issue 3.1 ~ spring 2008
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in this issue:
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"cattail and willows" photo by karen schubert |
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"Incantations for Burned Children"
feature article by philip brady
artwork
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from the editor welcome to the third issue of yack! what began as a project in a NEOMFA publishing class at youngstown state university is continued here for another year, but with the same intention: to publish a diverse selection of work from the writers of the northeast ohio master's of fine arts in creative writing program (neomfa). the program is a consortium that consists of four schools: the university of akron, cleveland state university, kent state university and youngstown state university. this online journal is meant to showcase the up-and-coming talent of the burgeoning writing scene in northeast ohio. enjoy!
valerie suffron, editor may 4, 2008
"rue amelie" photo by karen schubert
I.
Leaf. No water sky.
Do not look down when you have no home.
You will not see your feet taking you. The earth slow rolls beneath.
No one will say you left on your own.
No one will say you left your mother in a heap. Or your father parted in two.
They will not say uncle’s cows remained in a thicket. Or that you ate
dirt to stuff it down.
There is water in a leaf. Relief in sucking twigs.
We sleep like pods in a row half-planted. Ready
for hyena or helicopter.
II.
Neck to neck we are four, worth more than 400 cows.
We shed their burnt stink of hair and dust in the sun.
Stray cows who are cows no more, but lost,
every one of us beast.
Tangled when the sun takes his rest, we are
eight-legged, motherless
tenders of our selves.
III.
We are more than we seem stuffed into this stand
of trees, smell of night still on us. A groan, a shiver.
Little rivers going nowhere we are unformed nose to nape
shaped by the next one’s sharp elbow, split knee, our great need.
Eurydice’s Complaint
fine there.
Reflection on the Grave Goods of an Unknown
Woman
--Kate Greenstreet, from case sensitive
The Thirteenth Fairy takes Sleeping Beauty to Lunch Order whatever you want. I’ll pick up the tab. Don’t you see that’s what I was doing at your birth? Did you really think I was upset at not being invited to a child’s christening? That I would threaten death if it didn’t mean more life? How could I? Those around you couldn’t see, the weight of their expectations muddying your eyes. Sandman’s grease if I ever saw it. I just gave you permission to do what you needed to do: yawn and close your eyes. And look at what you have now that you’re awake. Now you voraciously chow that steak. In the old days, you’d have nibbled at the edges of a salad, pushed through greens with a spoon. Now you grip knife and fork in each hand, slice sharply into meat that is yours. I never intended a curse with that spindle. Mine was a blessing, hidden in the form of a prick. Your father might have rid the kingdom of all sharp objects, darning needles, razor blades, cat’s claws, even pencils and paperclips. He put away danger and temptation, but he couldn’t keep you from holding a hand, peeking around a corner, playing hide and seek with yourself. Sooner or later, you’d pick up a pen, you’d find a man dressed in black, find a ride out of this nowhere town and a way to toss your bags in the back of a red convertible and speed down the highway, headed for a gorge. Didn’t you know you’d never truly be a princess till you touched that edge? Never be a princess till you slept and dreamt? Never be born until you surrounded yourself with thorns and made the choice to touch it, come what may.
pamela r.
anderson
"lee in rain" photo by karen schubert
Meat-Loving Calf Eats Chickens
Incantations for Burned Children
Late at night, scrolling across the CNN news crawler, I see it. Seven dead in Waynesburg fire. I register passing concern though more amazement that my small rural hometown won the catastrophe lottery, garnering some sort of twist on tragedy so that the news mavens would rush to break the story. My husband comes home to tell me he heard it briefly mentioned on NPR and I think I’ll call Mom later for the scoop. She’d surely call if something was wrong. I’ll call her later, I think, but soon forget.
A week later, Mom’s talking to me like I know all about it. “Whoa, whoa, Mom, slow down. I don’t know anything about it, just heard the story mentioned on CNN.” The fire headlines I’ve forgotten is evidently still hot fodder back in my hometown. I’d only imagined the pictures of raging fire that must have blazed the background of the story CNN carried, had meant to google more details, but I had forgotten all about it. Seven dead in a house fire. Seven who I had only to assume I didn’t know or Mom certainly would have called much earlier. “It’s just so sad, just so sad,” she repeats, “all those little kids, six children under seven.” She describes their pictures plastered across the town newspaper, rows of crooked and missing front teeth, unkempt hair. The counselors camping in the schools. The calls across town to find out who was related to whom. “You wouldn’t believe these obits, it’s like a maze trying to figure out who’s related to whom.” She told me of how she’d called up her teacher friends across town and they had tried to put together the puzzle of which child belonged to which person, how many different strains of family seemed to be occupying the house and how many Eddys and Arthurs and Blakes and Shrivers were mixed into the cobblestones of the story. She makes it sound like fun.
I press her again to tell me exactly what happened. She’s going on and on like my mother gets when her world is thick with gossip and she thinks it’s funny or disturbing or both. I corral her into telling me what actually transpired, pulling her away from the sordid tales now circling amongst her friends.
She returns to the sadness of six children plastering the front page. Everyman names like Rebecca and Tiffany, Donna Jo and baby Christopher cut only by the more sparkling Diamond Nicole. Diamond. I wonder at her name. Think of what might have awaited her had she lived past seven. Begin to picture these people squatting in a small house that Mom tells me lacked heat or telephone. I think of how cold it’s been here in Ohio this February and can only shudder thinking of these children Mom now describes, huddling around a fire place, wet wood that won’t burn. Going to bed with small space heaters blaring, pushing bursts of warmth that reach out only a hand’s length, not to the cold bed they share.
Mom goes on, more interested in the workings of family line, twisting the story from a tragedy of a mother who returned to a burning house to attempt to save her three children and their cousins into some perversion.
“You’re telling me with four adults living in that place, they couldn’t get themselves together to get a job and pay for gas to heat that place?”
I feel like slapping her out of her rant and screaming, “Mother!” It’s not only the telephone line that keeps me from it. Instead, I opt to remind her she doesn’t know the full situation, that the newspaper’s objective facts and the blurry lines of what she’s discerned from her townie friends doesn’t really tell any of us what happened. She consents that I’m right, but I realize even I know from the sketch that she’s drawn, from the outsider voices of Mom’s friends from the high school where she works, that we are all painting the same picture.
A house out Valley Farm Drive, multiple adults and unrelated children, and a slew of hillbilly names and relations reads to more mainstream rurals as part of the welfare collecting community. I cringe remembering the name we had for them as children, the word grubs rolling off my tongue as easy as anything.
Waynesburg had made the national news scene. Mom and her cronies could rest easy, discussing the minutia of house fire as if it were a celebrity marriage. The fire had lost its tragic aura. Sure, it’s sad to see six children die, but somehow the children are now characters in this morality play. It didn’t happen to a Waynesburg family.
It happened to one of them.
I think of Diamond again a few days later. Diamond Nicole. How her coffin, paid for by the state, would be lowered into the ground today after a joint funeral honoring all of the children. Diamond’s best friend, Candy Bebout, would be there. Candy would have clipped the photograph of herself laying stuffed animals in the driveway in front of the charred house, a kind of memorial her momma had seen on tv. She’d bring a piece of the police tape that had cordoned off the area tucked in the pocket of her corduroy pants. It had come undone from a red Escort, flapping against the rear bumper, and Candy had taken it for a souvenir, something to remember Diamond by since she had no pictures of her save the one clipped from the same page of the newspaper.
Candy had sometimes felt nervous about Diamond. Diamond talked loud and seemed not to know the things Candy’s mom beat into her. Candy had to carry her hairbrush and change clothes when she got home from school. Diamond’s hair rarely looked like she, or anyone, had thought of it since she went to sleep the day before, and Diamond often wore the same clothes for days. More often, Candy was detecting the whispers of other children as the two of them played at recess or sat together during story time She was too young to understand it, but still felt the judging stares. Before long she’d have been pushing Diamond away, not returning notes scribbled in attempted script that asked, “Are you my best friend? Circle yes or no,” avoiding the eyes that pleaded to be seen.
In fourth grade when I moved to Waynesburg, I had a friend named Belinda. Her sister Melinda was in fifth grade and had become notorious by giving birth to a baby that year. That seemed shocking but distant, and Belinda and I remained friends, trading bubble gum cards and Trixie Belden novels from the library until the next year when I knew better. At Margaret Bell Miller Middle School, she went to the lower level math and reading, and I no longer saw her except for the specials like art and music. I’d begun to listen to the playground gossip, situating its standards with my own, and let her fall away as I clammered around the other girls who wore pretty blouses and clean jeans, much like my own. Nothing purchased at the high end retail shops an hour away in Pittsburgh, but clean nonetheless, our freshly scrubbed skin announcing where we stood.
Belinda seemed to understand. A few hellos in the hallway were all she tried, but she found her own group among the tough girls, girls who I was amazed were not afraid to risk lunchtime detention to pummel someone who looked at them the wrong way. The next year Belinda and I were both in choir, but she hunkered shyly over the music with her new found alto friends and I sat on the other side with the sopranos or was picked for solos that took me to the microphone.
I struggled with my guilt that had no place to go. I still wondered if Belinda thought of me or if she knew. I always hoped she didn’t know what was said on the bus, as kids informed one another about the leaning of the grubs at the Waynesburg Hotel. Everyday on our way out of downtown, we passed the run down blue house, a large Victorian that now barely resembled its former grandeur. Nine or ten adults sat on the front porch, legs poking out through broken rails among the litter of beer cans, paper bags, and discarded small appliances. They’d be smoking and laughing, and I felt some vague discomfort at the fact my mother would be wondering why they weren’t at work.
Kids would jeer, everyday reminding me of their name for it—the Welfare Hotel. I’d try to monitor my own use of the word grub to describe the kids that clustered together at the bottom of our social hierarchy, but somehow it always slipped out. I might finally extricate it from vocabulary, somewhere during high school when College Bound course loads and the Vo-Tech across the street made these students invisible. Certainly, I could drop it when I entered University in Boston, cruise bars with guys tossing fifties and study Brahms as if it mattered.
I think Belinda got pregnant a few years later like her sister. I like to think she held out, dreaming of a sweet prince and a little white house, but I really don’t know what ever went through her head.
On the phone to Mom a few days later, she seems to have forgotten the drama of the week before. She doesn’t mention the fire or follow-up with how many people filled the funeral home. Not that she would have been there, but someone in town would have heard. She’s on to new things: her trip to Arizona in a few weeks, my sister’s new job, the luncheon with the Gardening Club. I too don’t have time to ask. I’ve got a huge stack of papers to grade and am just waiting for Mom to finish the litany of the day.
Hanging up the phone, I think one more time of Diamond, of Belinda. I wonder where Belinda is now, but think most likely she’s on the steps of the Waynesburg Hotel or some place like it. No need to wonder if she found her dream. She never had one.
I do think of Diamond’s body, her porcelain fingers still sticky with Kool-Aid, hovering in bed between her sisters, crying silently as she shook and shook and shook. Did she run from the smoke or had it been there all along?
I can make up a story from some of this that may tell you something. The house was in North Akron. A small, frame home with a short gravel drive for a rusting Chevy van and just enough room for the family lawyer’s very nice car. I parked at the curb and breathed deeply. The overgrown apple trees along the street had burst out whitish pink spilling that perfume imprinted from an Ohio childhood, and I had an idea of the kind of life I was entering having read the medical records. I saw in the warmth of the spring morning that the doors and windows were sealed tight. I could invent a lie like I imagined harpies and angels circling the chimney fighting for precedence of their entry. Or I could say, as if making a guilty admission, that I was hoping to be able to confront this dying mother with an embarrassing question about her compliance with doctor’s orders. But that would also be a lie and only the most foolish lawyers do such things. The truth is that I was entering because it was my job and the woman’s image and words were going to be recorded by her attorney on videotape to show to a jury sometime after she was gone. The bell button was missing and I knocked hard enough on the door to feel it in my knuckles. The dog tied in the back barked a warning and a fly buzzed my face. I should tell you the door paint was peeling and there was a dirty teddy bear lying on the porch. The door part is true but the bear is a lie, though I will say that there were three children in this bruised family and one was born less than a year before her mother’s metastatic colon cancer was discovered. The mother’s husband opened the door and I extended my hand, but he had turned to the lawyer for permission to let me enter. I stepped into the room, once a little living room but now the room that contained the life of this young lady, wife and mother, who would be gone next week. Please don’t expect me to give her the dignity of a name because I would only have to lie about her name. The room smelled of urine, disinfectant and something sweet and sick. The woman, raised up on her hospice bed, wore a gown and I saw the morphine drip and I knew exactly where I was. I took a seat on a folding chair while the video crew set up tight against a wall, and then her attorney undertook his story in the form of carefully crafted, telling questions and her short answers. She seemed to drift a bit during the hour, and then he directed that she open her smock and show the colostomy bag for the zoom lens. When she was comfortable again, he patted her on the leg, paused, and asked her to tell the jury what she thought her doctor had done wrong. I voiced an objection knowing that I would need to decide months later whether to argue for the court to strike this. She began in short, choppy phrases, struggling for a word between breaths, but he let her go on and the assertive fragments grew into sentences, and her focus tied itself around a rage that found its way from her met-laced gut to her face, and this found fury continued until she was spent into shuddering sobs. Her lawyer turned to me and I said, for the record, through the air congealing over the bed, “No questions.” My profession required entering the lives and sometimes the houses of the medically injured and dying. The invasion was a matter of the tangled procedures that lead to adjudication of responsibility. This forced intimacy didn’t require or entitle me to visit their graves. For their families and lawyers, the process was an accounting. Economic? Cosmic? I couldn’t check the bank accounts or measure the karma of the survivors but sometimes I wondered what they did with the money–if they received any money. Some got only more grief–or whatever they carried in their hearts. Life goes on may be the truest cliché. I could discuss the ways of justice and its attendant loops but that is behind me, and what remains are the stories of faces, gestures, phrases, tears, tirades and the public secrets of disclosed medical records. * * * All characters in this story are fictional and the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons and events is coincidental.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). I glanced the clock on the small table between the bed and the rocking chair: 6:45 a.m. It was Saturday on Labor Day weekend, but every day felt drowned in the monotony of motherhood. The baby would need nursed soon. I rolled onto my back to say my morning rule of prayer, at least the parts I could recall without the Orthodox prayer book, but felt completely unmoved. I sighed, asked the Lord to help me pray, and crossed myself, turning and crossing my husband whose hot leg was too close to mine. His eyes peeped open groggily, my right hand mid-air. I smiled at him. “Read your essay about me,” he mumbled. My smile melted. I’d written countless essays about him that expressed my love. Recently, however, I’d needed to write through why I’d been tucked away in bed, or with a child, or on the computer—too busy for him, beyond necessity. I wondered what it meant to lose the magic of romance, the thrill of love, the energy of marriage, easier in the beginning, only seven years ago. I began to downplay my doubts and then let go of controlling the situation. “It’s how I felt.” There was nothing to explain. I knew it wasn’t circumstance that tested my emotions, though having money and time to share with him might have seemed a balm. Love was layered. It seemed the deeper we tread through the stratum of our life, the more feelings could turn cool. Yet—with him was the smooth cheek of our newborn, the bell-like giggles of our toddler, the afternoon breeze floating through our kitchen with a hint of garlic. He was the only man who felt the silence of my breath against his bare shoulder. Faith was loving him. The air was crisp, the tips of trees beginning to darken with the end of summer. An American flag flapped from our chipped white door post, honoring Labor Day and the war in Iraq, five years and still rolling on. My husband and toddler were fishing on Lake Erie in my father’s small aluminum boat. I sat cross-legged on the carpet in the living room beside our four-month-old, intently slobbering over his fists, kicking tiny toes in the air. I began reading an account of the Orthodox saint, Mother Mary of Egypt. As the story went, a monk had lived at a monastery since childhood and thought he’d attained spiritual perfection. He went on a pilgrimage into the desert and discovered a woman, naked and dark with white, wool-like hair. The vision brought him unspeakable joy. He knew she would illumine truth that would somehow strengthen his faith in God. The woman shared the story of her life with the monk. She said she had wandered the desert for forty-seven years after living in Egypt as a prostitute. When she had been in the world, she had satisfied great lusts for wine and men, food and every pleasure that consumed the flesh. One day, she saw a group of Egyptians hurrying to the sea for a journey to Jerusalem for the Elevation of the Honorable Cross. She followed, hoping to sleep with young men on the pilgrimage, and was successful in her pursuit. She followed the people to church once the hour came for the Elevation of the Cross, but a power kept her from entering the sanctuary. At once, she realized her sin. She tried to enter four times before praying the Mother of God allow her to repent and enter. Once inside the church, she vowed to live her life completely in honor of God. In that very moment she chose to believe, her faith became full of life. While in the desert, she longed for the pleasures of the world. Without food or clothing, shelter or companionship, she survived on things found among the sand and barrenness. Faith burned within her and so did doubt and temptations to return to the world. Yet, the woman continued on and fed on incorruptible food, the hope of salvation, as she told the monk. When the monk asked how she knew the Psalms, as she had no Bible and had never been taught from it, she said that the Word of God, living and active, itself teaches knowledge to man (Heb. 4, 12). Love was our faith in action. Her humility allowed belief in God; she chose to love Him more than herself. She gave her life reciprocating love unto God. As the story went, she lifted in the air when she prayed in tongues the monk could not understand. She walked across the Jordan. She prophesied. The monk had not obtained such spiritual gifts. Through the Egyptian woman, formerly a prostitute, the monk, who thought he had reached spiritual perfection, learned the cost of choosing faith and acting in love. My body was stiff as I stood from the floor and drifted into the kitchen for a plate of ginger cookies and a glass of milk. My mouth watered, though I’d eaten a thick sandwich minutes earlier. I couldn’t imagine: no tasty treats, no hot shower, no sex—no distractions to the attention of my soul, that inner voice that craved something beyond me, something more silent than silence, more warm and comforting than wine. I wondered, though, in the world, what was faith? What did it look like? My mother and I had walked around Silver Lake on an overcast afternoon a few days earlier. We had talked of marriage, how the magical feelings fade. Geese squawked as my laughing toddler closed in on them. It seemed love for each other, like faith in God, was a choice. At first, the choice was soft, the other person eliciting excitement within one’s self. At first, the pressure was light, everything new and possible. But life branched out, stretching beyond one’s self, and became weightier, as though laced with snow. Walking back toward home in a drizzle, my mother had mentioned hearing on the radio how Mother Teresa doubted God throughout her life. The saint had written letters to her church spiritual guides in the 1950s and 1960s that were forgotten until two years ago when the Vatican had gathered paperwork on Mother Teresa for sainthood. In one letter she wrote, “Love—the word—it brings nothing. [. . .] In my soul, I can’t tell you how dark it is, how painful, how terrible—I feel like refusing God.” As we walked on, the colorless day seeped into me, everything seeming dull and monotonous. Mother Teresa had lived in the world. She had known the pains of recent times and somehow chose faith, even when she felt empty. She acted on her faith in God—serving the poor and needy through her old age. She loved people as the way to loving God. * I stared out the window as the baby cooed and reached for his toes. My husband and I were married on a brilliant summer day. As the sun spread orange and pink over shimmering Lake Erie, we had held each other and slowly moved to Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together. I had closed my eyes to my sister and mother, huddled close, my father looking off into the distance, to friends and long, winding links of family. My young husband’s heart had beat against me, his warmth wrapped me in a deep and rich quiet, despite the party. It had been easy to feel love, to choose to stay together. Faith had spread as naturally as the setting sun, love burning as radiant. The flag billowed with the summer breeze. I wondered if my husband and I could find the energy and interest in a slow dinner talking patiently with one another, beyond the everyday worries of life. Recently, my sister had begun attending the Orthodox parish with us. She told me how weeks ago as we awaited Holy Communion the sanctuary seemed to glow as though she had tears in her eyes. Everything seemed soft, golds shining in the periphery, she said, and she believed that this would be the way it was in heaven. At the time, she hadn’t realized the experience as a miracle, but as the weeks passed and she noticed the same feelings didn’t come, she knew she had been able to see something more. She was afraid to join the Church. The cost was great, she said. She didn’t want to explain Orthodoxy to friends and family who seemed to think it strange and foreign. She felt like remaining more in sync with those she loved—yet, she returned to the vision she’d had. Faith in God was undeniable, and she chose to return to Church. Perhaps feelings encouraged one to choose faith in God, in each other, but these faded in time. Enduring faith was acting in love even when the feelings were so flat, or, as with Mother Teresa, the soul’s darkness was so painful that we felt like denying God. Always, there was the humbling choice to weather the season that no longer made me feel good, and hope the young, green leaves would come again. Or, with fear so easily clouding faith in love, with doubt always so near, I could deny hope. I could fail to love. *** The Ebb and Flow of Faith was previously published in America, the National Catholic Weekly magazine.
feature article by philip brady On Becoming a Poetry EditorIt’s Saturday night. The living room’s strewn with paper. The Indians are on, with the volume muted. I slit open the next envelope, take another sip of lukewarm coffee. I am a poetry editor. How does one become a poetry editor? Yeats seems to think it a by-product of hair loss (bald heads . . . edit and annotate the lines . . .). In my case, the senior editor was up to his eyeballs and asked me to help out. “Why not?” says I. Dan Bourne is a fine poet; he plays guitar and shoots hoops. Twenty years he’s worked on Artful Dodge, nursing it through the mimeograph runs of graduate school all the way to a full fledged national journal with staff and grants and a basement office and a logo (looks like a dead turtle—we’ll have to talk). So far, this is what being a poetry editor has meant: I go to the Post Office and pick up a carton big enough for a Xmas tricycle, wrestle it into the car, rope the trunk, drag the box into my living room and tear the flaps off. Then I dig in.. Next comes the sorting. At first, this felt slightly indecent: opening someone else’s mail, reading letters addressed, “Dear Dan,” or “Dear Mr. Bourne,” or “Dear Poetry Editor.” And the letters themselves: everything from the shoulder-padded university letterhead, spangled with credentials, to tickertape-sized “bio’s,” to handwritten notes that drop out of the sheaf like a bizarre ransom note—“take me.” Until now I’ve always been on the other side—wondering whether to enclose covers, what to say, how to entice without explaining, praise without fawning. Philip Dacey has written a grand “Form Rejection Letter,” and William Trowbridge of the The Laurel Review sends out a gem of a subscription renewal letter, complete with veiled threats from “Trigger Bob in the mailroom.” In this vein, there ought to be a poem, “Form Cover Letter.” Maybe I’ll write it. Then I’ll write a cover. Poets often try to gage editors’ biases; for or against rhyme, political or pastoral, confessional vs. ironic; experimental or narrative. At this stage, I hold a mild grudge against every envelope I handle. When I sling a batch into the reject pile, I’m cheered. There’s a small sense of achievement. Not because I’m glad to see bad poems, or because I’m gloating that someone (even folks with muscled covers) could write such dreck. It’s just that I’m half-inch closer to finishing. That’s Pile 1. It’s happy pile. I unfold SASE, check postage, stuff poems and form letter, lick (piquing a delicious neurosis about poison) and place in Pile 1. Meanwhile the husk which contained the processed poems is marked “No,” and placed in Pile !A to be checked later against submissions records. The process is clean (except for the lick) and certain. Progress is steady. Standards are confirmed. Artful Dodge needs these poems; they are the foundation upon which the journal rests. Pile 1 is the most human pile. Most Pile 1 poems rely on two beliefs: 1) human experience has intrinsic value and 2) Therefore, human experience can, should, and ultimately needs to be reported. This imperative is so strong that it sloshes over acquaintance; it outstrips instruction, even sex can’t stem it. I think of Galway Kinnell’s lines about his correspondence school students, “their loneliness/given away in poems, only their solitude kept.” Somehow, only strangers can satisfy this human need to testify. This afternoon, I represent those strangers. I try to be gentle. I read the covers for clues, imagine the life from which the poems emerge. I read a little longer than is necessary to decide. Pile 2 isn’t a pile at all. It’s a stack, thick as a bankroll. These are the poems I’m going to live with for a while. They are about Gerald Cambriensis and the drift between days and nights; there are phloem and chrisoms, culvers, legerdemain. These poems are hilarious, moving, compendious, eerie. Having torn them from an envelope, I feel as if I’ve assisted if not at birth, then at a baptism. These are poems I would have written if I’d been given the talent or vision or occasion. I read them out loud; I want to learn them by heart. Looking over Pile 2, I’m amazed how various the poems are. I don’t see a pattern: lyric or dramatic, light or dark, formal or free. If these choices reveal my ‘taste,’ I infer no formula, no theory. What I learn from Pile 2 is how desirous we all are—even poetry editors—to be absorbed, how apt we are for transformation. Sure, I’m surly at first—having read so many submissions I feel like I’m being stoned with marshmallows. But when a Pile 2 poem comes, I feel it—sometimes from the very first line. I’m carried away; I trust implicitly the voice, give myself to it, suspend critical faculties. It might be oracular, “Out of the Rolling Ocean, the Crowd.” Or startling, “My mother has your shotgun,” or serene, “I cannot think of anything today/That I would rather do than be myself.” There’s a certain authority, the feeling of something impelled, not invented. Here are a few from Pile 2; see if they grab you:
Then there’s Pile 3. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the poems in Pile 3. Pile 3 poems show craft; they exude professionalism; they demonstrate familiarity with tradition. Taken individually, these poems are capable of being admired. But there are so many. They create a mood that closes over you gradually, like a climate. It’s heavy, Pile 3 is. It bulges. Each envelope is spongy as blood pudding. Pile 3 is the kind of reading you do late at night, when your thumb aches and you read three pages before you realize you’re re-reading. If I were called in and asked to describe Pile 3 poems for the sketch-artist, here’s what I’d say. There were two of them, Officer. They were narrative; there was a story , kind of, at least a setting. One was outdoors, one indoors, I’m sure of that. Irony? Yes, I felt a bit. Tepid. They each wore two observations—like this; no, closer together. Everything was consecutive. Thing floated toward a moral, implied: one was “life, savor it.” The other, “life, improve it.” Or maybe “fuggetaboutit.” They weren’t workshop poems. They didn’t bop in from the street, either. Syntax was normal. Loose lines, tetrameter maybe. One was enjambed, radically. The other read like a sentence with no parole. But it’s hard to tell; the light was bad… By the sixth inning Pile 3 starts to swell. Most Pile 3 poems believe they belong in Pile 2. Their postmarks snarl. Their covers prepare appeals. I know what they want. They miss their study with banker’s lamp and sofa. They miss the respect which came from the hard work that went into their making. They miss their names. Where else but here, in the first stage of editing a journal, would these poems be read without the protection and empathy provided by book jacket, classroom, or friendship? When I hear, “Let thought become the beautiful woman,” one word is absent: “Hafiz.” When I read “I have eaten the plums which you left on the refrigerator,” what keeps the door ajar is the murmur, “Williams.” Without those key words these chestnuts might well have been headed for a long stretch in history’s Pile 3. Am I cynical? Calling the great poets mandarins? No. But I’m afraid that certain poems might need a pinch of something, like “Emily.” Maybe they need an approach supplied by history or critical prose. Maybe they need a better editor. That’s why there’s Pile 4. Most Pile 4 poems did time in Pile 3. Some sounded so crazy at first they were committed to Pile 1. A few poems arrived here directly, often from long distance. How they made it I don’t know. They won’t say, even when I shake them. They are poems that elude, poems with a hint of something beyond my ken. There are times I’m not sure Pile 4 poems are poems at all. Sometimes they come naked, with no cover, and I wonder if perhaps there hasn’t been a clerical error. Maybe envelopes wee exchanged? Maybe some clerk at the George Foreman gas grill & metabolizer warehouse is lip-reading, “It so happens I am tired of being a man.” Not that I suspect Neruda of tampering from beyond. As pleasurable as it is to come upon Pile 2 poems, I know that they aren’t the ones that make a poetry editor. They are thoroughbreds groomed from the get-go; anyone could see that. Pile 4’s where a poetry editor makes his mark. Like a birddog scout who glimpses the future star in the rank hayseed, a poetry editor needs canniness and patience to restore the envelope of silence that permits each poem to be fully heard. To handle Pile 4, an editor has to read every poem as if it were the first of the day, but not the first of his life. He has to follow poems fathoms deep or through an airy clime, even though most often he’s in for a nasty bump on the head. He has to remain able, against all odds, not only to discriminate among submissions, but to come under their sway. Pile 4 also offers the best opportunities to exercise the poetry editor’s prime function: to edit. A Pile 2 poem might permit some tinkering; but generally, they are as clearly articulated as they are finely conceived. Pile 4 poems are often fixer-uppers. But it’s important to be careful. Poets choose their editors—not merely by sending SASE. Before revising a poem, and editor should be committed to the body of the poet’s work; looking at an individual poem, he keeps in mind the poet’s overall vision. George Peffer writes that “The good editor tours the whole city before recommending changes.” I’m loathe to roll up my sleeves. When I’m tempted, I remind myself that William Stafford hesitated to change his students’ bad habits for fear that if cultivated, these very habits might yield originality. I think of Dan Langston who used to say that the proliferation of poetry journals has caused the floor (Pile 1) to rise, but the ceiling (and maybe a few Pile 4 poems float up there) to come down. I think of Blake’s injunction, “Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked paths are the paths of genius. ” I think of my own leaky vessels sailing out there, while the nail in some poetry editor’s mouth twitches. At closing time, Pile 4 has to fold. Everybody has to go home—back to 1 or 3. A few get the call to Pile 2. Then Pile 3 melts away. By night’s end there can be only two piles. One of these days, Dan says, we’re going to conference, compare notes and put together the next issue. I can’t wait. It will be something to see this process culminate, to see poems first loved on Xerox or watermark, with their labels and signatures, headers and “no stanza break” instructions, now dressed in Antique Olive and bound between covers of Artful Dodge, number 38/39—a double issue. Imagine them together in their plumage, flitting around the short stories, big as orchestral stands. What a ball. The fete swirls on; introductions are exchanged, champagne swilled, flirtations risked. I hope everyone likes each other. I hope it’s the grandest bash since Gatsby. For me, lurking on a balcony, every single glittering guest is Daisy. *** "On Becoming a Poetry Editor" is excerpted from By Heart: Reflections of a Rust Belt Bard forthcoming from the University of Tennessee Press in October 2008.
pamela r. anderson is director of philanthropic giving at WKSU-FM, Kent State University's public radio station, and she also is a freelance speech writer. A graduate of Hiram College and Kent State, her poetry and other writings have been recognized by several professional organizations, including Ohio Professional Writers, Inc. and have appeared in the Kent State University Magazine, Epitome, DiceyBrown.com, and others.
philip brady teaches creative writing and literature as well as directing the Poetry Center at Youngstown State University. His newest book is Fathom (2006). Previous books of poems include Weal and Forged Correspondences. He has also published a memoir, To Prove My Blood: A Tale of Emigrations and the Afterlife, and co-edited, with James F. Carens, Critical Essays on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He has won awards from the Ohio Arts Council and New York State, and residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Headlands Colony, as well as artist colonies in Ireland, Scotland, Spain, and the Czech Republic. He is Poetry Editor of Artful Dodge, and Executive Director of Etruscan Press. For kicks, he plays in the New-Celtic band, Brady's Leap. He is a past director of the NEOMFA, and the YSU Coordinator for the NEOMFA.
cathy fahey-hunt a graduate of Bucknell University, and a recent
graduate of the NEOMFA. lea povohazev is a Spring 2005 alumnus of the NEOMFA program; she writes in the genre of creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Ohio Teachers Write, Fringe Magazine, America and The Akros Review. Her nonfiction is forthcoming in Word, Spiritual Life and the anthology Growing up Transnational. She has a column in Cleveland State's Vindicator. She lives in Stow, Ohio, with her husband and their two children.
jana russ works for the NEOMFA program as an administrative assistant and teaches Chinese History and World Literatures at The University of Akron. Her poetry has been published in Riverwind, Poetry Midwest, Juicebox, and Vibrant-Gray, and is forthcoming in two anthologies: In the Hardship and the Hoping: Poems of Northeast Ohio (J. B. Solomon Editions, July 2007) and Women.Period (Spinsters Ink, August 2008).
karen schubert
has had poems in various
journals including Water~Stone Review, The Mid-America Poetry
Review, Versal, Poetry Midwest and DMQ Review, and her
chapbook The Geography of Lost Houses (2008) was published by
Pudding House Press. She has been nominated for Best of the Net and
a Pushcart Prize. Karen is in the NEOMFA through Cleveland State,
where she is editor of Whiskey Island Magazine.
amy bracken sparks
recently received her MFA from the NEOMFA
program and in the last year has had poems in Harpur Palate, Barn
Owl Review, DMQ Review, Hobble Creek Review, wicked alice, and
Gargoyle Magazine. She was poetry and art editor for the
upcoming Whiskey Island magazine #54-55, and works as an
editor at the Cleveland Museum of Art. rick strong is a recent graduate of the NEOMFA. He has worked as a teacher and a trial lawyer and will be teaching at The University of Akron beginning in Fall 2008. He lives with his wife and several pets in Medina County, Ohio.
tobin terry is embarking on his final year in the NEOMFA. His work has also appeared in The Akros Review.
YACK welcomes submissions for the Fall 2008
Issue. Please submit by November 1, 2008.
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