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.

Dan Beachy-Quick

Writer’s Notebook: Why I Translated This

July 6, 2020

It is as if translating these ancient poems returned me to a way of knowing I had not only lost, but never knew I lost.

Archilochus, Callimachus, & Alcman, A Suite of Poems from the Ancient Greek, from NER 41.2

I wanted to learn Ancient Greek to work down toward the roots of certain words and so dig deeper into the earthy loam that is the mind. And for a long time—studying the bewildering grammar, trying to memorize conjugations of verbs and declensions of nouns, reading through the vocabulary flashcards I made on the way to teach my seminar on Keats and Celan—that first feeling stayed true. Some words shook my head apart like a child shakes apart a dandelion: a strong breath that scatters its wish into greener fields. The word for poet was one such word, ποιητής, which means “maker; workman; inventor.” The related verb ποιέω means what you’d expect it to mean: “I make; I invent.” But unlike English, verbs in Ancient Greek can occur in the “middle voice.” I think of the middle voice as John Keats taught me to—a verb that is active and passive at once, a “diligent indolence,” in which the nature of the verb’s action is curiously at work inside and against itself. Some words change their meaning in the middle voice, a kind of magic, and ποιέω is one such word. What in the active indicative means “I make” in the middle voice, ποιέεσθαί, means “to consider.” So I learned the poem is the thing that must be made before it can be considered, that the thinking of the poem cannot occur in any true way before the writing of the poem, can be held or found no place else, but once the poem is written, the primer is there, and one can learn how to read once again. That one word made poetry more sacred to me—I understood that I didn’t understand, and that bewildered condition requires this building on the page called a poem.

But as I moved from those years toiling on in my student way to learn the basics of the language into these years of translating from the early lyric tradition (Alcman, Anacreon, Archilochus, Callimachus, Simonides, Theognis, and now Sappho) and from early philosophy (Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, and Thales) something changed in me. Another word helps explain it. The word for “reading” in Ancient Greek is ἀναγιγνώσκω. Its most literal definition is “to know again.” Reading returns us to knowing—the thought keeps echoing inside me, and by the echo, a kind of echolocation, I’ve found this work has opened something larger in me than I’d ever intended. Not a getting down to the roots, but as the poet Paul Eluard supposedly claimed, that “there is another world, but it is inside this one.” Not a root, but a cosmos: an order, an ardor, a door. It is as if translating these ancient poems returned me to a way of knowing I had not only lost, but never knew I lost. Some more essential way. A way of thinking we can no longer think in, it is so simple, our questions cannot reach it. Not mastery or fact. But participation. Nearing. Or as Heidegger puts it writing about Parmenides, “a heedful retreat in the face of being.” If one could draw the vectors of force of translating as I’ve learned to translate, it might look like this: a drawing near, a walking close, and the quick living fix of the other’s gaze, and then a walking backward, eyes to other eyes’ brightness locked, hoping what I see, and what sees me, follows. I’ve come to love this walking backward blind to every step, eyes fixed on a brightness more important than direction: to be in heedful retreat.

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator whose newest collection, Arrows, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Milkweed Editions will be publishing Stone-Garland, a selection of lyric poems from the Ancient Greek that includes the poems published here. His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim foundations, and he teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar. Beachy-Quick’s poem “Memory-Wax, Knowledge-Bird” appeared in NER 38.3. Read Beachy-Quick’s conversation about that poem with poetry editor Rick Barot.

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