H. L. Hix: The back cover text on eel on reef warns against attempts to construct linear meaning out of the poems, but if I stop at a moment in the poems, such as one favorite of mine, “i’m solitude rowing / through neons patterned / after the life / of a night” (63), there still seems to be “linear meaning” available: those four lines sound like a very compressed odyssey.  But if I were to modify the warning, to have it warn against constructing only linear meaning, would that simply be a step back toward what is being warned against, or would it nod to another aspect of the poems?

Uche Nduka: I think that taking words from a blurb rigidly to aid the reading of poems in a volume is a dangerous exercise.  That action may either hinder, intimidate, or confuse a prospective reader.  A poet writes a poem and the poem in turn inscribes the poet. The relationship between a poet and a poem is a free-wheeling one.  At each stage of composing a poem i feel language accumulate in me that will be able to carry the experience of that particular moment.  In other words, no aesthetic, stylistic or thematic preoccupation becomes totalitarian at that instant.  The warning against looking for or even constructing a linear meaning out of the poems of “eel on reef” is not to foreclose a reader’s own perceptions. Actually i think the “warning”, invites the reader or critic or enthusiast to a writerly adventure. It says:step out of your skin for a while and ride around with a poem;leave your usual way of reading-whether linearly or non-linearly and just be with the lines, the stanzas,the coup! lets,the poems as they enter your consciousness.  As a poet i am more interested in that dazzling immediacy that accompanies the bringing of a poem to life than the secondary explanations or rationalizations that come afterwards.  I am both reverential and irreverent towards meaning and form in my poems. The buoyancy and richness of a true poem point almost always to another aspect of communing with it.  Those four lines you quoted from the poem on page 63 strike me as adrenalised. To me a poem is continually evolving and sometimes even sabotages its operational strategies for better or worse.

Nduka, Uche.  eel on reef.  Black Goat, 2007.

My High School Letter:

I feel blessed to have been involved in the first edition of a Made Priceless A Few Things Money Can’t Buy.

One type of item seemed to be missing, the earned item.

Here is the first letter I earned from MacArthur High School in Tennis.

All those jocks who knocked the wind out of me in football, blocked my shots in basketball and struck me out in baseball, had trouble returning my serve in Tennis.

Someday I hope to become self-actualized, and material objects won’t help determine my worth. The experiences will.

Until that day comes, and here is the immature part of me, I can’t help but derive a small amount of satisfaction knowing some of my detractors didn’t even letter in high school sports.

A last note . . .

I joined Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Kansas City some 10+ years ago. Kristopher graduated from High School last May. We stayed pretty close until the end. He always thought my Letters were cool. He could have lettered in Basketball or Football if he would have stuck with them. He’s a good person, and although he isn’t returning my e mails now, I know we’ll reconnect again in the future.

John Ferry’s daughters, Katherine and Paige, may decide to letter in a sport when they reach high school age.

Shelby Shadwell, Untitled 10

Shelby Shadwell Artist Statement

I chose to draw the black plastic trash bags as much for aesthetic reasons as for the contents or connotations the materials may carry.  Formally, there is a palpable tension between representation and abstraction in the work, as the folds in the plastic and the light and shadow shapes assume an almost portrait-like presence in each piece, invoking Rorschach.  For me, the work raises some metaphysical questions about the visible versus the hidden and the valuable versus the disposable in art and a broader cultural context.

Response by F. Daniel Rzicznek

Shelby Shadwell lives and works in Laramie, WY.  F. Daniel Rzicznek’s books include Divination Machine (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press 2009), Neck of the World (Utah State University Press 2007). He teaches at Bowling Green State University and lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.

H. L. Hix: The Robot Womb on p. 67 “stopped me in my tracks” and made me start thinking in different terms about the book as I’d been reading it to that point.  I’d been accepting time as an organic phenomenon, but suddenly I saw also the tension of that time with time as a mechanical phenomenon (the clockmaker God of deism, and so on).  The irony/tension of the womb, the “most biological” part, being robotic, the “most natural” part being artificial suddenly feels strong to me in the work.  Is this for you as central a tension in the book as it became for me?  (It’s ok in answering this to heap scorn on me for being so dim-witted as not to “get it” until p. 67!)

Eleni Sikelianos: That poem was inspired in part by a radio piece on robotics.  A robotician was describing everything a robot can do, how “human” they have become, capable of affect (if not “feeling” it, as least encouraging it in human counterparts).  Strangely enough, I just a few days ago heard another radio segment (on Radiolab) about a toy that blurs emotive lines.  Scientists asked children to hold three things upside down: a Barbie, a hamster, and a robotic toy which starts to chatter and say “Me scared!” when dangled by its feet.  The toy was about halfway between hamster and Barbie (in how long kids felt comfortable holding it upside down, and, we can leap, between object and subject).  The uncanny valley (and maybe even machines in general) have been of great inspiration to writers for a long time, engendering dystopic (and maybe sometimes utopic?) flights.  At some point in the radio story, I think the robot-maker said something like “The only thing they can’t do is give birth, but we’re working on it.”  Or I imagined him saying that.  One or the other set me off on an image of something rattling around in my tin womb (which was, at that moment, occupied by a fleshly being).  I was thinking about the incredible technological advance from Dark Age Greece to The Iliad — the intricate metrical construction of each line of Homer’s poems — as a kind of possible parallel leap. (The sound of Modern Greek, which my husband once described as an olive pit rattling around in a can, also came into it.)  We’re closer and closer to a cyborg state — we’re probably already there.  That relationship is already deeply shaping our sense of time —  I sometimes think it’s one of the most profound impacts of the compact.  Time of course has particular significance to the poet, whose works unfurl within it.

I want to add here something Lisa Robertson recently quoted to a group of poets: “Language is not a tool.” I can’t recall which linguist said it, but I like it as a kind of differential between technologies.  This one, the one we work in, is not a tool.  Then what is it?

Eleni Sikelianos.  Body Clock.  Coffee House Press, 2008.

H. L. Hix: The subject made explicit by the book’s title, water, is present throughout, from the title/first word of the first poem, “Rain,” to the last image of the last poem, the sound of “tap water striking teakettle.”  But the sentence “Time is a symptom of music and light” (23), in the poem “Hourglass,” names three other pervasive presences in the book.  Is there any sense in which, for the poems in your book, time, music, and light function as “the first three dimensions” from which one “abstract[s] the fourth” (23), water?

Warren Heiti:

Warren Heiti.  Hydrologos.  Pedlar Press, 2011.

H. L. Hix: Yeats proposes in “Adam’s Curse” that apparent ease in poetry results from heavy labor.  Your poems, to me, have the sort of ease he speaks of, but I wonder if there are clues in your work itself that the ease comes from something else: I am thinking, for instance, of the “guiltless and forthright response” offered by the streetlight in “Instead” (11).  The response is offered, as a result of noticing, so I wonder if you would agree with Yeats, or if you would attribute the apparent ease in the poems to attention instead of to labor.  (Or indeed to something else: you’re not obliged by the false dilemma I just formulated!)

Julie Hanson: I believe there has been long preparation somewhere even with the poem that comes “as a gift”―the poem that feels, even to the writer, as if it has arrived nearly intact.  Unbeknownst contains within its pages a sampling of the full range, from “gift” poems to poems that were years and years in production and rest, production and rest, and if those in particular can “seem a moment’s thought,” I’ll be most pleased. Either way, quick or slow to arrive, there has been practice. The long labor on some bad poems that never do satisfy me and never do get published may well account for the very little labor on some that I like right off the bat.  I think of ballet dancers at the barre, or any athlete doing the repeated exercises to build the strength and dexterity needed to perform the movements that will seem effortless. And so, whether the lines in a particular poem have suffered long hours of “stitching and unstitching” or not, if the poem seems effortless in the end, I would say there’s good likelihood that there have been hours logged in in the practice. But would I call that activity “labor”?  Especially “heavy labor”?

No, not really.  I’d call it a pleasure. It always feels good to have written something, because, exactly as you have suggested in your question, poetry is a noticing. Composing is an act of attention.  And as a re-examination of an earlier draft, the revision portion of the writing is also a kind of noticing. And with it, there enters into the picture the noticing of things unnoticed in the first act of attention.  I produce a draft, or even a mere fragment, but it seems worthless and I set it aside.  When I come back to it later―and this happens to me all the time―I find to my surprise that there is something there, something interesting enough to engage me.  How is it that the value of the first attempt has been upped? The difference is not in the words.  It’s in the context.  Time has marched on and other things have entered my consciousness.  Since the time that chunk of writing was produced I went to the grocery store and overheard a conversation, saw various common wildlife in the yard, and cooked dinner with my spouse.  I fell asleep after re-reading a section of The Half-Finished Heaven. I woke up and read the newspaper. I had forty-five more memories and made seventy low-level judgments and decisions.  So now when I come back to the thing I wrote down yesterday, other things suggest themselves as possible companions to, or extensions of, that scrap of thought.  Furthermore, today’s rhythms are sufficiently different that it is easy now to notice the rhythms and mannerisms of the previous writing.  Yesterday those features may have felt like part of my thinking. Today I can hear them as separate from my thinking.  I can recognize them for what they are at one level of remove and in so doing I might take note of their compatibility or discord with the subject at hand. [In fact I may―only now―identify the subject at hand!] As for the now-recognizable features, I may decide I hate them or I may decide I love them. I can use them or leave them behind.  I can perfect them, or disturb them.  Whereas yesterday I could only produce them.

I suppose it’s at this point where the writer may feel most conscious of seeking, or hoping for, that effect you have spoken of, “apparent ease.” This is also a probable point, I suppose, for losing it!

And, actually, even with the poem that seems to arrive all of a piece, a similar process may well be underway during the original session, since, even in a first draft, words are crossed out, carets inserted, intention is realized, and a direction is discovered or altered along the way.  Case in point: I was reminded recently of how much the details I select may factor strongly in determining the purpose of a piece when, during the Q & A at the close of a reading, someone asked me if poems like “Always a Little Something Somewhere in the Purse” (p. 25) are put down pretty much as they happened to me in the incident reported, or if they were, more often than not, composites.  [An above-average question, I thought.  Examples of each are certainly to be found in Unbeknownst, and it is interesting to consider what makes the writer take one course―probably quite unconsciously―over another.]  In responding, I said that the poem mentioned happened to be of the first sort, and it was then that I recalled the impetus for the poem, which, as you might imagine, was the story the poem withholds, the story the distressed woman in the airport had told me.  But the poem never shares the slightest detail of the story.  When I began to write this poem, I fully intended that I would be re-telling at least a part of her story, but once I came to the line “Then she told me everything”  I knew I was done.  Her story would never be told.  The poem was about something else.

I was lucky that day to be paying attention to the draft, paying attention to the writing itself.  On another day I might have held ferociously to my original intent, and had I done so I’d probably still be trying to end the poem properly.

Julie Hanson.  Unbeknownst.  Univ. of Iowa Press, 2011.

I wrestled these rings off my mother’s hand around midnight, April 12, 2005.  Mortician Julie, in pony tail, khakis, and flannel shirt, said what she must say often:  “Don’t worry.  You can’t hurt her.”  They remind me of how much my body mirrors my mother’s.   I look at my hand and see hers.  Equally, they remind me of the attitude taken by both my parents toward dying:  inevitable, normal as taxes.  When my mother 1) left sea-level Los Angeles on March 19, 2005; 2) ascended same day to 7200-feet Laramie; 3)found her years of smoking catching up with her; and 4) received the news that she’d die within 2 weeks if she didn’t hook herself up to oxygen, she said:  “Really?”  It amused her that she and the Pope, whose death was getting a lot of TV coverage, were heading out at the same time – she to some hot bridge game in the sky, he to, well, who knows.   My father’s attitude included the same amusement, though in a slightly darker register.  He relished reading the poems of Tennyson to me and my brother, especially the one about the village beauty who will not live to see spring in spite of her pathetic confidence:  “For I’m to be Queen of the May, Mother, I’m to be Queen of the May.”   When I put our grandkids to bed, I find myself singing “Irene, Goodnight, Irene,” especially the verse “Sometimes I live in the country/Sometimes I live in town/Sometimes I take a great notion/To go down to the river and drown.”  And if not that, then “Oh My Darling”:  “Ruby lips above the water/Blowing bubbles soft and fine/ Alas for me I was no swimmer/So I lost my Clementine.”  And you remember the next verse – about the gravestone in the churchyard where the flowers grow and twine:  wild roses mid the posies fertilized by Clementine.   The kids watch me.  They mouth the words half a beat behind and laugh.    I care about these rings, but if I were to lose them I hope I’d wish them well.  These diamonds, like everything else, are not forever.

Janice Harris is a retired professor of English, and a novice grandmother and environmentalist.

Anuradha Mahapatra is a Bengali poet and social service worker from a village in the forested hills of southwest West Bengal.  She lives and works in Kolkata (Calcutta).  Carolyne Wright is a poet and translator who spent four years in Kolkata and Dhaka, Bangladesh, collecting and translating the work of Bengali women poets and writers.  She lives in Seattle.   This poem is from Another Spring, Darkness:  Selected Poems of Anuradha Mahapatra, published by Calyx Books.

The website of artist Catherine Ryan.

Mark Ritchie, “Rabbits and Thoughts: Mixed Messages”

Mark Ritchie Artist Statement

The Byzantine spaces in my work encourage the viewer to enter the flattened world of paper and ink. I seek a middle ground between the observed and objective and the lyrical world of the subjective image with the intention to evoke rather than describe a specific narrative.  It is my desire that the work prompts the viewer to enter and trace a journey.   Birds, monkeys, rabbits, dogs and horses frequently play the roles usually reserved for human characters in these obtuse narratives. Ladders, mazes, bells and paper airplanes reference communication and epiphanies.  These symbols are shared in many traditions, while others are unique to my own experience.  Asian folding screens, Islamic miniatures, paper fans and medieval book illuminations have all provided the inspiration for the aesthetic of recent work and the ordinary and daily of my own experience the source of the content.

Response by Walter Cummins

I can’t help being drawn to the gramophone with its tint of color.  I’m reminded of a bygone logo.  But where’s the Jack Russell head cocked in a befuddled stare at the sound emitting from that horn?  Of course, there’s no sound for the viewer to puzzle over.  With the parchment look of the background, yellowed and frayed at the edges, I can’t help thinking of my youth.  Long ago as it was, it came after the era of gramophones and parchment.  But my first record player, a present for my seventh birthday, was a suitcase-sized box with a windup 78 rpm turntable, quickly dulled metal needles, and acoustic amplification, the sound that emerged from the shellac groves bouncing off the composition board interior.  That was about the time I learned to fold paper airplanes, joining classmates in sailing them across the schoolroom when the teacher turned her head.  Those sketched here are the rudimentary basic model, the only one I mastered.  Friends with greater dexterity were much more inventive in their folding, producing aerodynamic wonders capable of looping and spilling, hovering and gliding to the most graceful of landings.  But what of the rabbits huddled on the bottom right, one barely there, little more than a hint of lines?  They’re certainly not substitutes for the Jack Russell, far from the speaker horn and ignoring it as if they were in another realm, one where creatures exist as wispy lines, colorless, dimensionless.  Perhaps they want to duck the bombardment of airplanes, shy away from the hiss of unheard sounds. Unheard sounds are eerier.

Mark Ritchie lives a works in the wind and solitude of Wyoming but likes to believe that through his work he is a world citizen.  Walter Cummins‘ fourth short story collection,The End of the Circle, was published by Egress Books in January 2010.