous boon to the writing life and being prepared is getting your arms around the gruesome and shocking detail of the dark spinning world, framing it and putting it in its place.You either hang yourself or you hang it on the wall. Integration is a wonderful byproduct of the writer’s life. The journalist should write as he/she thinks, at the cusp of the news cycle and before things get spun out and made do by the outrage culture of the reckoning world. A gut take is a great way to strengthen your voice, a safe way to find out what you think and a pure and uninfluenced catharsis.

There are large swathes of my day that could be lost in the thrall of a roaring anxiety or just spent fucking off. Fucking off is hardly a waste of time if you’re prepared. With preparation, you’d be surprised how little of an impending deadline is actually clutch. Several turns of phrase and rhythms of text in this very column have been tested, tried and true, in blogs and letters and poems that I write on a fire engine-red IBM Selectric II. I’m always pleased when poetry makes its presence known in my prose, both because I am in love with language and as an affirmation of its power. Poetry can dive down deep or just be and often, beautifully, it’s the same thing. Bukowski wrote that the mark of genius may be the ability to say something profound in a simple way. Hunter Thompson said that reality is far more twisted than what we could ever fear or imagine. Bob Dylan of course sang you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows and who knows how many countless iterations of that sentiment has come from the throats of as many punk rock singers since. The Wisdom body knows while the Reptile mind reacts and the legacy press panders to it. Salacious stories appeal to our fight or flight instinct. An identifiable enemy assures we’ll be too busy duking it out with each other in the streets to topple them in their tower. This is assuming a top down model of the press and an undemocratized media but ultimately proves the power of language, its power to incite or beautify and I am in love with it.

I am the living mind you fail to describe
in your dead language
the lost noun, the verb surviving
only in the infinitive
—Adrienne Rich, “The Stranger”

I write creative nonfiction and commit journalism for the sake of poetry and I write poetry to mine for the truth. If I could only throw my hat in fiction’s ring I’d rule them all. Not that I’m great, good Reader, or even good—God knows. Some posts at Going for the Throat have me cringing terribly, sometimes stealing from the madding crowd to scroll through my phone in the corner, gnashing and micro-editing as life passes me by. Point is, if you’re in love with language then bad writing can be just as inspiring, especially if it’s public. Bad writing is the best reason to sitcho ass down and get to work just as much as great writing can be a torch in the dark. Ask Heath Brougher. You’re not missing much by stanchioning yourself there but you’d be missing everything if you’re not getting steeped in the inner life.

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
—Herman Hesse, Der Steppenwolf

You owe it to yourself to step down that path good Writer and you owe it to the world to share what you discover. The world that we know is ending now, and that world is a world of power over. Get your power from within. A typewriter is a magic machine. It can create fortune and craft rue as it rolls out the road to the inner life, savage and lush with bloom and strangling tendril.The wild within is the best game in town. There are perverse and dark things buried there that need redemption. Take to the territory, good Writer, get charged with quest and invest long hours on the sinking throne. The world needs you. You need you. Don't save the world. Save yourself.



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On “Cairn” Peggy Shumaker’s Deceptively Simple Poems Will Stay with You Forever

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Peggy Shumaker was the Alaska State Writer Laureate for 2010-2012 and the founding editor of Boreal Books, publishers of fine art and literature from Alaska. Cairn, her recently published collection, evokes life in Alaska but frequently U-turns to the Tucson, Arizona of her childhood, making the 400 pages of Cairn a rich and diverse reading experience.

Largely made up of poems taken from her seven previous collections, the book also contains three sections of unexpected material. “Sparks,” which records an artistic conversation between Shumaker and her friend the painter Kes, is an almost novelistic account of each artist responding to each other’s work and providing prose feedback on each stage of the exchange. Woven into the artistic responses are the revelation of a cancer diagnosis and the death of a mutual close friend. Although the poems in this section are not Shumaker’s most memorable or accomplished, it provides an absorbing and novel testament to the vibrancy of the Alaska artistic community.

“Impossible Grace” is a deeply moving section of poems written around the death of Shumaker’s close friend and fellow poet Eva Saulitis. A “cairn” is a heap of stones used as a memorial for the dead and with each poem Shumaker builds a word-cairn for her friend. The poems are linguistically simple but emotionally complex and taken together evoke the universal suffering of an expected and painful death. Below is an extract from “Holy, the soup”:

Holy, the soup
each neighbour brings by.
By now, suffering has eased

Into our lives, moved in,
taken over. Overnight
we stop expecting next year,

next week, tomorrow.
Tomorrow might as well
be orbiting Saturn,

It’s that far out of reach. Reach
for her gently.

The subtle repetition of the final word of sentence to start the following sentence is a tool the poet employs frequently in the collection, evoking a sense of connection and continuity which feeds into her uneven but often exquisite pictures of nature throughout the poems selected from previous collections.

Death and nature appear to be Shumaker’s most glaring themes but there are two others bubbling under the surface which pack more of a punch than the more explicit subject matter. In the unforgettable opening poem “Parenthood, Unplanned” Shumaker writes in sharp two-line stanzas of her parent’s disastrous marriage after an unplanned teenage pregnancy and calls for the protection of reproductive right in America.

That broken teen
who carried me, who
pushed me out

into this world,
that brilliant

ragged girl
died young, worn down

In her thirties.
One small life,

I know. The only life
she had. I speak for her

When I say
Let women live.

Let women be.

The poet’s mother recurs as a painfully tragic character throughout this collection and Shumaker’s guilt over her parent’s unhappiness is palpable. The final section, an excerpt from her beautifully written lyrical memoir “Just Breathe Normally,” contains the simple line “All my fault, their misery.”

The poems “Hanna Zoe” and “The Provider,” about the poet’s mother and father respectively, are appropriately presented at the very centre of the collection as their lives and deaths reside at the centre of Shumaker’s art.

Such a vast collection is impossible to distill into a short review. In some poems the poet is heavily present, in others she is outside looking in. Many notable poems evoke nature such as “Sloth” and “Spirit of the Bat,” written in the rainforests of Costa Rica. The mysteries which lie inside the human heart are alluded to frequently, most notably in “The One Waiting”:

What she can’t
admit

crushes her, packs her
skull tight.

Scary, all
she knows.

Scary, all she
cannot know.

Cairn is a summary of a rich artistic life and evokes a fine and playful mind. Schumaker’s broad subject matter coupled with her skillfully expressed wisdom and deep human empathy makes this a collection which would make a fine addition to any personal library. Many of her deceptively simple poems will stay with me forever.

Buy Cairn (Red Hen Press, 2018) here.




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“Bone Willows” Paints Raw Eco-Poetic Landscapes to Lament the Passing of Time

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James Engelhardt is a self-proclaimed eco-poet. In his manifesto, he describes eco-poetry as an attempt to connect readers to the natural world and their own bodies to raise environmental consciousness. Bone Willows, Engelhardt’s debut poetry collection, charts the five years he spent living with his family in rural Alaska, a part of the world in serious need of protection. Under the Trump administration “Alaska is open for business” to oil and gas companies, giving Engelhardt’s poems a sense of urgency and foreboding. One might hope a copy of this engaging collection lands itself onto Potus’ desk, but I very much doubt that he reads poetry.

I had the surreal and quite pleasant experience of reading these poems during a heatwave—itself a consequence of environmental changes. They conjured a world I had not encountered since my childhood fixation with Jack London’s huskies and wild Gold Rush-era dogs. This landscape with its beautiful words—”boreal,” “taiga,” “Yukon,” “audabe,” “shims” as a verb, “ptarmigan”—is prime material for poetry but the poet wisely steers away from cliché, intertwining his observations of natural phenomena with  neighbourly dinner parties, his daughter watching dogs defecate on rubbish heaps, and his own marital tensions.

His relationship with his daughter underpins the collection. In “What You Know About This Place” he writes,

She’ll hate him for something
and love him for something else.

It is perhaps his love for his daughter which precipitates the poems’ poignant concern with the passing of time which provides some of the collection’s most striking lines. In “Faster, Spin the Wheel Faster,” “Ice and snow shock to flowers in forty-eight hours”. In “The familiar conditions change brings,” “change riots through the yard”. And in “A and Not-A” the poet helplessly observes “years speeding through the house”. This theme is most painfully captured in “Only Connect” in which the poet speaks of death in the same breath as describing the vital aliveness of his young daughter:

And death rises like another step along a ridge,
a gift from a child.

Engelhardt is a poet unafraid of his own vulnerabilities which easily endears him to the reader. Indeed, some of the most memorable poems chart the tensions in his marriage whilst living in an environment his wife despises. In “Aufeis,” glacial sheets become a metaphor for slowly melting relationships and in “Spring Brings Only Early Dawn” tensions almost boil to violence:

a man
sliding his anger at his wife, a woman
pushing a knife through despair

Happily all is not lost, as recorded in the moving “Into Language”:

They search the rift we know
hasn’t healed and splits each room . . .

. . . The girl claps her hands, the moon is almost up,
a star darts, our eyes fill, we spread our arms wide.

Although the collection is rooted in domesticity, the poet is not immune to the magic of the boreal landscape. The titles of many of the poems reference Norse mythology—”Freya and Odr”—and Pagan traditions—”Brigit and Ostara.” The final poem of the collection presents a raven as the local shama and pagan festivals hold great importance in this remote community, as recorded in “Tundra Carol” and “Boreal Halloween”:

Cold webs and the quarter-year, Celts
and Saxons and Norse consult the dead
before the long night relaxes into starlight chips.

The collection is full of surprises, keeping the reader engaged until the final pages. One such poem is “River’s Head,” an elegy for birth and motherhood which takes the poet himself by surprise:

I haven’t meant to collect these stories —
the contraction, dilations, the deep softening.

Some of the poems feel deliberately unfinished, as if Engelhardt is acknowledging the vastness and unknowability of the landscape in which he finds himself. The rawness of the environment is woven through the book with the repetition of the words “bone” and “bony”. This is life pared back to its essence, for better or worse. I sincerely hope the poet’s marriage thawed when he eventually moved back down south, but his family’s experience has left us with a highly recommendable, memorable collection full of joy and darkness.

Buy Bone Willows (Boreal Books, 2018) here.




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The Coarse Grind: Part 4

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It’s what I do all day—I sit alone in a room and dream up stuff and write it down, just doing the best I can.
– David Mamet

Well, I did it. I tried, at least. With nominal effort I got nominal result and another week hasn’t blown by with only a paycheck to show for it. Work was exhausting. I had to miss my favorite songwriter on Wednesday and, well, it was what it was—but I came through with a poem. I knew I’d have to force it, too. As mentioned last month, the last thing I want to do after driving a truck in the freezing rain for 10 hours is sit behind a typewriter. I did it anyway and I was able to talisman things from my day, mental images or states of being that weren’t the grind. What I came up with is birds. I conjured them up at the type, and they soared and dove above me. They took the deathly focus of the American laborer off of me, away from my sore shoulders and arthritic hands and up into the blue expanse. It was a moment apart and a temporary cure and I got it on wax, that is—it made it to the page.

A lot has been made of training your subconscious to anticipate creative endeavor. I’ve heard the creative self compared to a furtive animal—it won’t come out of the woods and into the clearing until it knows it’s safe. There are too many kinks and fuckarounds in my life right now, and most of them have put a stopper to the works. Everything from my roommate overcharging me $1,750 in rent to coming down with some kind of irritable bowels has put a halt to ambitious creative endeavor. I couldn’t even come through with my usual 600 words over at Going For The Throat at times—though, I’ll admit, some weeks I was just too angry to write. Which is another story for another time. What I'd like to impress upon you is that you need walls and a door and ideally no grifting roommates to create. You've got to schedule it and you've got to keep the schedule.

Last week was a breakthrough. This week looms large. I’ll be on the road in four weeks and hopefully won’t be waking before dawn every day. I know I’ll need to carve out some kind of place for myself, metaphorical or symbolic or otherwise. I look forward to it, truly—sometimes movement and travel is all the inspiration you need. This next month though, slogging it out, here, and putting my shekels away, working for the weekend and our Sunday sessions together with sweet espresso—I’ll be putting it all to the test. Everything you’ve read at The Coarse Grind will have to walk its talk. I’m going to find a way for my creative self to survive in the pitifully small window between work and sleep.

A working class hero is something to bebut I ain’t long for this life, good Reader. Just got to make it to the end of March and then July. Which could very well be the thrust and theme of The Coarse Grind: Live to create, and eventually creating will keep you alive.

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Part 3

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