Arielle Greenberg
We (the clown, the doll, the murderer and I) are in love./With the moon./She ascends: the sky purples, clouds, she rises, now grinning,/becoming a burning door. We love her still.
***
A blunt knowing, no questions asked. She tells all and tells how and why, so many questions in her readers’ heads but none in her own. She makes sense out of nonsensical situations. Plays on this in “Berlin Series” when the narrator continually changes what the poem is about: “This is a poem about a war.” “This is obviously about a person alone.” “As you can see, this is about a lost dog.” Commentary on current poetry? Certain themes run throughout: Love, sex, Jewish/Holocaust, reality vs dreamworld, abuse and the wrongness/rightness of abuse. Questions good and bad forces. Draws extravagant pictures with few words by playing on her readers’ knowledges and interpretations of certain images.
In the first three of her poems in the anthology, she uses each sentence (or, phrase set off by a period) to complete a thought. While the next sentence may change the meaning of this thought in our minds, the original sentence can still stand as a thought on its own. There is a discontinuity about some of her lines, where the following line does not always seem as if it should follow its preceding line. For instance, in “Berlin Series” – Poem is broken up into seven sections, yet the some of the sections seem to comprise multiple thoughts.
I like how she seems to organize her thoughts into these sections, though, at least in all of the poems in the anthology. In “Berlin Series” and “Saints,” this segregation is obvious due to her use of a numbering system. In “Afterward, There Will Be a Hallway” and “Nostalgia, Cheryl, Is the Best Heroin,” thoughts are organized by paragraph (stanza?). In “Analogies” she uses stanzas again, but sections are really set off by use of repetition; each stanza starts with “Let’s play” and then continues to the new image.
Her Appeal to a College Audience: Accessible images that leave you wondering what she has in mind. The give poems in the anthology are all inclusive; they either invite the reader to take part through the use of “we” or “let’s” – Or they are addressed to a certain person and an audience would feel as if they are being let in on a secret between two. Love her different rhythms and would love to hear these poems read aloud.
I Love How Your Eyes Close Every Time You Kiss Me (Erica Bernheim)
Tough night,/wet ink, loose seams.
***
flickr.com
Erica Bernheim wrote her first poem in the anthology, “I Love How Your Eyes Close Every Time You Kiss Me,” with an accusatory confidence. In the poem, the narrator tells the recipient of her thoughts what to do and what they (for, while I’m biased to believe this is addressed to a man, there is no evidence in that direction other than my own biases) are like:
You are alone and you are easy. 1
You see/the history of your life and lineage in your mitochondrial genes… 1-2
There is plenty of time for/nothing and you should volunteer for it. 14-15
Roll over and tell me you’re a/sofa,… 16-17
However, this confidence transforms into insecurity in her second poem in the anthology, “Like a Face.” Here, the narrator asserts that she is “on the wrong side of your affections” and “What I told you made no difference.” The connection in attitude between the two poems is that in each, she is sure of what she is saying. The second feels softer – The lines are longer and less pressing, less sharp. The first is, in her own words, filled with “words so staccato they bang like rats atop the roofs of government embassies” – Some of the lines are easy to trip on.
What I like most about Bernheim’s style is her ability to use sentence structure and punctuation to really accent a certain line or phrase; she knows which lines get her point across best, and which are those memorable sound-good sayings. In “Anne Boleyn,” for example, none of the lines end in any sort of ending punctuation until line 13 – And it is line 14, “What is wrong with a voice/that only wants opera?” that opens a part of the poem on whcih I feel the reader is particularly inclined to focus. She uses this technique again the next time a line ends in ending punctuation: after, we have “If the word ‘picnic’ had existed,/would you have chosen this life?” Another question for us to answer, or at least think about.
An emotional response: Why am I so much more comfortable reading women poets’ work than men? Is it a relating issue? What a mind trip.
Prologue (Dan Beachy-Quick)
The ocean knocks/Ceaseless on my little craft, and I am/Asking you, Will my craft hold?
***
poetryfoundation.org
Dan Beachy-Quick is a happy medium; not a cheerful psychic, but a poet who successfully bends language to serve his own purposes without breaking lines of communication with his poems’ readers. He writes in complete sentences yet uses enjambment as a way to change the meaning and attitude of these sentences. He plays a bit with spacing in some poems more than others; “Prologue” has more traditional spacing, while the premise of “Unworn” is that the spaces between words can alter the intentions of phrases: “Count me among those almonds your eyes/Count me among those almonds your eyes” (“Unworn” 1-2). Another of his poems, “Psalm (Traherne),” plays with spacing between words as well.
Of Beachy-Quick’s four poems I read, “Prologue” stood out for me. It is written as if a letter to an editor, meant to accompany and introduce an author’s new piece of writing. Beachy-Quick’s words describe an author who has sculpted his work as if it were a piece of himself, and that piece of himself is a ship he is sending to the editor. The imagery of a ship upon on the ocean runs throughout the poem; at the same time, so does the theme of “knocking.” This knocking is shown as knocking at a door, or a wave knocking at the shore. The line “don’t knock” is repeated many times. The author tells the editor not to knock, then proceeds to say he (the author) has been knocking at waves for some time now, while his wife is physically knocking at his study door to be let in.
…Thoughts: He uses alliteration often with the “B” sound, a sound that forces the reader to breathe out a puff of air: Life? Living? He compares his writing “the lines” to a man who is drowning’s need for air. Expression? Interesting: When you flip quickly through a book, it makes a wave-like shape “Until the last page turns and is turned/Into air.” Also: “…the crest of a book builds at the binding/And finally spills over on to no shore…” is similar imagery.
All of the wave and ocean imagery topples across each other until the author is brought back to reality by his wife knocking on his study door: she “knows the wood won’t open from wanting/Wood to.” Author is desperate, unsure (“will my craft hold?”), hopefully, insecure (“don’t knock”). Ends in a threat: “Send word, send word. If you don’t, I’ll know.” Threat, or begging “don’t hurt me”? He’s been turned down or hurt before. Uses repetition, also in his other poems. And words with double, sometimes triple, meanings.
From Stephen Burt’s “Close Calls With Nonsense” : “Enjoy double meanings: don’t feel you must choose between them.” “Look for a persona and a world, not for an argument or a plot.” This is the world of the author, which is him and his expression only. This world is being compromised by its sending to an outsider, the editor. The author begs for the editor the let the world open itself to him rather than criticizing or questioning (knocking). It’s a pleading attempt for the editor to let the author, or the piece of the author contained in the words, live.
St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (Karen Russell)
We’d heard rumors about former wolf-girls who never adapted to their new culture. It was assumed that they were returned to our native country, the vanishing woods. We liked to speculate about this before bedtime, scaring ourselves with stories of catastrophic bliss. It was the disgrace, the failure that we all guiltily hoped for in our hard beds. Twitching with the shadow question: Whatever will become of me?
***
At the insistence of Dr. Carney, I chose to start my semester by reading one of Karen Russell’s short stories, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.” The story is the title tale in her collection of short stories. Russell is coming to TCNJ in December for an installment of the Visiting Writers Series, and I always find it to be a good idea to familiarize myself with authors’ works before attending their readings – Considering I’m in the class hosting the event, this is no longer an option, but a (happy!) obligation.
The only regret I have is reading this story so early in the semester, because right now, I can’t imagine any other short story measuring up. It is, in a word, incredible. I spent my summer reading what I like to call “mind-melters” – you know, the books that take very little effort and are easy to read between naps at the beach. If those books were intended to give my mind a much-needed break (and they were), than this was just the short story I needed to get those thinking muscles working again. Which is totally hypocritical, considering I just said I regret reading the story so early in the semester, but if Walt Whitman can contradict himself, so can I, right? Woot.
I suppose a no-frills summary of the story would look something like this: A group of girls who were raised as wolves by their werewolf parents are taken in by Jesuit nuns at St. Lucy’s and are “rehabilitated” to become human. The story is told by a narrator – Claudette, one of the girls – as she looks back on her experiences. She focuses particularly on the eldest girl, Jeanette, and the youngest, Mirabella – both of whom are shunned by the other girls in the program. While Jeanette appears to succeed in her transformation, Mirabella meets with constant failure in the eyes of the nuns. After a climactic moment involving Claudette and Mirabella at a Debutante Ball, the story comes to a close as Claudette revisits the cave and the family she once thought of as her home.
So many different ways to take in this story. The most striking theme throughout is the lack of compassion that ensues from the characters’ transformations from lycanthropes to humans. Claudette gives new meaning to the phrase “holding your tongue” as she dismisses her instinct to reach out to her sisters and lick their wounds and tears. Consciously holding herself back, she worries continuously about losing “Skill Points” and instead loses her pack mentality. Gaining humanity means losing compassion, apparently. I nearly cried.
A Thought: So interesting how the place at which the girls are staying is called “St. Lucy’s Home” rather than “St. Lucy’s School” or “St. Lucy’s Academy” or something along those lines. This is more than your average education. “Home” implies the girls have been given a new starting point, a sort of home-base, to replace their old lives as wolf-girls.
Things to Explore: Connection to immigration, parent/child relationships, societal norms, culture shock, education versus instinct, education theories, the quotes from The Jesuit Handbook prefacing each section.
Literary Ponderings and Such 