Beth Bachmann, CEASE

survivor

outside there are street bombs & citizens with guns & farther away war inside we are our own pile of legs two of us are married two of us are falling had two of us are men two of us are man & woman two of us are not alone two of us are mother & father two of us are not fighting two of us are saying I love you I love you I love you two of us are watching two of us are touching two of us are undone two of us are whispering in the other’s ear not war not war two of us are beginning to stir two of us are at the window two of us are parting ‘til it’s just the two of us parting we’re all guilty what haven’t we done lately

Nashville poet Beth Bachmann’s third full-length poetry title is the incredibly powerful CEASE (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), following on the heels of her collections Temper (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009) [see my review of such here] and Do Not Rise (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) [see my review of such here]. Specifically writing, it would seem, on the threads of an American culture that have become increasingly complicit in violent action, both at home and around the world, the poems in CEASE exist with an urgency that responds to the fury of toxic contemporary rhetoric. “[T]o keep the peace,” she writes, to open the bookending “wall,” “we need a wall [.]”As the press release informs, Bachmann consciously takes up “Muriel Rukeyser’s call for women poets to respond to war (‘Women and poets see the truth arrive’),” and she does so in a way that is lyric, immediate and guttural. In an interview recently posted at The Rumpus, conducted by Blas Falconer and Helena Mesa, Bachmann responds:

I think if anyone is familiar with my work, Temper is the book that’s more widely read. It’s a book about my sister’s murder and though the poems are not narrative in nature, it seems to draw readers with a “true crime” fascination, which, given the context, can be disturbing. I’ve received some fan mail from prison (one said, in the spirit of Emily Dickinson, I write to you from solitary). When the book came out, I couldn’t even say the word “murder” and had to practice in the mirror before my interviews. Seriously creepy. So book one was a book about this big personal violence and used a lyric mode to relentlessly circle all the things that were constantly triggering me: death, death, death.

Do Not Rise grew directly out of Temper. One decision I made early on in Temper was to keep the violence violent to honor the magnitude of it. I fell in love with Chris Abani’s Kalakuta Republic and the poetry of Wilfred Owen for the intensity of their depiction of violence. I found a companionship in Owen’s poems about post-traumatic stress that echoed my own experiences; Do Not Rise is really a book about violence as a recurring present-state, so the title is in part a command for all the horror to stand down, but of course, it inevitably keeps coming back anew.

CEASE is an extension of that command, but I think it makes room for the idea that peace is a possible space, even if it’s only temporary. That’s a big step for me! I’ll take it.

The bulk of the collection is constructed as an assortment of prose poems, bordered on either side by two extended poems, both titled “wall,” each of them composed with words and phrases loose across the page, akin to unconnected brick, its mortar a resonance of explorations on truth, connection and the body that holds the whole together. In CEASE, the poems seek and demand a simple slice of peace, however temporary, through an increasing sense of both madness and terror, asking: how do we hold ourselves together through such threats to our health, safety and well being? This is a powerful work, one that presents itself as slant, before charging full-force directly at the heart of her subject matter.

the wall after all made of water                       the gulf

a blue we could      touch on both ends

given clearance to return what’s left of the bod now

bridge simple arch geometry of the circle spanning come

cool my tongue    this light-well opening internal space to

the space that opens into it wind eye the flood

made our bodies       a levee earthen gnawed away (“wall”)

Beth Bachmann, Do Not Rise

privacy

How much harm can entering

do? One cell, two,

and the whole law is broken in—

leg after leg,

the myrtle presses itself up from

the ground:

stampede. Horse, horse, horse, horse.

What are you turning

into? Inside me you murmur so much

pain so much

suffering. What makes the horses go

like that—fear

or fire? Circle me. What kills us is

not crush, but push.

Writing on “war, memory, and post-traumatic stress,” there is a palpable anxiety throughout the poems that make up American poet Beth Bachmann’s second poetry collection, Do Not Rise (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). In 2011, the manuscript won the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America for a manuscript-in-progress. In her judge’s citation, Elizabeth Willis wrote:

The collection’s conceptual center—and its most insistent word—is “open.” The poems have a stripped-down, investigatory drive.  Where the manuscript begins, everything “wants out,” and this outward pressure moves the work into a series of shifts, cuts, turns, magnetic pulls. Water on the tongue disappears into snow, snow gives way to a lake. It is as if we could witness the decomposition and refiguring of the world within the decomposition and refiguring of the line. We feel the poems pushing against grammar and logic and into phenomena. Words and phrases break into “fire,” into “splinters,” into “fragments.” At times it is as if we are watching a chemical reaction reset to the rhythm of human perception.  The resulting gaps open the poem to a meaningful range of pauses, hesitations, delays, sonic mutations, reconsiderations. A lapse of one thing makes possible another. A slowing down of time within the poem allows us to enter the folds of its thought. There is so much seeing in its listening.” The flaw is always / breaking away” Always. . . away. Discoveries lie on the verge of departure.

Do Not Rise follows her incredible debut, Temper (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), winner of the 2008 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. I’m intrigued by the cadence of Bachmann’s poems, relaying a kind of breathlessness to her lines, between her use of space and the dense lyric, as well as an intriguing combination of accumulation, collage and precision. As she writes to open the poem “sustainable”:

start here in each         other’s mouth third

in place of speech before it      sometimes it stops there

the fickle birds dropping          what they just picked up cold

Are her lyrics short, precisely because of this breathlessness, or for the possibility of the single punch? Bachmann’s poems strike with considerable narrative force, writing their way around, across and through the ugliness of war and the traumas that can’t help but linger.

humiliation

Where are the woman in this war? The long limbs of the trees stripped

are the limbs of the trees. You can’t have a war

without women. Where do you think all that blood comes from?

The trees in war are worse than the horses. You can kill a horse.

A horse can kill you. Most men have little use for metaphor.

Door go out. All fall down. Baby. Pray

nobody dare says the word. So many trees. The women are skinny

and there are more of you

than stars in the warfield, than shrapnel. Pigs?

I haven’t seen a pig for months.

From the Fishouse: an audio archive of emerging poets

Pearl Pirie recently pointed out this website of American poets' readings and question-and-answer sessions. A pretty large archive of new and newer writers, it includes a ton of worthy American poets: Barbara Jane Reyes, Beth Bachmann, Evie Shockley, Ilya Kaminsky, Kazim Ali, Laura McCullough, Mark Yakich, Mathew Zapruder, Paul Guest, Paula Bohince, Philip Metres, Purvi Shah Betsy Sholl, Rachel M. Simon, Rachel Richardson, Ravi Shankar, Reb Livingston, Reginald Harris, Richard Siken, Rick Barot, Rick Noguchi, Robert Farnsworth, Robin Beth Schaer, Sandra Beasley, Sarah Manguso, Terry L. Kennedy, Thorpe Moeckel, Tim Seibles, Tom Thompson, Tony Barnstone, Victoria Chang, Vievee Francis, Xochiquetzal Candelaria and Yona Harvey.

Pretty envious, this. Should we try to convince them to include Canadian poets as well, or should someone here simply attempt to construct our own archive?

Their website self-describes as:

Poets Q & A:

From the Fishouse is designed to be, in part, a resource for teachers and students of contemporary poetry. What better way to learn about poetry than from the mouths of those who practice the art? Listen to poets talk about writing, the writing process, and about particular poems featured here at the Fishouse. Below are links to more than 500 audio files of poets talking about their craft, arranged by author. These Q&A files can also be accessed through the individual poets' Fishouse pages.

Barbara Langhorst, restless white fields

IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER

i slept better before you

learned to kill

anxiety that perfect cure

now i share szumigalski’s

fear of knives i cannot stand to see

flustered chickens

popped in cones

heads thwacked off pre-cordon bleu

it takes so much rage

to learn

to love

to squeeze

a cupboard moth

immortal birds they fly at us

their suicide my potent fear

of being

god’s beetle

in leonard cohen’s hand

i slept better before you learned

to kill

Saskatchewan poet Barbara Langhorst’s [see her 12 or 20 questions here] first trade poetry collection, restless white fields (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2012), as the back cover tells us, responds to a “violent personal tragedy,” made clearer in the couplet “there are no kind words for this / my father put a bullet in her brain and a shotgun to his chest” (“MENSTRUL CUP”). Just as American poet Beth Bachmann wrote through grieving the murder of her sister by their father in her poetry collection, Temper (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), Langhorst writes out an exploration of the actions and consequences of her own tragic events, and the spaces it leaves. restless white fields is a collection that writes through the dark, constructed to explore conclusions, comprehensions and redemption. The poems in the collection might not all be directly about this, but are coloured by such.

GALL

there is such intimacy with the body in pain that one can come to crave

a pot of custard a trivial drop of pursuit a warm dish of tikka masala to ignite

the death projecting incarnation near pique that a lot of fat produces

an encounter with an ontological sensation in the gallbladder not dissimilar

to those who dare to hang themselves know that to increase orgasmic intensity

the irregularity of false love of success determines potency through the liquor

of settled stomach or the heat of bursting screaming breathless belly one comes

to feel the martyrs and their self-flagellation

Closer to home than Bachmann, Langhorst’s book reminds of Lamentations (Trout Lily Press, 1997), a first collection of poems by now-Winnipeg poet Charlene Diehl-Jones. Built out of a sequence of prose-poems, her collection focused on the loss of her first child. Books spawning from awful trauma are extremely difficult to work through in a way that any reader might want to engage (I can think of a few examples—that I won’t name here—of a poet requiring not a publisher but a therapist, resulting in the most awful and self-absorbed of texts), and Langhorst’s poems write through trauma and come through the other side. It is no accident, I would not think, that dedication at the front of the collection is “for love.”

last autumn’s fall expedition to the graveyard our chickadees went wild for my

students the romantics’ dead thoughts chanting confusion all through the lane

of the yellowing elms this year’s fashionistas their connected hundred-dollar

dresses become distraught with the cool west wind but they have dirt

on the mob as we sit beside the monks reading shelley’s

ode to the unified wish for

a cold climactic change of heart (“BELOW THE WIRE ii”)

Langhorst’s restless white fields is a collection of dark undertones, which by itself don’t make it a dark or pessimistic book, although it might possibly be a necessary book. constructed in five sections—no kind words, bellum, the persistence of memory, exiled hearts and blue placenta—Langhorst’s poems are highly aware of the proper use of space on the page, stretching long lines in some pieces, or spaces patterned across the page in others, stretching couples that run the length of margins and prose-poems that wrap up, curl so very nicely. Langhorst’s poems are an enviable expression and exploration of structure and highly mature rhythms, and a book that would be difficult to not see on award shortlists.

Hillary Gravendyk, Harm

HARM

Ahead the sky is winnowed to its smallest feature. Starred with damage, the body. What was promised, what was revealed. A long staircase of wounds. Behind: unseen error. Or accident. Harm winking on, a neon sign that says closed. Pain glued to each window. The rooms shadowed with harm. You offered anxiety, a harness made from care. Curved handle, intention. Harm a kind of adhesive. Skin clusters around the opening, ridged and thick. There are lighter and darker marks. They disclose. Paper echo, gesture. Bleakness along the spine of narrative. Harm flat as a swept floor. As a drawn planet. A bright story is requested. What will be touched? Machines, that flashing support, a threaded needle. And the body, sutured to harm.

It has been a while since I’ve seen a first poetry collection strike so well, and so hard. Harm (Richmond CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2012) is the work of Los Angeles County writer Hillary Gravendyk, which includes a foreword by poet Brenda Hillman, that writes:

Harm is a collection of poems, some in short prose blocks, written in a great burst after the poet underwent major surgery. It is a cleanly and delicately paced volume, its pages sometimes punctuated by asterisks which suggest small flowers, snowflakes or abstract ink-breath. It is quiet, intense, and subtly beautiful work and, following in a long tradition of American poetry, is a book about both human and planetary illness, about the subjective experience of illness and the images that come to someone’s consciousness in a time of illness. Thoughts about personal fate and of the present earth in peril are contagious here. References to hospitals, to medical procedures and conditions are threaded with allusions to plants and to physical landscapes. Interiors trade place with exteriors; the meditating poet comes up for air in atmospheres that are literal and figurative. She transcends isolation and offers—not as palliative but as artistic practice—a sense of calm estrangement that often invokes an “other” in the work of a collective dream.

In a collection built up predominantly of the prose poem, Gravendyk’s Harm writes through the space of illness (according to the press release, Gravendyk received a double lung transplant in September 2009), writing backwards through the dark, so that she might emerge from the other side, much in the way Sarah Manguso’s memoir The Two Kinds of Decay (New York NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) did on her own years of illness, and American poet Beth Bachmann’s poetry collection, Temper (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), wrote through grieving the murder of her sister by their father. In an interview with Omnidawn editor/publisher Rusty Morrison, included in the press package for the collection, Gravendyk says:

I wanted to offer a new narrative of the physical body constituted in perilous scenes of contact. Harm performs the loss of that fictive division between a unified body and its surrounding world. Terrifying and unlooked-for harmonies emerge in these poems, which dwell in a medicalized landscape where both the body and the land are monitored and laid bare. My intent was to trouble the idea of cure by recasting it in the terms of harm, to shift between warning and error, nature and the body. in the sense of Baudelaire’s “correspondences,” bloodclots externalize into “sunclots” and the air is “rusty with blood.” The book troubles the idea of cure by casting it also as a form of harm itself. Using versions of the prose poem and the lyric, I’m trying to navigate a landscape of extremity both frightening and filled with wonders. […] Part of what this book does is problematize the notion of “cure” by casting it as also a form of harm itself. The title “Harm” wants to trouble easy divisions between cure and harm, landscape and body, wakefulness and sleep. I think Harm drops a small bomb at the entry point of this book, forcing the reader to find their way in a place of partial ruin. That’s the hope, anyway.

There is such an incredible density to Gravendyk’s language, and this collection speaks to strength and frailty, of the human body and the natural world, and count among the finest prose poems I’ve read. This is very much a book of survival, and a deeper comprehension of just how close to the bone it can come. As she writes at the opening of the poem “THE SEVEN SINS OF MEMORY,” “Pain’s absence, like a footprint in snow // but the iron had eaten into my flesh // there was nothing, nothing to record.”

SAFEKEEPING

These were our secrets: samples from a charred heart, beak ligament, sharp fist of serpentine. We traded our phosphorous and filament for a ten-pin lock and were comforted. We knew that the right chemicals could make anything glow, knew that our discoveries were too delicate for exposure, and how distant, how troubling outside our rare cabinets! A little more protection and another specimen: clinging ring of iris, breath-bottle, bone, or scab. It was dangerous but it was ours for safekeeping. We wanted something coarser than blood to course through us: beeswarm and fiberglass. Wanted to glitter and wound and the same time.

Beth Bachmann, Temper

Through a recommendation by Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster, I was recently made aware of American poet Beth Bachmann’s first poetry collection, Temper (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), winner of the 2008 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.

TEMPER

Some things are damned to erupt like wildfire,

windblown, like wild lupine, like wings, one after

another leaving the stone-hole in the greenhouse glass.

Peak bloom, a broad of blue before firebrand.

And though it is late in the season, the bathers, also,

obey. One after another, they breathe in and butterfly

the surface: mimic white, harvester, spot-celled sister,

fed by the spring, the water beneath is cold.

As the author [see her recent 12 or 20 questions here] is quoted in the press release, “My poems turn and return to heat and the absence of heat, color and the absence of color, motioning between states of restlessness and composure, mimicking the way grief circles back to the site of the trauma,” with, as the press release also tells us, the trauma of the murder of her teenaged sister, and their father, accused of the crime. Bachmann’s poems turn, but turn through a movement of grief, beauty, acknowledgement and questioning, naming the unnamable. How does she manage to walk that fine line between story, myth, fact and grief without falling? Bachmann writes such a heartbreaking ease in lines that manage both a fine-tuned lightness and a heavy dark, writing a deep elegy that refuses to submit, refuses to slip into defeat, even as it passes.

AFTER THE TELLING

The conversation turns to paper
tapering at the edge

of the wall, the details of the interior.
You’ve put your hand

through my body and are caught
in the rack of vines

I’ve descended into.

You want to know what was left
for weeks in the weeds:

the trauma to the head,
the naked waist, my sister.

You ask whether the violence was domestic
and I tell you that an animal

nudged the bones, that afterwards,
someone put the dog to sleep.

I offer this as resolution. We turn again
to the space,

the crown molding, the framed faces.

In a clear, stark clarity of voice, how do you take the temperature of a collection like Temper, holding steady between the sky and ground? Rewriting and retuning elegy, the collection starts with the poem “Temper” and ends with “Elegy,” what this collection as a whole can’t help but be, refining, returning, reflecting; the point of it all.

ELEGY

No shepherds. No nymphs. Maybe just one:

the girl the fawn strips like a fisherman’s rose.

Death turns its mouth red. It can no longer lie

in the lilies. Not on my watch. The lake is filthy

with silver fish sticky with leeches. Lovesick,

I flick a feather into the water. No stones.

Only the one in my pocket, heavy as a tongue.