Shara McCallum

Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

November 23, 2020

Answering such queries typically falls to novelists. But, being a poet, I felt compelled to ask poetry to respond.

A serendipitous moment in Scotland sparked NER poet Shara McCallum to answer, in her poems, the questions What is our responsibility to the past? What are the whole truths of our inheritance? What choices do each of us face and make, within the circumscription of history?

Where history ends is where literature and the imagination often begin. No Ruined Stone, the book from which the poems in this issue are drawn, emerges out of history’s omissions and silences. It uses the lyric and dramatic modes of poetry to reconstruct and reinhabit a speculative account of the past.

The book was in some sense born of a chance encounter. On my first visit to Scotland in 2015, having just come off the train in Edinburgh with my husband and our then young daughters and climbing a million stairs with bags in tow, we stopped at a candy shop off the Royal Mile before even reaching our hotel. The owner of Lickety Split was an artist and, as with so many Scots I would come to meet over the next five years of returning, open and easy with conversation. She also shared one of my children’s names, and we got to talking. On learning I was a poet and from Jamaica originally, Naomi announced, “You must know the story of Robert Burns and Jamaica, then?” I didn’t.

Late in the summer and into the fall of 1786, it turns out, Scotland’s great bard had actively made plans to migrate from Scotland to Jamaica. He’d contracted himself to work as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation on the island’s north coast—though “bookkeeper” in this context is linguistic misdirection. Were it not for his ultimate abandonment of his plan, Burns would’ve been responsible for daily overseeing and managing the work performed by enslaved Africans.

At the time I learned of this fork-in-the-road in Burns’ life, I was living with my family in London, feeling the layers of history beneath my feet and everywhere I turned. For months I carried this story around with me, like a sore in the mouth one’s tongue keeps finding. Walking the city that winter, a question entered my mind and took up residence: What would have happened had he gone?

Answering such queries typically falls to novelists. But, being a poet, I felt compelled to ask poetry to respond. Doing so, led me to archives and travels in Scotland and Jamaica, into the pages of biography, literary and cultural history, and back to Burns’s poems, prose, and songs. It returned me with full force to some of my earliest and ongoing obsessions and vexations, including with Romanticism and the Enlightenment’s ideals and occlusions.

What resulted is a book-length sequence voiced primarily by two figures: Burns, transplanted to Jamaica for the last ten years of his life, and his granddaughter Isabella, a black woman born into slavery at the start of the nineteenth century, who migrates to Scotland and passes for white. The book dwells not only in the question that prompted it but in the many that persist for me as a writer. What is our responsibility to the past? What are the whole truths of our inheritance? What choices do each of us face and make, within the circumscription of history?

Shara McCallum, originally from Jamaica, is the author of six books published in the US and UK. The poems in this issue are from her forthcoming verse sequence, No Ruined Stone, a speculative account of Scottish poet Robert Burns’s migration to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation. Her previous book, Madwoman (Alice James, 2017), was winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the 2018 Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club. McCallum is a professor of English at Penn State University and on the faculty of the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA Program.

Mark Wunderlich

Writer’s Notebook—Sky Burial

October 23, 2020

My suffering did not last, though once I recovered, I knew that I had been changed by the experience.

Mark Wunderlich, author of
the poem series “Sky Burial” (NER 40.3).
Photo credit: Nicholas Kahn

Why do poets write about the worst things that have happened to them? What do we mean when we refer to our identity? Does our identity consist of the totality of what we do and say? What we know and make? What others have done to us? What portion of our identity do we inherit from our family and ancestors? Which parts of our inheritance can we choose, and which can we reject? What does it mean to be a victim, and is victimhood a part of an identity? These are the questions that drove me to write the poem series called “Sky Burial,” on a summer day in Umbria where I had gone on an artists’ residency. The poem also recalls the summer of 2015, when, after several months in a diagnosed major depression, during which the medications I was taking were not delivering relief, and the lifeline of therapy, though usually a reliable source of comfort and connection, was now beginning to fray, and as my much-hoped-for recovery started to seem unattainable, I found myself sitting in the grass in my yard with the barrel of a shotgun in my mouth and my finger on the trigger, rehearsing my own violent death.

For anyone reading this, I want you to know that I recovered. As in my previous depressive episodes, the medication started to work, and I began to pull myself out of a vast emptiness that was my mental illness; the poem explains—I hope—just what came between me and my wish to end my own life. I did not pull the trigger that day, nor the next, and with each passing day I began the slow process of returning to myself, of shedding the bleakness and ugliness around me, of awakening my instinct for survival. Weeks later, a day came when I was outside with the sun on my face, and I remember smelling the trail of wood smoke on the air and thinking how wonderful it smelled—homey and comforting and sharp—and just like that I had experienced pleasure once again. Therapy helped me to understand how my life had come undone, and an SSRI helped to lift me from a torpor and a lassitude that had enveloped me for months.

My suffering did not last, though once I recovered, I knew that I had been changed by the experience. I came to see my suicidal episode as a metaphorical death, my depression as a kind of trip through the deep recesses of the underworld. As part of my recovery, I began to tell the story of my time wandering in the land of shades. The poem sequence documents my survival, but it is also testament to my unwillingness to see myself as damaged, or as a victim making a play for your sympathy. Instead, I see the poem as a meditation on the nature of suffering, and on our ability to survive just about anything. I am not a damaged person for having suffered my own illness, having withstood the violence of others, or having inherited an unhappy family history. I am neither the hero nor the victim of my own circumstances. I want experience to mean something, and poetry is the most reliable mechanism I know by which I can render experience into something durable, useful, and encompassing, and which makes the lived life a life of meaning.

Mark Wunderlich is the author of four books of poems, most recently God of Nothingness (Graywolf, 2021). His other books are The Earth Avails (Graywolf, 2014), which received the Rilke Prize, Voluntary Servitude (Graywolf, 2004), and The Anchorage (University of Massachusetts, 1999), which received the Lambda Literary Award. He directs the Bennington Writing Seminars graduate writing program and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Emma Bolden

Writer’s Notebook—Mea Maxima Culpa: On “Confiteor”

August 10, 2020

I asked my sixth-grade Catechism teacher—and then I got in trouble.

Emma Bolden, author of “Confiteor” (NER 41.2).

When did Jesus know He was Jesus? Was he born knowing, or did He learn later? And if He was born knowing, does that mean He wasn’t a normal human baby?” I asked my sixth-grade Catechism teacher—and then I got in trouble. Some questions, she told me, should be silent, released as soon as they’re thought like doves winging up to God. I thought the questions and I kept them silent, but I couldn’t dove them, couldn’t give them the wings they needed to escape.

What does it mean, to be holy? To unite with divinity? In Catechism we learned that on Pentecost, God turned Himself into tongues of flame He used to speak to the disciples. I waited for my own ears to burn. I followed all of the rules I was taught. I capitalized “He” every time the antecedent was “God.” I fasted on holy days and Lenten Fridays. I read how the saints shivered and sacrificed. Every mass, I prayed the Confiteor. I confessed to almighty God that I had sinned by my fault, by my fault, by my most grievous fault. I beat my breast three times. I sought solace in the sacraments, in the belief that the hand of absolution the priest presses against your head is the hand of God.

I confess: I confessed, and I came no closer to knowing God, to burning with the word of Him, to bursting into a holy. I must have sinned, I told myself. I must have forsaken my God so deeply that He in turn had forsaken me.

At summer camp, a friend told me that he wouldn’t believe in God until God spoke to him directly.

I sat slack-jawed with shock. “But why assume God only exists if he personally proves his existence to you?”

My friend shrugged. “Because if God is God, He can do anything.” For the rest of the day I walked around fogged by my own resistance to the revelation I nonetheless could not keep from coming: that I did the very same thing, seeking God not in the world and its beauties but as a private messenger who spoke His holies to me. That the problem wasn’t so much one of sin as of positioning, of a way of viewing the world that set myself in its center like a jewel, waiting for God to shine it.

I confess: I am the center of nothing but my viewing of the world.

I confess: the closest I have come to holy is when I have understood that the one thing I will never understand is God. That the experience of the divine is to encounter all of the things that are larger than me—time and space and all of the thousands of tiny, immaculate coincidences that tie us all together—and acknowledge that understanding them is impossible, to find stillness in that absence of understanding, the fault line that lies between the human and whatever the divine may be.

Emma Bolden is the author of three full-length collections of poetry—House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2018), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press, 2016), and Maleficae (GenPop Books, 2013)—and four chapbooks. She is the recipient of a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, and her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, Best American Poetry, Best Small Fictions, and such journals as Mississippi Review, the Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, and Indiana Review. She currently serves as associate editor-in-chief for Tupelo Quarterly.

Su Cho

Writer’s Notebook

July 17, 2020

Every suburb and city I have lived in was marked by racism. But as a child, I associated those moments with the place—that it’d be better the next place we went—because surely, it couldn’t be like this everywhere.

NER poet Su Cho (“Abecedarian for ESL in West Lafayette, Indiana” NER 41.1) remembers the anger that came to her as a child being taught English, the hope that things would be better if that feeling could be poured into a poem, and how the ABCs and the American Dream are not so simple as they’re made out to be.

I was a talkative child, though it is hard for my present self to believe it. Apparently, I bombarded my parents with questions and endless musings. But when I try to remember all this talking I did, try to picture what I looked like, I only see myself now. I’m shrunken down to the size of a child, my mouth mechanically opening and closing. What I can imagine, quite clearly, is being spoken to, being told what to know.

It’s doubly difficult to imagine this chatterbox of a past self because all that chatter was in Korean. Now, Korean is just for my immediate family, or when I find myself at my parents’ church. I try to remember what I must’ve said in English growing up. The only thing that comes to mind is someone telling me, or perhaps I just knew, that school in America would be fine if I was armed with the ABCs and knew the difference between dog and cat.

After immigrating to the US, surely, I must have spoken. But I only remember observing and listening. And just like that, by the time we moved to West Lafayette, Indiana, English warmed on my tongue. For years I had the same ESL book with a blue cover showcasing the American Dream: a suburban landscape, everything neatly labeled mailbox, mailman, white fence, house.

When I wrote “Abecedarian for ESL in West Lafayette, Indiana,” I was angry. I didn’t know where to direct my anger, so I tried to make it precise. I don’t like how A is always for apple, that even in those big plastic posters of learning English for Korean kids, there’s a big giant red apple with 사과 written next to it. I used to think that the world would magically become a better place if I could distill my anger into a poem. How wrong I was. Every suburb and city I have lived in was marked by racism. But as a child, I associated those moments with the place—that it’d be better the next place we went—because surely, it couldn’t be like this everywhere. And just like that, just like all the immigrants and children of immigrants and all of those who found themselves in this country, English permeates my present, my future, and somehow, finds its way back to the past, where it didn’t really exist.

My memory of speaking Korean is wrapped up with my memory of learning English. This poem was a way for me to remember that even seemingly innocuous things like the ABCs are not simple. I made this abecedarian just for myself, to be able to call things as I see them with as much or as little explanation as possible.

Su Cho currently lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she serves as Editor-in-Chief of Cream City Review. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Gulf Coast, and Colorado Review, and she also has essays at GEN at Medium, Sycamore Review, and forthcoming from Black Warrior Review. You can follow her @su__cho or visit her website at www.suchowrites.com.

New England Review