Sunday Morning Coffee: Saltillo; Mau Pilailug; Sunken Ship at WTC; Jonathan Barnes

[Saltillo, "Remember Me," from Ganglion, released 2006]

Heat inescapable...canary seeks shade in a sycamore...lobster offers coffee infused with a spoonful of cold, cold vanilla ice cream...

One of the world's greatest navigators, Mau Piailug, died last week. A Micronesian, in 1976 he sailed alone-- and without compass, sextant or charts-- the 2,500 miles of open ocean from Hawai'i to Tahiti, demonstrating that the peopling of the Pacific islands was deliberate, not due to chance or accident. The Economist in its obituary describes Piailug as a poet of the trek (for the full obit, click here):

"...he would point his canoe into the right slant of wind, and then along a path between a rising star and an opposite, setting one. With his departure star astern and his destination star ahead, he could keep to his course. By day he was guided by the rising and setting sun but also by the ocean herself, the mother of life. He could read how far he was from shore, and its direction, by the feel of the swell against the hull. He could detect shallower water by colour, and see the light of invisible lagoons reflected in the undersides of clouds."

Two weeks ago, in the layers beneath the city, construction crews at the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan uncovered the bones of an 18th-century ship. As David Dunlap wrote in the New York Times (for full story, click here):

"In the middle of tomorrow, a great ribbed ghost has emerged from a distant yesterday."

Lobster and canary are reading The Domino Men by Jonathan Barnes (Harper 2009; first pb 2010). What a great read! If you like Gaiman's Neverwhere, you will like The Domino Men. Think also Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell mashed with John Le Carre. The protagonist reminds me of Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Knew Too Much, or Cary Grant in North by Northwest, with a Lovecraftian cabal as his enemies.

Sunday Morning Coffee: "Television Man"; Tony Judt, Matthew Cheney, Jeff Spock

[The Talking Heads, "Television Man," from Little Creatures, 1985]

Wake up Canary, wake up! Dawn is upon us, words there are to sing...

We enjoyed three good short musings this week on language, its challenges, possibilities and limits:

Tony Judt has a beautiful essay, "Words," in the current New York Review of Books . He defends rhetorical style and worries about the corrosive effects of inarticulacy. "When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express," Judt writes. "If we privilege personal expression over formal convention, then we are privatizing language no less than we have privatized so much else. [...] The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right...If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute?"

Matthew Cheney, writing as The Mumpsimus, consistently offers some of the most incisive (yet warm-hearted) commentary on speculative fiction and movies. His report on Readercon earlier this month includes this meditation:

"I'm [i.e., Cheney] not very good at inserting myself into conversations, so I did a lot of observing during the panel, piping up only to offer a sort of counter viewpoint from Gary's [i.e., Gary Wolfe] -- where Gary was in some ways agreeing with Paul Witcover's assertion that writers like T.C. Boyle are just using science fiction as "a trip to the playground". I was hoping we'd be able to discuss this idea a bit more, but time didn't allow it. Had it, I suppose I would have tried to say that to me the resentment of writers not routinely identified with the marketing category of "science fiction" or the community of fans, writers, and publishers that congregates under the SF umbrella -- the resentment of these writers for using the props, tropes, and moves of SF is unappealing to me for a few reasons. It's a clubhouse mentality, one that lets folks inside the clubhouse determine what the secret password is and if anybody standing outside has the right pronunciation of that password. It is, in other words, a purity test: are the intentions in your soul the right ones, the approved ones?"

Read the rest of Cheney's Readercon notes here.

Jeff Spock, a leading digital game designer, suggests some solutions to the challenge of telling stories in the very short form of the "casual game," in "Short Games, Long Stories" (originally in the International Game Developers Association newsletter, reposted to Gamasutra last week).

Spock writes:

"Basically, I [i.e., Spock] recommend (against my better instincts) using traditional story structures and stereotypical characters in order to simplify the player's task of digesting the plot. The analogy that I used in the article, and that I really like, is the "gutter" in comic strips. That white space between two panels has nothing in it, but the human imagination fills in everything that could have been written there. In much the same way, all you need to do to create a story is to suggest where you are in the story arc and what the characters are thinking; there is no need to be more explicit than that. The player's imagination is more than capable of connecting the links and filling in the details."

Read the rest of Spock's suggestions here.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Recommended Reading, Second Quarter 2010

We adore Alastair Reynolds. Out last month in U.S. paperback from Ace is his House of Suns, another one of his love stories wrapped inside a billion-year epic. Reynolds is a poet of technology: clones are "shatterlings"; "aspic-of-machines" is the term for the nanobots and other medicinal therapies one applies as an unguent to wounds. Reynolds is especially good at the toss-off line that illuminates the deep trend, the broad sweep: "Cloning is a technology like making paper: it is not difficult if one knows how to do it, but extraordinarily tricky to invent from scratch..." (p. 97).

Iain M. Banks is the other current master of the billion-year spree, painting on an enormous canvas but always keeping individual human lives in the forefront. Banks and Reynolds are the heirs of Asimov and Herbert, and especially the Vance of the Demon Princes series and the Alastor novels. (Scalzi and Haldeman as the left-handed heirs to Heinlein?) I am halfway through Banks's Matter, another novel of The Culture, published in 2008 (Orbit). At its heart this is a picaresque, with some of the best pert servant-clueless king dialogue since the 17th century. Or maybe it is a novel of ideas in the 18th-century manner, an anthropological inquiry...

Am also partway through Olga Slavnikova's 2017 (translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz; from The Overlook Press, 2010). Will review in more detail when I finish, but worth the reading: 2017 is genuinely strange, hard to classify, like the reflection you think you see on the edge of vision or the shadow of a bird that flies across your path. "Krylov for some reason lost his sense of his own height and couldn't tell whether he was in fact taller or not." That captures the mood of the book.

Danielle Trussoni's Angelology (from Viking, 2010) is uneven but -- in its best bits-- engrossing. If you like Lukyanenko's Night Watch trilogy, or any of the urban vampire-hunter series (Saintcrow, Butcher, etc.), you will enjoy Angelology...and its likely sequel(s).

The King's Gold by Yxta Maya Murray (from Harper, 2008) is a good romp, "an old world novel of adventure" as the sub-title has it. Sharp and witty characters, literary/historical riddles, pulp action, a wash of the Gothic supernatural...Reminds me of the Special Agent Pendergast series by Preston & Child, also a little bit of Eco, and of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind.

Two that I did not finish, despite high expectations: The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova, and A Dark Matter by Peter Straub. I need to explore why I did not enjoy either of these, what failed to work for me. Both are well written, thoughtful, serious of purpose. I was pre-disposed to like them: I devoured Kostova's 2005 debut The Historian, and I have long enjoyed Straub's work (regardless of my opinion, he is clearly one of the modern masters of horror and the supernatural) ...so I want to understand what mechanic on my side as a reader rendered these two particular novels cold for me.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Natalie Merchant; The Decay of Contemporary Art; Solar Sails

Natalie Merchant puts poems to music on her new album (released in April this year). See the PBS video above. Canary especially likes Merchant's stated emphasis on rediscovering and exploring the spoken, rhythmic elements of poetry.

Lobster likes Ben Lewis's polemic, "The Dustbin of Art History," in the current issue of Prospect. Some delicious quotes from Lewis:

"The paintings in Damien Hirst’s exhibition at the Wallace Collection last October were execrable. Most critics fulminated that these works of art should never have been hung in close proximity to masterpieces by Poussin and Rembrandt. [...] ...as I made my way hastily to the exit—down the grand staircase past vast pompous canvases of sunrise and sunset by the 18th-century French painter François Boucher, full of pink putti and topless girls in diaphanous dresses—I realised that those critics were wrong. The Wallace, famous for its collection of French rococo, was actually the perfect setting for Hirst’s exhibition, titled “No Love Lost, Blue Paintings.”

For there are compelling parallels between much of the contemporary art of the last two decades—not only the work of the expensive artists who made the headlines like Hirst, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, but also many of the conceptual artists patronised by public galleries—and French rococo, a movement that extolled frivolity, luxury and dilettantism, patronised by a corrupt and decadent ancien régime. Boucher’s art represented the degradation of the baroque school’s classical and Christian values into a heavenly zone of soft porn, shorn of danger, conflict and moral purpose. Similarly, Hirst’s work represents the degeneration of the modernist project from its mission to sweep away art’s “bourgeois relics” into a set of eye-pleasing and sentimental visual tropes."

"There is a pattern typical of these end-phase periods, when an artistic movement ossifies. At such times there is exaggeration and multiplication instead of development. A once new armoury of artistic concepts, processes, techniques and themes becomes an archive of formulae, quotations or paraphrasings, ultimately assuming the mode of self-parody."

Finally, on a muggy Sunday morning in New York City, the canary sighs in envy of the silken wings that sprouted this week on the Japanese experimental satellite Ikaros, 6 million miles out in space. Click here for photographs of the Ikaros solar sail. Perhaps one day such sails will take our craft to the stars, powered by the force of sunlight alone.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Terje Rypdal; John Brunner.

[Terje Rypdal, from Odyssey, 1975]

John Brunner's The Traveler in Black (1971) is a quiet, unsung gem. I revisited it recently, having purchased a used copy from one of the dealers at Arisia. Uncorking the bottle, I found the wine as full-bodied and heady as it was when I first savored it...I first met the Traveler c. 1970, in the two Traveler short stories that appeared in the Ted White-edited Fantastic.

Less precious than Dunsany, less mordant and cynical than Vance, not so filigreed as Clark Ashton Smith-- though owing a debt to each of these--Brunner in his Traveler tales finds hope in the melancholy, taps into a wry pity for human folly.

I love most of all his terse style. Few fantastistes (Leiber also comes to mind) conjure so much strangeness with so few words. Listen:

" 'Igoroth!' said Gostala in exasperation. 'Dumedinnis! And likewise Algorethon!'

Three odd-looking gentlemen--one in blue, one in white, one in green-- walked through a nearby wall and stood before her. None of them was entirely normal in appearance, though it was hard to say in what particular respect.

'Get rid of that--object!' directed Gostala forcefully.

The three peculiar personages looked at her, then at each other, then at her again. Premeditatedly, they shook their heads, and departed, taking her with them."

And this:

"...after great labor he incarcerated Wolpec in a candle over whose flame he smoked a piece of glass which thereupon showed three truths: one ineluctable, one debatable and one incomprehensible."

And this:

"Tyllwin's huge round head, like a turnip-ghost's, turned to watch them, and a smile curved his dusty lips."

Long live the Traveler in Black!

Sunday Morning Coffee: Jacky Terrasson; Christopher Beha;"Year's Best SF 15"; "Whitechapel Gods"

[Jacky Terrasson and friends]

* Lobster at the lectern:

Christopher Beha (an editor at Harper's) in the current issue of BookForum (page 39), reviewing Gary Shteyngart's latest novel:

"...Chekhov's genius lay precisely in revealing the complex interiority that energizes the most mundane human moments. [//] Shteyngart makes a compelling case that we lose that interiority-- the very thing that gives us depth and richness-- when we abandon literary culture. It may be, as so many want to tell us, that this loss is bad for democracy. But that is almost beside the point: It is bad for our souls."

* Canary in a hammock:

David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer are up to their usual excellent curatorial standard in Year's Best SF 15 (Eos, 2010). A few favorites:

"Edison's Frankenstein" by Chris Roberson, a clever riff on yesterday's future and the perils of prediction. "But he realized now it wasn't a hope for a new world to come, but a kind of nostalgia for a future that could never be" (page 491).

"The Island" by Peter Watts (whose novel Blindsight is one of my favorites of the past few years), a compact meditation on free will and evolution. " 'You're only following orders from a bunch of other systems way more complex than you are.' You've got to hand it to them, too; dead for stellar lifetimes and those damn project admins are still pulling the strings" (page 197).

"The Fixation" by Alastair Reynolds, also focuses on free will, the what-if's of alternate realities, the perils of unintended consequences. "Ghosts are not the souls of the dead, but the souls of people written out of history when history changes" (pg. 317).

* Lobster, after burnishing his claws on the cogs of a sunken ship, is relaxing with Whitechapel Gods by S.M. Peters. Not done yet, but impressed so far with this tale. Reminds us of China Mieville's work, of Gaiman's Neverwhere and The Light Ages by Ian MacLeod.

Enjoy your Sunday.

Sunday Morning Coffee: "Pavane" (Regina Carter); The Singularity on a Sunday

[Regina Carter, "Pavane," from her album Paganini-After a Dream, 2003]


Across the Hudson, mist like the film attaching to the inside of eggshell...the river's surface (the first time in weeks) nearly as smooth as the shell's exterior...

What promises will the egg bring forth?

With the elegant phrasing of Regina Carter in our heads, the lobster (nutmeg and cloves in his hot chocolate) and the canary (brown sugar, one more spoonful please) contemplate the Singularity.

Someone-- John Scalzi? Cory Doctorow?--has noted that science fiction is not in the prediction business, but is a means to imagine how humans will react to various future scenarios.

So, Mr. Nutmeg and Mr. Turbinado are parsing current and potential reactions to recent news:

* Last Thursday, the J. Craig Venter Institute announced that it has created a synthetic cell, controlled by man-made genetic instructions. (The media is calling the cell "Synthia"; Venter sails in a yacht called "Sorcerer II.") Creating life? "Merely" mimicking life? Playing God (or the Devil)? "Simply" demonstrating the chemical composition of life, a technical trick akin to coding a new PC OS?

* Also last Thursday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, testifying to the U.S. Congress, said about the still-unexplained May 6th free fall in U.S. stocks: "On this day, however, high volume could have beena misleading indicator of liquidity to market particpants and their preprogrammed algorithms" (quoted in Sarah N. Lynch, "Gensler Puts Blame on Math,"May 21 Wall Street Journal, pg. C2). As WSJ journalist Lynch explains: "In algorithmic or 'algo' trading, market players use computers to establish the parameters of an order in advance. The orders are directed into an electronic trading venue, and computers can carry them out without human intervention." (We seem to recall that Skynet did not become self-aware until 2017...?)

* Last week came further concerns about use of private data by various digital social networks. Among other things, an international campaign is calling for May 31st to be "Quit Facebook Day." Tempest in an electronic teapot? Libertarian revolt against the nascent hive-mind?

Sharon Dolin: Of Hours

[Ellen Wiener, "Moon & Lillies (Vespers)," painted 1999]

The lobster, with canary riding on his carapace, is delighted to present a coda to the Sharon Dolin interview (March 13th, "Composing for the Eye"). Sharon very wonderfully sent us more thoughts on ekphrasis, and a generous preview of her as-yet-unpublished work, Of Hours.

From Sharon:

"My Book of Hours

I have been working on another ekphrastic sequence that came to me by chance when the contemporary artist Ellen Wiener showed me her series of paintings that are a Book of Hours. She said she was looking for someone to write about them. So I began, in the summer of 2006, to work on my own Book of Hours and my 24 poem sequence, entitled Of Hours, has been the result. The best way to explain the project is by giving you the introductory note I wrote for the as-yet unpublished collection.

A NOTE ON OF HOURS AND THE BOOK OF HOURS

Of Hours is a contemporary book of hours for the twenty-first century and its reader could be someone from the Judaeo-Christian tradition or anyone with a devotional bent. The poems were initially inspired by a collection of paintings by Ellen Wiener entitled An Album of Hours. The paintings provided the framework for the sequence (each painting has its companion poem, though the poems and paintings can stand alone) as well as some images that served as a jumping-off point for my own reflections on a specific hour.

The canonical hours, upon which the paintings are based, were devised by the Catholic Church, and practiced as an official set of prayers by monks as well as lay people, since the sixth century of the Common Era. The hours or divine office are divided into eight daily prayers as well as several nightly divisions, the major ones being: Matins (at dawn); Lauds (praises, also at dawn); Prime (at 6 a.m., the first hour); Terce (9 a.m., the third hour); Sext (at noon, the sixth hour); Nones (at 3 p.m., the ninth hour); Vespers (at sunset); and Compline (at bedtime).

The devotional hours grew out of the Jewish practice of reciting prayers at certain times of the day, though not at a set hour. Observant Jews still recite prescribed morning (shacharit), afternoon (minchah), evening (ma’ariv), and bedtime prayers for weekdays and additional (mussaf) prayer for the sabbath (Shabbat) and holidays. All but the last correspond to the times when sacrificial offerings were brought to the Temple. In his Psalms David wrote: “Evening, morning and afternoon do I pray and cry, and He will hear my voice” (Psalm 55). Since the destruction of the Temple, all observant Jews recite devotional prayers, including specific psalms as well as a recitation of the sacrificial offerings, in lieu of the sacrifice.

In writing my book of hours, I sought to wrest back from Christian practice the book of hours which, during the medieval period was often a sumptuously illuminated manuscript owned by noble men and women as their private book of prayer. While Les très riches heures du Duc du Berry from the early 15th century is probably the most famous example of such an illuminated book of hours, women were often patrons or owners of such books. One of the earliest surviving examples of a book of hours was made in Oxford, England by William de Brailes in the mid-thirteenth century, who designed and illustrated it for a young woman who is depicted within the book.

As well as the paintings, I was inspired above all in personal tone, subject matter, and lyric intensity by the Psalms, the great Hebrew cycle of lyric poems (though not pinned to a specific hour), traditionally attributed to King David. The Hebrew psalms (Tehillim) provide a record of an individual’s experience of the Divine, passing through all the modes of individual prayer: praise, petition, doubt, despair, faith, exaltation, humility, defiance, and thanksgiving. Specific psalms are incorporated into Jewish liturgy, and are recited daily and on the Sabbath at set times as well as during Jewish holidays. Finally, this book of hours is inspired by the great devotional poets writing in English: George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Hart Crane, and any echoes you might hear are intentional homage to them.

It is my wish that Of Hours, in the tradition of the Psalms, can serve as a vehicle for personal devotion: to inspire, to exhort to pray, to provide a space for contemplating your life’s path as it evolves hour-by-hour.

"He put a new song into my mouth,
a praise to our God, so that many may see and fear,
and trust in the Lord."
—Psalm 40

May these “new songs” accompany and fortify you as you live through each day’s manifold hours. Selah!


Here’s the opening poem to Of Hours:


"Psalm of the Flying Shell (4:30 a.m.)"


"At what solstice hour do I arise
(at what daybreak dark do wingtips whir)

knowing I can never see Your face

knowing my life is spiraled in the conch
of consciousness (inside the solar plexus

of space) how can I see in
to the wings’ filigree I’m fused within—

what does the sea-rushing sound announce—
how decipher the architecture of cells alchemy

of stars as angels for Your will?
My heart is a volute inside a body-whorled

spire that obelisks
the air I am thrumming

Your praises as the only way to hear
with the soul’s inner ear.

Tell me what You require of me>"

(published in American Literary Review, Twentieth Anniversary, Issue Spring 2010)


Others may be found at the following links:

“Blue Ladder (9 a.m.)”
The Cortland Review

Electronic Poetry Review

“Psalm of Morning Mist,” “Duet of Tree House and Rain”
InPosse (online)

“With Roses (6:30 a.m.),” “Green Laddered Thanksgiving (11 a.m.),” “Blackberry City and Sun Dial Talk (4pm) Time”
RealPoetik

“Window with Wild Garlic in Wellfleet (5 a.m.),” The 22nd Annual
Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards for Poems on the Jewish Experience

Many of Ellen Wiener’s paintings from An Album of Hours may be found here ."

Canary sings her thanks, lobster thrums from his grotto.

Sunday Morning Coffee: "Touch"; Mills (The Blue Hour); Ponge

[Eberhard Weber, "Touch," from Yellow Fields]

Deborah A. Mills, an artist walking along the promenade on the lower Hudson, captured l'heure bleue in all its cobalt beauty yesterday evening.

She sees the inner being of things, how they manifest themselves as fields of color, color we can almost (but not quite) touch.

See deeply, see the thing-in-itself, and then search for the words to be that thing.

Francis Ponge phrased it this way:

"...man will make marvelous strides if he returns to things (just as we must return to the level of words in order to express things properly) and applies himself to studying them and expressing them, trusting simultaneously his eye, his reason, and his intuition, with no encumbrance to keep him from pursuing the novelties they contain--and knowing how to consider them in their essence as in their details."

---Ponge, Mute Objects of Expression (orig. 1938, trans. Lee Fahnestock, 2008, Archipelago Books).

From Beyond Raging Seas, Comes The King-Herring

[DJ Krush & Shinichi Kinoshita, "Beyond Raging Waves"}

Last week a Giant Oarfish, also known as the King of the Herrings, washed up on a Swedish beach near the Norwegian border. The beast-- the first found in Sweden in 130 years-- was nearly 11 feet long.

The Giant Oarfish is the largest living bony fish, reaching 35 feet. Ten specimens washed up in Japan this spring. The Oarfish is usually found 650-3,200 feet below the surface.

Traditionally in Japan, sightings of the Oarfish were considered ominous. Many in Europe and Asia think stories of the "sea serpent" may stem from pelagic sightings of the Oarfish.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Mother's Day

[Heitor Villa-Lobos, Magnificat-Alleluia]

Happy Mother's Day from the lobster and the canary.

Picasso Record, and the Impact of the Volcano

[Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, sold via Christies last week for an all-time record $106.5 million for an individual art piece.]


[Last month's volcanic eruption in Iceland]

Lobster lifts a quill from the ledger-book, pondering the price paid by an anonymous bidder for Picasso's 1932 painting...

Canary is glad not to fly through volcanic ash...the Icelandic eruption caused last month's Art Cologne, Art Brussels and London Book Fair to suffer many no-shows and delayed shipments...

Sunday Morning Coffee: "Jackals & Vipers in Envy of Man"; "Pyracantha & Plum."

[Sixtoo, Jackals and Vipers in Envy of Man, Parts 2 & 4, released 2007]
Spring, with muggy airs and green, sprang over us this week...from a hint of snow on Tuesday, to temperatures yesterday in the eighties (Fahrenheit)...

The vicissitudes, les ondes... lobster and canary this week celebrated their 101st birthday... a time for reflection on the season(s)...threads of winter woven into the verdant explosion...last fall's leaf mold wrapping the roots of the budding bush...

As Jane Hirshfield writes in "Pyracantha and Plum":

"Last autumn's chastened berries still on one tree,
spring blossoms tender, hopeful, on another.
The view from this window
much as it was ten years ago, fifteen.
Yet it seems this morning
a self-portrait both clearer and darker,
as if while I slept some Rembrandt or Brueghel
had walked through the garden, looking hard."

May Day Celebration: The Queen of Roses

May Day is here at last...the Queen and her court rouse themselves from sleep...hear the drums, the deep-lute strumming...with roses in her hair...

"A rose, but one, none other rose had I.
A rose, one rose, and this was wondrous fair,
One rose a rose that gladden'd earth and sky,
One rose, my rose, that sweeten'd all mine air--
I cared not for the thorns; the thorns were there."

(Tennyson, from Pelleas and Ettarre).

Interstitial Arts Foundation: Interfictions Zero// Call for Papers

Lobster and canary are members of the Working Group for the Interstitial Arts Foundation. The IAF just issued a very interesting call for papers, which we reprint in full below (for more, click the IAF site here):

"Interfictions Zero, to be edited by Delia Sherman and Helen Pilinovsky, will be published online by the Interstitial Arts Foundations in late August of 2010.

Submission Guidelines for 
Interfictions Zero: The Virtual Anthology of Interstitial Writing and Original Essays

What Is Interstitial Writing? Interstitial writing breaks rules, ignores boundaries, cross-pollinates the fields of literature, and helps them grow and develop. It’s about working between, across, through, and at the edges and borders of literary genres. It occurs in the cracks between other movements, terms, and definitions. Interstitial isn’t a genre, but many interstitial pieces serve as the germs of new genres that develop over time.

What is Interfictions Zero? Interfictions Zero is an online virtual anthology, comprised of a Table of Contents listing seminal pieces of published interstitial writings (with live links to those texts where possible) and original essays about the focus pieces listed in the TOC. With the online publication of Interfictions Zero, the Interstitial Arts Foundation will begin to create a historical context for how interstitial writing affects the growth and development of literature over time.

What Are We Looking For? We’re seeking original essays that examine seminal pieces of interstitial writing.

What piece should you choose to examine in your essay? Our only requirement is that the piece must have been published before 2009 and that it can be considered interstitial for the time it was written. Focus pieces can be from any genre or form, including but not limited to fiction (contemporary realism, classic literature, mystery, historical, fantasy, thriller, western, whatever), poetry, non-fiction, plays, and graphic novels/series.

If your essay is accepted for Interfictions Zero, the title of your essay’s focus piece will be added to the Table of Contents for the virtual anthology. Your essay will be published online as part of Interfictions Zero and linked to the Table of Contents. It will be featured on our blog and it will be archived in the Recommendations section of the IAF web site.

Who Are We Looking For? We’re looking for writers and academics who have a critical interpretation of a piece of interstitial writing that challenges genre tropes and expectations.

Practical Matters Our submission period will be from June 1, 2010 to June 30, 2010. Electronic submissions only. Overseas submissions are welcome. Send your essays as Word or .rtf attachments to: interfictions@interstitialarts.org. You will hear from us after July 31, 2010.

Submissions should include a 750-2,500 word essay that examines why the focus piece is interstitial and discusses its relationship with the writer and/or the writer’s body of work and/or other writing contemporary with the piece.

Please follow standard manuscript formatting and submission conventions: ie, double-spaced, with 1” margins, and the title of the essay on each page. No simultaneous or multiple submissions. Payment will be a $25 honorarium per essay for non-exclusive world anthology rights, payable upon publication.

Any questions? Write to us at interfictions@interstitialarts.org

Sunday Morning Coffee: Bird Song, People Song

[European Song Thrush singing]

[European Blackbird, i.e., also a thrush, singing]

[American Robin, i.e., also a thrush, singing]

[American Mockingbird, a close cousin to the thrush]

Canary is very happy, thinking of Earth Day just passed and anticipating World Migratory Bird Day nearly upon us (May 8/9)...we in the Northern Hemisphere thank our friends in the Southern Hemisphere for sending us the thrushes, the warblers, the wrens, the chats, the finches, the flycatchers...

Already the Robins and the Mockingbirds are singing, freshets of song that lace the sounds of traffic and construction here in Manhattan...listen carefully and you will hear the first White-throated Sparrows of the season in the underbrush of the parks...

Parched after a long winter, we northerners are like Beren in Tolkien's Silmarillion , spying Luthien for the first time as she danced in the glades of Doriath "at a time of evening under moonrise":

"Keen, heart-piercing was her song as the song of the lark that rises from the gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun behind the walls of the world; and the song of Luthien released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke, and flowers sprang from the cold earth where her feet had passed."

(Beren named her "Tinuviel," which is "Nightingale" in the Gray-elven tongue; Luthien's singing conquered the lord of torment, rescued Beren from death.)

The song that trickles up-- I know it, as Wallace Stevens knew it in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird":

"I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know."

As Mary Oliver knows it in "Goldfinches":

"Is it necessary to say any more?
Have you heard them singing in the wind, above the final fields?
Have you ever been so happy in your life?"

Sunday Morning Coffee: The Poetical Round (Dawes, Rich, Muldoon)

[Stanley Clarke and Steve Gadd conversing via bass and drum, c. 1980, riffing off "Lopsy Loo" from Clarke's first album, or maybe something from his School Days album.]

Lots of chocolate in the coffee this morning, to stave off the cold outside...

Lobster and canary have been riffing all week about poetry, partly in honor of National Poetry Month.

We've been feeling out how poems emerge, their genesis in memory, as scattered home-words that live in the heart, words that coalesce when separation through time and space suddenly or slowly reveal their value.

Maybe something along the lines of what Kwame Dawes relates in his memoir of immigration, A Far Cry from Plymouth Rock:

"We recited these tales of remembrance as people trying to ensure that the memory of our origins was not lost. It was part of who we were and we had no good reason to battle that nostalgia for it sustained us. So the names of our relatives, our cousins, our friends had the sound of a litany--a strange cadence that remained locked in the mind like a song. Nostalgia was rich: the fufu, the banku, the kenke, the kelewele, the okra soup, the palm nut soup, the groundnut soup, the yoyi tree, the akra, the garri done a million ways..." (pp. 70-71).

From the arterial clay of memory comes the rough cast; the poet shapes and sorts, molds and discards. Adrienne Rich says:

"What poetry is made of is so old, so familiar, that it's easy to forget that it's not just the words, but polyrhythmic sounds, speech in its first endeavors (every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome), prismatic meanings lit by each others' light, stained by each others' shadows. In the wash of poetry the old, beaten, worn stones of language take on colors that disappear when you sieve them up out of the streambed and try to sort them out."

---(from Rich, "Someone is Writing a Poem," in her What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, pg. 85).

Origins and drafting are hard enough to discern, let alone practice...what about the poet's search for a poem's ending? (Why do Clarke and Gadd end when they do, not earlier or later?) Paul Muldoon has spent great imagination on this question, and offers some provocative suggestions about "a poem that resists coming to a close, or drawing its own conclusion":

"My theory is that, as it comes into being, the poem is marking and measuring itself against a combination of what it might now be and what it might yet become. [...] My conclusion, insofar as I have a sense of it at this juncture, will be that the idea of anything 'designed and instituted' by a poet will almost certainly run counter to what I believe to be the 'object for which' poetry exists."

----(Muldoon, "Poem of the End; Marina Tsvetayeva," in his The End of the Poem, pg. 299).

Canary is very quiet as he assimilates this idea, that his song may have a purpose of its own. The poet is the vessel of the poem, the memories live in words that have no ending...

Lobster pauses in his search for sand-fleas and other cephalopods, trying to perceive the wave as distinct from the water.

"The Very Narrowest Alphabets"

Canary has been ruminating over this line, from Liesel Tarquini's translation of Silke Scheuermann's poem "The Sadomasochistic Grammar of Dreams":

"Lost to language we conjugate the very narrowest alphabets."

(Published in Lit, the journal of the New School MFA in Creative Writing Program, numbers 15 & 16, winter/spring 2009, pg. 93).

An alphabet of brute sensation, thus no alphabet at all...a (non)language of rage, hurt, and hunger...a separation of ourselves from thought...

Scheuermann's original German uses the compound word "Sprachfremd," which Tarquini translates deftly as "lost to language." "Fremd" also has the literal meaning "strange," "alien." Alienated from meaning, from language itself...

No conjugation but only ballistics and the trajectory of force...

Yet Scheuermann's poem is about the "grammar of dreams"...Canary wrinkles his feathers...for him the dreaming is where pure language emerges, where the Ursprache reveals itself with its infinite conjugations and branching alphabets, a thousand thousand meanings in each fleeting combination...

Wondering what others think on this?

Sunday Morning Coffee: "Cosmic Strut," Poetry, Translation

[Mahavishnu Orchestra, "Cosmic Strut," from Visions of the Emerald Beyond, 1975].

Canary sips thoughtfully at a cafe con leche...while lobster wishes grumpily for aquatic doughnuts...

"Cheer up, lobster! It's still National Poetry Month!"

As Dryden wrote in the introduction to Absalom and Achitophel:

"Yet if a poem have a genius, it will force its own reception in the world; for there's a sweetness in good verse, which tickles even while it hurts..."

How about this, "Cadmus Reminisces" by Sandra Kasturi? (You can find it in her collection, The Animal Bridegroom).

"Dragon's teeth
sown in our backyard
produced such an inundation
of small, fat iguanas
that Mother and Father
had several suitcases made."

Or this, "Small Moth" by Sarah Lindsay in her Twigs & Knucklebones collection?

"She's slicing ripe white peaches
into the Tony the Tiger bowl
and dropping slivers for the dog
poised vibrating by her foot to stop their fall
when she spots it, camouflaged,
a glimmer and then full-on --
happiness, plashing blunt soft wings
inside her as if it wants
to escape again."

Edith Grossman's just-published Why Translation Matters (Yale University Press) gets a good review from Richard Howard in this morning's New York Times (click here for the entire review). Howard highlights this quote from Grossman:

“Where literature exists, translation exists. Joined at the hip, they are absolutely inseparable, and, in the long run, what happens to one happens to the other. Despite all the difficulties the two have faced, sometimes separately, usually together, they need and nurture each other, and their long-term relationship, often problematic but always illuminating, will surely continue for as long as they both shall live.”

Canary goes for more coffee, and says to lobster-under-the-waves: "See, my dear, I love you thus!"

Lobster waves one slick-mottled claw...and foregoes dreams of doughnuts.

Raden Saleh, Milton, and a Tiger Couchant

[Raden Sarief Bustaman Saleh, "Javanese Landscape, with Tigers Listening to the Sound of a Traveling Group," 1849; being auctioned at Christie's in Hong Kong next month, after being in private hands since it was painted].

Keeping in mind that it is National Poetry Month here in the U.S.A., the lugubrious lobster selects a passage from Milton (from Book IV of Paradise Lost):

"So spake the Fiend, and with necessitie,
The Tyrants plea, excus'd his devilish deeds.
Then from his loftie stand on that high Tree
Down he alights among the sportful Herd
Of those fourfooted kindes, himself now one,
Now other, as thir shape servd best his end
Neerer to view his prey, and unespi'd
To mark what of thir state he more might learn
By word or action markt: about them round
A Lion now he stalkes with fierie glare,
Then as a Tiger, who by chance hath spi'd
In some Purlieu two gentle Fawnes at play,
Strait couches close, then rising changes oft
His couchant watch, as one who chose his ground
Whence rushing he might surest seise them both
Grip't in each paw: when ADAM first of men
To first of women EVE thus moving speech,
Turnd him all eare to heare new utterance flow."

Sunday Morning Coffee: "Tightrope," and a Flood of Poetry

[Janelle Monae, "Tightrope," featuring Big Boi, 2009: "The Palace of the Dogs Asylum-- Dancing has long been forbidden for its subversive effects on the residents and its tendency to lead to illegal magical practices."]

Fogged in this morning...a lone Robin singing down below, calling out perhaps for a mate who cannot find him in the greyness...

Listening to the stylish, interstitial Janelle Morae. (Thanks to N.K. Jemisin's Facebook reference!) Her musical mini-dramas feel like Calvino or Cortazar-- "Many Moons" might be Philip K. Dick crossed with Kara Walker. If you like Grace Jones, David Bowie, Bjork, Outkast, Prince, you'll like Morae.

In honor of National Poetry Month, the lobster and the canary suggest these from among recent publications:

Sonya Taaffe, "Idle Thoughts While Watching a Faun," (March 29, 2010 in Strange Horizons). It opens this way (click here for the rest):

"He should be ice in a northern garden,
a moss-flanked marble whose fingers cling
as stilly to his flute-stops as last night's rain
between the bowing heads of roses,
sheltered forever by a symbolist's afternoon
from November and the winter's stripping chill,
yet here he lounges in an abstract of boxwood
and holly, under a slate-lid sky,
the black of his pelt like the soft lees of Setinum,
his horns as sweetly whorled as pinecones,
a gold annealing in the slots of his eyes."

J.C. Runolfson, "Phineas Gage Blinks For Eternity," in Goblin Fruit (Winter, 2010). Click here for the rest, if you like this beginning:

"After the iron,
the fire.

Saw it coming, that eye, peripheral,
too quick for the man himself to know,
but the eye saw, told the brain,
and the iron drove straight through.

The eye and the brain kept their secrets."

Diane Gage, "Sign Language, in Perigee (vol. 7, issue 3). Canary likes this excerpt-- for the entire poem click here.

"This is one of those
understories
the kind told in riddles
and slivers of old bone
in some quiet room
off the main road"

Rachel Swirsky, "Mundane," in Ideomancer (in its lovely new format!, Feb. 18, 2010; vol. 9, issue 1). Click here for the entire poem.

"Our exploration limps, inert
and monotonous. We fill empty hours
imagining mirages that sparkle bright
beneath dim stars. We approach each
to measure and retreat, disappointed
as potential vanishes to dark."

Erika Lutzner, "The Great Mother Has No Face," in eclectica (Jan./Feb., 2010). Here it starts (click here for the rest).

"Do you believe in rebirth?
the goat asked the stone as they lay
by the river taking in the noonday heat"

Lynne Thompson, "Lament: I am Implication-," in Rattle, originally issue # 23, summer 2005, posted on Rattle's great new e-version, April 1, 2010. Click here for more.

"an afterthought,
meat gone rancid,
Anna Karenina in blue hose,
ephemerata.

Every need I’ve declined to marry
has failed me: moonrise and the milksops

I would have loved. Every daughter
who could have been my revenge."

Gwendolyn Clare, "Uttu's Garden," in Abyss & Apex (Issue 33, First Quarter, 2010). For the full poem, click here.

"The hummingbirds return each year
on Mother's Day, knowing how their thirsty industry
is a gift to her. The only gift
she receives, but it is enough..."

Lobster closes today with a bit of a poem not recent but this week Web-posted: "quilting" by the late Lucille Clifton, first published in 1991, now poem of the week at Cave Canem:

"somewhere in the unknown world
a yellow eyed woman
sits with her daughter
quilting"

National Poetry Month

[John Keats, played by Ben Wishaw, and Fanny Brawne, played by Abbie Cornish, in Jane Campion's 2009 film, Bright Star]



[Natasha Trethewey on history, place, reading and making, interview at the University of Oklahoma, 2009].



[W.S. Merwin on country life and meeting his wife]



[Louise Gluck, on the importance of a single line, interviewed at Smith College, 2004]



[Rita Dove on the importance of music to her work; at the inaugural Poets Forum, convened by the Academy of American Poets, and held at Marymount College, NYC, October 20, 2007]

April is National Poetry Month. For more, go to the Academy of American Poets site, here.

Fiction and Evolutionary Psychology

"It’s not that evolution gives us insight into fiction,” [Professor of English at Brandeis University, William] Flesch said, “but that fiction gives us insight into evolution.”

--In "Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know," by Patricia Cohen, in The New York Times, March 31, 2010.

The second-most e-mailed NYT article today.

Key words: literary Darwinism, "mapping wonderland," cognitive psychologists, memory, visual cortex, levels of intentionality, mechanics of reading, "altruistic punishers."

For the full story, click here.

Sunday Morning Coffee: "Harlequin," Lunacon, and Middle-Earth More Real Than the New Yorker

[Dave Grusin, Lee Ritenour, Ivan Lins, "Harlequin," 1985]


[Margaret Organ-Kean, "Masque," no date, c. 2008]


[Matthew Stewart, "Dernhelm," 2009]


[K.M. Kotulak, "Hiberno-Curio," 2009]


[Christy Grandjean, a.k.a, Goldenwolf, "Spirit Hunter," 2007]


[Donato Giancola, "Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire," 2009]

Coffee is ready! We're listening to "Harlequin" this morning, recalling the show by vocalist Ivan Lins at the Blue Note in the Village a few years ago.

The lobster and the canary participated last weekend in Lunacon, the oldest science fiction/fantasy convention in New York. The usual variety of panels and talks. Most impressive was the art show, featuring works by (among many others) Margaret Organ-Kean, Matthew Stewart, K.M. Kotulak, Christy Grandjean, and Donato Giancola. Giancola also painted a picture of Smaug, the dragon in The Hobbit, in front of a rapt crowd, genially explaining his choices as the painting emerged before our eyes. The canary snapped photos of Giancola in action, which we will post this week.

Lobster stirs his coffee with one claw, and savors this quote from Ross Douthat in the March 25th New York Times:

"The whole reason that modern fantasy, in all its various guises, has proven such a potent genre is precisely because it seems to capture more of reality than its technically-more-realistic competitors. Fantasy re-enchants our disenchanted world, and recaptures something essential to mortal experience along the way: Whether you literally believe in fairies or not, a great fairy tale is truer to the richness of human affairs than many “New Yorker” short stories. I’ve felt this with many fantasy writers, but like many readers I felt it first and strongest with Tolkien — and whenever I return to him, I feel it still."

Click here for the entire essay.

Recommended Reading: First Quarter, 2010

Lobster murmurs and canary whistles... time to blog again...

Recommended books read this first quarter of 2010:

We highly recommend N.K. Jemisin's debut, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (Orbit, released February, 2010). Jemisin has created a distinctive world, with idiosyncratic characters, vaguely Peakean in flavor, but entirely her own. We especially enjoy her dry wit, precise prose, and intricate plotting. Above all, we like her portrayals of the gods who have been enslaved: they are both more and less than human, raising a chill up the reader's spine while also tugging at our heart. We love them, fear them, do not understand them all at once-- we are as baffled, entranced and repelled as the heroine Yeine is by the immortal trickster youth Sieh and the terrifying (and terrifyingly erotic) Nightlord Nahadoth. Jemisin promises us two more in this series-- we await these eagerly.

Cherie Priest also does a fine job creating alien (eldritch, to use an overused but in this case very appropriate word) characters in Fathom (Tor, 2008, first paperback release February, 2010). The water elemental Arahab seeks to awake Leviathian from his slumbers deep below the earth's crust-- which will destroy the world. Yet Arahab is no caricature of evil: her actions have a defensible if wholly alien logic and ethic; she is willful, mercurial, but she weighs and measures, ponders, has doubts, is not merely hateful. If anyone is truly and one-sidedly evil in Fathom, it is the human Berenice, who betrays everyone, including her savior and patron Arahab. And then there is the enigmatic spirit called Mossfeaster: "From the feet up, the creature began to dissolve itself, not so much collapsing as letting the ground absorb it. But before the last of the shoulders, neck and head disappeared, it offered one final thought. 'You can help a thing who loves the world destroy it; or you can help a thing who hates it save it'" (page 100).

Spiritual quandaries also pervade Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress (Tor, 2009, first paperback edition February, 2010). Extraterrestials arrive to atone for a crime against humanity that no one on Earth knows anything about. "The Atoners" take selected humans to other planets to witness the consequences of this crime. Kress combines fast-paced drama with thought-provoking propositions. The revelations of the witnesses challenge deeply held beliefs; Kress is very good at describing how humanity reacts, in ways both trivial (celebrity tours, pop culture engulfment) and mortally important.

Incarceron by Catherine Fisher (Hodder U.K., 2007; first U.S. edition, Dial/Penguin, 2010) is really, really good. Finn has no memories of his past, but is now a Prisoner in the unimaginably vicious, squalid and vast prison-world of Incarceron-- a prison that is itself coldly intelligent, indifferently manipulating the fates of its inhabitants. There is and can be no escape from Incarceron. But where is Incarceron? That is the question for Claudia, daughter of the Warden, and her tutor, the Sapient Jared. As Finn and his deceitful, half-crazed companions desperately seek to escape the inescapable, Claudia (about to be married against her will to the Crown Prince) is furiously trying to locate Incarceron...all the more so when she and Finn stumble into conversation via a matched set of scientifico-magical Keys. Incarceron has it all: a twisting plot, flawed and believable characters, settings that live on after you shut the page. Peake and Vance come to mind, The Man in the Iron Mask, Dickens, Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games... we look forward to Incarceron's sequel, Sapphique.

Sharon Dolin: Composing for the eye

The lobster and canary are especially delighted to offer today's post: an interview with widely acclaimed poet Sharon Dolin. Sharon has published four books and five chapbooks of poetry. She is Writer-in-Residence at Eugene Lang College, The New School and she also teaches at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in NYC.

Click here for her website.

Lobster & Canary: You frequently give readings. How does reading your work aloud for an audience influence (or not) how you compose in the first place? Talk to us about the interaction of writing and performance as it may apply to your poetry.

Sharon: I don’t think that reading my work aloud before an audience influences the way I compose poetry. Certainly, I read my work aloud to myself while in the process of revision in order to catch the rhythms, to see if there is any unwelcome awkwardness (although sometimes awkwardness is the point). I come out of the Williams tradition and compose much more for the eye than for the ear. I spend a lot of time thinking about how a poem looks on the page. Is there enough white space? Should the poem have uniform stanzas? How long should the lines be? Are the enjambments perky?

Of course I enjoy giving readings, to feel firsthand how a poem goes over to a live audience. But this means that I carefully choose which poems work better at a reading and which poems work much better on the page. There are some poems that I would never read aloud to an audience.

L & C. You pay great attention to formal technique-- you are perhaps unusual in this (?). (Among your peers, I think of Molly Peacock, the late Reginald Shepherd, Susan Stewart, Louise Gluck, W.S. Merwin, but not so many others.) Tell us a little about that, about how you see form in relation to content. Do your words and images arise first, followed by the search for appropriate structure, or vice versa, or in some other order altogether?

Sharon: It’s funny that you should say I pay great attention to formal technique. I think of myself as a free verse poet, but one who has worked very hard, both in my poetry and in my theoretical writings about free verse, to claim that free verse is as formal as any poetry written in a fixed form. That the burden of finding the form is even more onerous for a free verse poet. Of course, I deplore how much sloppy free verse writing is out there, how many poems are merely prose chopped up into lines. I hope my poems never fail in that way. I think very carefully about the constitution of the line. Each line in a poem has to carry its own weight. Charles Wright has written some of the best essays on the subject. So I make no distinction between poems that use a fixed form, such as the ghazal (one of my favorites) and poems that have no identifiable formal label.

That said, usually an image or idea hits me first. Sometimes the form follows almost immediately and sometimes I struggle with making the two marry each other. Here are a few examples: In my first book Heart Work, there’s a long poem called “Praying Mantis in Brooklyn.” I knew right from the start that the poem would take the form of a sestina followed by a free verse expatiation on it. What had happened was a praying mantis appeared several times in very unlikely places: on the windowsill of my 4th floor walkup and on my street gate. The uncanniness of the meeting and the strangeness of the insect got me to thinking about Louis Zukofsky’s famous poem (really my favorite of his short works) called simply “Mantis,” in which a praying mantis flies at his chest on the NYC subway. He wrote this poem during the Depression and the mantis came to stand for the poor. He used a sestina followed by a free verse riff. In the late Eighties, when I wrote my poem, when there were lots of homeless on the streets of New York, I decided I would write my own Mantis poem with a nod to Zukofsky by using the same two-part form.

The same think happened with a poem in Burn and Dodge, my fourth book. I was at the Philadelphia Zoo, watching my niece and her girlfriend watching two tortoises copulate. I wanted to write a poem about the tortoises and about my niece coming out to the family. It seemed necessary to me that the poem take the form of a syllabic, Marianne Moore’s characteristic form, because she loved to go to the zoo and because she was so prissy about any sexual content entering her work. So my poem was an irreverent syllabic.

And here’s one more example of how I think about form over the course of a sequence of poems: In Serious Pink, my ekphrastic collection, I thought about the fact that Howard Hodgkin always paints over his frames. So in my sequence of poems in dialogue with his work, I wanted a flexible framing device. I decided to write 15-line lyrics in varying stanzaic patterns—near sonnets. Of course, in one poem, a ghazal it had to be 16 lines, an even number of lines, to accommodate the couplet form.

Many of the “free verse” poems in Burn and Dodge that deal with contemporary vices are written in tercets because I think of that form as a nod to Dante’s terza rima form in the Inferno.
In one of those poems, “Cursed Anger Sing” (Anger being one of the original Seven Deadly Sins), I chose a backwards moving tercet, because I think of anger as something we are only aware of in retrospect. Here’s the opening stanza:

Wound inside snake coils, cruel lover of blood
who sees only red, unlike Gluttony, Lust
and Sloth, when you are wroth . . .

Here you see I do also enjoy playing with internal rhyme as well.

In the poem “Grudge,” I chose boxy quatrains because there is something closed off about that emotion. Here’s the first stanza:

Holding–bearing—carrying.
To have is not to surrender
pockets of the mind
where hurt sojourns.

Finally, I probably feel drawn to couplets when there is a strong sense of a dialogic you and I, or some kind of love, as in the poem written for my son called “Shame.”

When my five-year-old, not listening , climbed over
the broken fence head first

and fell (the gash on his cheek, a huge backward “C”),
we didn’t recognize, as he bled,

what he’d opened up for himself . . .

Again, what I am calling a retrospective lineation, a not-seeing until after the fact, as well a way to represent non-alignment of self with the world at the same time preserving the couplet as a sign of tenderness between my son and myself. I was not trying for radical enjambments in this poem, which tells a story.

Elsewhere, more radical line breaks might be the rule.

L & C: We love your ekphrastic work. Which visual artists are you following with particular avidity right now, and why?

Sharon: First, thank you. Serious Pink remains the book I’m proudest of, in a way. I can’t say I “follow” particular artists. It’s all about serendipity. And I never know in advance what kind of book I’ll be writing. I just write poems and see where it takes me. Serious Pink began with the Joan Mitchell sequence, “My Black Paintings,” because I happened to visit the Robert Miller gallery to see a show of Mitchell’s work from the mid-Sixties that she called her “Black Paintings.” They were painted (I initially wrote “written” here!) when she was recovering from the death of her father and when her mother was ill with cancer. I, too, was slowly recovering from the untimely accidental death of my fiancé who, by the way, liked Joan Mitchell’s work. Perhaps that’s why I attended the show. Anyway, it gave me a way to write about the loss indirectly (I had already written a sequence of poems about him, published finally in Realm of the Possible in a section entitled “Geniza.”). So I bought the catalogue and decided to write about one of the paintings. Then the next. And the next. There are other stories for each of the other sequences, always quite personal. I was also interested at the time (this was in the mid-90s) in how I could write about abstract painting. Most ekphrasis, as you know, is the art of description. How do you describe an abstract painting? You don’t. So I had to do something else. That was my adventure. And in each of the sequences I approached it differently. Here’s one of the poems from the sequence “Black Paintings” that makes the elegiac subject matter quite clear:


BLACK PAINTING #2: THE DEAD


Blue winter rain
that's what you’ve become

a cloud
whitewashed by weather

this window
beyond being

the elements eat you

damp cold
of the first winter

now the second
you said you wanted

to travel
now you're still

blotches of flight
descend into your

stationary car


In my last book, Burn and Dodge, where there is a quadriptych scattered throughout the book on Envy, the final one is, as the title says, my “Letter to Seven-Hundred-Year-Old Invidia in the Scrovegni Chapel to be Folded in the Shape of a Snake Swallowing Its Tail.” I imagine Giotto’s figure of Envy looking across at the figure of Prudentia, who looks like a writer to me, and being envious of her. I thought of the poem in sculptural terms: Envy as a circle from which one never exits. Here’s the first stanza, which is almost purely descriptive of Giotto’s Invidia—well, obviously as seen through my manic eyes:


Letter to 700-Year-Old Invidia in the Scrovegni Chapel to be Folded in the Shape
of a Snake Swallowing its Tail

. . . out of your niche, Galatea'd on hate,
if it weren't for the bloody anemonaed
flames (coelacanthed), that hold you phoenixed
rebirthed, recursed
consuming you spewing you flue-ing
you up. Clutching your moneybag already
cinched
by the tasseled rope at your waist
and reaching to grasp—what?—You can barely see
for the serpent jutting from your mouth whose head circles
back to flick its tongue
over your eyes—your ears so outsized—batlike cartilage
ram's horns wrap around.



Right now, I am not “following” any artist in particular. A few years ago, I was looking at a painting by Cy Twombly called “Scenes from an Ideal Marriage” and that sparked me to write about my own very imperfect marriage. It’s a poem in four parts that got published by Ducts (http://www.ducts.org/content/scenes-from-an-ideal-marriage/).

L & C: The canary in particular is struck that so little poetry is written about music (as opposed to the visual arts, and not meaning lyrics composed for and as part of song). A case of sibling rivalry? Your thoughts?

Sharon: I think the tradition of ekphrasis, which began with Achilles shield in The Iliad, has always been one of the visual arts. Lessing’s book on the Laocoon was an entire argument about the strengths of sculpture and painting compared to poetry. Debussy’s Prelude to an Afternoon of the Fawn, was inspired by a Mallarmé poem. I think there are lots of contemporary composers who set poems to music. I’m not sure what to call that. It’s reverse ekphrasis: from words to images. We’ve had a few notable examples of that in painting: Charles Demuth’s painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold after Williams’s “The Great Figure.” There just seems to be a primacy to the image as visual as opposed to auditory. Poems are put to music as opposed to poems written about music. Think of the American art song tradition: Aaron Copland’s "Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson,” for instance. And contemporary composers such as Ned Rorem or Tom Cipullo come to mind but there are many others.

L & C: Robert Pinsky, in "Culture" (the first chapter of his Democracy, Culture and The Voice of Poetry) glosses Tocqueville's assertion that American democracy "has dried up most of the old springs of poetry." Pinsky suggests Tocqueville should be read to mean poetry's trajectory in the U.S.A. is the result of "not exactly the absence of legends, memorials, heroes, and pantheons but their insufficiency: a worn, jejune quality--a need for something either more candid, or more candidly fantastic." If the Tocquevillian premise is sound, then how has American poetry become either more candid, or more frankly fantastic over the past 150 years?

Sharon: I understand Tocqueville to mean that we don’t write public poetry anymore: to dead heroes or to living presidents after Whitman. Or, at the least, that’s not the source of our best poetry. I find this question a puzzling one as someone who has always been more interested in the lyric than the epic. I go to poetry—both to read and write it—for what the solitary voice has to say from his or her personal experience. The is one of the oldest “springs” of poetry. I never find myself moved by public poetry. It’s why I love the Psalms, no matter who has written them, because they are the voice of an individual, not a people. I’m not the first one to say that the tragedy of 9/11 reminded people that poetry could offer a certain kind of solace through an expression of grief that can’t be duplicated by other art forms.

American poetry as more candid or more fantastic? These elements have always been present in American poetry. Who is more candid than Whitman? Who is more fantastic than Poe or Dickinson? I think the use of language has changed, perhaps due to a sense of audience: poets more and more writing for each other. Or perhaps the causal connection is reversed: the language has changed and that has led to a falling away of audience. But that is another matter entirely.

L & C: If you were exploring poetry with sixth-graders in NYC, which poems might you include on the syllabus?

Sharon: As the mother of a fifth-grader who rolls his eyes at the mention of poetry, I think I’m going to duck this question and say: That’s why I prefer to teach college students and adults.

L & C: Fair enough! Thank you very much, Sharon, for your poetry and for your thoughts about the craft.

Supper's Ready

[Chaim Soutine, Still Life with Fish, c. 1921]


[Paul Cezanne, Ginger Jar and Fruit, 1895]


[Pierre Bonnard, The Dining Room, c. 1940-1946]