Amanda Moore, Requeening

 

Confession

In the chapel of our first days,
I put you to my breast again and again
and let you refuse me. 

Half-life half-lived and with you
as my witness: I have been more
mother than woman. I have stayed up
all night lining the shelves of my life
with your toys and books. 

It might be a comfort
the way my whole world spins
on the tip of your smallest toe,
but you will learn to be a woman
from the way I am a woman
in this world
and this is the litany
of my mistake.

From San Francisco poet and essayist Amanda Moore comes the full-length poetry debut, Requeening (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2021), 2020 winner of the National Poetry series, as selected by Ocean Vuong. Bees are, I’ve garnered, the earth-equivalent of the canary in a coal mine, and poets seem to return to bees fairly regularly, from Tonya M. Foster’s A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Brooklyn NY: Belladonna*, 2015) [see my review of such here] to Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s Listening to the Bees (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2018) to Muriel Leung’s IMAGINE US, THE SWARM (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], among others. For Moore’s part, the figure and mantra of the bee follows from opening to central image: “This might have been the way I was born,” she writes, close to the beginning of the opening poem, “Opening the Hive,” “to move over my mother and wash from her / what was left of painful birth, her legs / like the old wood cracked with a hive tool, / my lips clamping and the bees burrowing / into honeycomb, bathed in sweetness, / a taste fresher when robbed this way.” She writes of the wisdoms and lessons passed from one generation to another, such as the poem “Sonnet While Killing a Chicken,” that opens: “The most important thing a girl can learn / is how to kill a chicken for a meal / to feed a man, so she begins to turn / the bird by neck and bound feet—this skill real, / precise, my mother wringing damp both towels / and snapping them on our rumps like the neck / snaps in the hand, wings sputter, bowels / release shit.” Moore writes of labour, industry, mothering, birth and daughters; a sequence of women and bees, and the physicality of bodies and work. “I prefer the mystery / of a bee’s body returning,” she writes, as part of “Waggle Dance,” “bright orange streaks of pollen / in the sacks on the backs of her legs // like fistfuls of hazy, polluted sun.”

“Everything beautiful can be reduced // to scientific measurement:,” the same poem offers, to open, “this language / this dance // this swoop and waggle / across the hexagoned surface of comb [.]” The word “precarity” is utilized in Vuong’s blurb on the back cover, and Moore speaks to issues of health and other complications, writing a motherhood of bees and of just how easy the entire hive structure might simply collapse, and everything completely lost. Composing poems around the metaphor of bees, Moore writes of aunts, wasps, mothering and the lessons that emerge from each and all of the above, structuring her hard-won lessons through a variety of structures, from sonnets to a section of haibun to her carved accumulations of lyric couplets. And such hard lessons, certainly, through the ebb and flow of her prose lyric narratives, such as the opening of “20905 Caledonia Avenue Hazel Park MI,” that reads: “After tuning each floorboard / and scraping walls to chalky plaster // layering checkerboard tile and nailing / every shingle to the roof we made // a baby and I bore her in my body / until she broke me and we brought her there // where I milked myself each morning so happy / to make a home // for suffering, down to / the location even: the old place perched // on the edge of a city waking / from decades of cold dormancy.”

There is an attentiveness to Moore’s language; a precision to her explorations through mothers and bees, wasps and ants, and her own thoughts on mothering her own daughter. The slow evolution through the collection from writing of her mother to mothering to her own daughter is reminiscent of a couple of other titles over the years, most recently Silvina López Medin’s Poem That Never Ends (Essay Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Moore writes not only of mothering, but of the shifts in perspective that emerge with the role. She writes of love, failure and exhaustion, and of moving through the accumulation into something akin to appreciation, and even wisdom and accomplishment, such as the end of the poem “Everything Is a Sign Today,” that offers: “The only difference / the season and time of day, which is to say / they are like this grief these months later: / all the same but for the light.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Zoë Hitzig

Zoë Hitzig is the author of Mezzanine (Ecco, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Lana Turner, Harper's, Paris Review, London Review of Books and elsewhere. Currently pursuing a PhD in economics at Harvard, she lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book has improved my posture. Chin up. Shoulders back. I can look people in the eye now and say “I’m a poet.”

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’m bored by plot and narrative. I find a lot of fiction and non-fiction uncomfortably didactic. So I have a fear that if I were to write narratives, I’d be dragging a stubborn reader around on a leash as if on a guided tour through some kind of dreadful museum of my own inventions. I’d rather turn on the light in a Room of Requirement and invite a reader to explore it with me. That’s poetry.

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?
Some of my best poems came out in a sneeze. Those are gifts. But most of the time I write and revise, obsessively, usually late at night, over many months. Some poems absorb other poems, like hungry amoebae. Others are concatenations of failed ideas that actually succeed when strung together. Others grow and grow and grow over many months only to be cut down to a few lines in a single stroke, like Nasdaq during the dotcom bubble.

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?
A poem usually begins with an image or phrase. But there have been a few deliberately conceived projects. For example, Mezzanine contains a few poems from a project entirely centered on objects used as evidence in wrongful convictions. Also, the initial draft of Mezzanine contained a bevy of poems from a project called Fragments from the Imagined Epic––most of them were cut from the final manuscript. Those poems started as dreams. I dreamt about an epic poem about famous warplanes in history. Then I dreamt about an epic poem about the secretive military operations that led to the development of famous warplanes in history. Then, I dreamt about an epic about the Island of Yap in Micronesia. In all of these cases, I didn’t want to write the epic because I didn't feel qualified, and felt that the epic already existed somewhere out there. So I wrote down some fragments. From the imagined epics.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love attending readings. I love being surrounded by poetry people, people who are willing to walk into a room of strangers emotionally naked, having checked their cloak of cynicism at the door. I don’t know what I think about giving readings. I’m in a strange position where I’ve given more readings in the zoomscapes than in person––my debut book tour was scheduled for the inauspicious summer of 2020.

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 have no answers. Just questions. Why are we so often our own weapon of choice. What is knowledge. What is power. How does knowledge relate to power. How can we live with each other and ourselves. How should we distribute the benefits and burdens of cooperation in households, neighborhoods, cities, states, planets. Can we imagine a better world. If we can imagine a better world how can we bring it into being. If we can imagine a better world and bring it into being why are we so often our own weapon of choice. What is knowledge. What is power….

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?
This question reminds me of a quote from Renata Adler’s Speedboat: “That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.”

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
My most important editors are my friends. They are essential.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
The 10th rule in “10 Rules for Students and Teachers” by Sister Corita Kent (popularized by John Cage): “We are breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
Different kinds of writing require different kinds of coherence. My favorite thing about writing prose is that it’s much easier for me to cut corners, and just get it done. Poetry doesn’t let me take shortcuts.

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?
… “routine”?  I’m a nightmare in the morning. I’m at my best in the evenings. So I try to structure my day to give the evening to my current priorities and leave the morning for my current non-priorities. But even that sham routine is hard for me to stick to.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I rarely get stalled––I’m lucky when I manage to find time to write. And then when I find that time, especially lately, I’m overwhelmed by how many things I want to work on.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Dog pee and bagels & lox.

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?
I often try to read about new discoveries in mathematics. I rarely understand the discoveries––there are several scrims of abstraction between me and the research frontier in, say, algebraic topology––but just trying to grasp these discoveries serves a reminder to be ambitious with poetry. Mathematicians create entire worlds and logical systems with just a few symbols on a page. Poets have access to a much wider vocabulary, we should aim to build worlds and logics that are as rich and vivid as our toolkit allows.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
There are too many to name! Zbigniew Herbert is probably the poet who was most steadily at my side during the making of Mezzanine. Many of my closest friends are writers––I cannot overstate the importance of their work in my life.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to write many more books of poetry and the lyrics to a mediocre pop song.

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?
I would have loved to be an astronaut. When I feel like things are going poorly in my work I look at job openings on the International Space Station. I’m not qualified.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Unlike most other things, writing is best done alone. And I like being alone.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I have been working my way through an anthology of 20th century Hungarian poets published by Bloodaxe and edited by George Szirtes and George Gömöri. It’s astonishing. I’ve also been dipping in and out of a new selection of Wanda Coleman’s poems, Wicked Enchantment. She’s a genius. I watch Tarkovsky’s Mirror when the immediate future is looking bleak––I’ve watched it a lot lately.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m writing a long poem, which will probably end up being the backbone of the second book of poems. It is about the aftermath of a mysterious apocalyptic event. I am also writing a doctoral dissertation in microeconomic theory, which I try bring up only when it’s time to end the conversation.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Jennifer Kronovet, The Wug Test

CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS

There is a window of time to make language how the mind works. Words are milk so the mind survives on language.

Prove it. Take a boy who left the forest and became evidence. Victor, until twelve, knew only the sounds of rain on leaves, on rock, on dirt—no voices down the hall. No voice in his head. He entered the languaged world late and learned: to be pleasant, to remember remembering, and two phrases.

He loved milk but couldn’t request it. The word was uttered only in the joy of seeing it. Milk! The word contained the feeling. Oh, God! his horrified nanny said at him until it became his song of self.

Victor is used to draw the timeline of the mind, saying we must keep one another inside our words—a boy just asking without asking for milk, making the world a glass we fill by speaking.

Given I’ve published a good amount of this book via Touch the Donkey (where I also interviewed her) and an above/ground press chapbook and broadside (as well as subsequently, through Drunken Boat and Dusie), I’m delighted to finally see the second poetry collection by American poet Jennifer Kronovet, The Wug Test (Ecco, 2016), produced as part of the National Poetry Series (with this particular manuscript selected by Eliza Griswold). As part of her interview for Touch the Donkey, she speaks to some of the content of the current collection when it was still in-progress, writing: “I thought it would be sensible and interesting to write little essays about the factoids and personalities I came across in linguistics, but just like my other sensible plans, the project morphed, became entwined with poetry, the language I think with on the page. These poems—they are and aren’t essays, they are experiments and research and reportage.” Further in the interview, she speaks more on her work-in-progress Loan Words (the manuscript that eventually became The Wug Test):

I recently did complete a manuscript of poems that all dance around in the field of linguistics; it’s called Loan Words. Or, at least, I think the pieces in Loan Words might be poems. In it, there are also case studies, semantic analyses, dialogues, reinvented definitions, and many other forms that are also in the form of a poem. Some of the poems have real facts, some are vehicles to do new research without the constraints of science, and in some, I am the subject of study. One of my professors, when I was studying linguistics, off-handedly mentioned that many of the most important applied linguists were mothers who studied their children. I was lucky to have that seed, to suddenly be able to observe with purpose when my son was born. The manuscript started then, in some ways, and then moved further from home as he grew.

What is interesting in The Wug Test is seeing how those two elements she discusses have come together, from the poems composed as more scientific case studies, against the poems composed around “the boy,” from poems such as “WITH THE BOY, WITH MYSELF,” “WITH THE BOY, WITH THE BOOK,” “WITH THE BOY, WITH MY FATHER” and “WITH THE BOY, IN THE GARDEN.” The two ideas swirl around each other throughout the collection, existing in conversation, overlapping and even blending occasionally, writing out a series of studies on linguistics and offspring, writing the domestic of language and individual words, and the study of the her new self against this small human she’d helped create, becoming himself even as he remains an extension, and even a furthering, of his parents. “Now it is the time of the boy,” she writes, in the poem “WITH THE BOY, NOW,” “and I say things / to see what I mean in a voice I don’t.”

When I create my alphabet. That is not a thought I should have but I do. I’m married. To this script. The way you can’t say wife and husband simultaneously with one tongue.

When I can’t sleep, I say, in my head, the alphabet forward and backward at the same time. Cancelling out what can be said to bring me into No Saying.

The letter A/a in English was probably once an ox. The shape is many sounds—sometimes horned, sometimes innocuous as boneless flesh. I don’t wish the ox into my speech. I can only go back so far. But now: ox and ox.

I search out where sound squirms against script as proof of failure. That is my resistance to myself as speech. Instead: thinking, not thinking. (“LETTER”)

The core of the poems that make up The Wug Test exist as a series of studies in linguistics through a parental lens, allowing the study of linguistics to be but a means to an end, studying both the being of her child and the bond between them. How does one change when one becomes a parent? How does the language shift? As she writes in “WITH THE BOY, ON A WALK”: “The rubber of thinking / solo so much. The primer // of your hand being / affectionate.” Through her son, the solo does indeed extend, becoming both extension and coupling. Part of the strength of Kronovet’s work is the fact of its simplicity, composing straightforward, unadorned lines that strike with such subtlety and force that one barely registers at first, but the effects might last and linger for some time. As she writes in “Q&A”: “I make a space, a room of thought-muscle. Here I train / myself to un-logic and then re-logic. To make answers that aren’t.” There is something in her tone that make me think that if Lisa Robertson wrote like Anne Carson (specifically, her Short Talks), they would be the poems of Jennifer Kronovet’s The Wug Test.

Eileen Myles, I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems

AUTUMN IN NEW YORK

It’s something like returning to

sanity but returning

to something I have

never known like

a passionate leaf

turning green

August almost gone

“—that’s my name,

don’t wear it out.”

As if I doffed

my hat & found

a head or

had an idea

that was always

mine

but just came

home, the balloons

are going by so

fast. I lean on

buttons accidentally

jam the works

when I simply

am this

green.

With the publication of I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 (Ecco, 2015), as well as the reissue of her 1994 novel, Chelsea Girls (Ecco, 2015), New York poet Eileen Myles is enjoying a bit of a renaissance lately. Not that she’s been silent for any extended stretch, having published “nineteen books of poetry, criticism, and fiction,” but, as she says to headline a recent interview in New Republic: “I’m the Weird Poet the Mainstream Is Starting to Accept.” Basically, Myles is a writer that other writers have known about for decades, finally, as the stories suggest, moving into a larger and broader readership. Much of Myles’ work explores the line between fiction and memoir, utilizing elements of personal detail, in varying degrees of alteration. Often more straightforward, and sometimes deceptively so, her poems engage with elements of narrative, the lyric, performance, meditation, social and political commentary, the confessional and the short story, all of which she presents as “the poem.” When reading through this collection, I can see very much how some of these poems would have fit perfectly being performed at the late lamented CBGBs, where her first readings were held in the 1970s. As the New Republic interview informs us: “Eileen Myles seems to come from a New York that no longer exists. Her first reading took place at CBGBs, she lived four floors below Blondie, and contemporaries with Richard Hell, progenitor of the spiky-haired, torn-suit jacket look.” That might all read as a tad romantic, and even sensational, but hers has been a New York also populated by Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein, among so many, many others. A recent interview over at Electric Lit (an interview worth reading in its entirety), explores her frustrations with accessibility and readability, the limitations of form, and the limitations of naming form:

Before I was really writing I lived in Cambridge with friends after college. One day I went to Dunkin’ Donuts for a cup of coffee and the guy next to me just turned and started unloading his mind completely. There was no civilized introduction, no nothing. He was completely crazy but what was really astonishing was how seamless it was. I try to kind of do that. The most interesting moment in The Bell Jar is when they take the famous poet out to lunch and he sits there quietly eating the salad with his fingers. The narrator concludes that if you act like it’s perfectly normal you can do almost anything. John Ashbery said he writes as if he’s in the same room as the person who’s reading the poem. For example, if I wanted to describe…well that wainscoting I’d just begin right there: “I’m not sure how i feel but the black next to it is actually really great.” What it creates is a feeling of intimacy, if a reader will go with it. A lot of fiction makes narrators that just happily give it up! They show all the scenery, the whole plodding entrance. I’d call them “obedient narrators”. I don’t ever want to write an obedient narrator. I want you to have an actual relationship with the narrator.

This is only the second title I’ve seen of hers, after the more recent Snowflake: new poems / different streets: newer poems (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Poetry, 2012) [see my review of such here], but the poems in I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems allow the reader the possibility of seeing across four decades of her published poetry. Bookending the collection with “New Poems” and an “Epilogue,” the collection includes selections from The Irony on the Leash (1978), A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains (1981), Sappho’s Boat (1982), Not Me (1991), Maxfield Parrish (1995), School of Fish (1997), Skies (2001), On My Way (2001), Sorry, Tree (2007) and Snowflake / Different Streets (2012). What is curious is in seeing how the precision and rush of the pieces in the “New Poems” section are comparable to poems throughout her published work; Myles’ work has evolved, and honed over the decades, but the precision, energy and rush of her lyric, and the subtle shifts of tone and tenor of her lines, remains throughout. She knew what she was doing very early; she knew what she was doing, and pushed the boundaries while keeping her writing centred around an essential core of her narrative/meditative lyric.

WOO

out in a bus stop

among the

mountains

a yawn, boy drive by

blue mountains

little tan mountain

house, similar

each scape

is all its own place

no woman

is like any

other

Still: given the heft of such a collection, at nearly four hundred pages, why not include an introduction? (I don’t understand any selected/collected poems that doesn’t include an introduction.) She does, at least, include a short essay-as-epilogue, an essay that works through considerations of narrative, genre and form; an essay that opens with her poem “What Tree Am I Waiting” and poet Dana Ward, who caught sight of it in the online journal Maggy, and offered praise:

His explanation of why my poem was important to him was like balm to my ears. He wrote:

To hear someone arrive with that purpose & then put it right there, getting out of the way of everything else to get it right to the top of the thought & the poem. That’s the best stuff in the world to me, that sound. It seems harder than ever to do, or I’m confused right now somehow, regardless, it just tolled in the room for me.

This was huge praise from someone whose work I currently adore. I was pee-shy too about my own poem in particular because it was too emotional. How will it be received. Dana did refer to his own piece in Maggy as “a poem” which intrigued me cause it looked like prose. It’s prose in a world in which I’ve never really noticed whether people describe Bernadette Mayer’s influential early works “Moving” and “Memory” as poetry or prose. Didn’t she call it writing. I mean I think even for Lydia Davis genre is like gender in the poetry world. I’m remembering Amber Hollibaugh explaining gender this way once. It’s not what you’re doing, it’s who you think you are when you’re doing what you’re doing. So prose writers in the poetry world always felt less like prose writers to us, more like fellow travellers and someone like Bernadette was probably writing poems that looked like prose, or like Lydia, prose in the poetry world which for a while at least adds up to the same thing. She was a fellow traveller for a time, and still is, truly, though she’s also everyone’s now. John Ashbery’s greatest book I think is Three Poems which certainly looks like prose. So if Dana Ward wants to call his prosey looking stuff a poem it probably has more to do with how he feels about the work. Or whose he thinks it is. When I read it, it’s mine for sure.