New England Review

Middlebury Gathers at Poetry Free for All

July 21, 2017 Filed Under: Events, News & Notes

Gwyneth Lewis – former Welsh Poet Laureate, Bread Loaf Professor, and the evening’s emcee – offers some brief remarks to the audience before introducing the first readers of the evening.

Who do we want to be? This past Friday, July 15, members of the Middlebury community stepped away from the daily bustle and into a space of active reflection at the Kirk Alumni Center for the first-ever Poetry Free for All, hoping to answer that question as best they could. Co-sponsored by the Bread Loaf School of English, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, the Middlebury Language Schools, and the New England Review, the event featured a diverse spread of readers that put the breadth and depth of Middlebury’s influence on full display. Included below are a handful of photos from the event.

Those interested in learning more about the various readers can read more on the Middlebury College website here.

From right to left: Middlebury President Laurie L. Patton, former Navajo Nation Vice President Rex Lee Jim, and Arizona native Taylor Abasta chat briefly before the Free for All gets underway.

Special guest Lauren Marie Schmidt offers poetry from her recently-published collection, “Psalms of the Dining Room,” as well as the upcoming “Filthy Labors.”

Alumnus Jack DesBois ‘15.5, an active member of the Middlebury and Addison County community, treats the audience to a Robert Louis Stevenson poem as well as one of his own.

From right to left: the Middlebury Spanish Language School’s Francisco Layna Ranz reads while fellow faculty members and poets Jacobo Sefamí and Pedro Angel Palou look on.

Ismet Prcic

July 20, 2017 Filed Under: Behind the Byline

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.

Meet the Interns

July 19, 2017 Filed Under: News & Notes

Summer helpers Robert Erickson and Victoria Pipas sat down to trade blows and find out what makes an NER intern tick. Read on to see if their common Literary Studies major makes them more alike or different.

For Robert: What is your earliest literary memory?

Robert: What kind of question is this?

Victoria: Not just your earliest memory, but anything related to literature or writing in any form.

R: Okay, the first book I remember reading was this bizarre book about a little gingerbread man made by this little old lady and her husband in some nice little hamlet. He just had this voracious appetite: he ate the family and he ate the house before terrorizing the whole town. There’s definitely some psychoanalysis to be done there.

V: To you? Or to the book?

R: I don’t know if this book even exists or if I just dreamt it up. But I was about three years old, and I just remember this strange literary power captivating me. At the very end, he meets a ram standing on a cliff, and the ram says, “Close your eyes, I’ll jump into your mouth.” Except he jumps straight into his stomach because this guy is fifty feet tall at this point, and all the contents spill out.

V: Wow. So that was your formative literary memory.

R: It sticks out. We’ll go with that.

For Victoria: Do you have a favorite author, and if so, why isn’t it someone who was alive in the last four hundred years?

V: [cackles] Wow, I would have said someone who was alive in the last four hundred years.

R: Stay with the schtick.

V: Spenser’s my favorite author to read academically. I like The Faerie Queene because it’s Arthurian, and it’s the classical world, and it’s the British epic, and it’s medieval romance. It does a little bit of everything.

R: Hmmm, covers all your bases.

V: Yes, because I can’t make decisions and I don’t know what I want to specialize in. But my favorite recent author is John Irving—especially Cider House Rules, because it’s so New England, and it’s the most “me” book that I’ve read. It’s apple orchards and weird, lovable family drama, and, minus the incest, that feels like my childhood in some ways.

For Robert: OK, do you identify more with Texas or Vermont?

R: My identity certainly feels more Texan. Not in the ranch/country lifestyle way, but in the way that I think about my family and my interactions with other people, in the nuances of my worldview. Intellectually, I have more of a Vermont attitude—or at least a Middlebury, liberal arts one. Tied to this place, there’s a side of me that’s a lot more freewheeling, ambitious, perhaps eager. Which wasn’t necessarily absent when I was growing up, but it’s something that blossomed in my time here.

For Victoria: Do you think of your home state [New Hampshire] as the big spoon or the little spoon?

V: Oooh, well it’s bottom-heavy, isn’t it? I think of it as the big spoon. It has the stronger base.

R: So if there are two sides nestled in Victoria’s mind, which one is the big spoon and which one is the little spoon?

V: Well maybe Vermont is becoming the big spoon, just because this year it feels like I’m ready to move away from home. Vermont is this half of my mind that’s now the adult world—where I live by myself and form my own family—whereas NH is where I’ve come from. I think VT is taking up the bigger space in my mind now. Maybe VT has become the big spoon.

For Robert: Pancakes or waffles, and why?

R: Geez, a younger me would have certainly said pancakes, but I think as I’ve grown older, I’ve really developed an affinity for waffles. I don’t know, waffles are just so convenient for storing things. You can put peanut butter on waffles so easily . . .

V: A waffle is a vessel.

R: A waffle IS a vessel. And I never know when to stop with pancakes. I feel like with waffles, one is the norm, and two’s really pushing it. But pancakes, there’s no clear limit because they’re always different sizes . . . I guess I’ve come to appreciate the structure that a waffle provides.

For Victoria: You mentioned before that you really enjoyed your year abroad at Oxford. So what led you to become an expat?

V: England’s just great. It’s kind of a more temperate New England in a way, and I think it’s maybe because I can be the loud, friendly, extroverted American there, sort of like a novelty. There’s definitely a culture of formality there, which I think I can learn from. It’s nice to be unique, so maybe it’s just sort of an egoism thing. I also just love that everything is so old there.

R: So you like feeling new in an old place.

V: Yeah! I don’t want those young green shoots, I want the old oaks. And that’s what England is. Every town has a millennium-old Anglo-Saxon church, and I love that. I do think I’ll end up in New England, because I do value that new, young feeling. But I want to spend more time there with the old stuff.

For Robert: Which Shakespearean character would you want to be for a day?

R: For a day? If it’s just for a day, I’d go with Falstaff. I’d kind of get to just screw around and make fun of people, be boisterous and arrogant, flirt with hedonism, but then feel appropriately guilty about it—and be done after a day. I think it would be a very easy transition.

V: No consequences.

R: I think that’s what going to college is like for a lot of people.

V: [laughs] There’s a reason Falstaff’s the most popular Shakespearean character. Everyone who’s been to college identifies with him.

R: Which also makes me think that’s not a super fun answer. I really do love the Lancastrian tetralogy, though—that’s probably my favorite Shakespeare. Prince Hal would be so much fun . . . I could also be really mysterious and say I want to be the Changeling Boy from Midsummer Night’s Dream, because he’s only ever alluded to, but he’s kind of the main character in a way.

V: He’s a symbol.

R: And I like to think of my life in symbolic terms.

V: “I want to be the Changeling Boy from Midsummer Night’s Dream . . .” said no one ever. The Changeling Boy—he’s kind of a sexual object, isn’t he?

R: He’s a lot of things. He’s a changeling, you know, so a very volatile symbol there.

For Victoria: Getting more personal. Describe your ideal date. Unless it’s dinner and a movie—if that’s the case, I don’t want to hear about it.

V: Okay, my ideal date would be that first, we met in the library.

R: Oh my god. Do you stay in the library? Do you ever make it out?

V: We are in the library, and I have to approach him. Well, not necessarily. But probably. I approach him. No, we definitely make it out of the library. We could come back to the library. No, we make it out of the library. But we spend a significant amount of time in the library, over the course of . . . This is going too far.

R: This is a romance. This is your ideal romance. This is something quite different than what I was asking.

V: I do think an ideal date has to be productive. It probably would involve some sort of challenging physical activity. So like hiking, maybe, or learning some type of new skill, like sailing . . .

R: Do you need to be the more athletically adept person in this outdoorsy scenario?

V: No, not necessarily! I’m definitely looking for athleticism. So I don’t need to be the more athletic. I don’t think I even—no, this is too much, this is going too deep.

R: Write that down, folks. Be athletic, and find her in the library. Or let her find you there.

For Robert: Okay. How tall are you exactly? And what’s one benefit of height that you would never want to give up?

R: I am exactly six-foot-six and . . . five-eighths, I don’t know.

V: It would be cool if it were six-six-six…

R: I’m between six-six and six-seven. Six-six-six… Well, five-eighths is close to .66, you know. Yeah, 6’6.666”.

V: Yep, I like that. The number of the beast.

R: Yes. But a benefit that I would never give up . . . There are a few. I don’t really have people bothering me to steal or borrow my clothes for the most part, which is nice. Crowds are pretty easy to handle—concerts and things like that. And apparently they say that for every inch you’re above six feet tall you make 1,000 more dollars a year, on average. So that’s a free $6,666 . . . and 66 cents that I can take to the bank every year. Although that hasn’t quite happened yet. In a few years I might be able to say that. But at the moment . . . let’s stick with crowds and clothes.

For Victoria: All right, aside from the generous benefits and retirement plan, what do you enjoy most about working at New England Review?

V: Flexible hours. No, actually I like the quiet literary environment. And I also like learning about the literary world, because it’s a different side of literature. It’s sort of like the flip side: you’ve got these old books stacked in the library and then you’ve got this changing, volatile world of submitting and getting published. And I think I tend to under-appreciate that side of it, because I tend to put emphasis on published, respected, anthologized works, and the other side of it is that a lot of these authors went through this process first.

For Robert: What daily ritual is indispensable to your life?

R: Oh my goodness. No. I don’t have daily rituals. Okay, eating is indispensable, because if I don’t eat . . . Putting on clothes, I don’t know, that’s mostly indispensable . . . Do I even have daily rituals? I mean . . . indispensable to what?

V: To daily life.

R: To daily life…

V: To your daily life.

R: You know, I kind of have a habit of listening to music when I go to bed. And I find I wake up in the middle of the night being strangled by my headphones, kind of tossing and listening to something quite different than what I set out listening to. Generally some sort of classical music to help me fall asleep. So I don’t know if that’s necessarily indispensable, but it is a habit, and when I don’t have music I kind of go off thinking . . . and unless I’m really tired I can’t go to sleep. Indispensable? Somewhat. Relatively indispensable—kind of an oxymoron.

For Victoria: What is your least favorite book? One that you just thoroughly regretted having read. Maybe not regret, but just said that, you know . . . could’ve done without it.

V: I don’t, like, allow myself to read trash novels . . . I didn’t like A Passage to India [by E. M. Forrester], which I read for my freshman seminar, particularly much, but I don’t really regret reading it. It just didn’t do anything for me and I didn’t necessarily learn anything from it . . . I just can’t think of anything I’ve read that was just generally bad.

R: That’s fair.

V: I also don’t like Keats that much. That’s not a book. But I tried to force myself to read Keats and I just couldn’t do it and I just didn’t like it.

R: Too sappy?

V: Too sappy? [pause] He’s just young, he’s just this young promising poet but I kind of feel like that’s all he was.

R: It’s not his fault he died young.

V: Yeah, I know. But I was also at the end of my time at Oxford and I didn’t want to be reading Keats, I wanted to be playing outside and it was like, “Why didn’t Keats die sooner? Then I wouldn’t have to read this poetry.”

R: Oh no . . . Victoria, no . . . You’re gonna step on a lot of toes there.

V: I know. Keats just doesn’t do it for me. I was disappointed. But maybe I’m just immature. So that could be my own fault.

For Robert: What book is currently next to your bedside table?

R: Right now? I can never read just one book at a time. There are a few that I’m working my way through—currently on the forefront of my mind is Light in August. It’s really lovely. I also started Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

V: Oh, wow. That’s light reading. Casual.

R: Yeah . . . That was . . . something I was reading. It was being read. By me.

V: Isn’t that like a philosophical doctrine?

R: Sort of? Nietzsche’s Bible, in a way. Not a Bible, I guess it would just be a Gospel – and it’s really a parody in a lot of ways. There’s this prophet-type figure called Zarathustra who’s up on a mountain and is like, “I’m gonna come down—I’m like a bee that has too much honey, too much pollen, and I’m ready to share it with the world.” And he comes down and finds out that the people aren’t ready yet for what he has to say.

V: That’s not the mindless read, I hope. Is Faulkner the mindless read?

R: Faulkner’s not the mindless reading, but they complement each other, because Faulkner has less of an agenda than most. Faulkner just likes to tell a good story, whereas Nietzsche quite clearly has some tricks up his sleeve. I also don’t even have a physical bedside table, so that’s a huge lie. Those books (among others) are in my backpack right now in case I have enough time to finish all of them in one sitting. Which is absolutely unfeasible, that would never happen. But I’m afraid of getting caught without one.

V: Yeah, you never know when you might end up on a deserted island.

R: Or a bad date or something.

V: Yep, in the library on a bad date – that’s the worst.

New Books from NER Authors: July 2017

July 17, 2017 Filed Under: NER Authors' Books

Hinton is a rare example of a literary sinologist—that is, a classical scholar thoroughly conversant with, and connected to, contemporary poetry in English. —Eliot Weinberger, New York Review of Books

From the publisher: Henry David Thoreau, in The Maine Woods, describes a moment on Mount Katahdin when all explanations and assumptions fell away for him and he was confronted with the wonderful, inexplicable thusness of things. David Hinton takes that moment as the starting point for his account of a rewilding of consciousness in the West: a dawning awareness of our essential oneness with the world around us. Because there was no Western vocabulary for this perception, it fell to poets to make the first efforts at articulation, and those efforts were largely driven by Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist ideas imported from ancient China. Hinton chronicles this rewilding through the lineage of avant-garde poetry in twentieth-century America—from Ezra Pound and Robinson Jeffers to Gary Snyder, W. S. Merwin, and beyond—including generous selections of poems that together form a compelling anthology of ecopoetry. In his much-admired translations, Hinton has recreated ancient Chinese rivers-and-mountains poetry as modern American poetry; here, he reenvisions modern American poetry as an extension of that ancient Chinese tradition: an ecopoetry that weaves consciousness into the Cosmos in radical and fundamental ways.

David Hinton is the author of Hunger Mountain, Existence, and many translations of classical Chinese poetry and philosophy. His work appeared in NER 13.2 and he is a former acting editor for NER. His books have earned wide acclaim and many awards, including a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Wilds of Poetry can be purchased directly from Shambhala Publications or from independent booksellers.

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With four well-reviewed novels already on the shelves, Charles Holdefer returns to bookstores once more with a collection of riotous short stories that speculate about the early life and times of a future Vice President.

From the publisher: This darkly humorous collection of short fiction by Charles Holdefer, author of The Contractor and Back in the Game, revolves gracefully around an esoteric and, it goes without saying, entirely fictional account of the imaginary formative years of someone who at times resembles America’s most notorious—so far!—Vice President. This center provides a jumping-off point for free-wheeling, fanciful explorations, both poetic and satirical, into the archaeology of the banality of evil, that reveal, with a light touch and forgiving good humor, the soul-distorting burdens of duty, repression and narcissism in our daily life.

Author of four novels, Charles Holdefer grew up in Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Sorbonne. He currently teaches at the University of Poitiers, France. He most recently appeared in the pages of New England Review with his short story “Big and Nasty” (NER 37.1).

Dick Cheney in Shorts can be purchased online or from independent booksellers.

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Every poem is exquisitely crafted, with crisp, clean lines and imagery that dazzles. —The Washington Post

From the publisher: Laura Kasischke’s long-awaited selected poems presents the breadth of her probing vision that subverts the so-called “normal.” A lover of fairy tales, Kasischke showcases her command of the symbolic, with a keen attention to sound in her exploration of the everyday—whether reflections on loss or the complicated realities of childhood and family. As literary critic Stephen Burt wrote in Boston Review, “The future will not see us by one poet alone. . . . If there is any justice in that future, Kasischke is one of the poets it will choose.” This incandescent volume makes the case that Laura Kasischke is one of America’s great poets, and her presence is secure.

Laura Kasischke is a poet and novelist whose fiction has been made into several feature-length films. Her poetry has been featured in number of NER issues over the years. Her book of poems, Space, in Chains, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches at the University of Michigan and most recently appeared in the pages of New England Review with her poem “Executioner as Muse” (NER 35.3).

Where Now: New and Selected Poems can be purchased from Copper Canyon Press or from independent booksellers.

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Pulitzer Prize Winning poet Paul Muldoon, deemed by many to be the most influential poet writing in English today, brings the world a collection of 19 witty song lyrics in the vein of great bards such as Bob Dylan.

From the publisher: Paul Muldoon is widely considered the greatest living poet of his generation. A former professor of poetry at Oxford, and once poetry editor of the New Yorker, Muldoon’s influence on poetry is incalculable. At once playful, profoundly literate, pop savvy and allusive to the max, his poetry has tens of thousands of readers and fans worldwide. Sadie and the Sadists features punk-rock-style song lyrics—zany, witty, brilliant, sometimes startling—by the master poet, songs played by the spoken word music group, Rogue Oliphant.

Born in Northern Ireland, Paul Muldoon moved to the United States to begin his enduring career as poet, professor, and critic. Among numerous awards and titles which he holds, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in the United Kingdom, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Muldoon is a longtime contributor of poetry and criticism to New England Review, having appeared most recently in NER 34.2 with a comment on Seamus Heaney’s “Du Bellay in Rome.”

Sadie and the Sadists can be purchased directly from Eyewear Publishing, or from independent booksellers.

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Nutting deftly exploits the comic potential of perverse attachments . . . The novel charms in its witty portrait of a woman desperate to reconnect with her humanity. —Publishers Weekly, Best Summer Books of 2017

From the publisher: In her second full-length novel, Alissa Nutting demonstrates just how far some will go for love—and how far some will go to escape it. At once an absurd, raunchy comedy and a profound meditation on marriage, monogamy, and family, Made for Love is both perceptive and compulsively readable.

Alissa Nutting is an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College. She is the author of the story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, as well as the novel Tampa. Nutting contributed most recently to New England Review with her piece “Practice Falling Asleep,” part of the NER Digital series Secret Americas.

Made for Love can be purchased directly from publisher Harper Collins or from independent booksellers.

New England Review

Volume 38 | 2017 | Number 2

SELECTIONS FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE

POETRY

“My Mother Says the Syrian Refugees Look Like Tourists” by Hai-Dang Phan

FICTION

“Enough of Billy” by Castle Freeman Jr.

FICTION

“Desire Lines” by Laura Spence-Ash

NONFICTION

“Take Stock” by Clarence Orsi

Featured Work

Read Our Blog

Middlebury Gathers at Poetry Free for All

Ismet Prcic

Meet the Interns

New Books from NER Authors: July 2017

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