, from the green notebook

, reading Jen Tynes, Brenda Hillman, Rob Taylor + Joy Williams,




Michigan poet Jen Tynes posted this excerpt of Brenda Hillman’s “Dear emerging, pre-emerging & post-emerging poets,” to social media earlier today, originally published online via Too Little / Too Hard, a site for “Writers on the intersections of work, time and value”:

When you feel paralysed by the pointlessness of temporary fashion, or when dull and predictable work is lauded, try new things that will surprise you as you work for the joy of the process, remembering that all a writer needs are four true readers & one of them can be a tree. Never look at your phone while walking downstairs. Do not destroy your body by self-medicating under poetic stress. Just write new poems & read them to your community. Keep the ego in balance because the ego project is doomed to fail. If you don’t receive the rewards you deserve from “the outside world”—and you very likely will not—try to celebrate the good work of others; hold love in your heart; work for justice for humans & non-humans & keep writing.

Keep writing, most writerly advice offers. Keep going. Easier said than done, we all know. I work like a maniac for a couple of years on a manuscript, six to eight months further pushing the book once it’s published, and a royalty cheque a year or two later that won’t even cover a single outing of weekly groceries. It isn’t that difficult to feel discouraged, certainly. Keep going, keep moving, keep pushing. What are we doing, exactly? What is this for?

Tynes herself, from her chapbook Mushrooms Yearly Planner (2021): “We have every right / to be here muscle memorized.”

*

Awash in the beach-head of Bank Street traffic, another coffeeshop morning, Ottawa South. I’m reading through Vancouver poet and editor Rob Taylor’s pandemic-era poetry collection Weather (2024), his afterword to which includes this curious caveat:

Then, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had all of us searching for answers, I stumbled upon mine. Quarantined at home with my wife and two pre-school-aged children in our two-bedroom apartment, I had no choice but to venture outside to work in peace.

I understand that sentiment, especially from the viewpoint of living in an apartment, which would have provided an entirely different array of human interactions than where we’re at: three bedroom house, basement, fenced-in yard. The benefits of a particular kind of suburban lot, and the three months’ worth of notes across the onset of pandemic lockdown that evolved into my non-fiction hybrid, essays in the face of uncertainties (2022). We managed, if you can call it thus, fully aware we were in a better position than some. My home office, for example. In the early 1990s, when I lived with partner and preschooler in a one-bedroom Centretown apartment, the only way I could think was to leave for the coffeeshop, come evening. The stress was real.

Seeking a pandemic-era calm, where I delved into chaos. Peace is a relative term, after all. And the possibilities of space.

“the span it takes,” Taylor writes, “to read a poem / we can’t yet see.”

*

An interesting new interview with Joy Williams, conducted by Adrienne Westenfeld, lands online at Esquire, speaking to “the decades she spent contributing to Esquire, from the editors who shaped her career to the boxes of outraged letters about her most infamous story.” I love the detail that Westenfeld shares of sending Williams the questions, writing in her introduction that “Nowadays the eighty-year-old author lives in the Arizona desert, where she communicates by typewritten correspondence. When we sent over a questionnaire to Williams, what we received in return surprised even us. On vintage Esquire letterhead emblazoned with Hills’s name [the late Rust Hills, Esquire’s longtime fiction editor, who was married to Williams from 1974 until his death in 2008], Williams sent back typewritten answers to our questions, all written in the blunt, lucid voice we know and love.”

Interviews such as these remind of how early editors in such highly visible positions can be so essential for a writer’s career, from a young Joy Williams publishing stories in Paris Review and Esquire, to my own knowledge of infamous Canadian editor and broadcaster Robert Weaver (1921-2008), from his time as fiction editor of Saturday Night magazine, or his years broadcasting the work of a slew of younger Canadian writers on CBC Radio. Back when radio held a larger cultural attention, he created a variety of shows in the years spanning 1948 to 1985, including Anthology, that featured early works and appearances by Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Timothy Findley, George Bowering, Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen. Many of whom we consider Canadian canon owe their careers to the work of Robert Weaver. Will the same be said in the future of certain editors at This magazine, Maisonneuve or The Walrus?

In her Esquire interview, Williams responds to her time and experiences through the magazine, and of being edited by Gordon Lish, his pen striking through whole sentences, paragraphs. She answers: “I learned a lot. I had been getting a little wordy.” The sent questions and her single responses don’t allow for a back-and-forth, and there are more than a couple of her responses that scream for the inclination of follow-up. Still, her responses show a thoughtful combination of quickness, intuitive self-awareness and sharp terseness, offering only what is absolutely required. Her response to question six, the single, pointed: “No.”

 

Brenda Hillman, In a Few Minutes Before Later

 

Tech certainly hadn’t helped; chlorpyrifos;;—
cities eking out funds, people sleeping in tents

            with black & white dogs & children;

racist prisons—you’re getting numb to the list—“growth
in the service sector”—

women working three jobs—production of power

& that tone in the profit voices when you call customer service
growing slightly more officious suspecting the next “downturn”—

you wake with nano-minutes of stress built up overnight—
    offshore breezes,   fear of fires—

mosses bunched , , , ,,, , , , ,,,   , near the small oaks (did they fear stone?)

Women had experimented for centuries with too much cortisol—
so, what to do now,   since doing was the problem—   It was just

mainly important to get through the day (“A Slightly Less Stressful Walk Uphill”)

California poet, editor, teacher and activist Brenda Hillman’s eleventh full-length poetry title, In a Few Minutes Before Later (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2022) [see my review of Pieces of Air in the Epic (Wesleyan, 2005) and Practical Water (Wesleyan, 2009) here], a title, as she offers to open her dedication, that was “composed between 2016 & 2021, half before & half during the pandemic.” Sitting at two full pages, her point-form extended list of dedications includes numerous individuals, creatures, geographies, punctuation and ideas, and even a list of numbers; how many books, let alone poetry books, include dedications to lists of numbers or punctuation? Set in six numbered sections—“In Landscapes of Stress & Beauty,” “Activism & Poetry—Some Brief Reports,” “There Are Many Women to Cherish,” “For Writers Who Are Having Trouble,” “The Sickness & the World Soul” and “In a Few Minutes Before Later”—Hillman furthers her exploration through a poetic of lived action, offering up a lyric that contends with and articulates her activism on numerous fronts, comparable to similar works by Vancouver poets Stephen Collis and Christine Leclerc, or Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier. “Days are unusual.” she offers to open the first poem in the collection, “Micro-minutes on / Your Way to Work,” “The owl sends / out 5 zeroes from the pines / plus one small silver nothing.” As has been the case through her books for some time, Hillman’s lyrics are large in scope, and reminiscent, slightly, of the experimental lyric heft and lightnessess contained in the later works of the late poet CD Wright [see my review of her final collection here], offering poems that skim, stretch and turn, all while managing to lift the lyric well beyond its earthly bounds. Even her use of punctuation, offering sequences of commas, pushing beyond not only the visual element of text on the page but the actual fact of punctuating, holding, halting. Pop pop pop pop. One can’t help but be affected by the placement of text upon the physical page.

i saw the clouds go by in used lab coats.
i heard the neighbor looking for her cat.
      The hour is come, the prophet wrote
The squirrel  has no apocalypse,   & shakes
  a gravid branch—consciousness in high places… (“[in the split gardens   irrational hope]”)

She writes interruptions, activism and “minutes of visible and invisible existence,” tackling a world-view of a sequence of space both intimate and deeply personal. She wants to live, after all, and she wants you to be able to live as well, offering notebook scraps layered across and below ecological concerns and public declarations. “The future was handsome before the power went out,” opens the poem “Poem Before the Power Went Out,” “She wrote to say he was being nice [.]” Hillman’s poems always provide the sense of something detailed, shaped; a layering of perfect detail, through an ease of line that flows as easily as song. “Poets are often tired,” she writes, as part of the poem “Among Some Anapests / at Civic Center.” Later in the same poem, offering: “A terrible beauty is dead / & the sun was tender upon us // We don’t think the hitting will work / A defensive time is made // A poem is not a protest / Subject to history’s impress [.]”

Hillary Gravendyk (March 1, 1979 - May 10, 2014)

Dammit. American poet Hillary Anne Gravendyk Burrill, otherwise known as Hillary Gravendyk, died on Sunday after an extended illness. For those who might not known of her or her work, her poetry collection, Harm (Omnidawn, 2012) [see my review of such here], wrote around the body, and more specifically, the facts surrounding her double lung transplant in 2009. Through the publication of Harm, we began a small correspondence, and attempted to keep up with each other through emails and facebook, and I could see some of what she was dealing with, distracting her away from the work she so obviously fought to return to. We had discussed the possibilities of her engaging the ‘12 or 20 questions’ interview questions, but we never quite managed such. She generously provided a blurb for the back cover of one of my trade collections, and promised that she would get me some poems, once she was writing again. I enjoyed her work tremendously, and, despite not knowing her terribly well, enjoyed her remarkable energy and generosity, especially through her physical difficulties. I am wishing we'd been able to meet. Her last email, from early April, included:

How are you?  I've been enjoying the pictures of your sweet Rose on Facebook.  What a charmer.  My health is always a crisis, but in the last few months I've had a welcome sense of stability.  Things aren't getting better, but they aren't crashing like they were in the fall.  Just adjusting to the new normal, enjoying the pleasant SoCal weather, and taking pleasure in many things: LACMA, many good books, learning to knit, cooking, and finally getting back to the business of writing poems and essays.

If you are interested, I've also got two collaborative poetry projects going now: a book-length one with the poet Cynthia Arrieu-King, a shorter one with the poet Maureen Alsop (whose work I think you'd really like, do you know it?).  I wonder if you might have a good idea of publishers that would welcome (consider, even!) collaborative book projects?

This email includes everything I enjoyed about her missives: the delight she took from others, as well as the possibilities of her writing projects, but also includes both an acknowledgement and subtle downplay of her own health crises. I knew she’d been struggling with her health for some time (and knew it had been quite bad a few months back), but didn’t realize it was as bad as it was. Since the news of her passing, others have begun posting small notes on Hillary and her work, such as this piece on The Eat and Run Mom, a video of her reading posted on Ron Silliman’s blog, a piece posted on the Pomona College website, two poems reprinted at The Mark on the Wall, and a piece by Brenda Hillman forthcoming at Omnidawn. My own little poem "in memoriam" appeared earlier in the week at Moss Trill. With the notice Hillary’s husband Benjamin Burrill wrote on her Facebook page on Sunday afternoon, he included this poem:

Exuberance

To know me as golden is to know me all wrong. Every time I breathe in it smells rusty, like blood, and when I cough there is blood in the air.

If I were in charge of these special effects, I’d make it thicker; it’s so hard to take it seriously. Bright little hearts and stars and carnations on a white cloth.

Let’s go out with a thicker line, a cerulean skylight, rain that gets dumped out of a trough to thwack the pane of glass, a smear of red like tempera paint across the cheek or the hand, streaming from the mouth.

Let’s have a disaster, a lake made of salt, a blackout. Everything riots and unspools, the whole room on one side and all the sound winking out.

You stay here. Let me run into that starring role, pinker and more flooded with blood: remember when it meant exuberance, remember awe? Let’s be that breathless.

In that same email I received in April, she sent along four poems for consideration for the “Tuesday poem” series I curate over at the dusie blog, all of which I accepted, to post on July 22, 2014. I offer one of them, here:

Hillary Hillary

You creep through the air, a voice calling my name

in this dimmer winter where keels freeze to swells

I was lost in the delicacy of your warning, at sea.

Held myself against the roll of your tongue,

the door open like a mouth and the air falling

through more air, a hole in the light—

You carry each pinprick of rain and lay

me in fragments on the counterpane,

you circle the room, a quieting crow.

The window slices absence into segments

the door slaps the side of the house

and I’m ankle deep in clouds.

Robin Clarke, Lines the Quarry

Everything wants to live, not

even Robocop. The difference

between human, employee

hired hand & the ocean—

simply the road gets blocked, so

Carnegie built a library

sixteen hours of work each

shift your life is mined

by one way & another

bake a cake between the days,

workers, dynamite, dripping

things you don’t want to forget

headlamp, feed dog tied to post.

A history of methane

explodes one thousand feet

in your face is a ceiling

coming down? burns ninety

percent of the woman’s

disaster porn at Big Branch

coal mine, twenty-nine Do Not

Resuscitate, Mr. Blank

Blankenship throws down a rope

I’ve got my head but three years

of citation brings the whole

sputtering to today, the

rules, or all Americans

deserve to? The company (“My Father or the Prisoner Before Him”)

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania poet, activist and teacher Robin Clarke’s first poetry collection, published as winner of the Omnidawn 1^st/2^nd Poetry Book Prize, is Lines the Quarry (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2013). Selected for the award by Brenda Hillman, the book opens with Hillman’s “Judge’s Citation,” that begins:

            Robin Clarke’s inventive and brave first collection of poems is not a book that makes you feel better; it is a book that makes you feel. It does not necessarily bring comfort or spiritual discovery—though it could lead to those things. Using an approach that is both collective and personal, the poet meditates on mining culture, on the prison system, on the health care system, on corporate seizure of resources and on systematic economic failure, on attendant environment disasters; in so doing, she always keeps attention on the specifics of working people and their struggles. The three sequences here are full of detailed fragments of incidents—never completely spelled out—that allude to illness and injury, details of childhood, family history, showing humans and earth as victims of the mines and of both slow and sudden disasters, yet the result is somehow ultimately redemptive.

Hers is a collection of documentary poems built via collage, some composed using specifics directly from a series of documents, stretched out across three sections—“My Father or the Prisoner Before Him,” “In the Building Coming Down” and “Lines the Quarry.” In the first section, she writes: “The mine collapsed under the weight of its many / false documents.” These are poems composed out of striking lines pressed firmly into and against each other, all of which contain a brutal honesty, as well as a series of challenges: “The women of Harlan County used a cadillac / to stop the train. And began singing. Which side are you / on?” This book is comparable to Brian Teare’s recent title with Omnidawn, Companion Grasses (2013) [see my review of such here], for their meditative stretches, shared ecological attentiveness and their book-length units of composition, yet Clarke’s poems also seek discomfort, and almost demand the reader respond in some way. Honestly, it would be impossible not to respond to these poems. In terms of some of the structure of short phrases collaged into each other to produce a series of accumulative stretches, as well as for their shared exploration of environmentalism and personal-political responsibilities, one could even compare this to Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s recent collaborative re-issue Sybil Unrest (New Star Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]. Very much in the territory of “eco-poetry,” Clarke depicts, describes and laments needless destruction of the natural world through excessive mining, utilizing and lifting a language of nursery rhymes and song, implicating numerous structures in the physical destruction of the earth, all of which have been created by human hands. In terms of subject matter, her work is reminiscent of other works on disasters man-made, whether pieces on Frank Slide, Alberta, the bp oil spill or even Richard Brautigan’s infamous poem on Nova Scotia’s Springhill Mine Disaster (there were actually three mine disasters in Springhill, but who’s counting?). I wonder: there have been anthologies over the past couple of years exploring “eco-poetry,” but have there been any collections or critical explorations of poems that work through environmental disasters?

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones

What to do when yellow

fever, husband, child, child

child, child? She may have lived

100,000 years, a marriage

of action verbs & explosives—

the more I think the more rad

I get—mops & brooms used to

barricade the mine entrances

nobody wants a lady

to march one hundred child workers

from Philly textile mills to the

President’s house on Long Island

so she must become the most

dangerous America itself

Clarke describes those lost who, quite literally, “line the quarry,” and is not afraid to name names and list the dead, destroyed or lost, writing out the human and environmental costs of mining, oil drilling and other exploitations of natural resources. Through the first section, the American prison system is explored as well. In the first section, she writes: “dreams say it, together / who did nothing wrong [.]” The poems in this collection explore a series of causes and effects, some of which are quite disastrous, such as the list poem “2010 Workers’ Compensation Injuries, Illnesses, Fatalities,” the opening poem “2006 Workers’ Compensation Injury Data, United States” or the seven-stanza list poem “Mining Disasters in the Month of January, United States,” that includes:

1846 Delaware-Hudson, Roof Fall, Carbondale, PA, 14 killed

1883 Coulterville, Mine Explosion, Coulterville, IL, 10 killed

1884 Crested Butte, Mine Explosion, Crested Butte, CO, 59 killed

1886 Almy No. 4, Mine Explosion, Almy, WY, 13 killed

1886 Newburg, Mine Explosion, Newburg, PA, 39 killed

1891 Mammouth, Mine Explosion, Mt. Pleasant, PA, 109 killed

Through exploring various disasters, Clarke ends up exploring memory—“the worst disaster since the last one”—writing about people lost through the prison system, disasters man-made we don’t wish to think about, and just where the accumulation of disaster upon disaster might end up taking us. “What do you love about this / world? Without what is there nothing // else to say?”