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People Who Need People: Feldman, Pineda, Simmonds

Friday, February 8th, 2013

Our contributors are often inspired by art, images, ideas, and other objects and intangibles. We’ve noted the ways science, music, and women’s roles galvanized the writers of Issue 9.2.  Below, though, poets from that issue discuss a more “personal” influence:

Alan Feldman

on “In Response to My Fear That I’ll Receive Another Call from the Yacht Salesman”:

Like many, I’m afraid of the way a good salesman can play upon my desires. This was the most dangerous salesman I ever encountered, I suppose. He had a genuine love for the boats his company made, and he cast me as a kind of local-hero-to-be if I’d buy one; it was like a movie where I would single-handedly save the little coastal town where the factory seemed like the only industry. And, in return, he showed me how the boat could change my life. For days I gazed at the brochure, imagining a kind of heaven on earth for myself: the seas always manageable, the wind fresh and abeam. When I pondered this decision I realized either way—buying the boat or not—I’d be making a mistake, and there seemed something fundamentally shattering about that realization, and funny too. If I lose the yacht, I thought to myself, and the Eden it represents, maybe I’ll at least get a poem. Plus I get a lot of pleasure from the vocabulary associated with sailboats. I think such words evolved so they could easily be heard over howling winds, so they have rather distinct sounds and are fun to use.

on “A Message from My Mother”:

I do love to sail, and when I’m out on the water under a big sky, I sometimes check in with people I’ve lost, my mother especially.  She died about thirty-five years ago, and I’ve noticed, over the years, that she’s mellowed. She’s less apt to offer advice, for example. And she seems to have become somewhat passive, wistful, and even philosophical. I don’t know if she actually knew Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, but it’s my favorite long poem in English so maybe she’s had time to read it. She did love Keats, though—something I often think of, since she died relatively young. My young granddaughter lives at least half of her day conversing with people she imagines. Until I changed the title on this poem, so that it was clear that it’s my dead mother speaking all the way through, I’m not sure the poem succeeded. My favorite part is her description of what she feels like now.

Jon Pineda (on his poem “The Sow”)

I’d recently finished the first draft of a novel, and I needed to recharge a bit. So I returned to working on poems, going for compression. I wanted to hem lines in with sound. That was the big driver. Oh, and the fact that my daughter loveslovesloves pigs.

Kevin Simmonds (on his poems “ars poetica” and “poem”)

I can’t recall which current news item triggered “ars poetica,” but it was simply the latest in an onslaught of smartly constructed, prepackaged political talking points spinning some act of consciously committed and grave indecency. Maybe it was a lie told as the truth. Maybe it was a walk back from a previously lapsed and miscalculated truth. I wanted to write a self-conscious poem that didn’t traffic in untruth but, rather, spoke plainly in declarative sentences. And why not write about the atrocity of war, the male and blameless memoranda of war?

“poem” is a lie—a lie that reveals truths about my strained relationship with my father.

Funny, unplanned consequence: the word count of each of these two poems is within one word.

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Affected by Art: Conn, Cooley, Smith

Monday, January 28th, 2013

Our contributors are cultured folk: They like the 2005 Bordeaux and donkey cheese, and prefer Dvorak to One Direction—well, usually. We did accept a long poem composed of interlocking haiku singing the praises of the youthful Harry Styles’s floppy hair, but apparently another journal had already taken it. The following contributors from Issue 9.2 are connoisseurs of art, especially the particular images that inspired their work:

Brian Conn (on his story “The Perfumer”): Last summer I had a residency at I-Park, in rural Connecticut. On the first night, very late, I started wandering around the place in the dark. I ended up in the library, where, in a dusty box in a kind of cubbyhole under the eaves, I discovered an old tourist guide to Hearst Castle. Lots of fading color photos of opulent rooms where it seemed like they must have just finished shooting a cigarette commercial. I spent many nights at I-Park sitting in my writing hut, paging through this guide by the light of a small desk lamp and then looking out at the New England night and thinking I saw will-o’-the-wisps in the forest.

“The Perfumer” is the result of those nights.

Jordan Smith (on his poem, “A Convent Garden, Brittany”): A couple of years ago, I had my first chance to visit Dublin, and in the National Gallery of Art, I was especially taken with the Irish realists of the early-twentieth century. I know you’re not really supposed to look at art this way, but each painting struck me as a scene from a novel, one of those tangled and perhaps over-subtle studies of leisure-class affections that Masterpiece Theatre might dramatize in a heartbeat. Since as far as I knew this book didn’t exist, I decided to write a set of poems outlining its plot, “Sketches for a Novel,” all in the same form and each starting with one of the paintings. “A Convent Garden, Brittany” is the last of the group, and is after William John Leech’s painting of the same title.

Peter Cooley (on his poem “Possible Body”): Probably “Possible Body” emerges from my writing of ekphrastic poems in the past few years on Rembrandt, Rodin and Michelangelo, a triple header I want to make into a book. I think, especially, the sculptors play a singular role in my poem for CR. I know I wanted to say something about the body by fracturing the text yet still maintaining coherence. I think, in all honesty, that the hurricanes in New Orleans in the past few years have done their part in my embracing discontinuity. My wife and I stayed through Katrina and just recently Isaac. But to read my Katrina story you will have to read my book Night Bus to the Afterlife, due out from Carnegie Mellon in 2013.

(Read an appreciation of Cooley’s poem here.)

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Blinded by Science

Monday, December 3rd, 2012

Writers are often afraid of science. Perhaps their minds are not capable of complex math. Maybe they’re too sensitive to ideas like black holes, instant cell death, and robot children, which keep them up at night. Perhaps they’ve had bad experiences of scientific humiliation and disappointment. Associate Editor Lisa Ampleman was kicked out of 9th-grade frog dissection. (Miss Ampleman . . . that is not a puppet!) Senior Associate Editor Matt O’Keefe swore off chemistry after failing to achieve his teenage dream of making real-life moonshine. Assistant Editor Brian Trapp was going to be a veterinarian until that cat-agility experiment went horribly wrong.

However, the writers below have a more conciliatory relationship with science, finding inspiration in nanotechnology, diagrams, and field biology. Perhaps they will help us cozy up to the scientist inside all of us. If not, then there is always this poorly-made video of color-changing milk.

Amorak Huey (on his poem “She Blinded Me with Nanotechnology”): This poem came from a prompt, although I feel a little dirty for saying so, like I’m violating the poet code where we’re supposed to pretend our work flowed straight from the songs of the muses to the tips of our quills. In a poetry-writing group I belong to, one member comes up with a prompt each month, and that month’s had to do with science. Because nanotechnology had played a prominent role in a rather dreadful novel I read recently, I started reading more about it.  It’s fascinating how we can use all these tiny little engineering miracles to figure out the world, and isn’t that a perfect metaphor for a poem? Because everything I write is some kind of love poem, I ended up also writing about a marriage (not my own), and about the tiny things we do not understand about ourselves and each other. A prompt is successful, to my mind, when it gives you a quick shove toward something and then quickly disappears. That’s what happened here for me.

Talvikki Ansel (on her poem “Coil / Foil / Ribbon / Loft”): Someone was lofting a boat on my kitchen / living room floor—actually the whole downstairs was covered with sheets of plywood, painted bright white. And the lines and curves drawn on that clean expanse made me think of other shapes and lines, and how one makes the leap from 2-dimensional diagrams (artificial hearts, airplane wings) to the thing itself, moving and living. (Not something that I can quite imagine doing!)

Claire Eder (on her poem on “Crow Mob”): [This poem] happened when I finally got around to researching a seemingly strange phenomenon I’d often noticed but never understood: groups of small birds (crows, mockingbirds) chasing and harassing bigger birds like hawks and owls. I remember in particular biking past a hawk that sat perched on an empty playground’s monkey bars as crows circled and swiped at it. It looked harried (or at least annoyed) but also resigned—the best it could do was to flap to another spot a couple of feet away, and the crows just followed, jeering. At first, my sympathies went out to the hawk, the more majestic species and the apparent victim, but after looking into the matter, I found an admiration for the smaller birds and the ingenious, risky system called “mobbing” they’ve devised to protect themselves from predators. I was thinking a lot about the Occupy Wall Street movement at the time, which probably comes through at a certain level. It’s most likely a mistake to take sides when it comes to the natural world, and it’s a bigger mistake to find in its systems an analogy for our human systems, but I couldn’t resist.

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Hearing the Music: Guttman, Luongo, Mann

Monday, November 26th, 2012

We just heard from a freight company that has custody of a pallet containing Cincinnati Review Issue 9.2—they’ll be releasing this bookish bounty to us tomorrow! And then, after carefully stuffing each little volume into a labeled envelope, we’ll send our freshly printed literary offering into the world, wishing it well, singing “So long, farewell…” We’ve started fashioning our curtains into clothing (Brian Trapp gets to wear a bandanna made of blue paisley, Becky Adnot-Haynes brown tweed leggings) to wear as we sing in chorus. The following contributors had music in mind as they wrote their pieces, which you can read in full in the issue, available for purchase here.

Naomi Guttman (on her poems “Thin wishes” and “Domestic Dirge”): Three years ago, I began writing poems about a couple and their sons, which has now become the novella-in-verse The Banquet of Donny and Ari. The project began as an exploration of the tension in my own life between the desire to throw myself into life’s pleasures and the need to hold back, to conserve resources, to abstain for the sake of others. I divided the individual into two characters with distinct temperaments: Dionysian “Donny” is a musician; abstemious “Ari” is a textile artist. As the narrative of the collection unfolds, we discover that after long illness, Ari’s mother has recently died, and these two poems embody some of the feelings of loss, guilt, and anger that Ari experiences after this abandonment.

Margaret Luongo (on her story “Word Problem”): Probably because I’m terrible at math, I had been wanting to write a story in the form of a word problem. I couldn’t think what the story might be about, though, until we attended the Cincinnati Fringe Festival two years ago. A small group performed John Cage’s Radio Music. Clearly these were trained musicians, and most of them were young. I looked around the audience and wondered what people thought of this chaos, if that’s what it was—young men and women, fiddling with radio knobs, a string quartet bowing, plucking, vocalizing. Some of musicians looked happy, playful; others were intently focused. I wondered what had happened to them in their professional training and experience to lead them to this stage. That was the question the story would answer.

Randall Mann (on his poem “Young Republican”): I don’t have too much to say about the poem itself: I played Ronald Reagan at a mock debate at my middle school, and like Reagan, I destroyed mock-Mondale. But the whole scene had a bizarre musical component that I left out. There was a chorus performance of “Hello Dolly” with the lyrics changed to Hello Mondale and Hello Reagan. And then the smoldering dance-corps performance of The Time’s “Jungle Love,” all slinky leggings and eighth-grade ’80s sex appeal. What.

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Women’s Roles: Rawlings and Chertok

Tuesday, November 13th, 2012

In one week, the literary elf will visit our office under the cloak of darkness and leave beneath the dry-erase board dozens of beautiful brown boxes, each filled with 64 copies of Issue 9.2 (which you can order here). None of us has seen this mysterious figure in person, but Brian Trapp set up a webcam for 9.1 delivery, and that’s how we know she wears clothing consisting entirely of stapled-together pages from the Chicago Manual of Style—no doubt because Chicago covers everything. Har. At any rate, we are ever so grateful for the role this magically grammatical female plays in the life of the journal, and in light of the recent election (New Hampshire’s first all-female delegation! Twenty women in the Senate!), we thought we’d whet your appetite for the issue with commentary from two contributors who were thinking about women’s roles as they wrote:

Wendy Rawlings (on “Weight Watching”): This is the first piece of nonfiction I’ve written that directly addresses my interest in/focus on/obsession with weight. I’ve written short stories and parts of a novel that explore the ways women, and particularly American women, and particularly American women living in a postindustrial capitalist society, are bombarded with images of skinny women even as we live in a culture that just keeps getting fatter and fatter. A few years ago I read Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, and it blew my mind. She argues that in the last century, girls have shifted their focus from practicing domestic arts such as quilting, knitting, cooking, and sewing, to trying to perfect their bodies. Right around that time, my mother’s partner decided to undergo bariatric surgery in a last-ditch effort to lose the extra weight she’d carried her whole life. Watching someone close to me transform utterly after this radical surgery provided an opportunity for me to think about this pastime so many women engage in: watching ourselves and others—celebrities, reality TV stars, our friends and relatives—gain and lose, lose and gain.

Alex Chertok: In grad school I learned about words. How divisive and multivalent they can be. This learning didn’t always take place in the classroom. Like the word “motherly.” It became clear that many of the female twenty-somethings in my cohort felt affronted by the term. On the other hand, of the women I asked from my mother’s generation (all of them mothers), most felt a certain pride in being called “motherly” and understood it to connote someone who’s nurturing, unwavering in love and discipline, empathetic, strong. Both groups of women considered themselves feminists. Of course the maternal instinct isn’t knit into every female body. We know now that not every woman is hardwired to become a mother (and thank goodness for this), but denying the maternal instinct in toto seems wrong to me. The same way that denying the paternal instinct is wrong: I possess it unequivocally, palpably. Maybe the term needs to be changed, but the condition of feeling a presiding love toward one’s child, born or unborn, is real. I felt “motherliness” needed defending. It needed celebrating. I wanted my poem “In Praise of the Motherly” to depict my mother as I knew her, a woman of great agency and tenderness.

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Mourning the Loss: Black, Day, Hyett, Lyons, and McFee

Wednesday, October 24th, 2012

We just got our final proof from the printer, which means that Issue 9.2 will soon be trucking toward us (you can order the issue here). There’s a kind of grief in every transition; we mourn what’s passing as the new thing emerges, so we find ourselves decked out in black for the final few weeks of glory for the current issue. These five contributors to 9.1 write about more profound kinds of grief, and we’re thankful they’ve shared this commentary about their pieces:

Rebecca Black: “Lament for the Makers” is a hybrid of two failed poems, written over eight years apart, both parts written before I had a child, but only juxtaposed in the months right after my son was born. People always say “You’ll understand x, y, or z about your parents when you have children of your own,” and I always hated the sanctimony of that statement.  The truth is, you do have new visions about your parents after you have a child of your own, but they are not the perspectives anyone expects, predicts, or particularly desires. This poem is a proto-elegy for my father, who has lived ten years after a paralytic stroke. He always wanted me to be a writer. I have a fear that I won’t be able to write about him after he dies, so I’m trying to do it now.

Lucille Lang Day: One night my husband and I were talking about Haiti, and I wanted to reread the short story “Ti-Moune” in Love & Like by Herbert Gold, so I went to the bookshelf where I thought the book should be. It wasn’t there, nor was it anywhere among my husband’s and my books. While I was looking for it, I noticed that many other books of mine had gone missing. I felt devastated and started to cry. Some of the missing books had been inscribed to me, and one was a collector’s edition of Jane Eyre that had belonged to my father. A villanelle seemed like a fitting way to mourn them, so I wrote “The Lost Books.” Later I found some of the missing books in boxes in the basement that I had packed and forgotten about, but others never turned up. I fear they were in a box that mistakenly got sent to the Salvation Army during one of our periodic basement cleanouts. I hope someone, somewhere is enjoying them.

Eric E. Hyett (on “Like Leaves”): It’s amazing the tricks grief can play. This poem, perhaps more than any I’ve ever written, was very much influenced by my colleagues in the Workshop for Publishing Poets. It started with otters. I thought I was writing about otters—their gallant rituals, their orderly dance. That lasted a draft or two. Then my friend and fellow poet Matthew Sisson told me—out of the blue— to change the word “otters” to “watch”—the worst thing about losing your watch. That felt truer somehow, since people do lose watches, and also it gave me something about hands making wide circles. The poem stayed that way (“watch”) for a few dozen more drafts, during which it became a pantoum, and then NOT a pantoum (I love the repetition that the pantoum form brings, but it was too weighty for this poem to bear). Then, perhaps around draft 200, I was up late revising and changed “watch” to “son,” and suddenly there was the poem—the worst thing about losing your son . . . It had been there all along, but I needed to come to it circuitously and by following what felt bearable at each step of the way. Matthew was right; it wasn’t about otters. It’s amazing the tricks grief can play.

Richard Lyons (on “I Will Begin”): I wrote this poem, and several like it, after I had decided to eschew the stanza break for a while. I wanted to chant as Whitman, Stern, and O’Hara do, and I was re-immersing myself in the sensual rituals and rites of Odysseas Elytis’s poems. I was half serious and half not about the efficacy of amulets, but I thought the chanting would open me up and my poem up to the chances of magic or fate or any force outside my own desires. I am pleased that this poem “I Will Begin” evolved into a failed exorcism or a failed catharsis. I am pleased that this poem’s escape from uglier emotions owns up to those emotions. I am currently working to articulate a sense of the tribal in my poems without lying about the speaker’s fear and rage.

I am mourning the loss of Adrienne Rich, but her poems will endure without any help from me. In my life and in my poems, I hope to explore the complexities behind her line: “That intricate losing game of innocence long/ overdue.”

Michael McFee (on “Dust to Dust”): Last year, I decided to thin out the books on my overcrowded shelves, to sell or donate the volumes I really didn’t need to surround myself with anymore. It’d been many years since such a winnowing, and so I slipped each book out, considered it, then wiped off its edges with a rag before either returning it to the freshly-dusted shelf or adding it to the teetering stack of rejects. Somewhere toward the end of this slow and increasingly tedious process—weeks of sneezes, tissues, and sore knees—I finally realized: There’s a poem here. It wasn’t so much about me (yawn) as about a man who buys and organizes books on shelves all his life, but never really reads them as planned, and then his family has to deal with those dusty volumes after his death. (Okay, maybe it is about a version of me, but I hope it’s also about all of us readers and writers and lovers of the endangered book, that precious ink-and-paper literary artifact we can hold in our hands, its “written, printed,/ bound, forgotten words” as close as we may come to immortality.)

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Bonus Material: Donaldson, Gelston, Grimm

Monday, October 8th, 2012

Each new issue of The Cincinnati Review is like a baby to us. We nourish it, change it, tell funny anecdotes about it, and murmur gentle encouragements in its ear about the amazing lit mag issue it will someday become. And then, when the new arrival comes along, we crowd the older children into a cramped room and forget them. Just kidding! We love all of our kids. Which is why, as we inch closer to the birth/release of issue 9.2, we want to feature some excellent commentary from a few of our 9.1 contributors. None of the following has anything to do with the convoluted metaphor above, but these poets all found source material in elemental artifacts and environments.

Moyra Donaldson: A few years ago, a friend gave me a beautiful Thai stone Buddha for my birthday. Straight-backed and elegant, he sits on a railing outside my kitchen window, where I can see him every time I glance outside. The Buddha wears all weathers with equal equanimity, a cape and cap of snow in the winter; unblinking in the summer sun. Crows regularly perch on his head. I came to think of him as “the patience of stone,” and around that phrase, my poem “Rock” gathered and grew.

Sara Gelston: I’m a big rock and shell thief. Despite the posted signs in national parks and public beaches forbidding it, I always wind up bringing a fistful back to my house in the Midwest. Shells from Spain and San Diego become mixed with those from Maine, my home state. Dog whelks probably outnumber them all. They’re tiny, a dime a dozen, and while they have a completely benign exterior, they’re actually quite ruthless. If they’re hungry, desperate enough, they’re not afraid to turn on each other, consuming whoever is closest. Is this so unlike us, I wondered? How is the world we live in really that much different? “Dog Whelk” wound up being part of a small series that formed with these ideas in mind.

Susan Grimm: Last fall, I went to Kelleys Island with a group of writers I’ve known for a long time. I was feeling like the tail end of something, drearing across the lake aboard the ferry and dragging my books and extra water out of my car and into the house. We stay at an old farm house that backs up to one of the quarries. Just a short walk up the road is the nature preserve with its path to the lake. That beach is the location of the poem, and the source of the poem. Everything in the poem really happened. (I know you’re not supposed to say that.) At the island store, I bought a steno notebook, and I wrote the poem the day after in the very early morning in the farmhouse kitchen. The beach and the sun and the lake and the wind were a whip driving me back to awareness.

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Video Feature: Nance Van Winckel’s “Photoems”

Friday, September 28th, 2012

Nance Van Winckel is a decorated poet and fiction writer with almost as many books as fingers, but in our upcoming issue she blends poetry with visual art to create what she calls “photoems.” Her breathtaking digital photo-collages draw from the traditions of urban landscape photography, collage, mural, and graffiti. Of her process, she says, “I begin with a digital photo I’ve taken. Then, via Photoshop, I add other images I have created, e.g., black & white images I’ve Xeroxed out of 1930’s sixth-grade textbooks, hand-colored, and scanned back in. Then I add small bits of my own text—mini-poems, if you will.”

In CR 9.2, we showcase Van Winckel’s work in photographs of blighted urban buildings, which Van Winckel digitally alters both graphically and poetically. As her artist statement says, “Of these facades there seem endless ways poetry might intersect with/become/mash-up against graffiti.”

Here, Van Winckel applies this same aesthetic practice to train cars, creating a series of photo-collages set to music: “When You Need a Train It Never Comes” by alt-country musician Amanda Shires. She says: “These incorporate, like the building facades I’ve graffitied in this issue, small bits of text and graphic alterations. I haven’t quit poetry; I’m just putting it on walls, and trains!”

Tagging Trains

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Wonderful Weirdness: Kapitan, Poch, Perry, Norcliffe, Bakken

Wednesday, September 19th, 2012

Do you remember when you were a kid and you’d tell your mother you were bored, and she would say, “Only boring people are bored,” and then lock you outside while it was snowing? To discover how strange/cold the world could truly be?

If not, you probably had better childhoods than certain members of our staff, or perhaps you are on the same wavelength as our contributors, who needed no help discovering the bizarre in their own lives. Our contributors from 9.1 revealed the plain strange and sometimes macabre origins of their poems and stories. Pick up your copy of 9.1, and let’s get weird.

Joe Kapitan (on “Brothers of the Salvageable Crust”): My favorite kind of stories to read, and therefore to write, are stories of warped realism—where one aspect of an otherwise realist story is stretched to the absurd. That single absurdity, though, can be enough to provide fresh perspective on the surrounding reality. Think George Saunders or Aimee Bender, two masters of this formula. I’ve also found that, within a framework of limited absurdity, a story can be both funny and poignant. RE “Brothers of the Salvageable Crust,” I’d read a news story about the increasing use of interactive learning devices in high-school classrooms. I imagined an instructor getting carried away with the technology. I pictured one-liners and victims, side by side.

John Poch (on “Two Rooms”): [The poem] was written while I was in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts. Working one morning, I was interrupted by the sounds of sex in the next room; the walls in that old house were thin. These artists “making love” in the next room had made it known to everyone that they had a second profession as actors in pornographic films. Most of the other artists and administrators seemed to find this intriguing, while a few of us found it repulsive. I found myself trying not to judge them, and yet I judged them. One cannot know what goes on behind closed doors, or behind the curtain, or behind the scenes, or above a ceiling, or within a body, or in the soul, but sometimes one believes one knows.

Nathaniel Perry (on “Bizarre”): These particular sections in this issue of CR, from my poem, “Bizarre,” are examples of some of the side-roads that a longer poem takes. The titular focus of the poem is an eighteenth-century adultery/infanticide scandal that took place near my home here in rural Virginia. The actors in this scandal were members of the Randolph family (of John Randolph fame), who lived for many years on a local plantation, named, incredibly, Bizarre. The poem itself revolves mostly around parenting, but knowing that my readers might not trust a long poem about infanticide to speak entirely coherently to the experience of raising children, I knew the poem would have to, at times, veer elsewhere. Somehow, after hearing once again Mike Seeger’s amazing set of field recordings of the Virginia banjo player Dock Boggs, I knew that he belonged in the poem. Music and parenting aren’t all that different, in some ways—there is technique and there is mystery, and they’re kind of inseparable. And Ezekiel? I’m not sure how he got into this poem, but he lived with something too he could barely understand. Let’s just say that anything you nurture, live with, and call your own—a five-string country blues, a prophecy, a child—can be profoundly bizarre.

James Norcliffe (on “Laika”): I’m not entirely sure where “Laika” came from. It was one of those gift poems. The opening line certainly prompted what followed. The Russian theme probably came from the fact that I was at the Trois Rivieres International Poetry Festival in Quebec last autumn and kicking about with a trio of Russian poets. Laika would be familiar to baby boomers. She was the first creature from earth to be put into orbit. Wikipedia tells me that Laika was a Russian street dog (the name means “Barker”). In those days there was not merely a space race, there was something of a language race as well: would sputnik win, or satellite, would astronaut win, or cosmonaut? The strange thing in retrospect (I was a small boy) is that nobody seemed to comprehend (or care?) that Laika was doomed as there was insufficient technology to bring her down. Still, while the satellite/sputnik circled above we looked up marveling that a living thing had escaped the bounds of gravity. Or not. The final irony, we have since learnt, is that Laika probably never even made it that far, that the cooling system failed and that the poor creature almost certainly was cooked to death long before a single orbit was completed. Strange days. Most of this macabre stuff is irrelevant to the poem, but it does provide a shadow, a counterpoint to the poem’s lurching rhythm and ersatz romanticism.

Christopher Bakken (on Kouros/Kore): My new book, Impressions of a Drowning Man, opens with a poem

Courtesy of Christopher Bakken

imagining the failed suicide of Greek poet Kostas Karyotakis, who in July, 1928, spent ten hours trying to drown himself, but proved too capable a swimmer. This poem’s inquiry into the idea of suicide echoes throughout the collection, culminating in “Kouros/Kore,” a fourteen-section poem that appears at the book’s end. I think of the poem as an abstract “sonnet” in which I use the tropes of Greek sculpture to examine two figures—one male (kouros) and one female (kore).  The two sections printed in The Cincinnati Review are both addressed to the “kouros” figure, which I imagine by way of the monumental kouroi of Naxos: abandoned archaic statues that still litter the island’s hillsides.

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Poetry, Prose, and Pumpkins with Kick

Thursday, September 6th, 2012

Every year when the temperature outside begins to drop, the CR staff becomes giddy for all things fall. Matt O’Keefe positively giggles over the leaves crunching beneath his feet, and Lisa Ampleman and Nicola Mason nearly come to blows over the question of lattice-crusted versus crumb-topped apple pie. Becky Adnot-Haynes begins chucking a football at volunteers as they arrive for their weekly office hours, yelling “Think fast!” and Brian Trapp thinks the decreased humidity makes his hair look good.

In this celebratory fall spirit, we recommending curling up with your copy of 9.1 and treating yourself to a good pumpkin beer. Below, for your reading pleasure, we’ve created pairings with commentary from some of our 9.1 contributors.

Tracy Burkholder (Terrapin Pumpkinfest): I’ve never been a touchy-feely person and yet for fifteen years I’ve been a massage therapist, a profession that is nothing but touching and feeling. In “Proof” I wanted to explore the path, both personal and cultural, that brought me to a place where I regularly work my hands across the muscles of near-naked strangers. I wanted to examine the power inherent in a touch and the ways we so often avoid it.

Chris Cunningham (Dogfish Head Punkin’ Ale): I’ve been writing poems about a man named Mr. Anderson for several years now—”Mr. Anderson in the Supermarket,” “Mr. Anderson Rents a Foreign Film,” “The Sins of Mr. Anderson,” etc.  He’s a sad man, lonely—or at least often alone—and a bit eccentric.  My wife teases me that he’s going to “go postal” one of these days and start shooting people in one of the poems, but I want him to be sad and eccentric not in a scary or strange way but in the way we all are at times, so I’ve been working on poems that try to complicate his emotional life. “Mr. Anderson in the Fall” started as a scrap of observation recorded in my notebook one morning, the kind of thing you write when you have nothing to write. When I went back to it earlier this year, the scrap grew into a short lyric and took an interesting left turn, and I saw that it could be just the kind of experience and thinking I want for Mr. Anderson. Finally, I had been rereading Wallace Stevens, and I think echoes of his “Snow Man” found their way into the poem as well.

Kelly Moffett (Imperial Pumpkin): I wrote the poems while on retreat at KY Foundation for Women’s Hopscotch House, a farmhouse surrounded by acres of land and wood. I was pondering Ann Hamilton, my reaction to my father’s recent stroke, and the rain, the way the rain clung to bare branches like still tears and refused to fall and the way that landscape is presented both still and moving in Hamilton’s work and how Hamilton kind of collects material (like pennies, honey, and sheep) to create art. Then, quite literally, a herd of deer ran through the back field and there was a setting sun and a bunch of middle distance, and all I wanted to do (emotionally) was dive into that beauty, become the herd on the move, the red sun, the still rain. I was creating from the emotional space of the “impulse to dissolve,” to become ghostlike and beautiful—a different kind of alive. “Renunciation” and “Indwelling” became an accumulation of all of this.

Dave Yost (Ichabod Ale): Years ago, I took an out-of-town date to the Faust Park carousel  in St. Louis at her request and was surprised to learn she already knew a few of its animals and the workshops that had crafted them. She also told me their outrageous selling prices, and about the occasional robberies of older pieces. I’d never given much thought to carousels before, but I jotted the title “The Carousel Thief” into my notebook on the spot. Five years later, the rest of the story finally followed.

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