May 19, 2013

Dear Friend,

I’m sitting in the garden of an old house here in Noting Hill, reading an anthology of young British poets called Dear World & Everyone in It: New Poetry in the UK. It’s amazing how similar and how different the poetry of the United States and The UK really are seeing how the basic tool being used is absolutely the same! Rhyme and meter are still alive and well on this island but so is the prose poem and a kind of free verse that seems both free and sometimes shy about its own possibilities. Some exciting work in this selection is being done by poets such as Marcus Slease, Amy De’Ath, Ahren Warner, Rachael Allen, Emily Critchley, and someone named Jonty Tiplady.  There’s a range of energy here and it expresses, perhaps, a moment where young British poets are beginning to look away from their Iambic parents and toward something wilder inside themselves… or perhaps I’m being West-Coast-Centric and only want them to be wild. Either way it seems like an exciting time here and perhaps also a time where well-defined groups that identify as Marxist poets or Avant-Garde poets or just plain old poets begin moving out of their safe-houses and into the streets to party together, to spill into one another, and create a poetry community that is loose and vibrant. Any poet or reader of poetry in The States who wishes to know what’s going on over here should pick up this anthology.

I read here in London the other night and got the chance to meet some of these poets and hear them read. I wish you were with me, all of you, and that we could begin to build a bridge over the Atlantic and be in touch with these poets in a new way.

Instead of thinking of Shakespeare we might think of this:

“Now I’m real nakedness some kind of hay bale girl a goofball/ actress jumping rivers in the Comic Adventure of Boots” – Amy De’Ath

“I liked to read/ on you all my false news it went across your head like The/ Financial District and how you glowed with it” – Rachael Allen

“Matisse, radiance of crepe, cancer smarting like a bitch”  — Ahren Warner

Believe me,

Matthew

Matthew Dickman is the poetry editor of Tin House and the author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and Mayakovsky’s Revolver (Norton, 2012). He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

At first glance, Bram van Velde is interesting because of Samuel Beckett.  It was Beckett’s name, at any rate, that prompted me to search out the slim, paperback Evergreen Gallery Book.  The volume, printed by Grove Press in 1960, is the fifth in a series on contemporary artists (De Kooning, Stuart Davis, and Philip Guston, for example) in which, as the back jacket explains, “each work, perceptively presented by an outstanding authority, is richly illustrated.”  This rich illustration, in the case of Bram van Velde, includes nine black and white prints, much as you might expect, with an additional twelve color plates, tipped-in—that is, glued onto the pages along their top edge only.  It’s a process that hardly seems practical, production-wise.  Guide marks on the pages suggest that it might have been a human, and not a machine, who preformed this meticulous pasting.  Nevertheless, I’m glad someone took the trouble, because, as I flip through the book, it appears to me as if these plates have truly been hung on the pages—very much as the paintings they replicate once would have been in, you know, a gallery.

In this gallery, though, the primary attraction is not the art, but the text meant to “perceptively present” it.  The book contains three essays, briefer pieces by Beckett and a French art critic named Georges Duthuit, which were written previously and on separate occasions, and a far lengthier article by Jacques Putman, Parisian friend and mentor of van Velde.

Beckett’s contribution, which turns out to be shorter than this essay I’m now writing, reads like even more of a riddle than his fiction, mentions van Velde only once, half way through the piece, and pointedly neglects to characterize the work he’s ostensibly discussing.  Instead of reaching any conclusions, he writes about being unable to do so.  “What is this coloured plane, that was not here before,” he asks, and answers himself, “I don’t know what it is, having never seen anything like it before.  It seems to have nothing to do with art, in any case, if my memories of art are correct.”

If you’re unfamiliar with van Velde’s work, as I was, this statement might lead you to imagine something far more radical than what’s actually taking place on the canvas.  A few pages on, when Duthuit is, “in the dock,” as Beckett puts it, the art critic has a go at describing this non-art.  “An aborted geometry,” is his first suggestion.  Later he elaborates: “The canvases are breaking down but ordered; they disintegrate, are constructed; are stiff, expansive; somber and aglow.  One and the same surface is both taut and relaxed.”  Since his text is presented alongside the prints, he can perhaps be forgiven for not bothering to explain what they look like, in favor of these musings on their character.

For the sake of clarity, though, I’ll pause a moment to attempt what none of the authors of Bram van Velde ever get around to: a straightforward description of the “art” of Bram van Velde.  The paintings, yes, are abstract, but not so rootless that it becomes impossible to say, for instance, “there’s a face,” or, “there’s a flower.”  He resists pattern and symmetry, but elements such as shape, line and color are not absent.  Looking at one of his “compositions,” as nine of the color plates are titled, the work appears, in fact, composed.  I couldn’t tell you what logic or impulse might have compelled the Dutchman to place this green triangle up here and that white sphere in the corner, but the choices he’s made give my eye places to travel; his palette—sometimes tending toward pastel, at other times more gloomy, nearly always incorporating a network of red or red-brown, snaking lines—certainly creates a mood.  Like all works of art, his paintings are un-paraphrasable, but, like any work of art, they can be productively discussed.

And Beckett is, in his way, responding to the work, even if his response sounds far more like self-reflection.  “My case,” he submits, “is that Bram van Velde is…the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and to shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.”  If you’ve come for a view of Beckett, it’s a pleasure to read this thesis, which so transparently phrases his own philosophy.

Beckett’s, though, is a small part of this book, and arguably not its best gift.  If he is the curmudgeon in the room, Duthuit is the romantic, regaling us with lines like, “During all our attempt to understand his work this is our only datum: the fact that between this painting and ourselves there was an immediate communication, different from, or rather below the level of, any comprehension.”

Putman, whose essay accounts for the bulk of the text, initially presents himself as our arbiter, tempting us with the possibility of, “an original synthesis,” of the preceding viewpoints.  It quickly becomes clear, though, that, like Beckett, his interest is in refraining from conclusions.  His language is not so dense as Beckett’s, his air more cheerful, but his pattern of evasion is very much in kind.  He follows up the blessedly direct question, “Is his painting representational or not?” with this reply: “I don’t understand the question.”  He further asserts, “There is nothing more impossible than to tell whether or not things mean the same thing.  Except to tell whether they mean anything at all.  It is better to say nothing.”  A sentiment, of course, that we recognize from Beckett.

If I had come to Bram van Velde wishing to learn about Bram van Velde, I’d be left merely vaguely satisfied.  The brief biography that postscripts the essays and a quick perusal of the Internet do a far better job than our three authors at elucidating his life and work (Bram grew up very poor in The Netherlands, eventually moved to Paris, and by 1960 had experienced little commercial success, although that trend later reversed).  What their writings do suggest, though, is a common psychology, an obsession with the Sisyphean nature of life—as these men saw it—which contextualizes Beckett (and van Velde, too, if you like) in a way that makes his lonely toiling toward the minima seem, in fact, less lonely.

In James Knowlson’s biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, he remarks that, as the writer’s health was failing in 1988, “On one occasion, he watched a program about Bram van Velde, noting with emotion that, as he was being interviewed in a garden, Bram was carrying a copy of Beckett’s book Compagnie.”  In English, of course, that’s Company.  Never mind that the novella leaves us in doubt about the real possibility of companionship; what’s important is that it acknowledges, “the craving for company,” even, “the need for company.”

In the end, it isn’t Beckett or even van Velde that makes this little Gallery Book worthwhile.  It is the book itself, its spirit of inquiry, its esteem of conversation, its willingness to look a long time at something, withholding judgement, and to at last—in a final effort at companionship—bid the reader to take part.  “It’s your turn,” Putman tells us.  I’m going to go ahead and say that, here it is: meaning: in the desire to communicate, in the unfolding of a dialogue.  For what better reason could we strive and could we search, than for company?

Kate Brittain holds an MFA from NYU and lives in Brooklyn with her dog, her bicycle, and never enough books.

Alexxander Dovelin is an illustrator, writer from the internet. Crafting between tea breaks, Alex draws on personal experience and metaphor to produce poems, short stories, and pseudo-philosophies. You’ll find him scribbling over in Portland, OR.

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky (Assistant Editor, Tin House Magazine): I just finished Tin House Books’s own Me and Mr. Booker by Cory Taylor. I’m generally a slow reader, but I drunk this book down in one swift, gleeful gulp. The eponymous Mr. Booker, a dapper English film professor whose flirtatious coyness might actually be avoidance, had me thinking of the older man in An Education in the best possible way. But where that tale’s male lead is fundamentally a conman, Mr. Booker and his teenage mistress, Martha, are partners in crime, equally guilty of looking past the truth to keep a damned relationship afloat.

What drives the book forward, and what separates it from its teenage affair story competition, is Martha’s voice. She’s perceptive, candid, wry in a way only Australians can be, completely equipped to parry with Mr. Booker–and still just a kid. She and I both couldn’t turn away from what was happening, even when we both knew she was headed nowhere good.

Desiree Andrews (Assistant Editor, Tin House magazine): This isn’t a Friday Read—more of a lost and never found situation. When I was volunteering in Kolkata a few years ago, I ran across a copy of a book called The Affair.  The book was dingy, yellow and clearly very old but it looked like it had never been opened. As I read it, the binding glue disintegrated and pages feel out in chunks.

The book was about a scientist who had once taught at a prestigious British university but had left for the private sector. He is called back into the cloistered world of academia when an old colleague whom everyone hates (partly because of his terrible personality and partly because of his affiliations with the communist party) is accused of falsifying test results in an experiment. Although the narrator also hates the accused, he goes back to act as his attorney in a case that pits the academic old guard against the younger, more progressive professors.

All of the characters in this book are British men over 45. There’s no sex, no crime (other than the crime of scapegoating an apparent asshole) and the whole thing takes place on a dreary university campus circa 1970. There is no reason why I should like this book yet I’ve been explicably obsessed with it since I left India. I wrote the author’s name down in a journal that was lost in transit. Armed with only the loose description I’ve shared here, the Internet has been no help. I think it just goes to show we only want what we can’t have and I want to read The Affair this Friday.

Heather Hartley (Paris Editor): I just picked up a second-hand copy of Marguerite Duras’ short novel Summer Rain and haven’t been able to put it down. Lyrical and intense, abstract in the best sense and with a peripatetic and at times surprising rhythm, it is the jagged and moving story of a large immigrant family living in the grey cement suburbs of Paris. With spare and crystalline writing, Duras brings forward and into focus the humanity of and intimacy within this rambling family of nine, while the bleakness of the city’s outskirts fades in the background. As Duras writes in Summer Rain, “Their voices reach out into the empty yard, plunge deep into the hills, go right through the heart.”

Meg Storey (Editor, Tin House Books): I am halfway through the craziest book I have ever loved. At AWP, I picked up an ARC of The Carp Castle, which Overlook Press is publishing this coming September. It is the only unpublished novel by MacDonald Harris (the pseudonym for Donald Heiney), who lived from 1921 to 1993 and was the author of sixteen novels. Set in post–World War I Europe (at least, so far), The Carp Castle opens with a metaphysician chasing his soon-to-be lover through a German forest, each of them flinging off clothes throughout the chase. At the moment their relationship is consummated, the sky darkens, not because of a storm cloud, but because of a zeppelin, which, it turns out, is the vessel that will take them, the mystic/cult leader Moira, whom they follow, and other equally nutty (at least, so far) characters to a place that Moira calls “Gioconda” and the cover copy calls “a better future.” Best of all, the zeppelin is named The League of Nations. Stay tuned . . .

I was slapping at the welts on my shins one green evening when you told me to suck on the head of a match. Sulfur, you said, would get in my blood and keep the mosquitoes away. One match a month was all it took, you told me. I went back to catching fireflies. You said it was phosphorous in their bulbs that kept them lighting up. I walked around with a match in my mouth for a week, the stick swollen soggy in my mouth, until my mother slapped it out because of the chemicals.

You told me once that you were Johnny Unitas. It was your stage name, and no wonder. A name like that, Unitas. You didn’t want to have people stopping you and making a scene. The secret to being a quarterback, you said, was seeing the whole field. I remember you stepping backward, feet like a fencer’s, palming an invisible ball and checking down the passing routes in our backyard. Scan the field, and make a read you said. I told everybody at school.

The two boys on our street, Kevin and his brother Christopher, didn’t believe me. Kevin sat on my back while Christopher punched me in the head and told me how stupid I was. A year later, after you’d died, I wasn’t angry that you’d lied. I was angry I couldn’t tell it like you did, my voice easy and convincing and plain.

I remember you told me once what it was like to be a paratrooper. You had just pulled up in front of Gramama’s house in your camper. The muscles in your forearms were cleaved by two thick pipes of muscle, and the hair that covered them was paper white and thick. You gave me an ice cream cone from the cooler in your camper, and I asked was it true you were in Vietnam.

You told me how it is after you jump, before your chute opens. You and the rest of your platoon are connected on a static line, and the bullets fly by you in the air, and you can’t hear them, but you feel their gravity, the way the marrow in your bones thrills toward and away the ripples in the air. And you’re so scared, you said, that you forget your body. You don’t even thrash around, but move like a swimmer, and it’s like your arms and legs are on strings, controlled like a marionette is, and you can’t even feel your muscles.  Your arms float up next to your face, and you notice your hand, in the dark air, floating. You just felt light, you said.

I heard after you died that when you drank you were worse. My mother said that once you came in when we were all living in Alexandria and you told everybody to go into the bedroom and lay down on the floor with all the lights out. I was there, too young to remember. There wasn’t any time to talk, you said. Someone was looking for you, because of an assignment at work. You worked at the Pentagon. We all lay down, mother said, in the bedroom with our hands over our heads. After an hour passed and then another, mother walked out and found you passed out in the living room, your head tilted back on the sofa. She draped a blanket over you, and never talked about it again till I was grown.

I have spent my whole life trying to feel as light as you.

Danny Nowell is a blogger and writer living in Portland. His writing about the NBA appears at ESPN TrueHoop Network blogs, Portland Roundball Society, and HoopSpeak, and he reviews books for The Oxford American online. What he lacks in finesse he makes up for in zeal. 

*Tin House is now accepting flash fiction (under 1,000 words) for FLASH FRIDAYS. Please send to theopenbar@tinhouse.com with FLASH FRIDAY as your subject line.

As I sit here at my desk in Northwest Portland, in a lime-green apartment full of skylights, sandwiched between Tin House Magazine and Tin House Books, reading the dynamic and very brave poems my grad students at Portland State are writing—I find myself thinking, in the most basic terms, about what it means to be instructed by a poem. What are we talking about when we say we turn to poems for instruction?

Richard Hugo is the presiding poet-spirit in the M.F.A. program where I usually teach, The University of Montana.  From my (weirdly sunny) perch here in Oregon, casting a long glance back at my home state, I want to consider one of Hugo’s most-celebrated most-anthologized poems, “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” from his 1973 volume The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, in the hope of finding some provisional answers.

The poem opens with “You might come here Sunday on a whim.” (you can read the entire poem at the end of this post) The “you” in that first line seems to be a visitor, not unlike the poet himself, who, in his essay “The Triggering Town,” recommends to fellow poets that it might help “to use scenes (towns perhaps) that seem to vivify themselves as you remember them but in which you have no real emotional investment other than the one that grows out of the strange way the town appeals to you, the way it haunts you later when you should be thinking about paying your light bill.”

So you (the visitor, the poet, the speaker, the reader) come here some Sunday to take a look around, and although you’re not from Philipsburg, the town still makes some claim on you.  “Say your life broke down” is the first indication that what follows is a vision; you have to go there in your imagination and walk the streets, and try out—or try on—a life.  Whatever whim brought you here, there’s nothing remotely whimsical about the town, with its numbing failures, its streets “laid out by the insane” Philipsburg is in the last stages of collapse, constituted almost entirely of dilapidated, gutted structures, and eerily emptied of people.  A few isolate souls remain:  the jail’s single prisoner, a couple of local drivers (maybe driving in circles around the block, pathetically gunning their engines), the old man who was twenty when the jail was built, and a waitress.  There are mostly men, because the “best liked girls…leave each year for Butte.”

Life flows out of Philipsburg; the hotels were closed because people stopped coming; even the single prisoner doesn’t know why he’s “in,” why he’s been held back—and yet you’ve come here looking for something. Where is everyone? The poem tells us that the only surviving institutions are churches and bars, and yet we find out later that nobody’s in the churches:  the church bell rings and no one comes. In a sense, the town’s buildings are just as alive—just as dead—as the citizens themselves: the jail turned 70 this year. Evidence of the late stages of decay is everywhere. The huge mill is in ruin but “won’t finally fall down,” the economy is in shambles, and what’s left beyond these few persisting husks of life are the most impoverished human emotions:  rage, hatred, failure, defeat, scorn, and further beneath these—fueling these, perhaps most primal—boredom.

These are the degrees of gray, the filth itself, imaginatively entered and described, and they hold out the central challenge of the poem, which is not so far from what American citizens and readers and poets are facing today. What, beyond rage and boredom, is left of us?

Philipsburg’s past is nothing but a souvenir, and there seems to be some suggestion in the poem that, however specific and vivid, memories themselves won’t sustain you.  That one last good kiss, that one last good year (the 1907 boom), those eight once-productive silver mines (“going” in a way that the town’s current citizens can’t seem to), the very springs beneath the dance floor—each memory is “resolved” into a single, sweeping, generalizing, impersonal final gaze, figured here as a field of “panoramic green” that surrounds the town and is literally being eaten away by cattle. Boredom or memory: both do away with the vital, burning particulars, and Hugo hints that our eyes themselves are compromised, “two dead kilns” like two dead eye-sockets looming over the town, trying to grasp at something that once fed them. “Isn’t this your life—that ancient kiss / still burning out your eyes?” These are extinguishing fires—the fires that, like the forces of anonymity, wipe you out, slowly eating away at your spirit until you succumb.

This whole town, your whole life, announces nothing but its defeat, and the church bell announces its defeat, and all the empty houses ring with defeat.  And no one is responding to the call:  no one comes. This is a crisis of human response, and it is also the province of poetry. As Hugo understood, poems are at their most essential responses, genuine responses to a call that comes from outside the self—from the broken, spite-driven world. And so this speaker pushes on, hoping for some kind of instruction, some sense of purpose. What will suffice?  Are magnesium and scorn “sufficient” to support a town, a life? What can support your life, any life, given that the world will not offer you certain things—the “towering blondes, good jazz and booze,”—given that your desires will not be met?

And then a response arrives.  It is the first real action or undertaking on the part of the speaker in the poem: “Say no to yourself.”  It echoes the original “Say your life broke down,” and seems to mean, in this deepened context:  say no to your life breaking down; no, this isn’t enough; no to some part of your spirit that just wants to be extinguished. And the whole poem starts to pivot around that no.

Say no to yourself.  The old man, twenty

when the jail was built, still laughs

although his lips collapse.  Someday soon,

he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.

The old man, with whom the speaker appears engaged in conversation, is still able to laugh although his lips are collapsing around his mouth (The rhyme between “still laughs” and “collapse” suggests that this laughter is hardly carefree. And the description of the old man’s puckered mouth seems to be a kind of cruel parody of the “ancient kiss” that reminded the speaker of a time when he felt alive.). We don’t know, then, if an actual conversation is taking place, or if this old man is simply laughing and the speaker is imagining the old man’s thoughts. On the weird border between an actual and an imagined exchange, the moment is especially charged because the landscape of the poem thus far has been intensely desolate and solitary. This is the last remaining shape of human contact, even if it only takes place in the speaker’s head.  And out of this exchange comes what is to my mind the most crucial line in the poem, in all its visceral immediacy: You tell him no. This phrase is of a different order than “Isn’t this your life”—where the speaker is articulating something he already feels to be true—and it goes beyond “Say no to yourself,” where the refusal is somehow more general and more exclusively directed at the contents and choices of the speaker’s own life. Here, the speaker is simply—and extravagantly—refusing a stranger’s death, or more specifically, refusing the man’s resignation in the face of death. (“Someday soon, / he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.  You tell him no.”)

One of the things that makes this gesture so striking is that it’s undertaken on behalf of another:  it’s not the speaker’s life in question, but it might as well be his.  And the speaker’s refusal is striking because it’s outrageous:  nobody can say no to death, and certainly someone like this old man, about whom we know nothing beyond his apparent physical decay, is perfectly correct in maintaining that at some point, perhaps soon, he’ll go to sleep and not wake up. What we seem to be witnessing, then, is the sudden assertion, on the part of the speaker, of some buried or latent force of will—a will made manifest at the point of greatest urgency and threat of vanishing. I refuse your death; I insist against all plausibility, against everything I know to be true about the world, that you not succumb. And with this gesture Hugo puts his voice into a stream of beautiful, agonizing speech, a whole company and history of voices—the voices of poets who rage against death and against the habits, conventions, and dull, languishing routines of the self that threaten to make us die every day.

With “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” as in so many of his poems, Hugo offers us a city-map straight into, through, and—in a very fleeting, tenuous way—out of despair.  Some bedrock defiance of death is in you; you have a stake in life, this man’s and your own. “The car that brought you here still runs.”  There is money to buy lunch with; you can still eat.  Someone’s bringing you food:  there is company, you’re being served. And, as if to accentuate these reminders of worth, the very materials of the world seem to be making themselves present.  Although mined from elsewhere and so not supporting Philipsburg, the money is silver (gray, but lit—gray, but still burning), and like the silver of the change itself, the waitress’ red hair is “lit,” casting a red-gold, almost hallowed light against the wall.  There’s a flicker of the erotic among these newly luminous surfaces (Hugo pairs “silver” with “slender”), and we feel how hard-fought are the color and the light against that thick, lingering backdrop of obsessive grays.  Something at once small and tangible and ethereal and shimmering has appeared:  the light from the waitress’ red hair seems to spread to the wall itself, as if the confines of that space were, however quietly, expanded and transformed.  And all the eroded surfaces in the poem—from the meaningless grid of streets to the outward collapse of machines and concrete and persons—seem to momentarily give way to this singular illumination that is no reminder of a past life, but altogether of the present; that is not made of abstract, future desires, like the town of “towering blondes,” but of a glow that seems to emanate from this one woman, right now, in this last space on earth. However temporary it might be, it’s here, and it’s real. The poem never suggests that it will last: but that it happened. For a moment, the world was lit from within.

The poem follows an arc from the “last-one” sense of things in the first two stanzas (that last one kiss, the last one prisoner, the only restaurant) to the “no one” of stanza three, to the “no” of stanza four, and comes to rest on the apparently casual “no matter” of the final phrase. No matter wretchedness and degradation, no matter rage and hopelessness and constant, corrosive defeat:  some piece of life, some premonition of our worth, survives. “Call it,” writes Hugo in his essay “In Defense of Creative Writing Classes,”

the obsessive and irresistible love of being alive, if you can stand the rhetoric.  It is born of the certainty we will disappear fast enough…No matter how justified our despair, we still live in a world where circumstances that make death preferable to life are limited by our revulsion.  When moments that support our awareness of ourselves and each other, fond or sad,…insist, some of us would not deny them any more than we would deny our lives.

Joanna Klink is the author of three books of poetry, They Are Sleeping, Circadian, and Raptus. She teaches poetry at The University of Montana and is currently the Tin House Writer-in-Residence at PSU.

hhhhh

Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

by Richard Hugo

jjjjjj

You might come here Sunday on a whim.

Say your life broke down.  The last good kiss

you had was years ago.  You walk these streets

laid out by the insane, past hotels

that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try

of local drivers to accelerate their lives.

hhhh

Only churches are kept up. The jail

turned 70 this year.  The only prisoner

is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now

is rage.  Hatred of the various grays

the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,

The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls

who leave each year for Butte. One good

restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.

The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,

a dance floor built on springs—

all memory resolves itself in gaze,

in panoramic green you know the cattle eat

or two stacks high above the town,

two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse

for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.

jjjj

Isn’t this your life?  That ancient kiss

still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat

so accurate, the church bell simply seems

a pure announcement:  ring and no one comes?

Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium

and scorn sufficient to support a town,

not just Philipsburg, but towns

of towering blondes, good jazz and booze

the world will never let you have

until the town you came from dies inside?

jjjjj

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty

when the jail was built, still laughs

although his lips collapse. Someday soon,

he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.

You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.

The car that brought you here still runs.

The money you buy lunch with,

no matter where it’s mined, is silver

and the girl who serves your food

is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

We hope you have enjoyed the Tin House Seminar: Maggie Nelson thus far. For those of you new to class, read a full description of the project.

Last week, the seminar read  The Red Parts: A Memoir and completed the second writing assignment.  If you didn’t get a chance to read The Red Parts this week, these supplements will get you up to speed (and really make you want to carve out the time to sit down and read Nelson’s haunting memoir about the murder of her aunt, Jane Mixer, in 1969:

Eve Conant, “A Death in the Family,” The New York Times Book Review

This week, the class has focused on The Latest Winter and Shiner. Read the reviews here:  Jordan Davis, The Latest Winter in The Constant Critic and David Gunton, Shiner in Jacket #19.

Exercise #3: Poem(s)

Pick two poems from Shiner, The Latest Winter, and/or Something Bright, Then Holes.  Identify an element in each poem that you’d like to play with in your own work.  The element can be macro (a particular approach to subject matter, a certain kind of voice, a pattern of repetition, a strategy of ligature, etc) or it can be at the level of the sentence (syntax, orthography, lineation, acoustics, diction, etc).  Drawing upon both of the elements you’ve selected, write 2-3 pages of poetry (a single poem, or two, or several—up to you).

May 7, 2013

Dear Friend,

I have arrived in Berlin after a short stay in Reggio-Emilia, Italy. There at the Collezionemaramotti, I attended the opening of Jason Dodge’s first permanent sculpture titled “A Permanently Open Window”  and joined him in conversation about the piece, our ongoing collaboration in conversation about visual art and poetry, as well as reading a group of my own poems, translated into Italian by Franco Nasi, for the event which included about a hundred and sixty people. Part of my inclusion in this event came out of Jason’s interest in building a collaborative understanding/connection between visual artists and poets through his publishing house Five Hundred Places.

A lot of the time collaboration seems to be focused on some sort of physical object: a poet writes a poem and a painter paints the words on a canvas, a quartet plays and a speaker speaks, but those kinds of collaborations seem limited to me. Jason and I have been having an ongoing conversation for about a year now. It is the conversation itself that I view as the collaboration and through that conversation the poems I have been writing have changed. This is more than simply being affected and so ones impulses change, but a conscience decision to engage in the collaboration and choose to make work that comes directly out of it. I wonder if this makes any sense! I miss you and want to be clear! I wonder what you think about when you think about collaboration. Have you ever collaborated with someone who works with different tools than you do? Will you write me about it?

Maybe you and I are beginning our own collaboration right now? Maybe this week you might reach out to someone with different ideas than you, with a different heart, and collaborate on something, each your own, with them… and maybe write me about it!

Believe me,

Matthew Dickman

Matthew Dickman is the poetry editor of Tin House and the author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and Mayakovsky’s Revolver (Norton, 2012). He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.