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Zona Colonial

May 17, 2012 by JMT
Categories: NER Digital

Nicolas de Fer, 1723 Map of Hispaniola, Brown University (via Wikimedia)

A Circular View | By Hoyt Rogers

Hoyt Rogers

En route to Hispaniola, you fly over smaller islands that gleam like scraps of tin, scattered on the ocean. The pieces weld together in the light, as though the fragments of your life had found their wholeness. The approach to Santo Domingo from the airport completes the mending. The sea unrolls a patchwork of blue and green, from midnight to pale aqua. In pockets where no barriers dull their force, waves surge against the low escarpment. From blowholes in the rock, columns of foam geyser up, falling back in rags of mist. As you round a bend, you catch sight of the Zona Colonial on the opposite shore of the river. The city dozes like a dwarf with legs of coral-stone: its ancient quarter wedged along the Rio Ozama, its long torso of suburbs sprawling against the hills. Mountains mass behind them to the west, fading into a haze as dense as fog; to the north, palm-oil groves and pineapple-fields braid the horizon.

After you settle in, you go for a walk in the “Zone.” Even if you’ve never been here, you’ve always lived in this place. Why else would everyone greet you with Hola! or Que tal? Grins slant across a crazy quilt of faces that seem to reflect the entire world. You feel like you’ve strolled past these same buildings for decades—with their whorled facades of blue faded to gray, ochre bleached to white. They’ve been fissured and stained by centuries of torrid suns, hurricane winds, and hell-bent rains; ferns sprout from cracks in the half-ruined roofs. Here and there, a cast-iron balcony dangles, tipsy as the locals on the streets below. Pocket grocery stores spill from crooked passageways, clogging the sidewalks; their formica counters double as makeshift bars, where the neighbors shout jokes to the blare of Caribbean tunes. Salsa, son, bachata, merengue—all give their kick to a planter’s punch of sound.

Leaving the crowded lanes behind you, you enter Duarte Park, the oldest square in the Americas. Among the stumpy colonial buildings you notice a Belle Epoque extravaganza, topped by a high round tower. A Dominican poet you’ve just met tells you he’s renting that crazy turret, though he owns a house down the street. He calls it his “study,” but all he does up there is dream away the hours. Would you like to see the view? Be my guest. He yanks at a door in the wedding-cake façade and hands you a worn, silver key. You step inside, and he goes back to his friends. It takes a while for your eyes to adjust to the dimness. You climb flights of stairs that angle off oddly, as in a Piranesi print. Finally you reach a cramped landing:  a turn of the key, and you stand in a circular room. Moonlight seeps through a ring of portholes; you open one of the windows and lean out.

Beyond the tree-lined plaza, the Caribbean glimmers darkly, taut as a ribbon of navy-blue foil. A yellow quarter-moon has just popped up, and now it floats on an even keel like a primitive boat. You’re reminded of the three simple caravels, from half a millennium ago. At this height, the noise from the bars subsides to a muffled surf. Before you slumbers a toy-size Rome, drowned in bougainvillea and trumpet-vines. You anticipate the arches and vaulted naves you’ll see tomorrow; but also the wooden shacks, stuffed with plastic flowers. All you have to do is pause at a threshold, and someone will invite you in. Are you back here on a visit? Or did you never leave?

*

Hoyt Rogers’s most recent translation, Second Simplicity—a collection of verse and prose by Yves Bonnefoy from the past two decades—was published by Yale University Press. NER Digital is an original writing series for the web.

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Wreckage

May 16, 2012 by JMT
Categories: NER Recommends

Home Burial

In a rare long review of a book of poetry, Jeff Gordinier praises Michael McGriff’s second book, Home Burial, in the NYTBR:

Wreckage is everywhere in these poems…He’s plunging into the depths of some underground waterway in the American psyche — what’s happening to the environment, what’s happening to jobs, what’s happening to families — and rising to the surface to show us the debris.

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Miss Congeniality

May 15, 2012 by JMT
Categories: NER Classics

Space in Chains

Laura Kasischke’s poem “Miss Congeniality” appeared in NER 26.4:

There’s a name given
after your death
and a name you must answer to while you’re alive.

Like flowers, my friends—nodding, nodding. My
enemies, like space, drifting
away. They

praised my face, my enunciation, and the power
I freely relinquished, and the fires
burning in the basements

of my churches,
and the pendulums swinging
above my towers.

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NER poets at From the Fishhouse

May 14, 2012 by JMT
Categories: NER Community

The Mansion of Happiness

From the Fishouse, a site for audio recordings of poetry, features recordings of several poems originally published in NER, including Monica Ferrell’s “The Fire of Despair” (23.3), Patrick Phillips’s “What Happens” (27.3), and Robin Ekiss’s “Contemplating Quiet” (NER 29.2):

To contemplate quiet,
start with the first marriage
of sound and image:

seventeen seconds of film
in which two men are dancing
to the wheedling strains of a violin.

["Contemplating Quiet" audio] ["The Fire of Despair" audio] ["What Happens" audio]

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Memphremagog

May 10, 2012 by JMT
Categories: NER Digital

On Howard Frank Mosher | By Castle Freeman, Jr.

Mosher's Disappearances

This year marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Disappearances, a novel by Howard Frank Mosher. Readers have found in this book a view of rural Vermont that is unsurpassed for originality, color, and life. It is a strange, phantasmagorical work, but its central story is pretty straightforward. In the year 1932, during Prohibition, Bill Bonhomme, an eccentric hardscrabble farmer in the wild, forested northeast of Vermont, sets out with his son and brother-in-law to run a load of contraband booze from Canada, via the big lake, Memphremagog, that straddles the border. The escapade is entirely characteristic of Bill, a man who, in hard times and in a hard land, maintains a manic cheer in all things. As his son, the book’s narrator, recalls him,

My father was a man of indefatigable optimism. As a hill farmer during The Depression, Quebec Bill Bonhomme had opportunities almost daily to succumb to total despair, but he was impervious to discouragement of every kind… It made no difference to him if it was the middle of May and snowing hard with six inches of new snow in the dooryard. He would squint up through the driving flakes and say to me, ‘Wild Bill, this is the snow that takes the snow. This is the poor man’s fertilizer.’

Embarked on their adventure, the three would-be rumrunners soon find themselves pursued by a rival bootlegger called Carcajou, a nemesis-figure who is to other whiskey smugglers what Moby-Dick is to other whales. Carcajou is uncanny, fatal, scarcely human—scarcely even material. When he catches up with the Bonhommes, a climactic confrontation occurs.

In and around this story the author hangs a rich fictitious curtain of highly-colored history about the region and its people going back a couple of hundred years. Mosher invents an elaborate system of family and local mythology that plays in and out of the main narrative. He also constructs a remarkable picture of his setting, the made-up Kingdom County. Mosher imbues his dark, violent, suspenseful tale with an odd and unexpected kind of optimism or zest for life that may be the most original thing about the book.

In 1977 Howard Frank Mosher, born and raised in upstate New York, was a former high school English teacher in his mid-thirties living in northern Vermont. Disappearances was his first novel. Reviewers sometimes didn’t know quite what to make of it. Readers, however (as I recall) embraced the book immediately. Mosher’s accomplishment was to rescue Vermont both from the literary calendar artists and from the post-agrarian realists, establishing the state as a territory distinctly in and of the modern world (at least the modern world of fiction), a place, as his narrator says of Kingdom County, “full of terror, full of wonder.”

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Castle Freeman, Jr., lives in southern Vermont. He has been an occasional contributor of fiction to New England Review for many years. For more information, go to www.castlefreemanjr.com. NER Digital is an original writing series for the web.

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True Grit

May 9, 2012 by JMT
Categories: NER Recommends

At the sparkling and newly designed site of the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), Julie Cline appreciates the novels of Charles Portis while putting them in context:

It’s been suggested that Portis is or ought to be ashamed to have written True Grit, and maybe he is, but he didn’t write it, actually, not quite. He channeled an unmarried septuagenarian named Mattie Ross who reaches into her memory and conjures a vision of herself at fourteen, of the winter of 1873 when The Coward Tom Chaney murdered her father and stole his ponies and she tumbled into a snake pit and lost an arm, and she writes this “true account,” which, in pioneer days and after, was well-trod terrain, a known genre.

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What is the matter?

May 8, 2012 by JMT
Categories: NER Classics

Norman Lock

From Norman Lock’s story “The Captain is Sleeping” (NER 26.4):

 The engineers have not been seen for days. I stand outside the engine room, their freshly laundered sheets folded in my arms, and listen to them weep. I wonder at their anguish, at its depths, and shudder at the sound they make on the other side of the iron door.

“What is the matter?” I say through the door. I dare not shout. If I raise my voice so as to be heard, I am sure I will faint. My nerves have been tightly strung, like piano wire, ever since the ship began to act queerly. “What is the matter, men?” I try again, my lips close to the door, whispering into my cupped hands, having made of them a megaphone.

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Karen Rigby’s Sawtooth Poetry Prize

May 7, 2012 by JMT
Categories: NER Community

Karen Rigby's Chinoiserie

In her artist’s statement, Karen Rigby (NER 24.2) explains the title of her new book of poetry, Chinoiserie, winner of the 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize from Ahsahta Press:

Most of the time, chinoiserie is read in terms of 17th-century decorative arts, especially European attempts to draw from Chinese influences in household goods or furnishings. The book does not take a literal route, though there is certainly a bric-a-brac sensibility to the topics.

Instead, chinoiserie is interpreted loosely—as an elaboration, something imagined miles from its origins to become its own translation of landscape, texture, and pattern. The word evokes the fanciful as well as a darker potentiality, disrupting boundaries between tribute and theft, reinvention and repetition. What is “borrowed” from another art or culture (in this case, paintings, films, poetry itself . . . ) comes with expectation, but also complication. Even danger.

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Reasons for being there

May 3, 2012 by JMT
Categories: NER Digital

Automobile Blue Book Map, 1920 (via lib.utexas.edu)

Negative Capability in Kansas | By Sydney Lea

Sydney Lea

I’m just back from a week in Kansas, my reasons for being there irrelevant. I’m thinking of the farmer outside the town I was staying in, the one who said to me, “They think we’re crude and stupid because we’re poor.”

This was far from my first visit to that part of the world, and vehement judgment doesn’t seem part of the citizens’ makeup. But they may resent, however gently, the conspicuous smugness of some northeasterners, their studied diction, their oh-so-refined tastes: certain brand and food fetishisms, certain looks and styles.

On this recent trip, I met a goodly number of people who were anything but crude and stupid, and I noted how many of them were doing things that we all like to talk about: comforting the sick, feeding the hungry, caring for the misfortunate. I ate breakfast every morning, for example, at an eatery called The Gathering Place, run by a local pastor. The menu had “suggested prices” only, the restaurant’s guiding notion being that a customer paid what he or she could, precisely so that those who could pay nothing need not go hungry. In these tough times, a lot of the latter showed up each day.

When I told this or that Kansan I was a poet, I was met with curiosity and genuine interest. Mr. and Mrs. Kansas seemed a lot more willing to walk a mile in my shoes than some of my friends would care to walk in theirs.

One of the things that most attracted me to life as a poet is that lyric can see several sides of an issue, situation or personality at the same time. This is a capacity our nation could surely use. John Keats called it Negative Capability. Kansas people seem to intuit its meaning. Do we?

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Sydney Lea, founding editor of NER, is Vermont Poet Laureate. NER Digital is a continuing creative writing series for the web.

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A certain idea of America

May 1, 2012 by JMT
Categories: NER Classics

In “Theodore Roosevelt and the Masculine/Feminine Complex” (NER 26.4), Rob Hardy begins with this anecdote:

My wife and I were waiting in line to speak to our son’s math teacher at parent–teacher conferences when I noticed the poster on the wall of the middle school cafetorium:

 

Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.
—Theodore Roosevelt

I pointed out to my wife that the exhortation comes from Roosevelt’s Autobiography, where he is actually quoting someone named Squire Bill Widener of Widener’s Valley, Virginia, who was in turn quoting an anonymous bit of homespun folk wisdom. I told her I found it interesting how Roosevelt gave certain ideas like this, that were not necessarily his own, the force of a personality. He embodied a certain idea of America, I said.

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