Brooke Champagne on Vivian Gornick

On Being (S)Mothered: Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments

If I used the word perambulatory to describe this book, I’d stop to imagine my mother’s response: why do I always have to look up half the words you write, which invariably leaves me to interpret her comment as either compliment or pejorative (there you go again! she’d surely say). My mother is my favorite passive-aggressive editor.

But Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments is a perambulatory book, one in which a mother and daughter stroll down their New York streets across the decades only to misunderstand each other more deeply—more fiercely—as they slowly gray. Both women rhetorically strike back and forth with aplomb; their words stomp down the pages. Gornick struggles with her involuntary reactions to her mother’s ideas, the rush of blood to the head, the irritation morphing into rage. Oftentimes on walks that start off simple—let’s go for a walk and talk—she endeavors not to “make a holocaust of the afternoon.”

These are struggles of anyone with a mother, even one like mine, who perhaps I’ve been unfair to. Rather than an editor, she can be quite a sycophant. Ah, you wrote a piece about Gornick, she’ll say, how wonderful. Now who is he? Infuriating.

Hear Brooke read from this here.

(Learn more about Brooke Champagne herself here.)

Khadijah Qeen on Helene Cixous

Explicating Process: Helene Cixous' Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

I hesitate to write about Cixous' work. She says it all so well herself. In Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (Columbia University Press, 1993), she begins with the letters I and H, H particularly for its ladder-like appearance, and when that letter (in French) is "out of breath" (4), she turns to English to give it sound (life). With that introduction, proclaiming "this H, this ladder is writing" (4), she proceeds to send us to the School of the Dead. 

It is important that these are not schools in the traditional sense, but levels of consciousness that intersect and repeat. Whether you take notes, read straight through, skip around, reread or re-reread, reading Cixous often mirrors the act of memory, much like reading Morrison (as outlined in her essay "The Site of Memory," from Inventing the Truth, edited by William Zinsser).

Then we progress to the School of Dreams, still accompanied by the dead writers discussed in the previous School – Kafka, Lispector, Poe, Tsvetaeva. We learn that "One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write, how far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must walk as far as the night. One's own night. Walking through the self toward the dark" (65). Forget what you know. Look for what you don't understand, don't see – write through it.

The point of such a process, according to Cixous, is to unravel the self's mysteries, to know more than before about yourself and the world. Armed with that knowledge, "let the dream ladder grow. It grows down – toward the depths" (108) to the School of Roots. Reminiscent of Jenny Boully's recent work, not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them (Tarpaulin Sky, 2011) with its "Home Under Ground" throughout, we enter "a world under the world" (126), a place of metamorphosis, restoration, recovery of self and language anew (129). Then we come to a finishing place. We write something else. Do it again.

(Learn more about Khadijah Queen herself here.)

Arielle Greenberg Bywater on Maira Kalman

Hey, Willy, See the Pyramids by Maira Kalman

I was working as a nanny in college in the early 90s, and my three-year-old charge Gracie had this book, which is how I discovered it; and how I discovered that surrealist and absurdist humor is alive and well and continues to thrive in children’s lit, as does Chagall- and Florine Stettheimer-inspired art; and how I discovered how much I eventually wanted to have children of my own, partly to have the excuse to read more children’s books; and how I discovered Maira Kalman, the contemporary author I most want to have over for dinner, because she is funny and Jewish and cares about food politics and democracy and vintage hats just like me; and how I discovered how much joy I get from things like the “tiny story” in Hey, Willy, which goes, in its entirety, “Four very tiny people / walked right by me / on the way to school. / No one knew / where they were going, / but they were / walking very fast / and carrying / little instruments”; and how much I myself wanted to write spare, funny, weird little things, which is not what I was writing then, but is sometimes what I try to write now.


Hear Arielle read this aloud here.
(Learn more about Arielle Greenberg Bywater herself here.)

Jennifer Bartlett on Mary Rising Higgins

“One must grow used to happiness.”

Mary Rising Higgins, who passed away in 2007, was a public school teacher for 25 years who dedicated herself to poetry the last years of her life. Higgins describes her introduction to the so-called language poets (by Lee Bartlett) as one of the major turning points in her vocation. This passion became translated in the work of a poet who should be considered a major innovator. 

red table(s combines the experimental with lyricism and disjointed language to make a collection of poems that is, at turns, beautiful, difficult, and always surprising. At first, Higgins retains traditional form – flush left margin, in stanzas. Around the middle of the book, the reader can see her form expand and open into the “poetic field” that would become crucial in her later work.   

Higgins was a master of the constraint, visual poetics, and “word collecting.” 


As: 

            dinner music            space altar             ladder

she, the range in each bright   spinning   song
how he could not look back

She speaks of writing through dreams, dictionary meditations, and scored poems based on letters of the alphabet. Her later work became reflective of Olson’s field and what Higgins describes “about sound and movement in the poem. Linescape, really.”

As:

            Evening beads            pattern for swallow

she reflects   herself 

             stand            kindle            splitting

And a bit of geometry   in   both language   and punctuation:

a way to carve out the in)visible

            A required curve looks graceful enough

Although Higgins and her work are deeply loved by folks in the Southwest and those whom she was influenced by and who influenced her, her work remains "quiet." I think this relates to Higgins’s geographiphical location, but also to her non-assuming personality; this is the work of a poet who simply loved poetics for its own sake. 

(You can find more on Jennifer Barlett herself here.)

Dara Wier on Gillian Conoley

Gillian Conoley's TALL STRANGER was published in 1991 by Carnegie Mellon University Press.  Now,  almost any title with the word stranger attached to it will get my attention.  I like how the word stranger  functions in many areas:  uncanny thinking, science, and often in poetry, as in James Tate's you are the stranger who gets stranger by the minute.  Even Tina Fey's production company entices for it is called Little Stranger.  Stranger  invites so many sensations: a little dangerous because to us humans what is strange may be as yet misunderstood, a little fetching, as sometimes a stranger is in need of being cared for,  a little unfamiliar, and sometimes very distant, as in alien.  Sometimes a little homespun, as in Howdy, Stranger.  Conoley's book revolves in the orbits of all these.  Here she is:

in the spoiled ash,
in the stirred dust

                                            *


a shy, secretive being who loves 
how these new homegirls sing


                                            *

Black horse, red moon,
I want no government,


                                            *

One day I looked 
at the face in my shoes
and walked off the land


                                            *
and from the title poem:


I have a different fix on the stars,
and the frontier opens up again,
far into the interior



Download and listen to Gillian Conoley read from Tall Stranger here.
(You can find more on Dara Wier herself here.)

Cecilia Woloch on Sharon Doubiago

HARD COUNTRY a book-length poem by Sharon Doubiago, was first published by West End Press in 1982. A copy came into my hands in 1987, when I first began to dare to take my writing seriously.  I'm not sure, now, how it was that the book came into my hands; maybe it was a gift from my mentor, the writer Holly Prado. I'm certain, anyway, that it was Holly who first brought the book to my attention. I fell into it and couldn't stop falling: this was writing as the heroine's quest, a courageous and almost-breathless plunge into psychic and spiritual and historical depths, through the layers of the known world into the not-yet-known, and maybe unknowable, sources of creative transformation and what we call the Soul. The work is long and complex, an interweaving of poetry and poetic prose, an epic journey into the poet's deepest heart and the tarnished heart of her country. I read it in gulps; it seemed to be reading my life as I read it. It taught me everything I needed to know about how to live in the world as a poet, what that would cost me and where it could lead me and how, if I wanted to do my truest work, there would be no turning back.  One section of the poem has been a kind of mantra for me ever since:

     "Until I knew, as Rilke insists
     is the first discovery to make
     if one is to be a poet:
     I will die if I don't write...
     Until I understood
     years in my wild places
     writing is a physical act, erotic and dangerous,
     the lowering of the self
     into a well almost too deep.
     I must bring up the words
     or perish from their rot
     left inside..."

(You can find more on Cecilia Woloch herself here.)

Megan Volpert on Stephanie Paulk

This was probably five years ago. I was sitting in someone's basement with a bunch of local writers, and I was mid-lamentation--going on and on about something I was doing that I thought was just so edgy and asking for suggestions on what to read that might in some small way speak to this very profound, pioneering thing I was working on.  This was how the late Stephanie Paulk (who published as J.S. van Buskirk) brought herself to my attention. Stephanie, lodged in a corner but maintaining perfect posture, quietly interrupted me to slash my throat with, "have you read Alexander Pope?"

Oh, I died! I absolutely died! That moment will haunt me forever, because she could not have been more right. Here we go, all of us trudging dutifully into the future. No shoulder checks. So in curating this month's Delirious Hem action, my idea is to focus on older books. I consider it as homage to Stephanie, who ridiculously few people have heard of, but who taught me perhaps the most obvious lesson I had not learned. And I am not the only one who ought to learn it.

Lately, I often have that feeling of "why hasn't anybody heard of this book" or "why am I the only person reading this." This is compounded by the annual end-of-year "best books" lists that appear everywhere, which to me are like tiny tidal waves washing over just a huge amount of shit that was written years ago that I still haven't gotten to read yet. Including most of Alexander Pope.

So, I've rounded up a dozen or so ladies who are willing to look defiantly over their shoulders and point out older/obscure stuff that people are missing out on. The rule is that the book (which doesn't have to be a poetry book, but simply a book of interest to poets) has to have been published before the year 2000. Each poet has written up 200 words or so on why the book is cool to her, maybe including some choice quotations. I told each of them that I was also interested to get an mp3 of the poet reading an excerpt from her chosen book, so you'll also have something to listen to.

That's the story, and the mission of the project that is going to roll out in front of the readers of Delirious Hem this month. Thanks for your time and attention to these recommendations. Now, here's mine...

Stephanie Paulk. Duh. Her collected works are located at http://www.jsvanbuskirk.com/. Each of her projects is innovative in a completely different way, and from a time in my life when not many things managed to surprise me, Stephanie never failed to make a deep and lasting impression on me without much trying. I spoke at her funeral, but in some ways, this recommendation is the obituary I never got to write.

My favorite among the pre-2000 projects displayed on the website is Spot the Dog, an existential comic strip she wrote while in college. I would wear a t-shirt with any of these comics on it. It contains the seedlings of many things that I have come to view as trademarked for Stephanie, things that are also on display in the anecdote about Pope. Stephanie was herself such a lover of old books that she once summarized the entire works of William Shakespeare on Twitter, one tweet per drama. She also connected radically to the visual arts, tying much of her major work to collaboration with the artist

Julie Puttgen. I'm not including an mp3, as you ought to hear Stephanie in her own voice--particularly, look up Unless & Until.

Stephanie Paulk was so odd and perfect. And perhaps she will be missed a little less by those of us who knew her well if a few more people who have never heard of her click on through the wonders of her website.

(You can find more on Megan Volpert herself here.)