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e.11

Book Interview:Travis Mossotti’s About the Dead

Eye Contact with Dan Waber

The Impertinent Musewith Art Beck

Artwork by Bryan Estes

Issue #36 Preview

C O N T E N T S

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Alan Fox

EDITOR

Timothy Green ([email protected])

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Megan Green([email protected])

EDITOR EMERITUS

Stellasue Lee

© 2011 by the Rattle Foundation

Fall 2011, e.11

ISSN# 1097-2900 (print)ISSN# 2153-8115 (online)

All rights revert to authors on publication.Print issues of RATTLE are 4-color, perfect-bound, and include about 200 pages ofpoetry, essays, and interviews. Each issuealso features a tribute section dedicated toan ethnic, vocational, or stylistic group.For more information, including submis-sion guidelines, please visit www.rattle.com.

CCOONNTTEENNTTSS

ARTWORK

Bryan Estes About the Artist 3Genesis 2 3Genesis 8 7Genesis 7 11

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Deborah Diemont A Few Real Faces 4

INTERVIEW & BOOK FEATURE

Travis Mossotti About the Dead 5Interview 6About the Dead 10Saxifrage 10Only Then 11

ESSAYS

Dan Waber Eye Contact#5: Kevin Yuen Kit Lo 12Art Beck Impertinent Duet #5: The Poetics of Exile 14

#36 PREVIEW

John O’Reilly The Bittern at Abbott’s Lagoon 24Bruce Snider Cruising the Reststop on Route 9 24Dick Allen from The Zen Master Poems 25Li Bai Alone on Mount Jingting 26Jeffrey Franklin The Excitement of Getting a Room... 26Sarah Pemberton Strong Fish Tank 27Alan Fox from A Conversation with Chase Twichell 28

INFORMATION

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A R T W O R K

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

BRYAN ESTES studies poetry among thecorn and coal of the Middle West. He hasread poems published in Ploughshares,AGNI, Crazyhorse, The Kenyon Review,and elsewhere.

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Bryan Estes

Genesis 2Bryan Estes

L E T T O R T O T H E E D I T O R S

Dear Editors,

Colin Ward’s “Pixel Poetry: aMeritocracy” in Rattle’s e.10 issue isproblematic. There are faulty argumentsthroughout, such as the assertion that“face-to-face” friends could not possiblygive honest critiques, or that “onliners”uniquely care about the quality of theirwriting over fame. What I findcompelling are the poems Ward includes,however it seems to me that he picks thequirkier poets and claims them as thenorm. Interestingly, in the case of ErinHopson, he says that the poem sheposted to a board was so good, the criticshad nothing to say.

Ward emphasizes the beauty of theinternet for shy poets—one can postanonymously—but he doesn’t considerthat the sheer magnitude of internetcommunication may not appeal to some-one not fond of overexposure. I thinkmomentarily of Elizabeth Bishop. Aperfectionist, and by today’s standardsunprolific, she tacked drafts to the wallwith words circled for their imprecise-ness. Imagine her incredulity readingPoetry Free-for-all guidelines about notposting more than two poems a week! Iimagine she might be overwhelmed bynumerous possible responses frompeople she didn’t know. A poet likeBishop, who developed a distinctivevoice and sensibility, might also find thesystem suspect.

Developing one’s own sensibilitytakes not only time and patience butmore trust in oneself than online boards(or MFA programs for that matter) seemto find reasonable. If boards are attrac-tive to the shy, they are likewise meant todeal with our increasing isolation fromeach other, while taking minimalpersonal risk. Perhaps even more than

MFA programs, boards can speed upyour creative process. You can get a fairlyimmediate response as to whether or nota poem works, whether or not others“get it.” But no system can answer for theintangible qualities that will make a worktranscend its time, or even thrill a readerin the now.

This is the paradox of the internet:collaborative and yet isolated. Thereforeemotionally safer, but also more danger-ous. Here, I’d like to talk about M.A.Griffiths. I’ve read her posthumousanthology and agree that she’s a compli-cated poet with wide-ranging skills. Sheused internet boards as a means of inter-acting about poetry, but clearly, theywere not the source of her gift. Griffith’sonline friends have saved her work fromobscurity, and in this sense, it’s good thatso much of it had been posted. And yet,that this lovely woman’s work had to besaved by friends she’d never met impliesthe obvious: it would have been good tohave more actual faces around.

Stanly Kunitz said that poetry is forlife. Life isn’t for poetry, but how easy itcan be to forget that when you becomedeeply involved in an art. Sometimes Iforget, too. We push real life aside so wecan write, though of course it’s life thatwe write about. The sacrifices we makefor our art should honor the messiness oflife, facing the page truly alone, and shar-ing work long-belabored face to face. Itcan be hard to find a critic you trust, andthe people you know are always imper-fect. Still, I think it worthwhile to givethem a try.

Sincerely,Deborah DiemontSyracuse, New York

Note: We’re always happy to publishthoughtful letters on any topic relatingto poetry. If you have an opinion you’dlike to share, send it in an email to:[email protected]

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MM OREORE RR EALEAL FFAA CESCES

byDeborah Diemont

The following finalists will be publishedin Rattle #36, with the winner chosen bypopular vote among eligible subscribers:

Pia Aliperti, Atlanta, GA“Boiler”

Tony Barnstone, Whittier, CA“Why I Am Not a Carpenter”

Kim Dower, Los Angeles, CA“Why People Really Have Dogs”

Courtney Kampa, Oak Hill, VA“Self-Portrait by Someone Else”

M, Portland, OR“To a Husband, Saved by Death at 48?

Andrew Nurkin, Highstown, NJ“The Noises Poetry Makes”

Charlotte Pence, Knoxville, TN“Perfectly Whatever”

Laura Read, Spokane, WA“What the Body Does”

Hayden Saunier, Doylestown, PA“The One and the Other”

Diane Seuss, Kalamazoo, MI“What Is at the Heart of It…”

Craig van Rooyen, San Luis Obispo, CA“The Minstrel Cycle”

Jeff Vande Zande, Midland, MI“The Don’ts (An Incomplete List)”

Bryan Walpert, Palmerston, New Zealand“Objective Correlative”

Anna Lowe Weber, Altoona, PA“Spring Break 2011”

Maya Jewell Zeller, Spokane, WA“Honesty”

2011

Rattle

PoetryPrize

BOOK FEATURE - ABOUT THE DEAD

TRAVIS MOSSOTTI received a BA in Englishand French from Webster University andan MFA in poetry from Southern IllinoisUniversity–Carbondale. Recently a facultylecturer at the University of California–Santa Cruz, his poetry appears widely inliterary journals, including AmericanLiterary Review, Another ChicagoMagazine, Cream City Review, New YorkQuarterly, Passages North, RHINO,Southern Humanities Review, and manyothers. Mossotti was awarded the JamesHearst Poetry Prize from the NorthAmerican Review in 2009, and“Decampment,” the opening poem toAbout the Dead, was adapted to screen in2010 as an animated short film<www.decampment.com>. Mossotticurrently resides in St. Louis with his wife,Regina.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Travis Mossotti writes with humor, gravity, and humility about subjectsgrounded in a world of grit, where the quiet mortality of working folk isweighed. To Mossotti, the love of a bricklayer for his wife is as complex andsimple as life itself: “ask him to put into words what that sinking is,/ thatshudder in his chest, as he notices/ the wrinkles gathering at the corners of hermouth.” But not a whiff of sentiment enters these poems, for Mossotti haslittle patience for ideas of the noble or for sympathetic portraits of hard-usedsaints. His vision is clear, as clear as the memory of how scarecrows in therearview, “each of them, stuffed/ into a body they didn’t choose, resembled/your own plight.” His poetry embraces unsanctimonious life with all itswonder, its levity, and clumsiness. About the Dead is an accomplished collec-tion by a writer in control of a wide range of experience, and it speaks to theheart of any reader willing to catch his “drift, and ride it like the billowed/end of some cockamamie parachute all the way/ back to the soft, dysfunc-tional, waiting earth.”

PRAISE FOR ABOUT THE DEAD

About the Dead struck me on first reading as an adventurous bookgrounded in real places and real people, and reading it was like

following the poet up a steep climb on a rocky slope as he improvised hisroute, and at every step I was struck by the rightness of his choices, surprisedby so many odd words that seemed so exactly right.

—Garrison Keillor

AA BOUTBOUT

THETHE DD EADEADby

Travis Mossotti

Utah State University Press3078 Old Main HillLogan, Utah 84322-3078ISBN-10: 0874218268ISBN-13: 978-087421826888 pp., $19.95, Hardcover

www.usu.edu/usupress

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Note: One book feature appears in eacheIssue, every fall and spring, includingan interview with the author and samplepoems. If you’d like your book to beconsidered for a feature, send a copy to:Rattle, 12411 Ventura Blvd, Studio City,CA 91604. All books not selected for afeature will be considered for a tradi-tional review.

All poems copyright Utah State UniversityPress Press, reprinted with permission, allrights reserved.

““


GREEN: First books of poetry tend to bepatchworks of all the poems the authorhappened to get published in variousjournals over the years—sometimes witha core section that may have been anearlier chapbook or college thesis, butusually with a fringe of outliers that don’tquite fit the general color scheme, so tospeak. What struck me most in readingAbout the Dead was how much it didn’tfeel like a typical first book—and yet,flipping through the table of contents, itdoes ostensibly mirror that quilt-likecriteria. What makes the book unique, Ithink, is the voice. The narrator is so fullof an erudite grit, a kind of heightenedtwang with a unique diction, that I feellike I just read a series of epic narratives,rather than shifts through a range ofstyles and subjects. The speaker is thecentral character. I think it’s possible toread any random sentence in any book,and immediately discern whether or nota distinct voice is present. But I have noidea how that works, or what a voicereally is. Do you have any idea how yourpoetic voice developed? Is this a carefulcrafting of your own real-world voice, oris it something created outside of the wayyou think and speak? It’s clearly one ofyour strengths—so what is a voice, andwhere does it come from?

MOSSOTTI: Maybe it didn’t feel like thetypical first book you describe abovebecause I finished a draft of the manu-script before the individual poems started

getting accepted for publication, and thatfirst draft wasn’t too different from thefinal draft that won the May SwensonPoetry Award (same title, almost all ofthe same poems). I mean, don’t get mewrong, journal and chapbook publica-tions are a nice validation and a greatproving ground for the individual poems,but they don’t mean a thing in terms of afull-length book—first or otherwise. I’veheard it’s trendy now to publish a firstbook with previously unpublishedpoems, but this seems to me a bit of anoverreaction, too. If more young poetssimply read other poetry collections theyadmired with an eye for designing abook, maybe learned to trust their ownintuition instead of just listening toothers around them, I think they’d feel alot more confident in putting their owncollection together. In my thesis defense Iwas asked if I had any advice for theother young poets in the room: “So far asI can tell there is no such thing as aperfect book,” I said. “You have tocrucify that first one and have the confi-dence to move on.”

Personally, my goal was to create abeautiful artifact full of, yes, “eruditegrit,” passionately told narratives withbeautiful sound and imagery, memorablelines and a keen attention to scene. I cansee why the speaker’s voice stuck out toyou most of all. I guess the voice in Aboutthe Dead is more than anything a resultof the collision or collusion of varieddiction and speech patterns—I’ve always

been fascinated by how naturally theycan get along together, especially in freeverse. I know what Frost said about freeverse and tennis, but I’ve always felt thatfree verse actually demands a greatercontrol of syntax and language thanmetrical verse, and complex, multi-layered narrative poems demand that thething be said right if the speaker’s voice isto register authentic within the setting(s)of the poem. Of course, Frost alsofamously said that “everything written isas good as it is dramatic. It need notdeclare itself in form, but it is drama ornothing.” In my experience the drama iswhat makes the situations seem immedi-ate and real for the reader, reinforces theoccasion for the poem, and makes itpossible for any speaker to speak with aconviction that is rehearsed, revised,palpable and resolute. I don’t think myreal-world voice comes anywhere closeto my speakers’ voices because I don’thave the same luxury of revision.

GREEN: It’s funny that you mention thetennis quote—only hours ago I read aninterview with John Ashbery in APR, andwas delighted to find someone else voic-ing the reaction I always have: Tenniswith no net would be hard! It would takegreat skill and balance to make a game ofit without that external encumbrancesetting the ball’s pace. It seems to me aperfect analogy, but not in the way that Iassume Frost intended...

You also mentioned revision, and I’mfascinated by this idea that the book wascomplete and remained more or lessintact between the first draft and the last.Describe your process of imagining thisbook. Did you have an idea for themesyou wanted to address, and then writepoems specifically toward those themes?If so, did you still find yourself writingpoems that didn’t fit, or were you able tostay on task? I’m wondering how youchose what your subjects would be andhow that process worked itself out.

MOSSOTTI: So what if it’s not exactlywhat Frost intended? I like that interpre-tation. He’s too dead to take seriousoffense, and anyway, I think a little back

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BB OOKOOK II NTERNTER VIEWVIEW

WITHWITH

TT RARAVISVIS MM OSOS SOTTISOTTI

byTimothy Green

Note: The following interview was conducted byemail through August and September of 2011.


and forth between poetic schools ofthought keeps both sides sharp—we maynot always see eye to eye, but free versepoets and formal metrical folk have toomuch in common to be separated by acommon genre—as Pound wrote: “Wehave one sap and one root—/ Let therebe commerce between us.” Personally, I’llnever carry hard feelings for any poet(big or small) who’s brave enough to tryher hand at the craft.

With regards to About the Dead andrevision: It’s true the first draft was verysimilar to the final draft, but many of thepoems underwent heavy spells of revisionover the course of the two years that itwas shopped around. What else can youdo? A few poems were added whileothers got axed (primarily from the finalsection, As Broken in the End), and thingslike the section titles and the Tretheweyepigraph were a final flourish (I calledthem set dressing). But somehow at theend of the whole bartering process, thecore imagining of the book remaineduntouched, which, I think was impor-tant—to hold onto the humility, fearless-ness and discovery that inspired the bookin the first place.

Since it was written around the titlepoem, the theme, tone and voice of thatpoem were used as starting blocks foreverything else in the book. The subjectscame naturally and were often a reflec-tion of something else I was doing orreading at the time, but I never strayedfrom the idea of the manuscript. Onepoem led to the next. The process ofwriting it became focused and singular. Iremember about a year ago someoneasked me what would happen if it nevergot published—I don’t think it wasn’tmeant in any malicious or condescendingway, but I wasn’t sure how I wassupposed to respond. I remember tellingthem that I didn’t accept that as an alter-native, which I don’t think was idle bull-shit or blind hubris. The book wasfinished. A person can only carry some-thing so far. The details usually have away of working themselves out.

GREEN: “About the Dead” is a great titlepoem, in that it serves as a key for inter-

preting the rest of the book. St. FrancesContemplating a Skull...empty socketscontemplating St. Frances. “Whatremains” looking right back at you. It’s acomplicated nostalgia, where memoryhas its own animus, and so has the poten-tial to conceal. Like a good storyteller,memories lie. Garrison Keillor’s blurb onthe back of the book tells us that thepoems are “grounded in real places andreal people,” and I couldn’t help butwonder if that was true. Rather than askoutright how much of it is autobiogra-phy, let me ask this: As a poet, what do

you value more, the power of fact, or thepower of fiction?

MOSSOTTI: Nostalgia should always beseen as complicated. When it’s taken atface value, nostalgia actually becomesdangerous. It can inspire the false beliefthat there could ever be such a thing as“the good old days”—as you said, memo-ries are prone to lie, and lie they will. Innature, false or selective memory serves avaluable function (e.g., the ability toforget the pain associated with thebirthing process helps mother and infant

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bond more quickly), but in a collective,in politics for instance, nostalgia taken atface value allows groups like the TeaParty or the Front National (a similarparty in France) to espouse regressive anddestructive platforms—that’s all I’ll sayon politics. In poetry, untempered nostal-gia produces sentimental drivel,emotional pandering, which is dangerousfor different reasons altogether.

As to whether or not Keillor’s blurbholds water, I’ll say this: poets are aproduct of their experiences and so tooare the poems they write; it would befoolish for me to champion fiction or factbecause they both rely upon and informeach other. I remember David Clewellsaid once to my undergraduate workshopthat he didn’t care if the most beautifulbeach we’d ever been to was in Guam:“Make it Tahiti. Tahiti sounds better.” Hewas talking about having an allegiance tothe poem, not to fact or fiction, and Ithink when one is working in a craft ascomplex and nuanced as poetry one hasto be willing to sacrifice the small autobi-ographical facts for the needs of thepoem—for the larger emotional truth thepoem is after. Otherwise, the poem willsuffer and ultimately fail.

And vice-versa—sometimes the auto-biographical facts are important (onlyinsomuch as how those facts relate toother aspects of the poem). For example,I’ve been working on a poem for wellover a year now set in YellowstoneNational Park, and there’s this scenewhere my speaker is standing in thebunkhouse at Tower Junction:

I noticed a chart on the wall I hadn’t beforewith color photos of invasive plants:

bull thistle,spotted knapweed, dalmation toadflax,

houndstongue and leafy spurge.

The fact that the scene actually happenedto me personally is irrelevant to the poemitself (outside of inspiring its creation),but I remember standing in front of thatchart, writing down the name of eachplant and thinking that they soundedalmost too good to be true (hound-

stongue, seriously?). Here, the momentof discovery meshed so well with thequality of the thing discovered that theautobiographical fact became importantto other aspects of the poem—inextrica-ble almost. That isn’t always the case.

I guess what I’m getting at is prettysimple: in the end, fact or fiction, I thinkthe poet’s allegiance to the poem is theonly thing that matters. I’ve been readingthe collected poems of Russian poetYevgeny Yevtushenko lately (just got it inthe mail last week), and I remember read-ing a quote from The Sole Survivor wherehe says that “[a] poet’s autobiography ishis poetry. Anything else is just a foot-note.” That sounds about right to me. Ican live with that.

GREEN: I don’t want to sound like Idisagree with Keillor’s introduction;when he says “real,” I think what hemeans is “authentic”—and we’d all prob-ably agree that that’s what actuallymatters. He also compares you to a rock-climber improvising his route, and “atevery step...was struck by the rightness ofhis choices, surprised by so many oddwords that seemed so exactly right.”That’s my chief pleasure in reading yourwork, too—these strange lines that fitperfectly. They’re all over the place...I’lljust open to one poem randomly, “RedRoof Inn,” and here’s the very firstsentence: “The mattress had a deadman’s/ give to it.” Earlier you mentionedheavy spells of revision—are lines likethese a product of careful revision, or thespontaneity of first drafts? As a poorreviser myself, I’m always curious whatothers mean by revision. I never seem tobe able to achieve anything more thanrearranging syntax...

MOSSOTTI: Authenticity is the magicword indeed, and I think some of thatdoes come out of the revision process.But my revision process is different withevery poem. “Getting Arrested” forexample was a first-draft-best-draft poemthat took me less than an hour to write;“Decampment” on the other hand, tooknearly eight months of heavy draftingand revision (rewrites, adding lines and

entire sections, reordering, re-lineation,syntactical modifications, word choice,etc).

I know at least a few poets whobelieve that each poem must undergo aminimum of one hundred hours of revi-sion, must have at least thirty individualdrafts, oil change every three thousandmiles, etc., but standardized models likethat make me cringe—as Yeats said, “Ilike a poem to have fine machinery, but ifthis machinery is made to appearanything more than that, the spell of thepoetry is broken.” Sometimes too muchrevision ends up breaking that spell, andmany fine poems have been lost in theprocess.

I’m glad you mentioned Keillor’s“rock-climber” analogy, because that’sexactly how I felt writing this book.There’s a level of improvisation incomposition that’s different from anyclever bit of revision—it’s riskier, andI’ve always found a bit of my style isinformed by those risks: for instance, myability to leap from one word, one image,one line to the next is (to a certainextent) what makes my speakers unique.Usually that leaping comes from theinitial drafting.

“The Dead Cause,” for example, wasa first draft that Robert Pinsky picked asthe winner of the James Hearst PoetryPrize from the North American Review.But a poem like that is the exception, notthe rule. In my opinion, revision (nomatter how slight or severe it may be)keeps poems honest.

GREEN: “Decampment” has been turnedinto a wonderful animated short film<www.decampment.com>, which I’msure will help it—and thus poetry—reacha wider audience, and also give readers anew way to experience the book. I alwayshave mixed feelings about multimediapoetry, though—art is art is art and I’dnever want to argue against any of it, butpoetry is a sound-painting on the mind’scanvas...if you’re given the images upfront, is it still poetry? Does it matter ifit’s not? Or maybe an easier question—do you prefer reading the poem, orwatching the film?

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MOSSOTTI: Both Josh and I had mixedfeelings going into the project, simplybecause we had seen what typicallyhappened with animated poems. But wediscussed it for nearly two years beforethe production actually started, whichgave us loads of preproduction time toconsider how many ways it could gowrong and how many ways it could goright. So first off, we decided there wouldbe no floating words to clutter theimages; second, we would adapt imagesto the scenes selectively and only so longas they meshed with the action; andfinally, we chose to keep the focus on thespeaker of the poem and let him deliverit. Is it poetry? Ostensibly yes, but it’salso its own project. It’s an animationwith gorgeously hand-painted back-grounds, sound effects, lighting and abrilliant score.

And even though I guess I’m kind ofboring when it comes to my ownpersonal working definition of “poetry”(i.e., words on a page broken into lines),much of the animation works to accentu-ate what is often a barebones reading ofthe poem by a speaker who just happensto be sitting on the front steps to hishouse (e.g., the entire third section)instead of standing in a café or shufflingpapers at a lectern in some universitymulti-purpose room. As with any poetryreading, the film requires each audiencemember to listen closely and to activelyengage his or her imagination and knowl-edge of the craft. And I think it doesmatter how it’s defined, at least a little.There is so much celebrated poetry that is

aesthetically pleasing and inventive onthe page that dies in the mouth, so tospeak.

Josh took an early interest in thisproject because the poem sounded asgood as it looked on the page, and it hada narrative that was strong enough to notonly survive the process of adaptationbut to flourish in it. He took great effortsto understand and respect poetry as amedium in general and made greatpersonal sacrifices (i.e., worked literallyon nothing else for eight months ofproduction) to bring this particular poemto the screen; which goes an unfortu-nately long way to say, I honestly don’tthink I could prefer one over the other,just like I don’t think I could have a pref-erence for a poem on the page versus apoem read aloud (read well anyhow) at apoetry reading—both occasions areinseparable parts of the same experience.

GREEN: I imagine “Decampment” won’tbe your last cinematic collaboration, butwhat about a second book—youmentioned a poem set in Yellowstone.Do you find your new work to be head-ing in different directions, or is About theDead more of a first stop on a longerjourney?

MOSSOTTI: I have two more completedpoetry manuscripts that I’m shoppingaround right now, and while they sharesome formal, stylistic and contenttendencies, I don’t see them as extensionsof About the Dead, which isn’t reallywhat you were asking though—I’ll saythis: I believe a poet’s oeuvres are jour-neys of chance, should be explorations,and should always be seen as striking offin a new direction with an awareness ofwhere the poet’s been (if not also wherehe/she is ostensibly headed). I’m fasci-nated with place, not just with this coun-try, but let’s start there: the buildings,land, rivers, oceans, wildlife, all of it, andI don’t feel like it’s a place that can bewrung dry. We have a big damn wildcountry, and too many poets take it forgranted or cordon themselves off to aparticular quadrant or urban center orrural pit stop or strive to escape it by

being that international lyric-translation-octolingual-scholar-genius-jet-setter poetof mystery.

When I was an undergrad Frenchmajor, I took a few international studentson a classic American road trip at theirbehest (Iyad from Syria, Sylvie fromFrance, Mariko from Japan, and Mariafrom Guatemala), and to them, theWaffle House in Tallahassee was anadventure. Coming back home to St.Louis at sunrise, Iyad leaned over fromshotgun and told me: “You have a beau-tiful city.” I couldn’t recall ever thinkingof it with a sense of ownership, as a beau-tiful thing, and I’d certainly neverattached any personal sense of pride tothe thing itself (city as object). But, Iguess then, my work continues to beinspired by this idea of loving the placeyou occupy, no matter if you’ve beenthere 30 minutes or 30 years, no matterhow used, boarded up, or bulldozed itmay seem. This love is certainly there inAbout the Dead, and it’s certainly there inthe two subsequent manuscripts I’vefinished writing.

As for more film collaborations: wehave some ideas, but we’ll just have towait and see what comes of them.

GREEN: Thanks, Travis, I’ll be lookingforward to it.

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ABOUT THE DEAD

At the museum, I stop at a painting: St. Francis Contemplating a Skull. An upturned human skull nestled in his joined hands—

empty sockets contemplating St. Francis. What remainsof the dead fascinates me. In Paris I wandered

the Catacombs for hours looking at the bones—stacked so neatly. The plagues were so efficient

at producing bones to stack—the churches’ graveyardsdug up and brought by horse-cart under moonlight

to the vacant sarcophagi of the old Roman quarries. At Père-Lachaise I witnessed a young couple fucking

on Jim Morrison’s grave. They kept it up for nearlytwenty minutes before they were forcibly removed.

The man’s cock remained a hard, diligent protester bouncing as they hauled him away over the cobblestone path

out of the cemetery—something still locked up inside him.

SAXIFRAGE

The gym’s boxing room has the sunken décorof a Fifties bomb shelter—a heavy baggirthier than an elephant’s penis, loafingpendulumatic long after the barrage of puncheshave stopped. I used to imagine pummeling

the chops of the guy who slept with my ex.Thump, Wham! Thump, Thump, Wham!Knucklebone. Catharsis. Wingèd prayerfield-dressed like a pheasant. But sooneror later, everyone has to move on: tornado

swipples a huddle of yearlings from the field,event horizon of the astrophysicist’s wet dream,ice-cream truck caterwauling over a cliff,karma mule-kicking the dimwit wiping dustfrom the dictator’s silly fresco. Thump,Thump,

Thump, Thump, Wham! Thump, Wham!How useful would all the hitting actually beat say, fending off a grizzly bear? Blitzkrieg?Ice age? Fists already chafing rosily. Sweatbilging the usual spots. Sweet grass, duck weed

tupelo, box wood, juniper, box wood, juniper,flotillas of swamp sunflowers! Quickly now! Fasten the heroic couplets to stone tablets.Help me etch the stupid past into the future. Thump,Wham! Thump, Wham! Wham! Florida’s not just

for the elderly anymore. Picasso. Latrine. Homunculus.Filch. And as for the guy that slept with my ex, I nevermoved on; he’s still my flower that splits the rock—each punch ratcheted squarely into a pitof black canvas, my all-purpose jackstraw.

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from ABOUT THE DEAD

Travis Mossotti


ONLY THEN

The Hemingway Short Story is a stubby, torpedo shaped cigarthat responds well to fire. It lastsin the way we last: smokeof our body becoming air,becoming breeze, becomingthe cold front that slams its thickskull against a tree, against a forest,against the town, where as a boy,I slept with a brown teddy bear—threadbare buttons in its grooved sockets—that bearhad seen it all come and goand knew the familiar stingof quarrelsome parents lightingthe hallway, had often burieditself in the backyard underthe silver maple: a makeshiftgraveyard where the sunfell to its knees, the winsomesun pressing a shadow againstanother grave. I left flowers.My father would light thosestubby brown cigars and leanover the rail of the back decklike a Buddhist shaving his headin the dark; he would smoke andstare past the forest and imaginethe coming winter and the nextand before long his parturientgaze fell back upon the house,and I could smell the rushof spent tobacco as he brushedpast. I can smell it now. Wedon’t talk about such things in polite conversation althoughI wish we could. Then I couldshow you the night a tree fellon our house, the truculentwind escaping the forest’s lungs,the lightning bluing our crushedwooden deck, my mother’s ruffledblackwatch nightgown, felled treesnug against the roof, a hundred yearsof growing towards this scene.

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from ABOUT THE DEAD

Travis Mossotti


E Y E C O N T A C T

The avant-garde and the establishmenthave a strange sort of symbiosis, ormaybe co-dependency is a better word.They feed each other, they feed off ofeach other, and each is the reason theother exists. Fine art and graphic designshare a similar set of tensions.

Visual poetry exists in that spacebetween the textual and the visual whereit is often disregarded by both as being nochild of either. Dick Higgins gave it ahome under the umbrella term “interme-dia,” but inviting it into another home isstill a way to say it has no home of itsown.

I say visual poetry has no homebecause it belongs everywhere it goes. Itis ubiquitous. From corporate logos tointernational signage, from softwareinterface conventions to event posters,from display fonts to music videos, weare swimming in a sea of visual poetry, ofthe sign self-aware. Or as Paul Valéry mayhave said, “To see is to forget the name ofthe thing one sees.”

Poets are always among the first togo missing in regime changes, becausethey’re dangerous. The power thatpoetry has is the judo throw of paradigmshift. Those in Title Case Power are(rightly) afraid of those who are able towield this less-flashy but ultimately moreeffective lowercase power. Culture-jamming organizations like Adbustersregularly recruit professional graphicdesigners because they know that intoday’s hypermedia world these are thepeople with their hands right on thecontrols of public opinion. They knowhow to push the buttons, slide the levers,and twist the dials that make us think wethought of that ourselves. What happens

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EE YEYE CC ONTONTAA CTCT::

A LOOK AT VISUAL POETRY WITH DAN WABER

#5: Kevin Yuen Kit Lo

Capitalism KillsKevin Yuen Kit Lo

Note: All electronic submissions ofvisual poetry are automatically consid-ered for Dan Waber’s biannual “EyeContact” column. If you’re interested inhaving your work featured, follow theregular guidelines at: www.rattle.com/submissions.htm

E Y E C O N T A C T

when a poet who is also a graphicdesigner decides to use his powers forgood?

Check out this series by Kevin YuenKit Lo. When I first saw these five piecesI was struck by how arresting the imageswere, how the visual elements snapped

right in front of my eyes and led me bythe nose smack into the text. Then thetext held me there. Then it got fun.

Once I decided that I wanted toshow this work I had to decide whichones to select. Normally this columnpresents two or three images. So I started

comparing and contrasting and lookingat how I could best represent the wholeby only some parts. I knew I wanted touse “Capitalism Kills Love” because Ilove that densely layered but not clut-tered look. Then I wanted to include oneother and got stuck between wantingsomething visually minimal to contrast,or a bit more linear textually (also tocontrast). I placed “Capitalism KillsLove” on the left, and began cyclingthrough the other four on the right, tosee how each worked in relation.

That’s when I saw it. That’s when Iknew I needed to show all five pieces.*“Capitalism Kills Love” is both the sumof its parts and greater than the sum of itsparts. Like individuals and society. Takenall together, this is visual poetry thatchanges the way I look at the worldaround me because it changes the way Ilook at myself, and vice versa. It is theimage in the text “like a knife held upagainst the rain, without which we mightdrown” as much as it is the subtext in theimage of the figure with the umbrellacome to claim. Gutted open we becomeparanoid; it takes a measure of wantingto be the sun to impel social change. Puttogether the pieces, they will take youapart. Take them apart and they will putyou together.

KEVIN YUEN KIT LO is a graphicdesigner, independent publisher, andgenerally engaged and enraged globalcitizen based in Montreal Quebec. Hepublishes the magazine Four Minutes toMidnight, exploring the intersections oftypography, poetics and politics. Heholds an MA in Typo/Graphic Designfrom the London College of Printingand a Graduate Certificate Degree andBFA in Design Art from ConcordiaUniversity.

DAN WABER is a visual poet and multi-media artist living in Kingston, PA. Formore, please visit his website:www.logolalia.com

*For the full series, see pages 17, 20, 22, 24 & 27.

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KEVIN YUEN KIT LO

ON THE CREATION OF “CAPITALISM KILLS LOVE”:

ARAM TANIS graduated from theGerrit Rietveld Academy and didhis two year residency at DeAteliers in Amsterdam where hewas guided by Marlene Dumas,Steve McQueen and Fiona Tanamong others. He exhibited hiswork around the world, includ-ing at Witte de With (Rotterdam,NL), Van Abbe Museum(Eindhoven, NL), CCDPhotospring Festval / Arles inBeijing (Beijing, CN), Coalmine(Winterthur/CH), General Store(Sydney, AU), The F.U.E.L.Collection (Philadelphia, USA),MK Gallery (Berlin, DE),Westminster University (London,UK), and many others.

This series of image/poems draws from a writing process Ihave been exploring for the last few years, which I've dubbed

a fugue, elaborated principally within issues of the magazine FourMinutes to Midnight. Emerging from an interest in expressing acollective voice, generated through dialogue, the fugue is essentiallya “cadavre exquis,” rewritten, remixed, and reset in typography overan extended period of time. Many diverse writers have contributedtheir words to it over the years, channeled through the voice of thecollective editors and my typographic design.

The “Capitalism Kills Love” series was created when AramTanis contacted me with a series of beautiful black and white photosfor the magazine. I felt such a strong kinship between his photogra-phy and our words, so I proposed another level of remix, combininghis images with excerpts from the latest fugue. The title is one finalpiece of appropriation, stolen from the French artists’ collectiveClaire Fontaine’s work of the same name.

““

Original Photograph used for “And We Wish” (p.20)

T H E I M P E R T I N E N T D U E T

This is a volume I’ve wanted to write“something” about since I first cameacross it in the ’80s. Dimly, I remembersomeone—it’s maddening, but I can’tremember who—passing on a reviewcopy he’d been given, thinking I might beinterested since I’d just published a selec-tion of Rilke translations. That wasserendipitous; I can’t imagine I wouldhave sprung for the cover price of $24.95in 1985 dollars, probably the equivalentof $50 today.

What I vaguely dreamed of writing inthe ’80s, wasn’t a review, but a selectionof translations from each of the threepoets integrated with quotes from theirletters. But my one abortive semester ofbeginning Russian had left me with onlythe barest inkling of the Cyrillic alphabet.“Someday, I’ll take a course,” I thought,but someday never came. Now, finally,wanting to talk about some esoteric trans-lation concepts, I find myself re-readingthese letters and wondering if revisitingthe 1926 correspondence between thesethree poets might help to frame thoseslippery ideas.

I. THE MOTHER TONGUE AND

TRANSLATOR TRAITORS

The Italian saying, tradutorre, traditore(translator, traitor) is often quoted as amaxim on the difficulty of literary trans-lation. But I think the roots of thatexpression lie deeper, in the concept of a“national literature.” When I was a kid,there was a popular Book of the Monthclub anthology of Best Loved Poems of theAmerican People. That title sounds quainttoday, not because Americans aren’t fondof poetry: As many as ever probably are,including most Rattle readers. It’s that we

no longer think of loving poetry as a“people,” but rather as individuals withpersonal tastes.

The Best Loved anthology came outin the ’50s, a time when most Americanswere beginning to sense that the 20th

century might actually be becoming an“American Century.” We were export-ing—no longer protecting—our culture.And while Americans were voraciouslygobbling up foreign films, books, musicalong with strange food and foreign tradeprofits, our national literature was elbow-ing its place onto an international stage.So many American icons were expatri-ates: Hemingway, Eliot, Pound, Stein.And even those who stayed home lookedat their home with quizzical eyes.Faulkner’s South bore little resemblanceto Stephen Foster’s.

With this kind of self-confidence,cultures become cosmopolitan. They’rehappy to both export and import litera-ture. They’re nourished by, rather thanafraid of, foreign influence. Not to bepolitical, but within our still self-confi-dent culture, buzz-phrases like “AmericanExceptionalism” and “English Only”seem mostly bandied about by politicianswho make a point of distancing them-selves from the “elite establishment.”Their “culture protectiveness” is actuallycounter-cultural, more a reaction to, thana conservation of, a vibrant expansiveculture.

English is one of a handful of worldlanguages. “Smaller” languages spoken bya relatively small number of people tendto be more naturally protective of theiridentities, which for good reason theyperceive to be at risk. There’s often atendency to insist that their “nationaltreasures,” their “best loved poems,” areuntranslatable. For their more protective

intelligentsia, translation has an aura ofinsult and colonialism. From this perspec-tive, translation is as much theft ascommunication. A year or so ago, theALTALK chat group of the AmericanLiterary Translators Association was“visited” by a Vietnamese expatriate who,in a long back and forth thread, expressedextremely hurt feelings about the criticalsuccess of John Balaban’s translations ofthe 18th century Vietnamese poet HoXuan Huong. Nothing could sway hersincerely held sense of violation.

If some native speakers view transla-tion by foreigners as inherently inept,why, as a general rule, can so few nativespeakers translate poetry out of their own

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TT HEHE II MPERMPER TINENTTINENT DD UETUET::

TRANSLATING POETRY WITH ART BECK

#5: The Poetics of Exile and a Belated Review

LETTERS: SUMMER 1926by Boris Pasternak, MarinaTsvetayeva, Rainer Maria Rilke.Edited by Yevgeny Pasternak,Yelena Pasternak & KonstantinM. Azadovsky. Translated byMargaret Wettlin, Walter Arndt& Jamey Gambrell. Preface bySusan Sontag

A New York Review of Booksreissue, 2001. Originallypublished in Germany by InselVerlag in 1983, and in Englishtranslation in 1985 by HarcourtBrace Jovanivich. ISBN 978-0-940322-71-4


language, no matter how proficient theyare in the target language? Is it becauseappropriation by outsiders is one level offelony, akin, say, to burglary? But handingyour own national treasures to foreignersis a kind of treason, an offense that exactsa much higher penalty. Are these some ofthe dynamics of the Tower of Babel?

And national treasures have a way ofescaping. No one is more treasured byPoles than Chopin, who spent most of hislife self-exiled in France, and whoseexcised heart had to be smuggled intooccupied Poland for secret burial. But canpresent day Poles hear anything inChopin that the descendants of thePrussians, Russians and Austrians whodivided up their country in the 18th

century can’t?

II. EXILE: TSVETAEVA, RILKE, PASTERNAK,1926

And of course, large dominant culturesand languages have their own unease. Ifthe ’50s ushered in a sense of Americahaving arrived, the ’20s in Eastern andWestern Europe brought a nervous senseof something ominous about to arrive.Yeats’ The Second Coming was written in1919:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

...

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Poetry seems often predictive, not in anysagacious sense, but instinctively, like adog sensing an earthquake long momentsbefore the first tremor is felt. Rilke’s FirstDuino Elegy has a lot in common withEliot’s The Wasteland—the theme offacing existential issues without beingable to access the traditional comfortsthat lie in ruins; a poem that seems writ-ten from a crack in the order of things.But while The Wasteland was published inthe aftermath of WWI, the Elegy datesfrom 1912. Rilke almost eerily foreshad-

ows that cataclysm, weighing and discard-ing one explanation after another for hisvague angst until finally settling on acentral image: “those dead youths...takenbefore their time.” Their “very namestossed aside like broken toys.” These wereimages triggered by old inscriptions in achurch in Italy, not a conscious predic-tion. But within two years the imagesbecame suddenly contemporary.

A timeline may be helpful in relatingto the correspondents of Summer, 1926.Susan Sontag, in her preface to the newedition lists some happenings of that

summer, among them: Gertrude Ederleswam the English Channel. RudolphValentino died in a New York hospital.The architect Antonio Gaudi was hit by atrolley in Seville and died in the street.

Among the books published thatyear: Hart Crane’s White Buildings,Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Milne’sWinnie the Pooh, D.H. Lawrence’s ThePlumed Serpent, T.E. Lawrence’s SevenPillars of Wisdom, and volume two ofHitler’s Mein Kampf. Although notmentioned by Sontag, Isaac Babel’s semi-nal short story collection, Red Cavalry

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And We WishKevin Yuen Kit Lo


appeared in Russia in 1926. Preceding 1926, (and gleaned from

the internet) the early ’20s saw:In 1920, The League of Nations.

Voting rights for women and Prohibitionin the U.S. The first commercial radiobroadcast. And, in Russia, after severalyears of brutal civil war, the White armyfinally evacuated The Crimea.

In 1921, hyperinflation broke out inGermany, and the lie detector wasinvented. Peasant unrest swept Russia, butwas finally suppressed by the Bolshevikswho also suppressed new demands forfree elections.

In 1922, insulin was discovered,Ataturk founded modern Turkey, MichaelCollins was killed in Ireland, andMussolini marched on Rome.

In 1923, Hitler was jailed after theBeer Hall Putsch, and talking movies firstappeared.

In 1924, J. Edgar Hoover wasappointed to head the FBI. In Russia,Vladimir Lenin died. Trotsky’s bid tosucceed him was defeated and Stalinbegan to consolidate power. The SovietUnion was formally recognized byBritain. Mussolini’s new government alsoexchanged diplomats with the USSR.

1925 brought the Scopes MonkeyTrial in America. In Germany, the ambi-tious Nazi party formed its own specialforce, the SS. In Russia, the old BolshevikPolitburo leaders Kamenev and Zinovievbroke with Stalin; they would later beshot. Stalin’s errant daughter Svetlana wasborn. She defected to the West in 1967and wrote a memoir that sold well, butlived an always troubled life.

In 1926, Rilke is 51 and living inSwitzerland. He’s being treated in a sana-torium for leukemia. He’s dying, but inaccordance with his wishes and consistentwith medical custom at the time, is sparedthe full details of his prognosis. Born ofGerman-speaking parents in Prague, inthe then Austrian Empire, Rilke has beenmore or less an alienated wanderer mostof his life. He lost most of his possessionswhen he had to move from Paris at theonset of WWI. Returning to Austria, hewas drafted. After undergoing the trauma

of basic training, he was assigned to cleri-cal duties in the War Archive. After thewar, he lived in Munich for a time. Butthe threatening political climate (in whichhe found himself stateless after thebreakup of the Austrian Empire) led himto settle in Switzerland in 1919, where heultimately managed to acquire firstCzech, then Swiss citizenship. Despitesecure recognition as a poet he remainsdependent on the informal patronage ofcultivated friends. This is, in part, due tothe plummet in value of the German markin which most of his royalties are paid.

In 1926, Marina Tsvetaeva is 34 andliving with her husband and two childrenin France. She’s still only a modestlyknown poet. Maybe it’s more helpful toconsider her, not just in context of her lifeuntil then, but of a future she, thankfully,couldn’t foresee. To quote the summaryfirst paragraph of her lengthy Wikipediaentry:

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (8 October,1892–31 August, 1941) was a Russianand Soviet poet. Her work is consideredamong some of the greatest in twentiethcentury Russian literature. She livedthrough and wrote of the RussianRevolution of 1917 and the Moscowfamine that followed it. In an attempt tosave her daughter Irina from starvation,she placed her in a state orphanage in1919, where she died of hunger. As ananti-Bolshevik supporter of Imperialism,Tsvetaeva was exiled in 1922, living withher family in increasing poverty in Paris,Berlin and Prague before returning toMoscow in 1939. Shunned and suspect,Tsvetaeva’s isolation was compounded.Both her husband Sergey Efron and herdaughter Ariadna Efron (Alya) werearrested for espionage in 1941; Alyaserved over eight years in prison and herhusband was executed. Without means ofsupport and in deep isolation, Tsvetaevacommitted suicide in 1941. As a lyricalpoet, her passion and daring linguisticexperimentation mark her as a strikingchronicler of her times and the depths ofthe human condition.

Something of Marina’s state of mind in1926 might be gleaned from her answersto a questionnaire forwarded by

Pasternak from the Soviet “Section ofRevolutionary Literature,” which wascompiling a bibliography of contempo-rary Russian writers. She noted that herfather was a...“son of a priest...a philolo-gist working in European languages...Professor at Kiev University, then atMoscow University... Died in...1913....He left all he had (not much because hewas always helping others) to the publicschool in...the village where he wasborn...” Her mother: “of aristocraticPolish blood, a pupil of Rubenstein, awoman of rare musical talent. Died early.My poetic talent comes from her...” Oneof the questions asked for her “FirstEncounter with Revolution.” Her answer:“in 1902, 1903 (emigre); second in 1905,1906, Yalta...); no third encounter.” 1917is conspicuously absent.

On her history as a poet:

I have been writing poetry since age 6,publishing since 16. Have written poemsin French and German... I know no liter-ary influences, only human influences.

Her favorite contemporary writers were:

Rilke, Romain Rolland, Pasternak... Ihave never printed in rabid rightist publi-cations, because of their low culturallevel... Never have and never will belongto any school of poetry or politics. InMoscow I belonged (for purely material

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Marina Tsvetaev, via WikiMedia


reasons) to the Poetry Section of theWriters Union.

...

Things I hold most dear: music, nature,poetry, solitude. Completely indifferentto public opinion... Feel possessive onlytoward my children and my notebooks...Would inscribe on the finished product:“Ne daigne” (Never condescend). Life is arailroad station; soon I will set out—forwhere? I will not say.

In 1926, Boris Pasternak was 36 and

living in Moscow with his wife and youngson. He was in love with MarinaTsvetaeva—or maybe more accurately inlove with the idea of Marina. He hadn’tseen her for four years and knew her onlybriefly then. Their “affair” has been styledan “affair of letters” and no one reallyknows if it had ever been physical. Butthat summer they’re talking aboutconnecting and/or not connecting withmore than just letters. From Boris toMarina, May 5, 1926:

...when I received your chilling letterfrom Paris...found that I would not seeyou in St. Gilles. I knew it before theletter arrived. The coldness of the lettermitigated the harshness of the fact. Andyet, put me on ice as you will, the fact isunendurable. Forgive the excesses Iallowed myself then. I should have shownrestraint. I should have kept everything tomyself as a vivifying secret until the daywe met. Until then, I could and shouldhave hidden from you a love that cannever die, for you are my only legitimateheaven and wife... Whenever I murmuryour name, Marina, little shivers run upand down my spine from the pain of it...

Pasternak, unlike the other two, wasn’t anexile, but belonged to a class that hadbeen exiled from relevance by the govern-ment of the Proletariat. His parents andsister were emigrants, members of theelite intelligentsia who voluntarilyescaped the new Russia. His father, awell-known portrait painter, his mother askilled concert pianist, lived now inBerlin. But Boris seemed to navigate therevolution safely enough, a member ofthe writers union, making his living bytranslating German, Georgian, andEnglish poetry, and later, notably,Shakespeare. Educated in Germany, hewas at home in a tradition of Russiancosmopolitanism that dated back toCatherine the Great. But he was living ina culture that, while espousing revolu-tionary modernity, was led by an increas-ingly suspicious and isolated clique.

Despite Marina’s last minute demur-ral at their only half-planned, fantasizedtryst, her letters continue to give Borisreason to feel his advances remainedwelcome. On May 23, perhaps feelingexpansively liberated by the last minutecancellation, she writes to Boris from thecoastal village of St. Gilles:

Alya has gone to the fair. Mursik [her son]is asleep. The one who is not asleep is notat the fair, the one who is not at the fair isasleep. I alone am not at the fair or asleep.(Loneliness deepened by being a loner.Everyone else must be asleep for me tofeel I am not asleep.)

Boris this is not a real letter. The realones are never committed to paper.

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FishKevin Yuen Kit Lo


Today, for instance, while pushingMursik’s carriage along an unfamiliarroad—roads turning here, turningthere...I talked to you all the time. Talkedto you Boris, loved it, breathed deeply,easily... I took your head in both of myhands and turned it toward me... It was agray day, besides (the color of sleep) andno wind. But I felt Pentecost in theforeign air...

Several pages along these lines follow, andthen an interjection:

But there’s one thing Boris, I don’t likethe sea. Can’t bear it. A vast expanse andnothing to walk on—that’s one thing. Inconstant motion and I can only watch it...And the sea at night—cold, terrifying,invisible, unloving, filled with itself... As Iwould have hated Jehovah for instance, asI hate any great power. The sea is a dicta-torship, Boris...

She rambles on for another page or so,then ends:

Oh Boris, Boris, lick my wound. And tellme why. Show me that all is as it shouldbe. No, don’t lick it, cauterize it... I dolove you. The fair, the donkey carts,Rilke—everything, everything is withinyou, within your enormous river (notocean, I won’t say ocean). I so long foryou, it is as if I had seen you only yester-day.

III. ASKING RILKE’S BLESSING

In Boris and Marina’s back-and-forthabout meeting, the question arose, “wellwhere would we go?” The postulatedanswer was that the epistolary loverswould elope to visit Rilke. Why Rilke?What did Rilke have to do with Boris andMarina?

The answer begins in 1925 whenRilke’s 50th birthday was noted in thepress and congratulatory letters began toarrive. One of them was from LeonidPasternak, Boris’ father. Leonid remem-bered Rilke from his visits to Russia priorto the turn of the century. Rilke wasbarely into his twenties then, an as yetunformed, if ambitious, writer; the son of

a railway clerk with only vague notions ofhow he’d survive. He’d been taken inhand by a 36-year-old sophisticate, LouAndreas-Salome, a wealthy marriednovelist, psychologist and essayist whosefriendships included Nietzsche and Freud.Her marriage was platonic, but her tute-lage of the fledging Rilke was sexual aswell as aesthetic and literary.

Lou had been raised in Russia. Herfather, although German, was a general inRussian service. She was as wellconnected in Russian as in Austrian andGerman circles and when she took herpup of a poet to Russia, the trip includeda visit to Tolstoy arranged by LeonidPasternak, who was illustrating one ofTolstoy’s novels for serial publication.

Leonid’s letter to Rilke invoked anunderstandable nostalgia in someonewho’d just turned 50, and who may alsohave instinctively sensed his health, aswell as his youth, slipping away. Hereplied immediately with a warm, longletter.

Leonid, the proud father, had alsomentioned his “elder son, Boris...a youngpoet, already acclaimed in Russia. He isyour most ardent admirer...who, I mayeven say, calls himself your pupil...” Andin a postscript to his reply to Leonid,Rilke remembers:

Just now, in its winter issue, the verybeautiful, important Paris periodicalCommerce, edited by Paul Valery...haspublished very impressive poems by BorisPasternak in a French version...

So one thing led to another: Leonidquoted Rilke’s comments to Boris. Boriscomposed a long, laudatory letter to Rilkeand asked his father to forward it. And,because Switzerland and the USSR hadsevered diplomatic relations, BorisPasternak asked that if Rilke replied, hedo so through Marina Tsvetaeva, “a bornpoet” who “lives as an emigrant in Paris.”

IV: AN ABRIDGMENT AND CHANGE OF

DIRECTION

This seems as good a point as any to, all

too briefly, summarize the exchange ofletters and move back toward a themeI’ve been circling.

Rilke did reply to Boris Pasternak’sletter with a short, warm, collegial note.Some 34 years later, when Pasternak died,this letter was found, marked “mostprecious,” in a leather wallet he alwayscarried in his coat pocket, somewhat likea relic in scapular. Along with the letter,was a second sheet on which Marina hadcopied an excerpt from Rilke’s letter toher describing his reaction to Boris’ letter:

I am so shaken by the fullness and powerof his message to me that I cannot saymore today, but would you send theenclosed...to our friend in Moscow forme. As a greeting?

Despite Pasternak’s early successes, itseemed Rilke’s letter marked a turningpoint of self-acceptance and validation aspoet. Perversely, moved out of all propor-tion, he seemed unable to bring himself toreply.

Marina and Boris continued theircorrespondence with no interruption. Butan equally—if not more—lively corre-spondence sprang up between Marinaand Rilke.

V. ALL POEMS ARE TRANSLATIONS...

Why has it taken me all these pages to getto the esoteric (or maybe not so strange)

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Boris Pasternak, via WikiMedia


concept I wanted to talk about? I thinkbecause Tsvetaeva says what I want to saymuch better than I can, and with muchmore authority. And the better you get toknow her, the better she says it—sheseems to say it in the context of her wholebeing. In June, Rilke sent her a copy of hisjust released Vergers, a volume of poemshe’d written in French. He vaguelywondered whether he should be writingpoetry in a non-native language. Marina’sreply was immediate and ringing:

Dear Rainer: Goethe says somewherethat one cannot achieve anything ofsignificance in a foreign language—andthat has always rung false to me... Writingpoetry is in itself translating from themother tongue into another, whetherFrench or German should make no differ-ence. No language is the mother tongue.Writing poetry is rewriting it. That’s whyI am puzzled when people talk of Frenchor Russian, etc., poets. A poet may writein French; he cannot be a French poet.That’s ludicrous

I am not a Russian poet and amalways astonished to be taken for one andlooked upon in this light. The reason onebecomes a poet (if it were even possible to“become” one, if one “were” not onebefore all else!) is to avoid being French,Russian, etc, in order to be every-thing,...Orpheus bursts nationality...

This passage, from a self-exiled WhiteRussian in Paris, might well serve as theInternationale of poetic translators. Poetsof the world, unite! Translators, lose yourchains. The idea that a poem isn’t just afunction of the language in which itappears, but of some underlying, pre-Babel, mother tongue—elevates poetry toan almost mystical evocation.

It also evokes a quasi-mystical obser-vation found in various forms and similesacross a broad range of commentators onliterary translation. Which might beboiled down to the working translator’sinstinctive sense (or illusion) that apartfrom: a) the source poem and, b) thepoem as transcribed in a new language;there’s yet a third poem, an ur-text, as itwere, that both the original and tran-scribed poems draw from.

An implication is that authentic

poems, (as well as all great literature butparticularly poems), have a life of theirown that not only outlives their authors—but may actually precede the author. Notall poems: There are verses like JoyceKilmer’s Trees, “made by fools like me,”that entertain a generation, then passaway. But then there are those, albeit rare,works of another dimension, whose hall-mark is a certain inevitability. Poems thatneeded to occur and, once brought to life,live and migrate generations, languagesand cultures in ways not dissimilar from

music. Obviously, except at the extremes, it’s

a continuum; there aren’t just two classesof poems, rather a matter of degree. But,if you buy into this theory, the translator’sneed is to convey as much of thatinevitability as possible. One metaphorfor that inevitability is a culture-transcen-dent “mother tongue” in which the worksomehow already exists: the antithesis ofa “national poetry.” A sense that the greatstream of poetry and literature is aninaudible tongue that lurks in every

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ParanoidKevin Yuen Kit Lo


language, a tongue that’s indifferent towhatever language it appropriates as avoice.

Or maybe another way to put it: Welive in language and language lives in us,like the air we breathe, but the oxygencomes from the mother tongue. Ofcourse, this is as old as Plato, but MarinaTsvetaeva isn’t a philosopher; just a prac-ticing poet making a matter of fact colle-gial observation to another poet.

VI: RAINER AND MARINA

Tsevtaeva takes somewhat different toneswhen writing to Rilke and Pasternakabout their work. She’s effusive aboutBoris in writing to Rilke, has no problemstating categorically that Pasternak is thegreatest living Russian poet. But whenwriting to Boris about poetry—hers aswell as his—she’s practical, editorial,encouraging but not idolizing. They maylove each other’s poetry, but when Borisand Marina talk about poetry they do soas helpful friends, not stormy lovers.

It soon becomes another storybetween Marina and Rainer: “Do youknow how I fare with your poems? ...Lightning on lightning...that’s how ittakes me as I read you.” And earlier in thesame May 12 letter:

God. You alone have said something newto God. You are the explicit John-Jesusrelationship... Yet—different—you arethe Father’s favorite, not the Son’s...

Beyond her passion for Rilke’s poetry, shequickly moves to a passion for somethingmore—urgently pressing Rilke to meether, in France or wherever. In an August2nd letter:

Rainer, dusk is falling. I love you. A trainis howling. Trains are wolves, wolves areRussia. No train—all Russia is howlingfor you. Rainer, don’t be angry with me;angry or not, tonight I’m sleeping withyou...

And Rainer, rising from his sick bed likeLazarus, warmly responds. Effusive aboutMarina’s poetry, he writes an Elegy for

Marina, as a sequel to his nine DuinoElegies and styles it the tenth Elegy. Youwonder if he’s probably wonderingwhether this wild Russian might be a giftsent to cure the implacable pains nowassailing him with evocations of hispowerful first Russian love.

On August 14th, Marina writes:

Rainer, this winter we must gettogether...somewhere you have neverbeen. In a tiny little town, Rainer; for asbriefly as you like... Or in the autumn,Rainer. Or early in the next year. Sayyes...

Rainer quickly replies: “Yes, and yes andyes Marina, all yeses to what you wantand are, together as large as YES to lifeitself...” But he demurs about when, talksvaguely about “hauling myself in...out ofthe depths.” She writes back, a long,rambling letter on August 22, that opens:

Rainer, just always say yes to what Iwant—it won’t turn out so badly, after all.Rainer, if I say to you that I am yourRussia...

And closes with: “I take you in my arms.”Rilke never replies—just silence. His

illness has been kept quiet. Marina has noidea what depths he’s in. Finally, onNovember 7th, using the occasion ofinforming him of a change of address, shesends a postcard: “Dear Rainer, this iswhere I live—I wonder if you still loveme? Marina.”

On December 31st, Marina writes toPasternak: “Boris, Rainer Maria Rilke hasdied. I don’t know the date—three daysago...”

VII: THE BIRDS ON THE CEILING AND...LONDON

Her New Year’s Eve letter continues: “Wehad planned to meet. He didn’t answermy answer [to his last letter]. Then Iwrote him a single line from Bellevue...”Marina ends by asking: “Will we ever seeeach other? Happy New Era, Boris! HisEra!”

On New Year’s Day she writes again,

clarifying that Rilke died on the 30th.With the sad realization that “Boris, wewill never go and see Rilke. The placedoesn’t exist anymore.”

But noting that she’d dreamed of anocean liner and a train, she proposes anew destination: “Build your plans onLondon—on London. I tell you, I havelong believed in London.” She followsthis with a cryptic sentence that’s alwaysevoked a totally unreasoned sense in methat before she left Russia four yearsearlier; that yes, maybe Marina and Boriswere, at least once, lovers. “Rememberthe birds on the ceiling and the blizzardson the other side of the Moscow river?”

Both of them seemed to make a pointof telling other correspondents thatthey’d met only a few times, and wereunimpressed with each other. But theywere both married, both living in treach-erous social situations. What makes morehuman sense—that they found they weresoul mates only after writing letters toeach other? And how did this correspon-dence spring up between two people sounimpressed with each other?

Or perhaps their correspondence hada more tangible seed. Is it so unlikely thatin a metropolis of everything suddenlyturned upside down, two budding poetswith such similar backgrounds recognizedeach other? And maybe, in some discreetblue hour, quietly consummated a sponta-neous affection. Then, mused in the after-glow about escape.

Her letter goes on to beckon andimagine:

Never before have I sent for you, now thetime has come. We will be alone in thatenormous London. Your town and mine.We will go to the Zoo. And to theTower... In front of the Tower, there is asteep little square, quite empty, only asingle cat underneath a bench. We will sitthere...

A totally impractical fantasy that sheprobably thought better of as soon as sheposted the letter? It never happened, butthat whim of a dream might have beenher only chance to save her life.

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VIII: NATIONAL TREASURES

The Choice

The intellect of man is forced to chooseperfection of the life, or of the work.And if it take the second must refusea heavenly mansion, raging in the dark...

—W.B. Yeats

All three of the Summer, 1926 correspon-dents were poets whose ambition was for“perfection of the work,” rather than“perfection of the life.” It’s too early tosee how posterity will eventually valuethem, but their work has certainlysurvived several generations and theirown century. But are they “national treas-ures,” poets who live at the heart of theircultures, resistant to export and transla-tion? Well, how did their nations treatthem?

Rainer: If there’s anything mercifulto be said about Rilke’s early, painfuldeath, it’s that he didn’t have to witnessthe events of the ’30s and ’40s. Clerkingin the Austrian war office during WWI,he famously called himself a “witness tothe world’s disgrace.” His last poems, TheDuino Elegies and The Sonnets toOrpheus, might be characterized by analmost excruciating openness to the angstof the still emergent century. Would therehave been anything left to respond toHitler? And for the Third Reich, Rilkewas definitely not a treasure, but vilifiedas so decadent and un-German that heeven wrote in French.

Of course, Rilke’s German reputationhas been rehabilitated, but his real reputa-tion has become international. He may bethe single most translated foreignlanguage poet in English, with scores ofversions that still proliferate. Nuancesmay be lost and translations vary, but notbeing German is no more an impedimentto being moved by Rilke than it is toenjoying Beethoven.

Boris, the one who stayed home,stayed quiet, survived, and engrossedhimself in translating Shakespeare. Hispoetry had, and has, a high reputation inRussia, but, by most accounts, for itsaesthetic brilliance—rather than cultural

force. This may have helped him escapethe fate of so many contemporaries sentto the camps. Or, who—like Mayakovsky,Essenin, Yashvili, Fadayev...and on andon—committed suicide. In his 1959memoir, I Remember, he talks about themand says: “Let us begin with the mostimportant. We have no idea of the mentalagony that precedes suicide...” Then hedissects the psychological process heimagines must precede suicide, the strip-ping away of everything that constitutesself:

...one turns away from one’spast...declares oneself a bankrupt, andone’s memories are nonexistent... In theend, perhaps, one kills oneself not out ofloyalty to the decision one has made, butbecause one no longer can endure theagony that does not seem to belong toanyone in particular...

In that segment of I Remember, Pasternakconjures the final, suicidal states of mindof a litany of literary friends, concluding,inevitably, with Marina Tsvetaeva:

Marina...all her life, shielded herself byher work against...everyday existence.When it seemed to her that it was aninadmissible luxury and that for the sakeof her son she must for a time sacrificeher all-absorbing passion, she cast a soberlook around...saw the chaos that had notfiltered through her creative work,immovable, stagnant, monstrous, andrecoiled in panic. Not knowing how toprotect herself from that horror, shehurriedly hid herself in death, putting herhead into a noose as under a pillow.

I Remember also includes a section onTranslating Shakespeare and a discussionof Hamlet, about which Pasternak, as itstranslator has a personal take:

Hamlet is not a drama of weakness, but ofduty and self-denial... What is importantis that chance has allotted Hamlet the roleof judge of his own time and servant ofthe future. Hamlet is the drama of a highdestiny...a heroic task.

It’s hard not to view Dr. Zhivago incontext of that quote. In 1948, after

much hesitation, Pasternak began a novel:a poet’s novel, a story told in almost cine-matic images. A novel with a poet protag-onist that seems to repeatedly return tothe well of poetry and a deep spring ofmusicality. All the while dealing painfullyand openly with the era of Pasternak’syouth, a generation in which revolution-ary pride segued into national horror.

Completed in 1956, Dr. Zhivago wonthe 1958 Nobel Prize, but only in transla-tion. The manuscript had to be smuggledout of the country and didn’t appear inRussia until 1988. With serendipitoushelp from the lush David Lean movie,balalaikas and Julie Christie, Dr. Zhivagobecame an overnight international treas-ure, while virtually unread in Russian.

Marina’s work was much admiredamong Russian poets during her lifetime,but otherwise ignored or criticized inboth Soviet and emigré circles. The housein which she hanged herself is now amuseum and a Google browse of RussianYouTubes will find several of her poemshauntingly set to music. But her poetrydidn’t become popular until it was re-published in the 1960s. As with Rilke,being in the public domain has been help-ful in engendering translations and herpoems seem more accessible and moresuccessfully translated in English thanPasternak’s denser Russian.

Pasternak seems always to havecarried a guilty conscience about notwarning Tsvetaeva away when she asked,in 1939, what might happen if the familyreturned to Russia. But what could hehave said? Their correspondence was aslikely as not to be read by the authorities.And what choices did Marina and herfamily have? Her husband, who leftRussia as a White officer, had become anNKVD spy and reputed political assassin.He was also a Jew. Would they have faredany better in German occupied Paris thanin their homeland? Rather than a nationaltreasure, Marina seemed closer to theinternational flotsam and jetsam ofEurope’s pause between wars. And ofcourse we have her own words: “I am nota Russian poet... I know no literary influ-ences, only human influences... Life is arailroad station...”

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IX. CODA: A DIFFERENT BABEL

On September 22, 2010, the New YorkTimes published an obituary for“Antonina Pirozhkova, Engineer andWidow of Isaac Babel.” Isaac Babel, forthose not already familiar with him, was aRussian writer often compared to theyoung Hemingway. His Red Cavalry,short stories in the form of reporter’sdispatches from a Cossack regimentduring the Russian Civil War, rivalsGoya’s etchings in its matter of fact depic-tion of banal brutality. The stories have

the added edge of Babel being a Jewriding with the Cossacks.

Ms. Pirozhkova was actually Babel’scommon law wife. His official wife livedin Paris with their daughter. Pirozhkovawas 23, Babel, 38, when they met in1932. Antonina also gave birth to adaughter, Lidiya.

Babel was a highly successful writeruntil his arrest in 1939. Possibly, his real-ism went places Socialist Realism nolonger should. Or his name was named ininterrogation by some other unfortunate.Awakened in the middle of the night by

the NKVD, Antonina was forced to leadthem to Babel, and then allowed to ridewith him to headquarters. When theyarrived, they kissed. Babel said, “somedaywe’ll see each other,” then walkedthrough the prison door without lookingback. He was routinely beaten, interro-gated, and then shot in early 1940.Antonina was never advised of his fate.The NKVD told her to forget about Babeland “regulate your life.”

Antonina Nioklaevna Pirozhkova wasan acclaimed Soviet engineer who rose tobecome chief designer of the Moscowsubway system. But she also spent most ofher life trying to find what happened toIsaac Babel and to rehabilitate his workand reputation in Russia. (His interna-tional reputation in translation neverlapsed.) In 1954, during the Kruschevthaw, she finally succeeded.

She continued her scientific career,teaching at the Moscow Institute ofTransportation Engineers until retiringand, later, moving to the United States in1996 with her daughter to be with hergrandchildren who had previouslyemigrated. All the while she remaineddevoted to the memory of Isaac Babel andthe dissemination of his papers. She wasable to publish his diaries, in translation,at Yale in 1995. Her memoir of life withBabel was also published by an Americanpress in 1996.

Antonina Piroshkova died in Floridaat the age of 101. Reading her obituary, Ifound myself imagining her schmoozingat a card table in some sunny retirementhome, where someone or other wouldinevitably comment, “It’s a small world.”

ART BECK is San Francisco poet and trans-lator, and a frequent contributor to Rattlee-issue. Those essays are collected onlineat <www.rattle.com/artbeck.htm>.Beck’s translation of the complete poemsof Luxorius, a Roman poet whose 90extant poems were literally lost for athousand years, is scheduled for publica-tion this year by Otis College SeismicityEditions.

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RiotKevin Yuen Kit Lo

I S S U E # 3 6 P R E V I E W

TT RIBUTERIBUTE TOTO

BB UDDHISUDDHIS TT PP OETSOETS

This winter’s issue of RATTLE highlights the work of 30contemporary Buddhist poets. As Dick Allen writes in hisintroduction, Buddhism “is not a glimpse or gaze but animmersion. There’s no glass, no other side.” These poets don’twrite about Buddhism, so much as they seek to live it—“mysmall boat is no one on this water,” writes Lola Haskins. All oftheir poems are full of compassion and mindfulness, informedby years of studying human experience from this uniqueperspective, which has much to offer Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike.

RATTLE #36 also features an open section of 33 poets,and the 15 finalists for the 2011 Rattle Poetry Prize—with the$5,000 winner to be chosen for the first time by popular vote.In the conversations section Alan Fox’s speaks with M.L.Liebler and Buddhist poet Chase Twichell.

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RATTLE e.10RATTLE e.11RATTLE e.10F a l l 2 0 1 1

POETRYAnonymous • Kathleen Balma • Grace Bauer • Michael Bazzett

Jill Bergkamp • Destiny Birdsong • Jan Bottiglieri • Claudia Cortese Steven Coughlin • Hope Coulter • Sally Ehrman • Brian Fitzpatrick

Alan Fox • Sonia Greenfield • Paul Hlava • Donald IllichSean Karns • Quincy R. Lehr • M.L. Liebler • Joanne Lowery

Charles Manis • Bruce McBirney • Wendy Oleson • Jason OlsenJohn O’Reilly • Jack Powers • Murray Silverstein • Karen Skolfield

Virginia Slachman • Bruce Snider • Ephraim Scott SommersLianne Spidel • Jeanann Verlee

TRIBUTE TO BUDDHIST POETSDick Allen • Li Bai • Pam Herbert Barger • Karen Benke

John Brehm • Toni Cameron • Louisa DiodatoTeresa Chuc Dowell • Jeffrey Franklin • Robert Funge • Gary Gach

Dan Gerber • Sam Hamill • Gail Hanlon • Lola HaskinsDonna Henderson • Yang Jian • Bo Juyi • Alison Luterman

Paul Pedroza • Peg Quinn • Diana M. Raab • Richard SchiffmanJinen Jason Shulman • Sarah Pemberton Strong • Anne Swannell Robert Tremmel • Tony Trigilio • Chase Twichell • Jack Vian

CONVERSATIONSM.L. Liebler

Chase Twichell

ARTWORKToni Cameron

$10.00 US/CANwww.rattle.com/purchase.htm

RATTLE POETRY PRIZE FINALISTSPia Aliperti • Tony Barnstone • Kim Dower • Courtney Kampa • MAndrew Nurkin • Charlotte Pence • Laura Read • Hayden Saunier

Diane Seuss • Jeff Vande Zande • Craig van Rooyen • Bryan WalpertAnna Lowe Weber • Maya Jewell Zeller


John O’Reilly

THE BITTERN AT ABBOTT’S LAGOON

the walk to the sea belongs to the seawe are drawn on as waves arethe late light is sidelonga glance at a partypassed from one guest to the next

few have binoculars out for the bitternon the other side of the lagoonthe walk pauses where thosewho’ve been shown it show it to otherslike a face in a tortilla

for some time we forget about the oceanall of us eyeing this cryptic birdwhich deems itself invisibleas we deem ourselves while exposed

soon darkness will sidle downbrought to the hem of the Pacificthat the bittern might recedeinto invisibility amid the reedsthere upon its hunting grounda shy and terrible god like ours

Bruce Snider

CRUISING THE RESTSTOP ON ROUTE 9

From where you stand you can feelthe back road empty into the county, an endless need. Moths flickerat the bulb’s lit nerve, coupling

and uncoupling over greasy linoleum.You lean against the sink, its faucetdripping, trying to form a word, nightstalled between hand and zipper.

You know a man on his kneescan read the scored tile, torque of his mouth filled with night and the marshfields’ dampness. Anything can happen

when the urinal flushes, but tonightthe trucker won’t look up. That’s howit is sometimes, paper towels cloggingthe drainpipe, water blackened with rust.

Outside, cars deliver strangerspast orchards where raccoons poachrotting plums from low cracked limbs, all that sweet flesh waking in the dark.

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from RATTLE #36, WINTER 2011Poetry

THE ZEN MASTER ON THE RAFT

The trouble with you, said the Zen master,to the ardent scholarand his ardent disciples,is you carry the raft everywherebut you’ve never floated upon it

and if you ever do,once you reach the other shore,can you leave it behind,

bobbing in the water?

THE ZEN MASTER ON THE RAFT II

perfectly adrift


Dick Allen

from THE ZEN MASTER POEMS

WHAT THE ZEN MASTER TOLD US

A single blind tortoiseswimming in a vast oceansurfaces only onceevery century.

Floating on the vast oceanis a single golden yoke.

It is more rare,said the Buddha,to be reborn humanthan for the tortoiseto surface with its headpoking through the holein the golden yoke.

You have this rare time.Do not squander your chanceon the ephemeral.

Practice the dharmaand, lest you get too serious,eat sunflower seeds.

Gazeat the waves on the water.

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from RATTLE #36, WINTER 2011Tribute to Buddhist Poets


Li Bai (701 – 762)

ALONE ON MOUNT JINGTING

The birds have flown up high all togetherOne cloud is lazily driftingAnd we never grow tired of watching each othersitting here—me, and Mount Jingting

—“made new” by G. G. Gach & C. H. Kwock

Jeffrey Franklin

THE EXCITEMENT OF GETTING A ROOM

WITH A MINIBAR

If you were Gidget or Gigi or Glorianne from Kansas, you might kick both feet up behind like a miniature pony,sending the pleated skirt too high, squeal and runto bounce on the bed with flipped cockroach legs.

But instead you are tired after the happy disaster, the bad fantasy, the aging family members and mirror phobia,not to mention the failed restaurant. This isn’t Daytonabike Week, nor your first time in Paris, and you are

all too aware what they charge for those dinky bottles.No, you’ve brought your own fifth, picked upat Dino’s Liquor and Car Wash before you checked in.Today was not the day your happy childhood predicted.

You are sad with a sadness only a single room matches.This is your reward, this view of curtained windowsexactly like yours, these industrially sanitized towels,this generic solitude… You slip off your shoes

and click on the scrolling menu of tonight’s movies:a meteor the size of Cleveland, or sadistic murderjustifies the most thorough revenge ever quenched.Things are looking up. You amble over to the minibar,

lift the white fluted paper cap from the cafeteria glass,and crack your bottle of Sky. For just one moment,your heart soars: there, in the plastic bucket,still smoking with cold, perfect lozenges of ice.

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Sarah Pemberton Strong

FISH TANK

My daughter has dropped two slicesof her plum into the fish tank.The black molly, after circling around,

is nibbling at the sticker I neglectedto remove: Product of Mexico.I’m on the phone long distance

with my teacher in England,who suggests I might begineach session of meditation

(Buddhist, from India) with a bitof appreciation for my body.Not for the cleverness

of my fingers, or the back handspringI could turn at the distantand limber age of thirteen.

Consider your organs,he says; the liver, the kidneys,the spleen, all doing their work

so perfectly together. Right nowthat work is taking placeat a kitchen table in Connecticut,

where I’m watching my sweet girlwith her fish, and drinking teagrown in the Yunnan province of China.

A China that is everywhere,just as is—my teacher says—compassion.And I believe him,

though mostly I forget it,just as I forget the factoriesinside me, how they work

throughout the night without pause,becoming visibleonly when something goes wrong,

as the glass wall of the fish bowlis visible to the fishonly by the green bloom of algae

across it. Through whichmy daughter’s eyes and minenow gaze through the water at

her offering, dropped downfrom another worldthat is this world.

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FOX: So why didn’t you become an artistinstead of a poet?

TWICHELL: Well, I started off as a painter.When I was a kid I was fascinated bypainting. Our art teacher got sick in gradeschool, and so they had to run out andfind a quick replacement. They found aguy named George Chaplin who was agrad student at Yale and had probablynever been around children in his life andthey dumped him on our third grade andsaid, “Teach them.” He was fantastic. Hedidn’t really know what do so he startedwith Josef Albers’ color theory, so we allhad a stack of those cards and we woulddo exercises like, “Choose three colorsand put one in the middle and make itcome toward you. Now move themaround so the one in the middle looks likeit’s farther away from you.” We would justplay with color. We didn’t know it wassophisticated; we thought it was a game.So I learned a lot from him. He used toclimb into the dumpsters at the end ofevery semester and fish out all the half-used-up tubes of oils and all the canvasesthe Yale students had painted bad paint-ings on already. So we had unlimited oilpaint and he always gave us a canvas thathad already been painted on, and we hadto turn it upside down and paint on it, soit was already ruined before we evenstarted, which got rid of all the fear of theblank page. And he moved all the furni-ture around so that all the desks werefacing the wall, so you couldn’t get nerv-

ous because of what somebody else wasdoing. And we just painted. That’s all wedid. And at the end of the class we’d bringthem up to him and he’d make acomment, or not, and that was art class. Iloved it. And I got so obsessed with it thatby the time I went to boarding schoolwhen I was 14, my parents were reallyworried that I was going to becomesocially abnormal since I preferred paintto human beings [Fox laughs] and so theyconspired with the school to not let metake art, and that’s when I started to writepoems, for revenge [both laugh]. So reallypainting was my first love. And I oftenwish, I always wish, that I had continuedto do that. Because now I try—I do paint,in the closet. But I don’t have any of thatwild freedom and just playfulness that Ihad as a kid. I’ve actually been doingfinger painting lately.

FOX: Ah.

TWICHELL: Which is really fun. I went outand for $2.99, I bought the deluxe set[laughs] and painting on wax paper or,what do they call it, that baking paperthat’s shiny on one side and dull on theother—

FOX: Wax paper or something...

DAVEEN: Baking...

TWICHELL: It’s baking paper, I don’t knowwhat they call it, but it’s really cheap and

it’s an endless roll, so you can’t screw uptoo much. I try to write that way as wellactually.

FOX: Say more about that.

TWICHELL: Well I think one of the dangersof writing for a long time is that youbecome more and more conscious of whatyou’re doing, which eventually becomes akind of reflex of self-consciousness so thatyou start to write something and youthink, “That’s no good,” and you censoryourself, you pause, and it’s very hard tojust put the stuff out there and worryabout it later. An interesting thinghappened to me maybe ten years ago,before people realized that burning trashin your backyard was not ecologically agood thing to do. We all had burn barrelsin the back of our yard—we live in theextreme wilderness in upstate New Yorkin the Adirondacks—and we’d burn paperand stuff, because you have to pay foryour trash disposal by the pound, soeverybody burned everything that couldbe burned. And I had started a book, itwas The Snow Watcher, I think, and I hadmaybe 25 pages, 30 pages, and I sat downone morning and I read it and I thought,“What? This is not the book I want tohave written,” and so I threw the manu-script in the burn barrel. Of course, I stillhad it on a floppy drive and I still had it onthe computer. So the next thing I did waszap it off the computer. And then the onlycopy that was left in existence was the CD.And I threw it in. And I had the greatestsense of liberation, like “Phew, I’m free ofall that, I’m not attached to it anymore.”

FOX: Wow.

TWICHELL: And I was of course afraid thatI would wake up the next morning and go,“You idiot, what did you do!”

FOX: Of course.

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from RATTLE #36, WINTER 2011Conversationsfrfromom A CA C ONVERSONVERS AATIONTION

WITHWITH

CC HASEHASE TT WICHELLWICHELL

byAlan Fox

Note: The following is excerpted from a 24-pageconversation conducted April 30th, 2011


TWICHELL: But in fact I just felt relief. Andat that point I started working on thecomputer instead of longhand. Because Iused to keep every draft, in case theremight be some gem in there that I’d over-looked, and I’d go back five years laterand think, “Oh, I really was a genius, I justdidn’t know it at the time.” [Fox laughs]And basically I go back through that oldstuff and that’s just what it is, the throw-aways; that’s where they should havegone. And so I began to work on thecomputer , which I’d never done before,and it meant letting go of things all thetime, just as part of writing. “I don’t likethe way this is going, am I going to stickwith it?” “Nope, gone.” Or just getting toa sticky part in a poem, being able to makethe choice between saving it for later,throwing it away, or working it into thepoem. And so I have two notebooks. Oneof them is called “The Compost,” andthat’s where all those little scraps thatmight develop into something go, andusually that’s where they stay, althoughevery once in a while I will be able to usesomething somewhere or some snippetwill turn out to be the seed of anotherpoem. And then there’s one called “TheOrphanage,” which is for polished,perfected bits in poems that look likepoems, sound like poems, but are reallyfake poems. They all go live in the orphan-age and I hope someday I can adopt someof them but so far they’re all still in there.

FOX: That’s great.

TWICHELL: It’s useful. I can kick them outof the poems without feeling anxiousabout their fate because I can always gorescue them if I want to.

FOX: When I write a poem, I look it andsay, “This is no good, it’s never going to beany good,” and just get rid of it.

TWICHELL: It’s really hard to do that,though.

FOX: Yes.

TWICHELL: And there’s a...I should call it afantasy, I guess, in our culture—a lot of

people want to believe, especially if you’reyoung, that if you are a poet, anything thatcomes out of your mouth might be poetry.Or worse, is poetry. [Fox laughs] So every-thing is holy and must be saved.

FOX: Yes. But also, I think we fall into thetrap—if I’m a writer and I read poetry, andI’m reading your work, I’m reading yourbest work in finished form.

TWICHELL: That’s right.

FOX: And then I’m writing something andI say, “Well, that’s not nearly as good aswhat I read”—but it’s a first draft! So wetend to compare our own first drafts withpublished work.

TWICHELL: That’s absolutely true. Astudent came up to me yesterday and said,“When you write a draft, how many linessurvive in the final draft?” And I said,“You mean, how many lines just came outright the first time? None.” “Really?!”“Really.”

FOX: Well, I think it’s important to notcensor when you’re doing the first draft.Just let it rip.

TWICHELL: That’s exactly right. That’swhy I was talking about finger painting.You try to do first drafts that are like fingerpainting. Just let it go. Worry later aboutwhatever it is.

FOX: You used a word which struck achord in me—“revenge.” I try to live bythe proverb, “Living well is the bestrevenge,” but when I look in myself some-times, I want revenge. How does thatwork for you?

TWICHELL: That sort of emotion crossesmy mind from time to time, I must admit.[laughs] Actually my study of Zen hastaught me a lot and I’m sure your study ofinsight meditation has taught you some-thing too...

FOX: Yes.

TWICHELL: Which is that if I can remem-

ber, my little mantra that I say to myself is,“Not two.” I and that person who justpissed me off are not two, we are one, andso it’s a much more complicated dancethen.

FOX: Yes, yes.

TWICHELL: A much more complicatedrelationship and kind of internal balanceof things, if you can remember that. It’snot easy to do it and I usually rememberabout 30 seconds after I’ve opened my bigmouth and said something I wish I hadn’t.It’s a natural human feeling I think. Thethings that enrage me most, about which Iwould like to take revenge, are ecologicalmatters.

FOX: Ah. Say more about that.

TWICHELL: Well, we were talking aboutthis a little at lunch, but it seems to me thatit’s fairly obvious that it’s too late for theearth, and that willful ignorance in dealingwith it, I mean of human beings, is very,very upsetting to me. Not that I have anybrilliant ideas, mind you, about how to fixit all, but I do kind of rage against thestupidity of humanity and the terminalself-destructive blindness that we seem tobe in. And I think this is probably the firsttime in history where—well I suppose inthe past—I was going to say, where thevery life of the planet itself is threatened,but that’s not probably actually true if youthink back to various religions which havebeen apocalyptic, believing in the end ofthe world or that the sun god is going tocome and stab us all to the heart or what-ever it is, whatever form it takes. But I’vehad a lot of trouble dealing with my angerabout that. I had the great good fortune togrow up in the Adirondack mountains,which is the last significant wilderness eastof the Rockies. It’s six and a half millionacres, and I grew up right in the middle ofit. And so I grew up in pristine wildernessand during my life I’ve seen it go frombeing basically untouched to damagedbeyond repair.

[...continued in RATTLE #36]

R29


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