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Behind the Byline

A Talk with Poet Dan Beachy-Quick

October 4, 2017

NER Poet Dan Beachy-Quick


Poetry Editor
Rick Barot talks with Dan Beachy-Quick, author of “Memory-Wax, Knowledge-Bird” from NER 38.3, about the nature of knowing and forgetting, and of the work we do to construct our own minds, hearts, and philosophies. 

 

 

Rick Barot: “Memory-Wax, Knowledge-Bird” is such a richly meditative poem. In the poem, you manage to generate an atmosphere that’s both intimate and spacious at the same time.  Can you talk about the origin of the poem, and perhaps describe the process of writing it?

Dan Beachy-Quick: There’s really two sources for the poem, though as I think often happens, by poem’s end those two sources revealed themselves as one. The first was reading again Plato’s Theaetetus, that dialogue that so questions the nature of knowledge. I felt very taken by one of the discarded theories, that of the mind as wax tablet that the impressions of the world fall onto, fall into, leaving their mold as memory. I felt even more taken by the vision of the mind as an aviary, where each bird is a form of knowledge, and to catch it in the hand is to learn—but there are also birds of forgetting, of ignorance, of oblivion, and it’s hard to tell which birds those are by looking at them. I guess you only know when you catch one and forget why it is you’re holding it.

I’ve long been of the awful suspicion that each of us has to create our own epistemology—that we must in the end explain to ourselves how we built our own minds, how we constructed our own hearts, and in this way, each of us is a philosopher. Of course, I love most that ancient confusion where what is poetic and what is philosophical aren’t so easily told apart, and so the poem becomes the testing ground (or is it threshing ground?) for the mind’s question it must ask itself. It means, or might mean, that the poem is a mind outside the mind, a heart outside the heart, offering back its questions. So it feels, at times, anyway, to me.

But I also was thinking of my childhood. I spent my summers with my father in Ithaca, New York, walking through the woods outside of town—woods I loved and still love. I spent the school year in Colorado with my mother, and every fall, a package would arrive: a box from a department store, but instead of a shirt or socks, inside would be a parcel of leaves, each dipped in paraffin to keep the color. Over the years I would take each one of these boxes out, and look at the leaves of many years, all spread out over the floor, each leaf encased in wax. It’s an image indelible in my mind—in the wax of my mind. More than that, I realized whatever thing my mind is, my heart is, that it was formed in some significant way by those experiences—by being in the woods, by having the woods sent to me from a long distance away.

The process of the poem was one of long patience. Reading again the passages in Plato and pondering them in the early morning, drinking coffee before the family wakes up. And then writing just a few lines, only 2 or 3, and putting the poem away for another day. I wanted that world to unfold by itself in my imagination, so that I could wander through it as I once did, looking around, listening, wandering and wondering, and line by line, the poem is that record of crossing back over the years, trying to return to a point of origin, feeling the miracle of arrival, while feeling also, the whole time, the distance of years and more that make such return impossible. Just like thinking about anything—you discover the distance within what grows near.

RB: Reading “Memory-Wax, Knowledge-Bird,” I kept feeling the resonance of Romantic lyricism fused to an awareness of the slippages of various late 20th-century avant gardes. You have, in fact, written a book on John Keats, among books of poetry and prose that are in conversation with poetic tradition.  How do you see your work as a contemporary poet in relation to the long, complicated tradition?

DBQ: Both as an investigation and a participation, or so I hope. I think I’ve long had a suspicion that the bloom of experiment is rooted in tradition, and that the necessary work isn’t to abandon the past, or feel one has advanced beyond it, but to dig down, with care and curiosity, to get within the loam. I like it when Thoreau says his head is an organ for burrowing. I’m with Shelley when, in “A Defence of Poetry,” he writes: “The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life of all.” I feel that writing a poem is oddly tending those links, and by tending them, discovering them anew. It may well be that one of the primary paradoxes of a poet’s life is that you care for the chain by adding another link, and then the mind reaches back, somehow, to those first utterances, the need for that first utterance, a kind of invocation, that first word that breaks silence, that looks like a link in a chain itself, “O.”

RB: You work in many genres. What are the writing projects you’re engaged in now?

DBQ: For the past few years I’ve been working on a book of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song. It has many hopes, some of them contradictory. The large thought, somewhat absurd, was to return to one concern over and over again—to search for that form of silence that lurks inside what we say, inside what we think, not as a denial of speech or meaning, but as the very source of it. I wanted to learn how to hear that silence, to find some comfort in it. But at the same time, I found all the ways in which what is unspeakable is so out of the various horrors present throughout human history, and that silence also made itself present in the work. I found myself yearning after a form of writing that refused any distinction between the personal and ancient, the aesthetic and the political, the textual and familial, the poetic and the philosophical, and so wrote so as to disturb the boundaries. And in the writing of it, I grew very skeptical of the ease with which we think we’ve advanced beyond those thinkers and writers whose lived occurred millennia ago, and came to think instead that the crisis of the human condition is constant, and that’s a difficult blessing, to sense we have not gained or gotten better at all. The book comes out in December from Milkweed Editions, who have been so good in publishing a number of those books you mention above in conversation with poetic tradition.

RB: Who are the writers and texts you’re deep into these days? What are the books you’re recommending?

DBQ: I’ve been reading much ancient literature for the past few years, and right now, am teaching Homer, so find myself most deeply immersed in The Iliad and Greek tragedies. And I’ve returned to Plato. When Socrates claims in the Protagoras that he is an absurd kind of physician, because he “makes the malady worse,” I find some jolt of recognition about the work of the poets I most admire—those that don’t “heal,” but make the genuine crisis more felt. Some books that have done that for me lately that I’ve been ushering others toward: Sally Keith’s River House, Jorie Graham’s Fast, Susan Howe’s Debths, John Tipton’s Paramnesia, Pam Rehm’s Small Works, Brian Teare’s Companion Grasses, and Laynie Browne’s You Envelope Me. Katie Peterson’s poetry has been a powerful presence to me for the past year. But the writer who has most lit up my mind and eye has been a return to Sir Thomas Browne, whose Urne-Buriall, Religio Medici, and The Garden of Cyrus have shown to me the mind I’d most wish to have myself, that one which can write, “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us,” and has learned how to see by that invisible light. 

 

Filed Under: Behind the Byline Tagged With: Dan Beachy-Quick, Rick Barot

Behind the Byline

Ismet Prcic

July 20, 2017

 

Fiction editor Janice Obuchowski talks with Ismet Prcic: “I’m a child of wartime, he tells us, “so I obsess about death ad nauseam, which apparently makes me both a better and a sadder human.” And, apparently, an astonishing writer. Read the interview below and “Desiccated,” his story, in NER 38.2.

 

Janice Obuchowski: Early on in “Desiccated,” your protagonist remembers the metaphor of a frog that allows itself to be boiled because the water was heated slowly. “This horrified you as a kid, this notion that something can be all around you, killing you, something you could get yourself out of if you could perceive its presence, yet you have no apparatus to do that.” The writing then keeps enacting this idea: the protagonist is slow to understand the horrors about him. He wakes and doesn’t remember for quite some time his wife has died. He studies his neighborhood and can’t place what’s wrong with his environment.  When I first read this piece I kept thinking this was a story about horror—a dead wife, a zombie apocalypse, memories of war-torn Bosnia, words missing from printed texts (a kind of blankness)—but it seems to me equally about the perception of horror. Were you thinking about it this way as you wrote?

Ismet Prcic: I’m a child of wartime so I obsess about death ad nauseam, which apparently makes me both a better and a sadder human. My maternal grandfather, who was an imam, used to say that if a person thought about their own death every day they would surely end up in heaven without even having to be a believer, without all the abracadabras and aerobics of Muslim prayer, because the fear and introspection that happens when we examine our own mortality wakes us up and changes the way we perceive our life and the way we spend it in the now. And spending our lives we are, with every click of a mouse, with every meme, with every tweet of our president.

And the horror of being alive, if we really examine it, is always about perception of life ending. An empty alleyway in the middle of the night is not scary if you’re drunk and really need to urinate, but it is if you have time to think yourself stabbed. Earlier humans lived to survive; they had to procure food and water and shelter on a daily basis, carve it out of the sea, the mountain, had to take risks, lived shorter lives, but lived them for reals. There was no time in the day to contemplate mortality the way I do it now, obsessively.

I had a taste of living just to survive in Bosnia so it’s really hard for me to convince my American wife that I’m primed by this experience, that I’m still in a lot of way in survival mode despite the fact that our pantry is full, that water flows out of a pipe in our wall when I lefty-loosey it.

 

JO: This also strikes me as a story about survival, both literal and emotional.  This character has to process his grief about his wife. He also has to fend off zombies. He thinks about what he knows of survival as originating in his experiences as a teenager in Bosnia.  Do you see this character as capable of surviving?  As incapable?  (I see a lot of evidence for both, actually, which feels to me compelling in its own right.)

IP: I was trying to explore where the experience of living actually happens; is it in the thoughts or in “real life”? I guess the use of quotation marks here give away where I stand on the subject currently, even though, intellectually, I understand that both of these positions are true simultaneously, that it’s the limited human brains that are inventing the distinction between the two, because we as a species can’t stop noticing mostly meaningless patterns, can’t help thinking in a binary way. Incidentally, we build complex technologies using the same principle and we worry about singularity—the moment when a manmade machine becomes enlightened—yet in our whole history we’ve only had a handful of actual people who achieved the same. Most people when they hear that we gain by giving, that we win by not fighting, that we feel stress and suffering because we’ve learned to do so, not because they actually exist, dismiss these truths as lack of common sense. And common sense gives us both Out of sight, out of mind and Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Both sayings ring “true” in a same way that photons are both waves and particles; it has to do with who is doing the observing.

At the end of the day it’s always about communication, it’s always about how well we can make our particular truth ring through in the ears of loved ones and strangers alike, hear their truth back, and survive in this world together, despite differences.

 

JO: Recently you co-wrote Imperial Dreams (streaming now on Netflix).  The film is synopsized as, “A young father returns home from jail eager to care for his son and become a writer, but crime, poverty and a flawed system threaten his plans.” Do you think of this short story and the film as being thematically similar?  (Are there themes that preoccupy you as a writer?) Second: How different are the experiences of writing a short story versus writing a screenplay?

IP: To answer your first question, yes. When my friend Malik Vithal approached me to fictionalize the story of a young man he met in Watts, I didn’t know if I was the right man for the job. I mean, what do I know about the hood? Or the racism of the criminal justice system? Or what it’s like to grow up black in the US? But at some point I connected with this young man because of PTSD, which in the US is most prevalent with our armed forces, rape victims, and young people from the hood. It turns out that growing up under siege—with no power, no food, negotiating the moods of people with guns and nothing to lose—is similar to growing up in the hood. The fact that this young man wanted to write and make music and thrive made me feel that despite the fact that we come from such different places our feelings were similar, which provided a way for me into his story. Still, it was tough going, let me tell you; three and a half years Malik and I went back and forth, and being a loner fiction writer most of my time, fighting only with myself, I was thrown for a loop. Once I saw the final version though, the work of all of these people who brought it to life, I signed up to do it again. Malik and I are working on a new project now.

 

JO: Anyone you’re reading now you’re particularly smitten with?

IP: Currently, I’m reading a novel by Percival Everett, poetry of Joan Naviyuk Kane and rereading stories of Danilo Kis and John Edgar Wideman in preparation for a gig at IAIA in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the end of July.

 

JO: What are you working on now?  More stories?  A novel?

IP: I’m trying to finish this pivotal short story in my collection about immigration and alcoholism that has been kicking my ass for over a year. But I keep going after it, despite the glass chin. Perhaps a good zombie apocalypse is what I need, or new anti-depressants. Or I can practice mindfulness and learn to smell the fucking flowers with the same amount of energy I spend worrying about the shit I can’t control.

Filed Under: Behind the Byline Tagged With: Ismet Prcic

Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Behind the Byline

July 6, 2017

Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Susan Gillis speaks with NER author Gjertrud Schnackenberg about “Afghan Girl,” a poem that interrogates conflict and empire, beauty and religion, and about how poetry can “slip the cuffs of ideology.” The interview first appeared on Susan Gillis’s blog, “Concrete & River,” with contributions by Gregory Fried, and can be read in full here. “Afghan Girl” was published in NER 38.2, and an excerpt is available on our site.

 

 

SUSAN GILLIS: Your poem “Afghan Girl” opens on Sharbat Gula’s gaze as it is caught and held in Steve McCurry’s photograph. Let’s begin there, then. Is it fair to say the poem is one in which image-making as subject is explored through image-making?

GJERTRUD SCHNACKENBERG: Image-making as a way of exploring the image, and of exploring the insuperable drive to make images—yes, and the poem seesaws between the opposing facts that human images are prohibited in Islam, and that this photographic image of an Islamic girl is one of the most famous photographs in the world.

In reference to the paradox of this poem’s subject, an image taken from an image-forbidding culture, the poet Mary Jo Salter has spoken of “the unwinnable, unlosable argument of imagery.” Her phrase goes directly to the heart of how poetry thinks, and I think it furthermore hints at the bond between imagery and negative capability. That is, the way that poetry thinks, which is so often in imagery (and in imagery that imagines thoughts about images), is one of the ways that poetry slips the cuffs of ideologies and beliefs (and of the self and its viewpoint, too) while retaining the value, even the moral value, conferred by witness.

Read the full interview at Concrete & River.

Filed Under: Behind the Byline Tagged With: Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Gregory Fried, Sharbat Gula, Susan Gillis

Peter LaSalle

Behind the Byline

June 8, 2017

Editor Carolyn Kuebler talks with Peter LaSalle, author of “Conundrum: A Story About Reading,” about realer-than-real realism, fiction, and the lasting power of John Updike’s Rabbit, Redux.

CK: “Conundrum” is, as it says, “a story about reading,” but it is also about memory and dreams and the way all of these layers of our interior lives get mixed together. It’s surprisingly rare in a piece of fiction for a character to interact, in such intimate and complicated ways, with a specific book, the way your narrator does with Rabbit Redux. Why do you think that this kind of book talk is usually relegated to reviews, criticism, essays—possibly memoir—but is so unusual in fiction?

PL: I know what you mean, that such commentary about books is typically confined to literary outlets other than fiction. However, when you think of it, if books play such a big role in many of our lives, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t provide a subject as valid for fiction as the pursuit of a proper marriage based on the financial circumstances of the landed gentry (e.g., Jane Austen) or the certainly more harrowing pursuit of an enigmatically snowy whale all over the South Pacific.

Borges was one writer who fully realized this. He was a librarian in Buenos Aires by trade, surrounded by books and often admitting his life was more about books than what passes for actual living. He had scant success in love, never made that much money, yet, man, it seems he’d read almost everything, ventured far into the mysteries of the human psyche via that particular pursuit. Therefore, reading—along with what you call book talk—is the subject of a good deal of his fiction. And, needless to add, it’s fiction that has become some of the most startlingly original writing of the twentieth century, a story like the classic “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” being a prime example.

CK: Could “Conundrum” have been about any book that you’ve read, or is there something about Updike that set this story into motion for you?

PL: Well, Updike’s work has bowled me over ever since I started reading it way back in college. I remember my roommate left lying around our dorm room a well-worn paperback copy of Couples, a book considered quite racy at the time, and I was amazed then by what has amazed me ever since in Updike’s writing—the keen social observation and solid sense of structural craft, also such a rare gift of language.

About a year ago I set out to reread just about all of the major novels in his vast oeuvre, finally deciding yet again that Rabbit Redux, a tour de force set in the turbulent late 1960s, stood out as his very best. As the result of that, I guess, and more or less drunk on the wonderful power of his jeweled prose, the story “Conundrum” took off in my mind from there. The idea was to have somebody recommending a book—in this case Rabbit Redux—to somebody else, and then that other person passing away before he has a chance to read it. Then somehow, as in a dream, the two of them rectify that misfortune and eventually find themselves in another zone of perception altogether; there, with chronological time denied as maybe the flimsy premise it is, the book gets read aloud by the recommender—the story’s narrator, an unnamed, worn-out journalist who briefly studied for a PhD in literature when young—to the other person, his deceased brother-in-law Bill, a guy who worked his whole life in a print shop and always loved reading. They have long conversations about specific passages in the book, and the recently deceased Updike himself—smiling, characteristically charming—eventually shows up to contribute to the discussion as well. I mean, why not?

CK: For your narrator, the experience of reading is imperfectly remembered, rooted in a time and place, filtered through actual dreams, and the basis of his connection to another person. Because that seems pretty much how reading works for me too, this story feels like a kind of realer-than-real realism. Another of the story’s questions seems to be, what is reality anyway? To you, what makes a work of fiction most “real,” or most engaging in terms of this question?

PL: I do like the way you phrase it, “realer-than-real realism,” which possibly means going beyond realism to evoke something truer. And it sort of describes exactly what I’m after in this story, as well as with much of my writing in the three short story collections I’ve had the good luck to publish in the last ten years or so, including the book that I hope is the most daring of the trio, Sleeping Mask: Fictions, which came out this past winter.

I want to use the tools of fiction to tap into the metaphysical, as common assumptions about a lot of things—time and space, reality versus unreality, even the distinction between life and death maybe, as in “Conundrum”—are questioned. It involves seeing fiction as an opportunity not only to provide entertainment, which is important, but also to embark on larger explorations. The approach seems akin to how a scientist might go into the lab, or a theoretical physicist might start chalking away some complicated, mile-long formula on the blackboard and suddenly have it lead to a totally fresh, unexpected revelation, what goes beyond clunky deductive logic and, yes, metaphysically, strikes one as truer than true, realer than real indeed.

That said, I realize I shouldn’t let myself get tangled up here in attempting to explain too much when it comes to any concept of reality, which is beyond merely being complicated and most likely never can be properly explained, only experienced. That’s the inherent magic of it. Probably it’s enough to simply ask Maestro Borges to step into the witness box once more, with his great quote that succinctly gets at the heart of the matter: “We accept reality so readily, perhaps because we suspect nothing is real.”

CK: Books (and other art forms—movies, music, etc.) become a part of who we are, as this story suggests. You’ve also written a lot about travel. Do you think that travel plays a similar role as art? Is the experience of travel, or of recalling a trip years later, anything like the experience of reading a book for you?

PL: Travel has been important to me throughout my adult life, usually as purposefully conducted solo. And I strongly believe that both reading fiction and traveling alone have a spooky something in common, their both entailing entering into an unknown territory (the pages of a book, the places in a foreign country) and never knowing what you’ll encounter next—entirely dreamlike, I’d say.

Not to sound like I’m shilling my own various books here, but a year or so back I published a collection of essays that involve travel as it transpires when focused on literature, which seems to relate to what we’ve been talking about. The collection, The City at Three PM: Writing, Reading, and Traveling, mostly contains essays I published in magazines over the years and that document a particular kind of trip I take. I pack a small gym bag with enough clothes for a couple of weeks and books by an author from another country, to reread the work in the place where it’s set, on the premises, so to speak, and see if anything different happens. I’ve gone to Paris to reread surrealists Breton and Aragon there, gone to Tunisia to reread Flaubert’s wild novel about ancient Carthage there, even, and of course, gone to Argentina to reread Borges there. I usually write an essay about each trip, plus acquire new ideas for fiction.

Now that I think of it, travel does figure into the rather dreamlike machinations of the story “Conundrum,” where, if you remember, the journalist narrator, once a New York newspaper’s foreign correspondent, tries to pinpoint where he seemed to be in the odd dream he had about Rabbit Redux, finally concluding it was Istanbul. In fact, that’s another place where I also spent time recently, going there to meet with the translator of one of my books as well as to thoroughly immerse myself in that country’s fine literature.

CK: You mentioned that you’re reading contemporary Vietnamese literature now to prepare for a trip and to meet writers there. What are you finding so far? What are your plans for that trip?

PL: Yes, this is my latest trip, upcoming.

Almost twenty years ago I reviewed an anthology called The Other Side of Heaven, edited by the novelist and Vietnam War veteran Wayne Karlin. The book built on the very original concept of providing short stories about the war by writers from both sides. So, you had Americans like Larry Heinemann and Tim O’Brien represented, but much more intriguing for me, the Vietnamese writers, such as Nguyen Huy Thiep and Bao Ninh, the latter a North Vietnam Army veteran and his contribution to the collection, “Wandering Souls,” excerpted from his internationally praised 1987 novel The Sorrow of War. The Vietnamese writers often seemed to be dealing with matters visionary, the war for them becoming a somehow ghostly experience, haunting, otherworldly, perhaps a mindset influenced by the country’s own tradition of metaphysical thought in the Taoism and Buddhism that have contributed to religious life there.

Those stories stuck with me, which doesn’t usually happen when one reviews a book simply received as an assignment from an editor. This past spring I started tracking down more Vietnamese writing, and then I looked up online an email address for Karlin and contacted him. I asked him if he remembered the review and told him I was reading all the contemporary Vietnamese fiction I could and planning on going to Ho Chi Minh City—as Saigon is now known—and Hanoi this summer to further explore that literature there. Karlin and a Vietnamese novelist whose work he’s translated, Ho Anh Thai, generously put me in touch with some writers and editors to meet with in Vietnam to discuss the country’s literary scene. I’m definitely looking forward to the trip.

CK: Your narrator says, “There’s nothing better than recommending a book to somebody and having them really like it.” I think a lot of readers would agree with that—do you? Can you tell us about any particular experiences of having someone really like a book you yourself recommended? Would you like to recommend anything here, to readers who liked “Conundrum”?

PL: Being a teacher, I recommend books to students all the time, to the point I suspect they probably grow tired of hearing me tell them that they just have to read this, or they just have to read that.

Nevertheless, a college creative writing teacher of mine, Carter Wilson, once casually recommended I read Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, the powerful novel about a dipsomaniac British consul in Mexico in the 1930s who conducts his own almost epic battle with the ways of the universe, unquestionably a masterpiece of late modernism. It turned out to be one of my all-time favorite books, has been very influential when it comes to my own writing, too. So I guess one never knows if a suggested title a student jots down in a spiral notebook yanked out of a book bag while chatting with a teacher during office hours will, in fact, have at some point a similar pretty massive effect, right?

I will say that in general I’d recommend to young creative writing students especially that they read daring, even overtly experimental fiction, which in turn might spur them to be adventuresome in their own work, take risks and not settle for the more commercially viable formulaic. Or, to put it another way, make them want to explore in their writing the limitless potential of fiction as true art and not just the predictable mainstream stuff that literary agents and conglomerate-owned publishers nowadays tend to be attracted to, convinced that big money might be made by sticking to what’s safe. It nearly broke my heart a few years ago when I had a seminar class of bright, talented graduate MFA writing students at the University of Texas where I teach and I asked how many around the table had read Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, to see only two out of a dozen raise their hands.

I could add a ten-page list here of books I’d recommend, or maybe a twenty-page one, but for the moment let me only say—or shout to anybody willing to listen—please read The Sound and the Fury if you haven’t already. Don’t let another moment in what for any of us is our brief time on this sweet planet pass without the undeniably rare experience reading a brave book like that can be.

Actually, to maybe bring this all full circle and return again to my NER story “Conundrum,” it would be so good if the story possibly turned somebody on to reading Rabbit Redux, a novel extremely risk-taking in its own way. And I suppose that if “Conundrum” did inspire at least one reader to go out and get Updike’s book, such might be the ultimate kind of success for my story that I surely would hope for.

CK: Thank you, Peter.
PL:  And thanks go to you, too, for the really good questions.

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Behind the Byline Tagged With: Peter LaSalle

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Celebrating our fortieth year!

Volume 39, Number 1
Cover art by Jeanne Borofsky

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Confluences

Brancusi’s Bird in Space

Didi Jackson

Brancusi’s Bird in Space

I move around the gold line
of a bird until I see a single feather,
the sky and song inside reflection,
an endless body balanced on beak,
the foot a hackle of bronze. . . .

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