Posts Tagged ‘Laura Eve Engel’

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

Tags: , , , , , ,
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.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Why We Like It |

Accomplished Contributors

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

A slew of good news for our talented contributors!

Fellowship News:

Ari Banias (5.1) has been awarded a fellowship in poetry to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Sarah Rose Nordgren (6.1) will be a second-year fellow.

Laura Eve Engel (8.1) is the 2011-12 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a 2011 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship finalist. (Read an appreciation of Engel’s poem  from issue 8.1 here.)

Dana Koster (7.1) and Mira Rosenthal (5.2) are Stegner Fellows in poetry this year. (Read an appreciation of Koster’s poem from Issue 7.1 and her description of that poem.)

Book News:

Stephen Haven (5.1) won the 2010 American Poetry Prize from New American Press for his book The Last Sacred Place in North America, chosen by T. R. Hummer.

Ted Sanders (5.2) won the Bakeless Literary Publication Prize for fiction for his novel, No Animals We Could Name.

Jane Springer (3.2, 6.2) won the 2011 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books for her book Murder Ballad. The title poem (a Pushcart Prize winner!) appeared in Issue 6.2, and you can read an interview with Jane here.

Chase Twichell (6.2) won the Balcones Poetry Prize for her book Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been (Copper Canyon Press).

Congratulations to all!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Literary News |

“Reciprocity”: Why We Like It

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

It’s not unusual for poet Ruth Williams to disappear on occasion. These absences are often preceded by some sort cryptic comment from Ruth, like “I have, each year, lived past the day I will die.” Then, a week or so later, she’ll return, clutching a pile dried leaves on which she’s jotted existential musings using a sharp stick and caterpillar blood. So when Ruth came into the office to grab a copy of issue 8.1 and muttered, “How could one ever hope to have congress with another,” we realized we may not see her for a bit. Though we still haven’t tracked down Ruth, we have been finding around our building an assortment of leaves with messages scrawled in various fluids—some identifiable as the products of congress, which makes us optimistic about Ruth’s return. The following is a transcription of what we’ve collected (in sealed plastic baggies) so far:

Ruth Williams: I was walking yesterday, and I heard an owl in a nearby tree. It was a contradictory sound: at once specific, a direct “who, who,” yet otherworldly, coming from an indistinct somewhere, nowhere place. Maybe there was still an echo in my head when I read Laura Eve Engel’s poem “Reciprocity,” because its unique use of “who” jumped out to me immediately. As I read the intriguing first line, “And who bites who for a living,” that earlier “who” kept ricocheting delightfully around my head.

In the poem, Engel makes deft use of a repeated structure, each line starting with an “And who” statement that describes the reciprocity, often strange and surreal, that exists between the two whos in the poem. Sometimes the two are in happy concert, “And who skims the scrape off whose knee,” but most times, not, “And who sends who to the bottom of a sweet drink.” Of course, each of these descriptions might also be read as a rhetorical question, one who hoping to make the other own up to his or her actions: “And who shames who into yes-making.”  Who, indeed?

The repetition makes us consider how we assign blame to the others in our lives, failing to reach reciprocity. In essence, Engel wittily captures the push-and-pull at the heart of all relationships. In the last line, the poem comes to a neat close: “And who cries for who and who cries for who.”  While this could be a description of a tender reciprocity, an empathetic moment between the whos, it could also be a final questioning of the relationship itself. Engel leaves it up to the reader to decide which, choosing instead to end with the sound of “who” ringing in our ears.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Why We Like It |