Posts Tagged ‘Issue 8.1’

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What We’re Reading

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

Matt McBride: Lately I’ve been reading Terrance Hayes’s newest collection, Lighthead (Penguin, 2010). Hayes, who is the current Elliston Poet-in-Residence here at UC, is one the few poets who can use form—both conventional forms such as acrostics and found forms like Pecha Kucha (a sped-up Japanese version of Power Point)—to make poems stranger as opposed to using form to rein poems in. What I admire most of all in Hayes’s poetry, though, is its ability to stay in motion. Hayes poems are like wind-up search engines, moving through culture and integrating allusions ranging from Wallace Stevens to Elizabeth Cotten, from James Joyce to Tupac Shakur. Mixed with these allusions is the personal—indeed, Hayes collages a self from all these differing cultural representations of human existence and identity, and while doing so conveys his experience as an African American. Further, all this is accomplished with a language lithe enough to keep up with the speed of Hayes’s consciousness but substantial enough to support the significance of what he has to say. It is a poetry that can jump from “I’d rather have what my daddy calls ’skrimp.’/ He says ‘discrete’ and means the street/ just out of sight. Not what you see, but what you perceive” to “that’s poetry. Not the noise, but its rhythm; an arrangement of derangements; I’ll eat you to live: that’s poetry,” without skipping a beat or collapsing under the weight of its pronouncements.

If you’re interested in reading a more thorough review of Hayes’s Lighthead, check out Lynnell Edwards’s “A Chorus of Selves: Terrance Hayes’s Lighthead” from issue 8.1.

And if you happen to be in the Cincinnati area, make sure to attend Terrance Hayes’s talk about poetry on May 25 at 4:00 p.m. in the Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library on the University of Cincinnati’s main campus.

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Posted in What We're Reading |

Bonus Material: Brunton, Faizullah, Glick, Kaiser, Wilcox, Wohlfeld

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

While recording commentary for his acclaimed Battlestar Galactica remake, creator Ronald D. Moore would treat himself to a tumbler of fine Scotch, and he would begin each episode’s podcast by telling you what that particular Scotch was. The Balvenie. Ardbeg. Highland Park. Lagavulin. Yes, life was good for Ronald D. Moore.

As The Cincinnati Review abides just north of the Bluegrass State, bourbon is the whiskey we give our contributors to inspire them as they look back on their work. Here, then, are the last six contributor’s comments for Issue 8.1, along with the bourbon pairings (okay, one’s a rye) that may have helped (consumption being optional, of course) to coax these comments forth.

Jaime Brunton (Eagle Rare Single Barrel): It is rare to see a wild animal—a swan or a loon or a deer—performing a task or making a ruckus without some identifiable purpose. When I watch animals, I feel their purposefulness as a gulf that separates us; I feel inadequate by comparison. What need justifies my speech? What weight do my words carry? Am I speaking only to myself? These are the questions that I grappled with when writing “The Mute Swan” (and that I, and other artists, must always grapple with as we attempt to make work that presents some fresh perspective and is, therefore, worth making). Interrogating my work in this way keeps me moving forward to the next poem. However, this pressure to say something “worthwhile” can also be stifling, especially if applied too heavily in the early stages of a project. I’m forever reminding my students (and myself) that writing should be an experiment, not a means to a single, predetermined end. As such, our writing has the potential to become many things, with any number of uses and effects we cannot begin to predict.

Tarfia Faizullah (Very Old Barton 100): In a letter to Erich Einhorn, Paul Celan wrote, “Everything is near and unforgotten.” My hope is that these two poems honor both the terror and beauty of Celan’s statement by allowing the past to rise into the present, even at a dinner party, even upon waking. One of the many things that I find incredible about language is that it can collapse the boundaries between time and space using metaphor, juxtaposition, even point of view, as these poems attempt to do. “Nocturne: Dinner Party” and “Aubade: Nightmare Pastoral” further owe a debt to graduate school for necessitating so many late nights and early mornings: the only times I was able to write alone and in silence.

Robert Glick (Knob Creek): “How to Wash” began as a collaboration with Camie Schaefer in which the text was printed directly onto a dress. I was fascinated by how our seemingly simple desire to keep our clothes spotless intersected with a set of cleaning instructions that implied a purity of body, a mode of scrubbing off everything that touched us. This return to Eden, this wipe of memory and experience led me to bleed poetic subject into object (as if they ever were separate entities) and to let incomplete metaphors spin out of control. In retrospect, I see the poem as perhaps an allegory of the body, as an expression of a semiplayful anxiety about how helpless we are in controlling how exterior forces mark us.

Mary Kaiser (Booker’s): These poems come from a sequence of dramatic monologues set at the nineteenth-century Shaker village at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. When I spent a few days in one of the old dwelling-houses in 2007, I became fascinated with the play of light through the windows, with reflections and shadows in my walks through the village. As a result, “seeing things,” both real and imaginary, became one of the motifs in the collection. The speaker in “She Considers the Transmigration of Souls” is a young woman from Mississippi, formerly a spiritualist medium. She sees strange reflections in some upper-storey windows one early evening, as I did on my early-winter visit, and converts them into a speculation on the ancient Roman belief in transmigration of souls, where dead souls enter the bodies of newborn babies.  The second speaker is a Shaker carpenter who finds visionary experiences in his daily life as he meditates at his lathe on “turning” in “At the Lathe, He Considers a Text,” watches the shifting light of early morning in “He Dreams a Mother,” and even as he encounters the memory loss and confusion of old age in “He Walks the Long Ditch.”

Adam A. Wilcox (Van Winkle Family Reserve Rye): My general way of working is to take a moment of sensed experience or memory as a basis and to jump off from it, allowing connection and disconnection to build what I hope are meanings that you can feel when you bring your own experience to the party. I do this jumping in “Wireless,” but from the starting point of an imagined dramatic scene, which is unusual in my work. I’m not trying to create theater so much, but rather to evoke the way what travels across the air between the characters might make the woman feel. On a formal level, I am often compulsively syllabic. This poem is not so strict, but I hope the form feels somewhat constricting. The hint of me is in the licorice.

Valerie Wohlfeld (Four Roses OBSQ Barrel Strength): For at least the last decade, I have been writing almost exclusively in such forms as the sonnet, villanelle, rondel, and ghazal. I use form the way a cobbler chooses a last to shape the shoe; one pounds the nails, stretches the leather, and stitches the sole in an attempt to marry style and function. Even though “Open Water” arises from a specific, unique emotion that I have experienced, I cannot write autobiographically without the infusion of a fictive element. Fact and fiction intertwine in my work like the light and shadowed swirls in the veins of a marbled stone, creating, I hope, a mystery of what is true and what is imagined.

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Posted in From our Contributors |

Collaborative Feature—Soapbox and CR!

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

We’re trying something new and different—a collaboration with the amazing online magazine Soapbox.

Soapbox tells the new Cincinnati story—a narrative of creative people and businesses, new development, cool places to live, and the best places to work and play. And each month, Cincinnati Review will contribute some of the best lit—poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—in the country. The full text of a poem or story will run in Soapbox, and we at Cincinnati Review will post  on our blog “bonus material” in the form of comments from the writer and our staff, including the editor who accepted the piece for publication.

Our first collaboration features a poem that appeared in issue 8.1: “For I Will Consider” by Terese Coe. If you don’t have a copy on hand, you can read it in Soapbox by clicking here. Look for our next feature—a fiction selection—in February!

Terese Coe’s poems and translations have recently appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Poetry, Agenda, New American Writing, Orbis, and Cyphers, among numerous others, and will soon appear in Alaska Quarterly Review and The Connecticut Review. Her first collection of poems, The Everyday Uncommon, won a Word Press publication prize and was published in 2005.

Terese Coe: Normally I don’t care to track how my poems were written, but this case is different. It came to me suddenly after rereading Christopher Smart. The lines flew off my pen. There were more than twice as many as now. At first it was a straight intuitive/objective exploration of the individual, a loading of facts and now and then an attempt at reasoning them out. Smart’s “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry” is partially a search for cause and effect, as in the Psalms, but for me that search emerged more clearly in the writing process. I put together a list of one cause that lead to another—as if it could make sense, or explicate existence. But nothing can make sense of existence. Nothing can make sense of the outlandish crevasse between life and death.

Some months later I began trying to reorder the lines, cutting whatever seemed out of place and trying different permutations. I did not add; I simply cut. I knew the poem needed gravitas. I wanted irony only at the end.

It is a story told in the form of litany, or dialogue with oneself, which makes it essentially dramatic. I find the lines are more open to variation in performance than I had expected, and that is characteristic of drama. The meaning varies according to vocal inflection, tone, and mood variations, like dialogue. Of course, it is also a dramatic monologue in which the lines have immediacy and flexibility. And the poem is peculiar in that it doesn’t seem to matter that most of the lines are quite unlike contemporary dramatic dialogue. Smart’s style adds something enigmatic to the subject/protagonist, and that produces a counterpoint to his evident interest in nature and the natural.

Lisa Ampleman, Assistant Editor: Although the long lines and anaphora of Coe’s poem may call up Walt Whitman’s ghost for some readers, “For I Will Consider” is more directly indebted to Christopher Smart, an eighteenth-century writer best known for “his reckless drinking and spending habits” and “religious mania” (as the Academy of American Poets puts it)—and for writing a poem celebrating his cat, Jeoffry.

That poem (link: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15798), from Jubilate Agno, captures the cat-ness of the cat as he “sharpens his paws by wood” and “can catch the cork and toss it again.” This cat, however, also is “hated by the hypocrite and miser” and “knows that God is his Saviour”—atypical feline traits.

As we read Coe’s poem, we think about how Shay seems cat-like: fishing is his way of nourishment, he needs little to survive, and he sleeps on the carpet and is pleased.  However, he is also one with his dog and tinkers with the Kawasaki—things Jeoffry would be unlikely to enjoy.

Matt McBride, Associate Editor: I like to think of poems as perpetual motion machines, little Rube Goldberg devices of language that accomplish the impossible—they add up to more than the sum of their parts; they make something out of nothing. The most engaging thing, for me, about Terese Coe’s poem is the way it generates itself, the way it pushes itself along by its own momentum.

Coe does this through the use of repetition. By beginning each line with “For,” Coe sets us up for a poem that will be nothing more than a list with each object weighted equally. However, we quickly see that is not the case. Repetition inherently lends import. This import, though, can quickly become hollow, a weight without substance (see for example every political slogan ever). Coe prevents this by subtly raising the stakes as the poem progresses, matching the poem’s content with the power generated by the repetition, so the “For at the first glance of a girl in his direction he worships dutifully” becomes, a few lines later, “For thirdly he works not upon relationship but extends himself quietly.” The “For fishing is his way of nourishment” becomes “For the sea is in him” in the next line.

And this is what makes this piece so beautiful for me, the way it accrues. Coe’s poem is like snow, or the Dirty Harry films. Any single discrete part of the larger whole is not in itself amazing, but somehow these seemingly unimpressive parts (though many of the individual lines do have a kind of beauty in their sentiment and expression) add up to a value larger than the constituent elements.

Don Bogen, Poetry Editor: Back in Issue 4.1 (Winter 2007), we published Terese Coe’s “Boy Hustler”—a smart, tough sonnet spoken by the title character—and I was delighted to have another rich and energetic piece of work for the latest issue. Except for the fact that they are both young men, the figures the two poems present have little in common.  The forms of the poems are different as well, but in both cases Coe really livens up the conventions. Those lines about the cat Jeoffry from Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno are among my all-time favorites, and (full disclosure) we’ve had a cat in our household for many years now, so I was skeptical at first that Shay could live up to his illustrious feline predecessor. But, as Lisa mentioned, the young man has a certain cat-like mixture of grace and separation from the world that is immediately appealing.

Coe’s variations in pace, tone, focus, and line length keep the poem and the figure at its center constantly shifting and developing. I suppose one key challenge in a “perpetual motion machine” of this sort (to use Matt’s term) is how you get it to stop.  Coe’s last line is a quick jolt off in a new direction that caps the poem perfectly. What moves me most in the poem, though, is the depth of characterization embodied in the details—Shay’s take on girls, on the outdoors, on needs in general, and, my favorite, on self-defense: “For when attacked, he will grab the other’s wrists and hold them tightly rather than fight. / For I have seen this twice and was glad of it.” The observation is sharp, the character distinct, and the feelings of both mother and son rendered brilliantly.

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Posted in Features, From our Contributors, Soapbox and CR, Why We Like It |

Bonus Material from Issue 8.1

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

Any day now, we’re going to receive a number of large, ridiculously heavy boxes full of Issue 8.2. As we wait, we’re doing core-strengthening exercises and reminding ourselves to lift with our legs. Managing editor Nicola Mason leads us in calisthenics to start each day, periodically shouting: “Knees higher! Come on, people, an ampersand has better form than you!” We’re also checking every entry in the subscriber database and periodically sandpapering our fingerpads to encourage calluses. Fun Fact: the manila-envelope papercut rates a 10 on our papercut scale (whereas 60 lb. white offset comes in a weak 6) and surprisingly produces a larger quantity of the red stuff than the occasional, accidental letter-opener incident.

Before we shed blood to bring you great lit, though, we want to look back wistfully at a strong issue, 8.1. For one last time, we take a closer look at what some contributors had to say about their pieces in that issue. In fact, we’ve waxed enthusiastic on all three of these pieces in our “Why We Like It” feature!

Steve Amick: Initially, I was asked by the writers Keith Taylor and Laura Kasischke to write a contemporary Michigan “ghost story” for an anthology they were editing for Wayne State University Press—Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them. But I was more interested in doing something that could also be explained as just a psychological glitch. Harry Bennett was very much real and lived (before I was born) in a “castle” about a mile from the house where I grew up. Yet I had no idea, till I did much more research than I probably needed (I even spoke to an elderly woman who babysat for his kids), that he was born in Ann Arbor and had what one might consider fairly “enlightened” influences in his early years. The layers made him infinitely more interesting to me, and I am now working on expanding “Not Even Lions and Tigers” into a short novel. As a villain, his union busting is of course incredibly timely today. Michigan’s new infamously anti-union governor even lives in a high-security mansion in the very same small township as Bennett’s Castle.

CR volunteer Brian Trapp’s take on “Not Even Lions and Tigers”

Julie Funderburk: These two poems, “Landscape of the Young” and “Landscape of the Careful,” belong to a series of landscape poems. I was happy to discover this structure, because it enabled me to embed narratives, widen the poems’ sense of relevance, and speak authoritatively through imagery, which is perhaps what I seek to ultimately do when I write poetry. I found the titles could give the poems immediate purpose. The structure even became an opportunity to breathe new life into some temporarily abandoned drafts that did not function well as more straightforward narratives. Once I had the right abstraction in the title, the hard part was done, and I found much pleasure in crafting the images.

Associate Editor Matt McBride’s take on “Landscape of the Young”

Laura Eve Engel: I have a terrible memory, but I recently discovered that if you ask me about where I was when I wrote what draft of which poem, I can tell you exactly. The first line of “Reciprocity” arrived in its entirety as I was falling asleep, so I got out of bed and typed it. I do this a lot, but I get distracted or choose sleep instead, and the lines end up lost in a graveyard of untitled documents. Maybe it’s the way this particular line began with “and” that made me want to follow it somewhere; all I know is this time I stayed up until I’d done something I liked with it. I think I’d just read Chelsea Minnis’s Poemland, which has, if I remember rightly, many sweet drinks. It’s likely I’d been realizing again, too late, that I was disappointed in something.

CR volunteers Joe Dargue and Ruth Williams’s takes on Reciprocity

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Posted in From our Contributors |

Bonus Material: Grumbling, Kalscheur, Wagner

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

You know how Joyce said that if Dublin burned to rubble, you could use Ulysses to rebuild it? Well, after Tuesday’s fine intro, we (some of us, anyway) have decided to make this blog, in part, the Ulysses of Joe Dargue. (But don’t burn to rubble, Joe!) Ten more facts about him:

1. Like most of us, he tries to match his socks.

2. He can run the 100 in about 13 seconds. (Quite above average!)

3. When a virus invades your network, he will hunt it down and delete it in all its nefarious forms. Then, a few weeks later, he will call that virus’s mother and calmly explain why what he did was necessary.

4. At a fancy restaurant, he will often order two appetizers in lieu of an entree, for variety’s sake and because he can’t help choosing entrees mostly for their sides.

5. He has seen the future and is far too modest to admit that it is himself.

6. When CEO Reed Hastings was thinking about raising the rates for Netflix subscribers, the first person he called for advice was Joe. But Joe was snorkeling off the coast of Guam, and his voice mail was already full of messages—from Michael Bloomberg, who just keeps leaving messages until you call him back.

7. If you see Joe in a hat, that hat will be a trilby.

8. “Joe” is short for “Jocephus,” which itself is a transliteration of “Joseph.”

9. He is a superb judge of fiction and poetry, though he loves all nonfiction indiscriminately.

10. His favorite American Idol judge is Randy.

And now, without further ado, three comments from contributors to Issue 8.1.

Megan Grumbling: The poem “Kept” began with a small but curious discovery I made about an old friend—a guy about whom I thought I knew everything—when he showed me a certain keepsake in a jar. Seeing his souvenir, and realizing the hold it had on him, I found that something had shifted ever so slightly in my understanding of him: It was as if a new celestial object had been introduced into the psychic universe between us—a tiny object, but one which nevertheless had its own gravitational field. The encounter got me thinking about the things we hold to, their hold on us, and the increasingly complicated orbital shenanigans that develop as they accumulate. I wrote the poem as a sonnet, but in deference to unexpected astronomical pushes and pulls, I let the line breaks depart from the form’s conventions, hoping to convey just the slightest shift in gravity.

Josh Kalscheur: On “Advisement”: There was an ex-pat I knew when I lived in Micronesia who always talked about the various opportunities that could be had in the U.S. for young Micronesian guys (since they have work rights in the U.S.). He told stories about Micronesians he knew in the 1980s who he thought could’ve starred in old Westerns as American Indians because of their hair and skin tone. He said they could wash windows on high-rise apartments or do trapeze in a circus because of their experience climbing coconut trees. The stories were often long and ridiculous, and sometimes ignorant as far as I was concerned. This poem is an exploration of his voice (as he is the speaker), in both its rhythm and its wild, sometimes troubled reasoning and imagination.

Jeanne Wagner: Before I wrote “Ovid” I’d been reading Ted Hughes’s translation “Tales from Ovid: 24 Passages from the Metamorphoses.” At the same time, an old friend of mine, in the last stage of a debilitating disease, believed that he’d spent his whole life wearing someone else’s body. I wanted to write a poem that celebrated the essentially transformative nature of the body itself.

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Posted in From our Contributors |

“Reciprocity”: Why We Like It

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

In the CR office, we get to know our volunteers pretty well. There are the weekly meetings, of course, and also we require every volunteer to put in office hours. This is largely so there’s someone for Matt M. to wrestle; someone who’ll salivate when Lisa heats up her leftovers from home; someone to act blinded when Becky walks in wearing her blaze-yellow coat; someone to say, “I’m a peach person, myself,” when Matt O. polls the office on which fruits are favored, which frowned upon; and someone to scribble notes when Nicola holds forth from her doorway on the best way to get a tick to disengage so the mouth parts don’t get trapped in your epidermis and cause a nasty local infection at least and at worst transmit some icky ticky disease (she grew up in the woods; she also fed a lot of chickens, but that’s a post for another day).

At any rate, volunteer Joe Dargue was, at first, a bit of a cipher. A quiet type. Tall, but not too tall. Slender, but not excessively so. Mysterious and blond at once. He wrestled, salivated, went blind on cue, and scribbled raptly as required—all with the genial air of a tolerant go-along guy. Then . . . one day . . . Joe said no. He said it pleasantly, quietly, but with an unmistakable undertone of steel. Joe’s no was a no in its very essence. Negativity in its purest form. We all recognized it. Matt M. stopped practicing head-locks, Lisa stopped blowing on her spoonful of delicious homemade chili, Becky stopped twirling around in her brightly fashionable coat, Matt O. stopped pondering his pear, and Nicola . . . Nicola realized something. She realized that you can ask Joe to write a few paragraphs about a poem, no problem a-tall, but you can’t ask him to do data entry.

Joseph Dargue: Every once in a while, you’ll stumble across a poem that makes your heart beat faster, your lungs ache. Laura Eve Engel’s “Reciprocity” does just that. In fact, the poem anticipates and encourages this kind of visceral reaction in its fragmentary description of the dissolution of a relationship. This is the reciprocity not of building but of breakdown.

The momentum of the poem is realized through the simple power of anaphora and rhetorical questions, which also create a sense of endlessness and circularity (lacking question marks, the lines carry a foregone feeling of futility). Every line begins with “And” and contains the twice repeated “who”: the partners in the poem inflicting and experiencing reciprocal and escalating kinds of pain on each other. With the termination of each line, a new, slightly more unsettling aspect of their entanglement is brought to bear. We move from “who shields who from the shadow’s big tree” to “who sends who to the bottom of a sweet drink” in a mere ten lines. This is not a poem of compromise; it’s downhill all the way.

At the end of the poem, a barrage of repetition blurs the distinction between the unhappy lovers. We, nor the speaker for that matter, can tell where one ends and the other begins. The reciprocity has been reduced to tears and confusion. The last line—”who cries for who and who cries for who”—is wrenching to say the least.

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Posted in Why We Like It |

Bonus Material: Adams, Rzicznek, Debus (and introducing O’Keefe)

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

By now followers of our blog have been privy to posts by our new sunny-on-the-surface-yet-with-dark-hidden-depths staffers Becky Adnot-Haynes and Lisa Ampleman (by day, they read submissions; by night, they prowl the city, scrawling HYPERCORRECTION MUST DIE in scarlet lipstick on the windows of citizenry who have been heard to say, in the course of a casual conversation, the maddeningly WRONG phrase “between you and I”).

Our other new staff member, Matt O’Keefe, is a crusader of a different stripe. Often we’ll catch him muttering under his breath about his hero George Washington, how pres numero uno is underappreciated, the poster child for poor dental hygiene, unfairly pictured with dinghys or cherry saplings when he’s about SO MUCH MORE. “Why are people always going on and on about la-dee-dah Jefferson,” Matt will complain while making the mindlessly-yapping-mouth gesture with his hand, “when Washington was totally the bomb dot com!” We have to keep him from inserting facts about GW into the manuscripts he edits, or grading down submissions for not mentioning the Great Man. But here at CR, we accept that people are not perfect, and we try to accommodate each other’s harmless little foibles. When Matt said he wanted to write something for the blog, we knew what was coming, but he did single-handedly engineer our new online submissions program, so we were willing to cut him some slack.

Matt O’Keefe: Last weekend I went with my family and some friends to Gorman Heritage Farm just north of town to rustle some hay and maybe eat a cinnamon donut. While there we watched a man shovel manure balls into a wheelbarrow while the horse who made the balls looked on. It was a glistening chestnut animal with a long, noble head, of which I remarked to my friend, “Imagine waking up with that in your bed.” But guess what, it wasn’t a horse; it was a mule. I never knew a mule could be so beautiful. The guy with the shovel told me that George Washington first brought mules to North America and improved them with his meticulous experimental breeding. A mule is a combination of a female horse and a male donkey; if you reverse the genders, what you get is called a hinny. Famously, both mules and hinnies, having a number of chromosomes (63) indivisible by 2, cannot reproduce with other mules and/or hinnies, though sometimes a male horse or donkey will make a female mule or hinny pregnant.

All this is to say that horses, not mules or hinnies, feature prominently in the current issue’s poems by the below-listed contributors. And, no, that’s not a typo, Ben Debus’s poem is not actually titled “The Abandoned Horse at 824 Sleepy Hollow Road.” I won’t give away the equine angle except to say it has something to do with the metaphor he mentions.

Lavonne J. Adams: I have been fascinated for years with matters of depth perception, as if I were a painter and everything around me part of a still life. On the particular Saturday when I wrote “A Certain Perspective,” the Preakness was about to begin. The announcer’s small talk about the track caught my ear, especially the words “optical illusion.” The scene at the track and my own physical reality began to merge. But I was completely surprised by the poem’s last line, which I think is always a pleasure for a writer—that acknowledgment that the subconscious has its own agenda, and sometimes we must allow it to set the pace.

F. Daniel Rzicznek: I wrote “Horses” in the span of an afternoon, the images flying one after another onto the page. I see this poem as both a tribute to the beasts that have labored for thousands of years to build our civilizations and as a warning that the universe eventually swallows all. As Americans, our history surrounds us, and one of the things I’ve been interested in lately is giving a voice to landscape itself and inventing memories for the earth. I tried to allow history to shade certain parts of the poem as well. How often we forget that our lives are built on loss.

Ben Debus: “The Abandoned House at 824 Sleepy Hollow Road” is one of a group about abandoned houses. In part, it has to do with a concern about the foreclosure crisis. It makes me wonder where the people who leave their houses go; and (as in this one) what happens to a house untended, unlived in. This one burns. The ways that a house can fall apart are astounding. That we put so much into houses, our things, time, hopes: The metaphor is, in one way at least, an attempt to express the aliveness we grant to houses.

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Posted in From our Contributors |

Bonus Material: Pierce, Chitwood, Cohen

Friday, September 16th, 2011

In their waxing and waning, seasons are like radio signals, and as we climbed toward our McMicken Hall office this morning, the forty-nine-degree air was a cold static on our naked forearms, calves, and flip-floppeted feet. People smug in their jeans and windbreakers were giving us impertinent looks. Once inside, we ransacked the CR’s desk drawers and file cabinets, hoping for a left-behind sweatshirt nothing had nested in, but unfortunately all the left-behind sweatshirts had been nested in—by mice, spiders, Lit PhDs, etc.

Then we turned up these three comments from contributors talking about poems in the current issue, and though we didn’t feel any less underdressed, we realized there are other ways of making do when the temp. starts to drop for good.

Catherine Pierce: When I was younger, I spent many long summer days imagining the life I would someday live. Those daydreams were often the best parts of my days, because the experiences I imagined having were, I was sure, much richer and more exotic than anything I could experience at home (I will be a world traveler and learn seven languages! No, I will live in a cabin without electricity and spend my days hiking unforgiving terrain! No, I will somehow develop artistic talent and be a painter!). There’s a particular rush that accompanies this type of wide-open-future imagining, and in “Dear Self I Might Have Been” I wanted to explore what might happen if that rush of almost, of will be, of soon, were pursued obsessively and indefinitely.

Michael Chitwood: I went to a scout camp on a small lake for several summers as a kid. During the day, the dock area was all shout and shove, splash and knock; the oars thunking in the oar locks. It was good ruckus. But I would wander back to the dock in the late evening when all the gear had been stowed. It was quiet, but you could still feel the potential energy of the place. The memory of that was how the poem got started, and, as with many of my poems, I had no idea where it would go from there. “At the Dock at Dusk” was a surprise for me. I consider it as a good sign when language takes its own turn.

Bruce Cohen: For what seemed like a hundred years, going to the beach was work: eagle-eyeing my three boys to make sure nobody drowned, or consumed too much sand, or stood too close to the edge of the gangplank of breakers, or sliced their feet on barnacles, or buried each other alive. . . . Of course, in this exhausting chaos of my own ineptitude I couldn’t be too concerned with the way they disrupted the enjoyment of other families. On those days, all I ever daydreamed about was one relaxing afternoon where I could simply read and snooze and not be bothered. And that, in fact, happened: All of a sudden the boys were grown and had no interest in going to the beach with us, but I found myself watching strangers’ children, walking out to the breakers myself, contemplating the large issues of life, death, generational disappointments, evolution—what is, in fact, missing from our lives. And in composing “Beach Day,” I know I was thinking about that Philip Larkin poem about going to the beach, and that resigned sadness and sense of loss and never-coming-back seemed to infiltrate my poem as well.

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Posted in From our Contributors |

“Not Even Lions and Tigers”: Why We Like It

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

CR volunteer Brian Trapp is haunted. If you see him from a distance, you might think the noxious-looking cloud wafting behind him is indicative of a Pigpen-like stench, but really Brian smells okay (a bit like cashews, actually). The emanations trailing him like a comet’s gaseous tail are, in fact, [booming voice here] HIS DEMONS. Because he leads a cursed existence, we feel sorry for the guy, which is why we overlook it when Brian mutters darkly over his shoulder, burns the hair off his arm with his lighter, or drinks so much at parties that he loses skin tone.

Considering his plague-o-phantasms, it’s no surprise that when Brian picked a piece from our current issue to write on for the blog, he chose Steve Amick’s “Not Even Lions and Tigers,” a ghost story rooted in the actual and factual—with a throng of done-wrong souls that makes Brian’s own spectral assemblage seem like so many annoying uncles.

Brian Trapp: The premise of “Not Even Lions and Tigers” is the kind that I enjoy most: The seemingly fantastic is only a slight exaggeration from the absurd truth. Steve Amick’s main character and narrator, Harry Bennett, was a real-life executive of the Ford Motor Company. A former boxer, sailor, and all around street-tough, Bennett was “discovered” at a bar fight and eventually put in charge of the Ford Service Department, a clandestine and violent organization (part mob, part CIA) entrusted with busting unions and “settling” labor disputes, if you know what I mean. The man had a lot of enemies and was more than a little paranoid. He built immense fortifications dubbed “The Lodge” and “The Castle,” complete with dynamited moats, secret passageways, caches of arms and ammunition, escape routes, and, yes, lions and tigers.

Harry Bennett's Castle

While anyone can learn these things about Harry Bennett, Steve Amick takes the historical details and gives us back something even stranger and more wonderful. Told in a disarming free-indirect style, the story begins with Bennett convinced “his hunting lodge now had a full-blown infestation of haints.” He’s not sure who these ghosts are, but suspects that they’re some of the union agitators he’s snuffed out around the property. He flees from one stronghold to the other, but the haints follow. In comic escalation, Bennett squirms, going to greater lengths to disavow responsibility.

One of many moments that made me laugh out loud occurs as Bennett takes a bath to unwind. He hears one of the haints say, “Sou-oopp . . . !” Bennett thinks: “No one was turning up the boil on Harry Herbert Bennett, thank you very much. He would not be ingredients. Not today.” The story is full of moments like this. Amick renders Bennett as comic and pathetic without demeaning him, a skillful balancing act. In one poignant moment, Bennett recounts his “big break” meeting Henry Ford and teeters into self-pity, thinking of his younger self: “Before he knows it, it’s his life and maybe he’s kind of lost his way.”

With its well-crafted unreliable narrator, the story treads the line between paranoia and the paranormal, as any good ghost story should. I won’t be “that guy” who ruins the ending for everyone who hasn’t read it, but as Bennett makes his final dash, Amick ends with these fantastic lines: “He wished there wasn’t a moon tonight. Big bare bulb of a moon, looking down at him like that. Big know-it-all moon.” Bennett can’t hide, and neither can we.

Through Bennett, Amick shows how our conscience can manifest in mysterious ways. The piece is political without being overbearing or reductive, and in blending fact and fiction, it demonstrates that truth is not stranger than fiction, but equally strange.

In this spirit, after you finish reading this story, I recommend a family field trip to the outskirts of Farwell and Ann Arbor, where (clutching your Cincinnati Review) you can view both the Lodge and the Castle and re-enact Bennett’s flight from the “haints.” I’m slated to go at the end of August. Maybe I’ll see you there.

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Posted in Uncategorized, Why We Like It |

Bonus Material: Sweeney, Beebe, Russ

Thursday, July 28th, 2011

More from our contributors on their work in our current issue—volume 8, number 1. We’re struck by how these three poets approach dailiness. Through lavish contemplation of common objects, events, or experiences, they enliven and enrich what often falls under our radar.

Chad Sweeney: I’ve written a series of poems with place names for titles in which the narrator personifies some aspect of that place, including Istanbul, Michigan, Bolivia, Chicago, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Paris, California. The poem “Los Angeles” imagines a poet (or someone who once thought of himself as a poet) caught in commuter traffic on the way to his commercial job in Los Angeles. I haven’t seen much poetry written in this landscape, the commuter’s highway, yet it is the daily reality for so many people living in the outer rings of urban sprawl. I think one of poetry’s challenges is to claim the “unpoetic” for its materials: elevator, shopping mall, office space, fax machine, and parking lot. I wrote the poem while living in Michigan, yet ironically I’ll be navigating that freeway sprawl east of Los Angeles when I begin teaching at Cal State, San Bernardino, in the fall of 2011.

Cindy Beebe: During a poetry workshop I attended a few years ago, I was privileged to hear B. H. Fairchild speak of “the too-muchness of the world” and how it must be given voice. I couldn’t agree more. Always, and everywhere, especially in mundane places, I find there is something a bit “too much” to ignore, some fact or aspect that endears, or surprises, or in some way begs my attention—for example, the time my father pulled me aside and declared that my aunt had a naked man in her garage. I knew immediately that a poem, which eventually became “My Aunt Has a Naked Man in Her Garage,” was coming.

Don Russ: I’ve come to think that anything looked at closely enough becomes everything—or at least begins to reveal kinship with everything—in my world.  Both “Girl with Gerbil” and “Reunion” grew out of autobiographical material I’d earlier recorded in notebooks. When at some point I sat down to think and to try to make them into a poem, each episode eventually began to breathe my deepest preoccupations: childhood and identity, relationships, questions about the very nature of reality and its relationship to human perception and creativity. To some degree they both became poems about art, about poetry itself.

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Posted in From our Contributors |

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