Poetry Archives - Page 3 of 4 - A Geography of Reading

The Quiet Menace of Inner China by Eva Sjödin

May 5, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

Frequent readers of this blog will know how much I appreciate spare language. Inner China by Eva Sjödin and translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida shows brilliantly just how much horror can be wrought with the sparest of language. The story of two small children who hide in the woods to escape sexual abuse is remarkably restrained. And therein lies the power of this poetry.

The Sound of Poetry

The narrator, the protector whispers to her mute sister:

Dark hard. — And quiet, I say. Not a word to Mother, not to anyone.
Get it.
Otherwise you are dead dead.

Those sentences take on the feeling of a heartbeat when you are so scared and small that the biggest sound in the world is your heart is pounding in your chest and your ears. The staccato two beats of “Dark hard,” “Get it,” and “dead dead” are so simple and so strong.

Words Rushing Together

Throughout the book, Sjödin takes what would normally be a list of items and removes the punctuation as in, “Nettles brushwood thistles grow down towards the river.” The cumulative effect of these run-on lists is the feeling of rushing and running away. There’s an immediacy and she uses it judiciously.

The Power of an Image

Sjödin also uses simple yet unusual images in Inner China. The narrator describes how she and her sister are “empty inside like carbonation.” A soda is usually a happy thing for a child and many delight in the fizzing and sparkle, but here she sees the other side of that and I wondered, worried, that something as simple as a soda pop was part of their torment. Though why I should cling to the idea of a soda among all the other pleasures of life these girls have foregone…

Quiet Menace and Denial

As much as I read about suffering and sadness, sexual abuse and rape are topics I usually avoid. It’s easy for the writer to slip into what I feel is description for the sake of titillation, and I just can’t bear it. Sjödin does none of that. She provides very little description of the acts. Instead, she builds a feeling of menace. Early in the book she writes, “There is someone who eats children eats children” and combines it euphemistically with “He sticks it to me on the sly.” It’s clear what is happening to these girls, but the language is pulled back just enough that I found myself denying what was happening for much of the book. This adds another layer I felt like I could have been the mother of those girls, refusing to see what was in front of me.

Know Your Recommender

I adore recommending books, it’s like sharing an intimate part of your soul, but I’m only just now learning to reach out to friends to create reading lists for me. Inner China was recommended by Gwendolyn Jerris, a gentle and poetic soul who is likely to hide the things that really hurt but will tell you the real truth if you ask her. Invaluable qualities in an artist and a friend. I asked Gwendolyn because I knew I needed something quiet that spoke loudly and boy did she deliver. Don’t wait as long as I did to start asking for what you need. Your fellow readers are wonderful resources and sometimes what scares you most is just the right thing.

The Importance of Difficult Books

I will not deny that this is a difficult book to read. In fact I wouldn’t recommend it to most people just for the sheer emotional impact of it. I’ve kept it nearby in my office in the days since reading the book I think because I knew it wasn’t done with me. And I wasn’t going to write about it for this blog, but it is a beautifully written book. And it’s important sometimes to read outside your comfort zone in order to stretch and grow as a writer. I am grateful that Gwendolyn trusted me enough as a reader to recommend this book. Writers like Grace Paley can show you how to unpack an image in a few spare words, but even she got shelved relatively quickly. I think I’ll be living with Sjödin on my coffee table for a good long while yet.

What books linger on your coffee table or next to your computer? What are they teaching you?

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Inner China from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Dunya Mikhail Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea

March 31, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

On the tenth anniversary of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, I listened on NPR as Renee Montagne interviewed an Iraqi poet who fled her homeland and I knew immediately it was Dunya Mikhail and that I had read her book, Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea and I needed to read it again.

Plausible Deniability

In many ways, I’ve been avoiding reading about the Middle East since we invaded that sovereign nation under false pretenses. I protested the war then, weakly, and as I realized how little power I had to change our policies, I turned away and pretended that I couldn’t see that my taxes weren’t paying for the destruction of someone else’s infrastructure and the murder of other people’s children. I’m opposed to both dictatorship and terrorism, but what we did in Iraq was uncomfortably close to a Crusade.

Somehow now, 10 years later, I’m ready to begin to really look at the Middle East again—to let my political scientist side again start to question—and to confront what makes me so uncomfortable about Iraq just as I have started to question my reading tastes. Truthfully, I stumbled into Iraq a few weeks ago when we finally started watching Homeland. I didn’t actually know the show started in Iraq, but watching Claire Danes piecing together international intrigue and speaking in foreign tongues reminded me of who I used to want to be. So here I sit, holding a book filled with Arabic script, trying to reconcile these pieces of myself.

Facing the Truth

The hardest thing to see in an “enemy” is his or her humanity. Mikhail’s book starts just there, with the simple observations of a child:

In my childhood, I envied myself for being a child.
I thought everyone was created the way they were:
created as a child or an old man or a mother.

She goes on to write:

I used to count dreams on my fingers
and cry, because my fingers were insufficient!
I also cried when I saw myself in photos
and I would shout:
“Take me out of the picture!”

The book slips quickly into scenes during the first Iraq War, Operation Desert Storm, but Mikhail doesn’t show the images I’m used to seeing—Humvees lumbering across a desert or oil wells on fire. Instead she writes about how life continued:

I was not waiting by myself;
the river was there, too,
and the smoke that rose from the explosions
and from the cigarette of a lover
who contemplated his loneliness
like a pawn in the corner of a chessboard.

And I remember what it was like then for me, my friends and I—not yet teenagers—gathered around a table in a kitchen discussing whether our brothers would be drafted. Our language wasn’t as beautiful as Mikhail’s. Our bodies were so much farther from danger. But we, too, existed with this war as it shaped our lives in ways we couldn’t understand or control. Still, Mikhail’s experience was much more immediate and soon the words devoted to war outweigh those devoted to other aspects of life:

Sometimes I imagine the war has ended
and life creeps into the foreheads of the corpses
for an instant.
One instant is enough,
a moment
the size of a bullet.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Has the war stopped?
What will we do now
without enemies?

“Pens and Rifles Have One End”

The second part of Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea was written after Mikhail fled Iraq. No longer subjected to Iraqi censors, the poetry begins to use real names rather than references to Zeus. Instead of oblique references to chess and electrons that split and reunite only to destruct, she tells stories of her “war generation.” I remember that the Gulf War was not the first to touch her lifetime and her city.

The way I fled the country was like everything in Iraq:
too hard, too easy, and exactly as they liked.

The way the book is laid out feels like a metaphor. Because Arabic is read right to left, the English translation of Mikhail’s words and the Arabic original meet in the middle with only to separate them. Somewhere between these two languages, amidst the family photos and images of other important papers, is a poet and her story.

It’s time to begin digging into my own story—to stop turning away when I encounter resistance—to delve deeper when life and writing are the most difficult. It’s time to find who this person who is part political scientist, part writer, part woman, part wife, and so much more—who this person is.

Read Mikhail’s poetry for the beauty of her language, but as you are reading, listen to the conversation that happens with all great books—the one where an artist provides you the keys to help you learn about yourself.

If this review made you want to have your own conversation with Mikhail’s work, pick up a copy of Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Arlene Kim’s What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?

March 17, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 3 Comments

Poet Arlene Kim rocked my literary heart at Richard Hugo House’s Lit Series earlier this year with an erasure poem displayed entirely in slides. This haunting response to the abuse of girls changed my conception of poetry. I bought her book, What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?, immediately and have carried it with me every day since.

Although the video of that evening’s performance is locked somewhere in a vault and I cannot share it with you, I can share this book and what it taught me about poetry. If you’re a returning reader to this blog, you know that I’m fascinated with poetry, but I am only recently learning to write it. So when I read a book like Kim’s, I am reading as much for what I can learn from it as I am for the beauty of language.

What Poetry Sounds Like

I’ve been reading Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry lately. In fact, it was his discussion of the way tension carries across a line that taught me to better hear poetry. Kim utilizes that tension incredibly well. In “Hollow Tongue” she writes, “The dead can speak / any language, I’d imagine,” and I became enraptured with the way the line breaks. I’ve run it over and over my tongue just to capture the way, as Pinsky has taught me, the line slows the sentence down and the sentence speeds the line up.

Another favorite selection I’ve been studying for line breaks is “Paper Suns,” where Kim writes, “My love. I tended him / after he fell. His charred wing stumps, / his elegy of scabbed feathers. Only then”. The line breaks give an extra charge to a poem already full of rich language and evocative imagery.

The Many Shapes of a Poem

My knowledge of forms of poetry is limited. What I can tell you is that Kim considers the entire page when she writes her poems.

The first poem in the collection, “Rot,” is a series of conventional paragraphs spread across multiple pages whereas “Wind,” also a poem set in paragraph form, gusts across the pages it covers with shifting margins and alignments. “Spool, Book, Coin” is written in very short lines that, according to the endnotes, mimic the wavering walk of a child. The way each of the poems in this book is laid out is so carefully considered and unique to each instance, that I wanted to (and will in the coming days) study them over and over to learn precisely how the layout and syllable counts affect my read of each poem.

Recurring Imagery

There are many images that Kim returns to again and again throughout the book including the woods, hair, and birds. It was the Biblical apple, though, that caught my attention. This was in part because it’s a relatively accessible image and occurs very early in the book, but it was also so lusciously invoked that I wanted to think about it over and over. “Rot” starts, “Begin / An apple. Experts agree that it starts with an apple.” The language was so simple and yet I was so firmly entrenched in Eden. I wondered how she did that and if I had somehow too firmly committed to one interpretation. The poem goes on in the next section:

A tempting red apple sits on the table. The person sees red, sees just the skin of the apple—not the flesh, or the seeds, or the table, or even the room. And certainly not the story. Not yet. The apple is of color. The person is of color. The apple has the property of redness. The person has the property of color.” – Arlene Kim, “Rot”

And so the poem isn’t just about sex and temptation but it’s about surfaces and the way we become beguiled and misled by them. There are many, many things happening beneath the surfaces of Kim’s poems and I look forward to discovering more as I read them. I was grateful for the notes she provides at the end of the book, but the poems are strong enough to do without them if you choose.

Now that I’m getting over my obsession with getting poetry “right” (damn you undergrad English courses), I’m really starting to enjoy reading poems. My favorite prose is usually about the language of a piece and concision anyway, and who spends more time crafting language than poets?

I recommend Arlene Kim’s What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? for poetry newbies like me and also for my more educated poet friends. I learn from you, so please share your thoughts about the craft of this book with me in the comments below. And if I ever find that video of the erasure poem on the web, I’ll post it here.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Lisa Robertson Finds Poetry in Architecture

March 3, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

When I requested a review copy of Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture by Lisa Robertson, I was working as the managing editor of an architecture magazine while earning my MFA. The irony of my experience was how many architects used convoluted and turgid language to describe designs that were pared down to their purely minimal essences. The days I spent sorting through jargon like “fenestration” and “tectonics” were great training for nights spent finding the clearest way to communicate an idea in my own writing.

Essays on Art and Architecture

“We believe that the objective of architecture is to give happiness.”

A poet, Robertson uses her command of words to blend the architectural vernacular with everyday language. She writes in the persona of the Office for Soft Architecture which speaks in the first person plural about a wide range of issues that affect the urban environment from architectural style and color to invasive species.

One of the ways Robertson displays her skill with language is by pairing a simple sentence with a truly dense one:

“The Himalayan blackberry escaped. The plant’s swift rhetorical trajectory from aestheticized exotic, to naturalized species, to invasive alien, all the while concealing a spurious origin myth, displays a typically hackneyed horticultural anthropomorphism.”

At times, I found myself lost in the richness of her vocabulary, but the writing was so well crafted that I felt I still understood her meaning on some subliminal level. Just when I thought I might truly be done for, Robertson reeled me in by tying the lascivious undertones of strawberries in Jane Austen’s Emma to the Arts and Crafts Movement in British Columbia.

Some of my favorite essays in this book were commissioned to accompany art shows. I enjoyed leafing through the full-color illustrations of those shows and guessing what Robertson might have to say about them.

Seven Walks through a Changing City

“Imagine a very beautiful photograph whose emulsion is lifting and peeling from the paper. There is no longer a negative. To preserve it you must absorb this artifact through your skin, as if it were an antique cosmetic comprised of colloidal silver. You must absorb its insecurity.

The seven walks in this book are poetic journeys through a rapidly changing Vancouver. They are not meant as guidebooks. In fact, it would be impossible for an outsider to replicate the paths Robertson is describing. Instead, they impart the feeling of a city as it evolves around you. Sometimes she references architecture directly:

“Ruined factories rising into fog; their lapsed symmetries nearly gothic. The abandoned undulations of the vast mercantile storage facilities…”

Other times the walks become more emotional journeys.

“There was no window in the city that was not overtly moralistic – the roadways were illuminated and my decadence seemed to soak the asphalt so it shone.”

But the language is always evocative and it feels as though the setting is pregnant with potential stories even when Robertson is merely conveying a mood.

In Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, Robertson finds poetry in the language of architecture and finds a new way to convey the experience of urban geography. It is a book architects will appreciate for the careful consideration of form and context and writers will appreciate for the plasticity of Robertson’s language.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Ondaatje Illustrates the Life of Billy the Kid, or Does He?

July 24, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Reading The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, I was struck by Michael Ondaatje’s inclusion of photographs with the text. The text itself was an interesting patchwork of poetry and prose and I can see that Ondaatje was using visual matter as another layer of that patchwork.

In works of nonfiction, I’m used to seeing batches of photographs grouped in one section or two (likely for ease of collation of the glossy pages) with captions and arranged in more or less chronological order. In fiction, I am unused to pictures at all.

I was distracted but intrigued while reading Ondaatje by having the pictures strewn throughout the text without captions. The placement of the images seemed to be related to the text rather than in chronological or any other order.

What is Authentic?

I found myself wondering if the pictures were actual representations of the real people and the real places. For example, on page 91 there is a picture of a bed with a gun leaning against it. It looks like a period photograph and on the previous page is a description from the point of view of Pat Garrett in a room with a straw mattress. On the page following the picture Ondaatje writes, “This is a diagram then of Maxwell’s” which combined with the photo of the bedroom put me in a visual place and made me want to believe the picture was actually of that room where Garrett shot at Billy.

I got hung up in some of the details and started thinking that the blanket looked authentic and if the picture had been faked then they had done it well. So in some ways the incorporation of visual matter into the text enhanced my experience and in some ways it distracted from it.

Using Images in My Book

In my novel, Polska, 1994, I considered incorporating some memorabilia as souvenirs in the most French sense, but I was concerned it would become too scrapbook‑y. I also worried about the mixing authentic mementos with a fictional narrative.

How Max Frisch Incorporated Images

It is important that extraneous material incorporated into a text become an organic and necessary part of the whole. Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch uses scraps of encyclopedia entries as part of the narrative. These scraps are seamlessly integrated into the narrative because Geiser is clipping things that matter to him from his books and pasting them to his walls as he is slowly losing his memory. For example, one of the scraps is a definition, “Weakness of memory is the deterioration of the faculty of recalling earlier experiences.”

It isn’t until much later in the book that Frisch has Geiser recognize that he is in fact losing his memory. The visual pieces serve to tell part of the story. It was easier for me to enter the fictional dream because the visual elements are mostly text and Geiser was a fully fictional character.

When I studied visual arts, it was always stressed to me that the piece should speak for itself. I was discouraged from including words in painting or sculpture. I am carrying that baggage but I am also starting to see that like most hard and fast rules, it is merely cautionary. Anything done well is worth doing.

Are pictures the new adverbs—verboten because they are seen as easy shorthand? Or are Ondaatje and Frisch telling me to loosen up and work with whatever material tells the best story?

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.