Matt Donovan

Writer’s Notebook—Poetry Where Nonfiction Fails

May 4, 2021

Not long ago, I flew to Chicago with a list of phone numbers, an interview itinerary with several social workers, ER doctors, and victims of gun violence, and a book project that was already unraveling, although I didn’t know that yet.

[Matt Donovan, photo by Brandan Sodor]

More than a year into writing a journalistic exploration of guns in America, I had an agent, deadlines, punchy chapter subtitles, and a two-sentence handwritten mantra pinned above my desk: Figure it out. Get to work.

Given the structure and premise of my planned book, “getting to work” often meant jetting off to different locations to ask a single pre-determined question about guns. A few weeks prior to arriving in Chicago, I’d traveled to Cody, Wyoming, to speak with teachers, parents, and the town’s sheriff about a new proposal to arm public school staff. Soon, I’d be spending the entire day with a ballistic detective in Cleveland. And my misguided agenda for Chicago? To ask about a trauma surgeon’s claim that we could change public opinion about guns by barraging the public, in the wake of a mass shooting, with graphic photographs that capture the way a bullet ravages the human body.

Given all the inherent problems with that question, I’m humbled by the patience, kindness, and generosity of the Chicago residents with whom I spoke. I’m particularly indebted to two people who ultimately revealed to me the myopic nature of my approach.

The day after I arrived in the city, artist Garland Martin Taylor offered me an extended tour of his studio. I tried to capture just one of his beautiful, multifaceted, ever-changing sculptures in “Here the Thing with Feathers Isn’t Hope,” and the ways in which Taylor’s artwork uses metaphor to interrogate firearms helped me understand that I needed to rework my planned nonfiction book into a collection of poems.

And then I met Pamela Bosley, co-founder of Purpose Over Pain, an organization that fights for gun law reform and offers support to parents who have lost their children to gun violence. In a conference room in Saint Sabina, a church on the city’s South Side, Bosley began our conversation by matter-of-factly describing the murder of her son. Her response to the tone-deaf question that I eventually asked is incorporated verbatim into my poem, “The Wrong Question More Than Once,” which I hope reflects my failure in that moment to understand the most fundamental truths about race and empathy in America.

After our discussion, Bosley led me outside to the sprawling memorial wall which commemorates hundreds of neighborhood residents. She pointed to a photo of her son—grinning in a white tuxedo and holding a cane—that was captioned “A Night of Elegance, Prom 2005.” I stood there on the sidewalk, looking at a picture of Terrell Bosley—whose nickname had been Mr. Music, who had been killed at the age of eighteen while unloading a drum set in the parking lot of a church—having just asked, a few minutes earlier, about whether photographs of the dead could enact grief and change.

Matt Donovan is the author of two collections of poetry—Rapture & the Big Bam (Tupelo Press 2017) and Vellum (Mariner 2007), as well as a book of lyric essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press 2016). A new collection of poems—The Dug-Up Gun Museum—will be published by BOA Editions in 2022. Donovan is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. He serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

Sarah Audsley

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

February 1, 2021

Sarah Audsley photo by Anne Skidmore — Sarah Audsley, photo by Anne Skidmore

Do poets always feel envious of painters? Do painters ever envy poets? “Field Dress Portal” (NER 41.4) was not begun out of envy but out of admiration for the painting Field Dress by Lauren Woods. However, I would be lying if I did not admit to often being envious of my friends who are painters. With layers of color from an invented palette, the artist’s perception of the world is realized; sometimes, it seems like an easier task than the poet’s. I am making assumptions. Of course, I do not believe that either the painter or the poet ever endeavors because it is an easy task. Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

The ekphrastic poem has always eluded me. In graduate school, I failed to respond to a writing prompt by one of my favorite mentors. I never really tried again until this poem because, I think, the ekphrastic poem intimidates me. At its heart, I understand that ekphrasis—defined by The Oxford Classical Dictionary as “the rhetorical description of a work of art”—is supposed to describe and respond to a work of art beginning with the poet’s description. But how does one adhere to the mode’s expectations and, possibly, transcend the pitfall of mere description?

My response to Woods’s painting evolved over time, almost along with the artist’s reworking of her canvas. I watched the pictures of her progress on social media, the painting morphing over the course of several months. Revisions of the poem did not exactly follow the changes the painter made, but I reworked many drafts from August 2019 to the final proof for NER.

I wanted to step into the painting—to feel the tree limbs underfoot, to imagine inhabiting the lighted landscape the painter created, to understand the forest in a new way. A painting is 2-D, but how can words make it 3-D? I hope this poem enlivens the painting, creates a portal for the reader, encourages looking up the original artwork, and for the question the poem asks to be worthy of the leap. Also, I am aware that I cannot use the phrase “dead doe” without evoking “Dead Doe” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, which, in my opinion, is inimitable—I bow down before her and her genius. Perhaps Woods’s painting reminded me of Kelly’s poem. And, in that regard, Noah Stezer’s poem “For All the Deer” in Sixth Finch provides another lens to ruminate on deer poems.

Most importantly, though, I consider myself a “rural poet.” What I mean by that self-designation is that I claim belonging in the rural landscape—Vermont, specifically—as a Korean American adoptee. Seeing someone like myself represented in a rural or wild landscape was not common when I was growing up. I claim the pastoral. The poem’s speaker’s identity is not disclosed, but it is important for the “I” to take up the rural descriptions, to walk through the painting, to make my own portal of belonging with words.

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.

New England Review