Charles Rafferty, A Cluster of Noisy Planets: Prose Poems

 

Greetings

I counted the water towers, the active smokestacks. These were the breadcrumbs I thought would lead me back. Now I know it’s possible to drive so far we forget why we left, that the journey continues even after the car breaks down. I used to think I had no message, but the message is me—bloodshot and hungry, spilled coffee down the front of my shirt. People of the future, father round. I have traveled through ink to greet you.

The latest from Connecticut poet and fiction writer Charles Rafferty, following eight chapbooks and six full-length collections of poetry, most recently The Smoke of Horses (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2017) [see my review of such here], is A Cluster of Noisy Planets: Prose Poems by Charles Rafferty (BOA Editions, 2021). As I mentioned in my review of that prior collection, there are elements of his prose poems that lean up against an arbitrary and very fluid boundary between poetry and prose into the work of short story writers such as Lydia Davis, composing as much in the realm of postcard story as lyric prose poem. “The moon shows up like a cigarette hole,” he writes, to close the poem “Less Buoyant,” “and the weather keeps milling our mountains into sand.” He composes narratives, but one with a compelling music across his lines as important as the words and his placement of them. I’m also reminded of American writer J. Robert Lennon’s remarkable short story collection Pieces for the Left Hand (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2005) through the way that Rafferty paints such miniature portraits of scenes, moments and occurrences of action and/or thought. Across sixty short, individual and single-stanza prose poems, Rafferty composes short narratives and musings on beauty, attention and meaning, history and memory, and what sits beyond his front step.

Evolution

The ice used to be a mile thick above your house, and every now and then the river uncovers a shard of Colonial flatware, an arrowhead, a piece of beer bottle incapable of cutting anything. The fragments add up. They tell us the story of how nothing can stay the same. I no longer worry that caterpillars are destroying my only oak. I don’t care if the Planning and Zoning Board approves another nail salon. Whenever you say that you’ll never leave your husband, I remind myself that whales used to live on land, that they weren’t much bigger than dogs.

It might be fair, as well, to refer to this particular collection as a kind of commonplace or sketchbook, composed of short pieces attending to the daily moments across his immediate scope of vision. If I had blurbed this collection, I might have offered: “Charles Rafferty strolls around his landscape, both internal and external, and takes pictures using only words.” There is something in the way Rafferty captures the essence of an idea or a moment across the short span of a sentence, or a collection of sentences; the way he encapsulates it, offering it up for a far broader and wider spectrum of readings. In certain poems, the distances he manages to cover from one end of the stanza to the other is quite stunning, and I find myself rereading almost in disbelief at what his narratives have accomplished, as though some of the most important elements of each poem is set not in the words he chooses or how he chooses them, but in what he sets amid and even beneath them. One marvels at what reads so easily, and yet, so utterly beautiful, wrenching and complex.

Evidence

On the map I have, the topographic lines of this hill look like God forgot to wipe away his fingerprint before he got into his Bible and fled. I knew one of the murdered boys. I had handed him a tissue once, to wipe his nose, as my daughter played piano at her recital. The apologists are full of mysterious ways, but I know evil when I see it. I can feel the thumb above me now, pressing down, fitting the grooves of this hillside.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Charles Rafferty

Charles Rafferty's twelfth collection of poems is The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, O, Oprah Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. His stories have appeared in The Southern Review and Per Contra, and his story collection is called Saturday Night at Magellan's. He has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. Currently, he directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My earliest work favored rhymed and metered poetry, and my current work is all prose poetry. I used to take great pleasure in resolving a formal constraint placed on the poem. It's the problem of finding a rhyme for "bazooka" and making it seem natural and inevitable. I'm enjoying the comparative freedoms of the prose poem. I feel like they've given me permission to be wild.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry in high school. The Milton and Keats we were reading left me cold, but when I was 15 I got interested in the Doors' music, which led me to read Morrison's biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, which name-dropped all the poets I would have an early interest in (Rimbaud, Ginsberg, etc.), which led me to Ginsberg's poem "Howl," which I found in my older brother's Intro to Literature textbook when he went back to college. The hook was set at that moment.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Everything depends. Some poems are done in 2 weeks; others take 10 years. If I had to guess, I'd say I average about 20 drafts to finish a poem.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I confess I don't put a lot of effort into the organization of my poetry books. Yes, I want all the poems to be strong, and I generally pick poems that have a similarity of subject matter, narrator, tone, etc. However, I don't care all that much. When I read a book of poetry, I never read it from start to finish. I open it up at random and start there. Usually the poem I start with is short. Or I'll read the first and last poems of the collection, reasoning that this is where the good stuff would naturally reside. There is only a small percentage of poetry books where the order of the poems is actually important. In most cases, you could order them randomly, and I'd be just as happy.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy doing readings, but it's time away from family and routines. And of course, if I'm giving a reading, I'm not working on my writing projects, so I'm wary. As long as the readings don't disturb the Jenga tower that is my life, I'm happy to give them.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I've never even thought about this. I'm certainly not partial to any flavor of poetry as a reader. The only reason I'm writing prose poetry exclusively right now is that I haven't exhausted my interest yet. As soon as I start to get bored with them, I'll move on to something else.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Poets have no role in the larger culture. Poets in America are fourth magnitude stars, and everybody's night vision has been ruined by cop shows and football.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I find it gratifying when it happens. Too often, the editor merely accepts the work for publication, rather than helping to shape it.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Read everything. Write every day – even if it's just a half-hour. Keep everything in the mail.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
It's easy for me to shift between the genres now, but I held off even attempting to write fiction until I was 45. I was a coward.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
My goal is to write every day, no matter what. I have a family and work three jobs, so I don't have the luxury of a regular writing pattern. But I'm good at exploiting whatever time makes itself available – commuting by train, waiting in the lobby during my daughter's dance lesson, waiting at the doctor's office, waiting for the spin cycle to finish on the washing machine. I can usually fit in at least an hour of writing per day.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Yeah, I'm very suspicious of the word "inspiration." I always have many works in progress, so it's almost unheard of to have writer's block. If the novel gets tired, I work on my poems. If the poems are going nowhere, I'll revise a story. Etc. If I'm really not interested in pushing a pen across the page, then I'll read – not to get inspiration, but to see how someone else confronted and resolved the same problems I'm working on. If even that's a dead end, I'll go for a walk in the woods. In fact, going into the woods is always helpful. I don't wait for writer's block to occur before entering.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Piles of autumn leaves in the yard.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Sure. I would say everything. I aspire to be as promiscuous as possible when it comes to influences.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I'm always reading. Because I teach, some of that reading is re-reading the poems and stories I teach. Beyond that, I just want to read whatever I can fit into my schedule. My favorite things to come across are works that I myself could not have imagined.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I'd like to publish a novel. I've got one that I just finished, but I'm still in that stage where I'm not positive it's ready. I can't think of anything else to change, but it still hasn't been picked up by an agent or publisher.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
The writer part stays no matter what, but I've also been a teacher and an editor. If I thought I could swing it, I'd become a mailman (the walking around kind) or a forest ranger.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Well, my first real aspiration was to be a bass player in a rock band. But my bass playing stopped improving at a certain point. Except for the first 6 or 7 years, my writing was always better than my bass playing.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Amy Hempel's Collected Stories. I don't see a lot of movies, and it's been a while since I saw one that was "great." Let's say The Graduate as a safe move.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A novel called "Moscodelphia." A short story collection called "The Blue Piano." A collection of aphorisms called "Oddments." A new, as-yet-untitled collection of prose poems.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Charles Rafferty, The Smoke of Horses

After the Flood

The day was bright. We saw where the water stopped rising by the marks on the vinyl siding. The raccoons had all come down from their trees, but no one could say where they had gone. On our walk, we found a truck tire welded to the riverbank. The water beside it was a silver ribbon. It was doing its best impression of something that would not chew holes in the railbeds and cover the town with a fine patina of river mud. It was “bucolic,” the word the realtors used, convincing us to build here—beneath the trees that never burn, the sky that is ever blue.

I must say, I’m intrigued by the prose poems of Connecticut poet and fiction writer Charles Rafferty’s latest collection, The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2017), his latest in a line of over a dozen published books, yet the first I’ve spent any time with. While my preference for the form of the prose poem leans far closer to the lyric of poets such as Sawako Nakayasu [see my review of her latest here], Jennifer Kronovet [see my review of her latest here] or Amelia Martens [see my review of her latest here] and others, there is a straightforwardness to Rafferty’s narrative prose poems that is quite appealing. Existing somewhere between poetry and the very short story, the pieces in The Smoke of Horses are short and self-contained, composed as single-stanza meditations and observational poems on multiple aspects of the world as it is, as it might be, and even, possibly, as it should be. While he does lean far closer to the side of the very short story, there is a fluidity to his prose, far stronger than the pointedly-straight (and to my mind, pointedly dull) prose poems of Russell Edson; there is a narrative line, but one attuned to the lyric, equally at home in poetry and short fiction. As he writes in the poem “Two People Kissing in the Park as Seen from a Speeding Train”: “It was that kind of story.”

And yet, Rafferty’s The Smoke of Horses occupies the same stylistic and structural territory as the short story writer Lydia Davis (who provides a quote on the back cover of this collection). How is one considered a short story writer while the other is considered a poet? Is this a territory where the naming of genre is as fluid as their lines?

Barbarian

After the invaders entered the palace, they dragged the great tapestries down. They cut them apart as they called for beer, and the queen was made to serve them without taking off her crown. Later, she gathered up the scraps and took them to the stables so that she might end the shivering of her enemies’ horses.