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A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Nance Van Winckel Gives Voice to the Dead in Pacific Walkers

September 15, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

The world is full of strangers—people we’ll never know and those we once knew but will never see again. I come from a small town in northern Idaho and there I left behind so many former friends who are strangers to me now. Reading the poignant poems in Pacific Walkers by Nance Van Winckel, I began to wonder if I knew any of those Jane and John Does—if any of the friends who are lost to me have also been lost to the world.

You see, Van Winckel pulls her inspiration for many of the poems in this book from the records of the Spokane County Medical Examiner’s Office—a place not very far from where I grew up. She also gives life and stories to the people in old photographs. Van Winckel is humanizing what we have all left behind and some of the writing in this book is simply stunning.

Anonymity

“the question won’t pertain to tattoos

or unmatchable DNA, but to what
world, under what sun, in what situ

we go on finding each you, each you,
the not-missed, the never missing.”

– Nance Van Winckel, “Last Address”

I felt weird writing “left behind” above, but the word I really wanted to use was “detritus” and that felt worse. We’re talking about, and Van Winckel is writing about, human lives—a man found dead in a landfill, another in a railroad tunnel a premature baby girl found at a water treatment plant—and these are the lives of people we’ve left behind, who might never be claimed. People who are missed in some absent part of our brains that wonders only occasionally “What ever happened to…?”

And that’s part of the point, of course, of writing this book. That part of the experience of reading this book struck me so hard that I couldn’t even write about it for a week. Van Winckel touched on things I did not want to think about. I can barely leaf through old photo albums at the Salvation Army because I find the discarded memories so sad. Here she gives full stories to those people. The language is restrained, as it should be, and Van Winckel leaves me to sit in this uncomfortable place of wondering what’s happened to those I left behind.

The Detritus of my Life

“you were all the world I had to leave” – Nance Van Winckel, “Afraid of My Rays, No One Comes Near”

I remember a boy in junior high. I thought he was the cutest. I never dated him—I was dating other people and he never seemed to notice me—but I always knew when he was near. He didn’t have a lot of money and so he wore the same jacket for all the years from junior high through high school—not that I think he graduated—so it was easy to catch a glimpse of him on a street corner. I don’t know his first or last name—I only have his nickname and a hazy memory of where he lived. I know he got hard into drugs like a lot of his crowd did. And Spokane would have been a natural place for him to end up.

As I was reading this book, it was this boy I kept thinking of. When Van Winckel placed descriptions from the coroner’s office near the poems, I read them extra hard to see if any were him. I hoped they weren’t, but I wouldn’t have been surprised. There were others who were acting as lost as he was at the time, but they had bigger personalities and people to catch them. This boy, I don’t know… I hope he’s out there somewhere living a happy life surrounded by people who love him.

Poetry for Strangers

“Taped into the space
Where a window had been,
that newspaper: it must
be scanned… each day
another fact aglow
with sunlight,
each night the same war.” – Nance Van Winckel, “Compromised State”

So I want to tell you more about the language and form in Pacific Walkers, but I can’t. Maybe the level it affected me on says it all.

This weekend Rebecca Bridge and I are putting the finishing touches on our book of writing prompts and one of the things we suggest is taking a photograph and making it into a story. If our readers do have as well with that exercise as Van Winckel, they’ll be in great shape. My cousin Elisabeth finds inspiration in strangers every week and pulls it together into Poetry for Strangers.

Perhaps writing is a way we can catch people who might otherwise fall away.

“By May / I’m a dashed-off note with promises / of more where this one came from.” – Nance Van Winckel, “I Am My Own Assistant”

If you want to connect with the people in this book or to actually see what the writing is like, pick up a copy of Pacific Walkers from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: Nance Van Winckel, Pacific Walkers, Poetry

Karen Rigby Explores the World in Chinoiserie

August 25, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

karen rigby chinoiserie

When Karen Rigby asked me to review her book, Chinoiserie, I had no idea how much of the world would be contained in this slim volume. Winner of the 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize and published by Ahsahta Press in Boise, ID, I thought the book would be more, well, Idaho. Being from (and having fled) that beautiful but somewhat isolated state, I was delighted to find a rich, cosmopolitan collection of poems.

Why Book Cover Design Matters

We all judge books by their covers. There is only so much time in the world and there are a lot of books. A lot of time smaller presses don’t have the cash to get great designs or they don’t have someone on staff with a strong eye for design. I don’t know the story behind the cover design for Chinoiserie, but I do know that the organic white shapes against a lush red background is gorgeous. The book feels Asian and yet it’s reminiscent of European toiles and Islamic designs as well. It’s simple and yet it’s transnational. Much like the poetry itself.

This attention to detail continues on the inside of the book with a leaf of vellum before the title page. The title page itself is one of the most attractive I’ve ever seen. It boldly and cleanly declares the title across two facing pages with two lines of Rigby’s poetry, “Dear Reader, what I started to tell you / had something to do with hunger” spanning the bottom of the title. No illustration, just that inviting text.

I don’t usually spend a lot of time talking about the design of books, and I don’t want you to get the idea that the outside is more important or interesting than the inside, but aesthetics do matter. I recently went through this design process with a book of writing prompts I co-authored that’s forthcoming from Write Bloody, another small press. We hated the first design. Actually, it was pretty cool, but it said all the wrong things about our book. I’m glad we spoke openly and honestly with the press. I know the budget is tight, but in just one turnaround, we got a cover that’s inviting instead of scary and I’m really happy with the results.

What’s important is that the book design of Chinoiserie made me want to linger over Rigby’s poetry, so let’s do that now…

A World of Poetry

I knew this was the right book for me when I saw that it was divided in three sections each introduced by an epigraph from a Spanish-speaking poet. Rigby quotes from Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, and Octavio Paz. Epigraphs are amazingly important to a book and I sometimes forget that, skimming over them. But here, Rigby reminds me that it’s not just the words in the epigraph that are important, but the other details as well. Because she chose poets rather than essayists or definitions, I stayed in the poetic sphere of my brain as I was reading. By embedding the epigraphs in the text of the book rather than placing them somewhere before the table of contents, she brought them in closer relation to her own work. And because of who she chose, poets that I personally love, I felt closer to the text–more invested in it.

But this isn’t the only way that Rigby brings the world into her poems. Her subject matter spans the globe. As you might imagine, I love that. She wraps her words around subjects as diverse as Pittsburgh and borscht, as international as the film of The Lover and women harvesting lavender. What could be disjointed instead weaves together into a gorgeous portrait of what it means to observe the world carefully.

Unexpected Imagery

“her body as shorthand / for what his body mistook for love” – Karen Rigby, “The Lover”

One of the things I loved most about this book is the way Rigby uses words to make me look closer at the everyday. It’s something we’re all supposed to do as writers, but it sometimes feels damned hard. But Rigby’s use of phrases like “lizard-dark” make creating that perfect image look easy and I want to know more about that creepy night. When she writes about “a matchbook / missing half its lashes” I know exactly what she means and I wish I could have put those words to the image. And there’s an undercurrent of flirtation there that makes me think of all the phone numbers ever written into matchbooks.

Sometimes these images turn into full-on scenes when Rigby creates phrases like “Places you meet turn semaphore” and I picture both the signalling flags and the metaphor behind it and a story starts to form from those few words. When when she writes about The Lover, “hunger traced the Mekong” I can feel the sensuality in that line and also the geopolitical import. Because Duras is one of my favorites and I’ve watched the film over and over, I remember images of the older Chinese man tracing his fingers over the young, bony, French girl and think of the many forms of hunger.

Rigby makes me want to spend more time digging into my own images and making them this evocative and concise.

The Power of Repetition

I love repetition in its many forms from anaphora to epistrophe. I’ve written about it before and will continue to because of its incantatory magic. What Rigby shows me in “Orange/Pittsburgh” is the power of implied repetition. Let me explain, but first, let me show you. In the third stanza of this poem, Rigby writes, “Orange is girder / & rusted flange, citrine” and then in the middle of the sixth, seventh, and eighth stanzas that “Orange is” returns like this…

“Orange is Japanese carp
beneath the tattoo needle,

habaneros sweating
in their grocery bins.
French horns warming

on the south cathedral lawn.”
– Karen Rigby “Orange/Pittsburgh

See how your mind fills in “Orange is” before “habaneros sweating” and again before “French horns warming”? I don’t know if this spell works because I’m so conditioned to rules of three or if including “Orange” in the title is what makes the magic, but I loved the tension between the words I was hearing as I read this poem and the words on the page. It opened a whole new space of reading for me.

Although some of the poems in this collection were too spare for me to get inside, I will return to this book over and over to learn from Rigby’s use of language and to see if they open to me. And I hereby vow not to prejudge literary products from my home state nearly as harshly in the future.

If you want to travel the world with Karen Rigby’s poetry, pick up a copy of Chinoiserie from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: chinoiserie, Imagery, karen rigby, Poetry

On Lyn Hejinian and Reading Out of Your Depth

August 18, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

my life and my life in the nineties - lyn hejinianA couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a friend about our mutual interest in Buddhism. She recommended I read Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha and I asked if she’d read the works of Thích Nhất Hạnh. We agreed that neither of us really understood him, but I said what I like most about his work is precisely that I don’t understand it and that every time I re-read one of his books, I take from it what I need that day, regardless of what’s on the page. That’s how I felt reading My Life and My Life in the Nineties by Lyn Hejinian.

Drowning in a Book

“I imagine a foreign language to be like a thin stick over a creek, one must run on it with great speed so it won’t have time to break and without stopping for a second so one won’t lose one’s balance.” – Lyn Hejinian

I’d been told that My Life and My Life in the Nineties was a difficult book. I don’t think that’s strictly accurate. What the book is is fragmentary. Each of the poems or sections or essays, whatever you want to call them seems at first to be a series of disconnected sentences. But I ran head first into the book, determined to achieve that perfect balance of comprehension and enjoyment. I found myself immersed in a collection of reminiscences, and even though I could not put together the narrative, I could feel Hejinian’s life moving forward in time as I progressed through the sections.

Finding Inspiration Anywhere

“I can type faster when I don’t hear my hands.” – Lyn Hejinian

As I was reading into this book, looking for that narrative I’m so accustomed to, I found myself grasping onto individual sentences but not in the way you’d think. Instead of clutching a gnarled sentence for meaning as I would with a writer like Faulkner, I was holding onto some of Hejinian’s clear sentences as they pulled me up out of the ocean of her book and into the surface of my own writing.

Let me explain that. Normally, when the style of a book pulls you out of the narrative, that’s a bad thing for flow and surrendering to the fictional dream, and all so on. But because I was happily wandering through this book without really knowing where I was, I was glad to stop when I encountered a sentence that reminded me of something from my own life.

If I’d been in a writing frame of mind, My Life would have been the single greatest set of writing prompts I’d ever encountered. Lines like, “Because children will spill food, one needs a dog” sparked memories from my childhood and I had a visceral feeling of having food licked off of my face. Different sentences will speak to different people, but over and over as I read the book, I could feel long-lost memories igniting.

What’s the Difference Between Prose and a Prose Poem?

“Consciousness is durable in poetry.” – Lyn Hejinian

I’m not a student of poetics, but what Hejinian showed me in My Life and My Life in the Nineties is that one big difference between prose poems and prose is whether narrative is a main thrust of the writing or not. The passages in the second part of the book, My Life in the Nineties, contained more contiguous sentences in the same narrative stream and the section read faster for me, but this book is still for me much more about the language than the narrative.

Another thing I came to appreciate in this book is the way Hejinian uses particular sentences as refrains. I was well into the book before I realized that some of her sentences felt familiar. I started reading closer and marking the ones I recognized. I couldn’t discern an intentional pattern, but they did feel like a key to another way to read this book. It was as though those sentences were the triangles on a sewing pattern and when I pulled the writing into three dimensions I would connect those triangles and appreciate a completely other creation.

“Please note that in my attempt to increase the accuracy of these sentences and the persistence and velocity with which they proceed, I’m pursuing change while trying to outrun the change that’s pursuing me.” – Lyn Hejinian

Reading out of your depth can be frustrating or it can be the most wonderful thing ever. I highly recommend that you pick a day where you have nothing pressing and the world will leave you alone, and then pick up a book you always thought was beyond your ken. Read the book for whatever strikes you. There is no wrong answer and there will be no test at the end. Let me know what you discover.

If you need some fresh inspiration, pick up a copy of My Life and My Life in the Nineties from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: lyn hejinian, Poetry, Reading

Blowing Apart Language in Joie de Vivre by Lisa Jarnot

July 28, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 1 Comment

What I wanted to do this evening is hide out in my basement and continue to ignore my writing. I had a really wonderful burst of creativity in Port Townsend two weeks ago, but it’s easier to keep that notebook closed than to actually look at the poems this evening (writers, this is not how you finish a project). Anyway, I made myself flip through the stack of book I’m planning to review and in it I found Joie de Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012 by Lisa Jarnot, and I’m so glad I did. From the very first page her poems shocked me and engaged me and made me want to read on. Now I know why I keep finding this book on the floor of my office–the fates have been throwing it at me for weeks, but I wasn’t ready to catch it. Here’s how this book shook me right out of my funk.

Step One: Read a Book Aloud

“I am ebbing in and out, I am dreaming dreams I hardly know and have tattoos, I am dreaming dreams outside of dreams and fish tanks and the spanishest of music.” – Lisa Jarnot, from “Sea Lyrics”

Reading a book aloud is a luxury. It’s slower and can be taxing on the vocal cords. It also requires solitude (or patience from your housemates). But reading aloud, especially a certain kind of poetry, is worth the effort. I found myself slipping into a southern drawl as I pronounced each of Jarnot’s words. I learned things about the way her poems worked when I spoke more or different words than are on the page. While I wouldn’t recommend reading War and Peace aloud anytime soon, reading a really good poem (or book of poetry) is a great way to (re)awaken your love of language.

Step Two: Throw Your Sentences in a Blender

“Blood in my eyes followed by truck in motel. either severely or proper. followed by police activity. followed by truck in. followed by followed by. followed by truck in motel. at the library. at the truck in motel. at the of.” – Lisa Jarnot, from “blood in my eyes”

This is not the right book for a lot of people, but the poems in this book, especially the selections from Some Other Kind of Mission accosted me with language. And I was grateful. They are filled with jarring compositions and staccato, unfinished sentences that leave room for me to leak into their interstices and complete the stories. I felt challenged by these poems and I wanted to hate them for their rawness and simplicity, but I kept falling in love with the richness of their repetition and the way the sentences evolved. They rocked my world and made me consider each word and each phrase and each mark of punctuation in a way that will help me write and edit both more carefully and more creatively in the future.

The repetition isn’t always as artful, and “molecules, selling crawfish” went too far toward the comical for me.

“Molecules, selling crawfish. selling selling crawfish. selling crawfish selling. wrecked in crawfish selling highway.” – Lisa Jarnot, from “molecules, selling crawfish”

But when the repetition works (which is more often than not) the anaphora and epistrophe and straight up repetition is pure magic. And in poems like “Greyhound Ode” the whimsy works better for me.

Step Three: Leave Your Work Open for Interpretation

Something else I loved about this book was the way the selected poems, again, especially those from Some Other Kind of Mission, bled into one another. There were no titles on the pages of that section and Jarnot uses unusual words like “meticules” and “tern” and “firs” over and over so that the poems can be read as one continuous narrative. But they are also individually constructed and each can stand on its own. I loved how that engaged me as a reader and I could feel myself making choices about how I wanted to read the book.

I didn’t love the poems later in the book as much as I loved the early ones, but I can see how Jarnot has been evolving over the years and playing with new ideas and forms. I appreciate a writer’s willingness to change and grow even while maintaining a few signatures. For Jarnot I’d say those signatures are that gorgeously evolving repetition of phrase and her ability to create images like “upon the moon in silver deep.”

What writers shake you out of your writing funk or challenge you to rethink everything? I’m going to build a list for nights like these.

If you need to shake up the way you see language, pick up a copy of Joie de Vivre from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: joie de vivre, lisa jarnot, Poetry

Building a Hybrid Memoir in Mother Departs by Tadeusz Różewicz

July 17, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Tadeusz Różewicz Mother DepartsI was offered Barbara Bogoczek’s translation of Mother Departs by Tadeusz Różewicz for review I think because of my interest in Poland and, of late, Polish poetry. But what made me read the book this week was flipping through and seeing that mix of shapes of text on the page that belongs uniquely to hybrid forms. Since reading W.G. Sebald, I’ve been interested in the way writers transcend the boundaries of their genres using hybrid forms and I thought this book might help me experiment with that a bit myself.

What I didn’t realize until reading the introduction is that the book is actually a compilation of Różewicz’s poetry, essays by his mother and brother, and selected family pictures. The result is a wonderfully polyphonic memoir as the voices harmonize to tell a greater story. And although the emphasis is on the family, the narrative is deeply influenced by the fascinating period in Polish history starting before World War I and ending just after the fall of communism.

On Polish Peasantry

At first reading the childhood recollections of Różewicz’s mother, Stefania Różewicz, was somewhat jarring. Her sentences are much shorter than his and her observations more quotidian. But I soon ceased to care about the writing itself because the stories were so interesting and, to me, personal. She was a Polish peasant at the same time that my grandfather’s parents were peasants in nearby Ukraine. As she describes how desperately poor the families were – taking babies to the fields and sending young children abroad to work – I started to imagine for the first time the circumstances my family had lived in and why they likely fled to work in Pennsylvania coal mines. I also thought back to stories my adoptive Polish grandmother (from when I was on foreign exchange in Poland) had told me about her childhood. This book made all of those stories come alive for me.

Stefania Różewicz does a lovely job of immersing the reader in her mode of life. And later in the book when she finally owns a purely decorative vase, the exquisite luxury of that one simple object is enthralling. It made me think about my relationship with material objects and consumption for its own sake.

Selected Poems

The language in Różewicz’s poetry is relatively simple and his imagery isn’t especially evocative. I think without the context of his mother’s narrative, I wouldn’t have found it at all remarkable. But within the context of her story, his poems come alive. Because I was seeing the Różewicz’s story from a myriad of angles, I began to feel like I was a member of Różewicz family.

mother in the photograph
is still young beautiful
smiles slightly

but on the back
I read written
in her hand the words
‘year 1944 cruel to me’

in the year 1944
the Gestapo murdered
my older brother

we concealed his death
from mother
but she saw through us
and concealed it
from us
– Tadeusz Różewicz from “The Photograph”

By focusing on the emotional push-pull of sharing and concealing information surrounding the death of Różewicz’s beloved brother, I saw both the importance of tacit understanding in the family and the depth of love in that silence.

A Mourning Diary

The heart of the book is Różewicz’s “Gliwice Diary” a record of the time he was attending to his dying mother. This section spans just a few months of her decline and yet it conveys the depths of both love and despair he’s experiencing as his mother passes slowly away. Some of the most beautiful moments are watching him try to cope with her impending death by making his art ever better.

“I am at rock bottom. That’s almost funny. There are no rocks here, it would be hard to explain even to somebody close what I mean. I am at rock bottom. Used up rhetorical phrase, says nothing. And still… I know there’s no sense or value to what I’m writing. But I must not scream.” – Tadeusz Różewicz

But there is sense to what he’s writing and this section struck me as a more emotive and poignant version of A Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes. The death of a loved one is something we all hope never to experience, but most likely will. I was glad to see another example of how a writer can turn even the worst of times into art.

Hybrid Forms

“You ought to be writing one single novel or play or one volume of poems all through your life” – Tadeusz Różewicz

The various viewpoints coalesce beautifully in this book. I think if Różewicz hadn’t focused so tightly around his mother, the book would have felt more sprawling. Instead that focus reminded me of Colette’s My Mother’s House. Mother Departs is certainly less whimsical, but it’s no less personal and poignant. And whereas Colette speaks from one viewpoint and completely in prose, Różewicz allows the reader to form his or her own relationship with the entire family. And readers of prose and poetry will find an entry point into this narrative.

If you want to learn more about Różewicz’s family, pick up a copy of Mother Departs from Powell’s. Your purchase supports a wonderful independent bookstore and your faithful reviewer.

Filed Under: Books, Eastern Europe Tagged With: Mother Departs, Poetry, Polish Literature, Tadeusz Różewicz

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Polska, 1994

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Recent Posts

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What I’m Reading

Isla's bookshelf: currently-reading

Birds of America
Birds of America
by Lorrie Moore
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
by Jonathan Lethem
The Souls of Black Folk
The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. Du Bois
Bomb: The Author Interviews
Bomb: The Author Interviews
by BOMB Magazine
On Writing
On Writing
by Jorge Luis Borges

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