AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Poetry at the End of the World

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

DON SHARE: This is the Poetry Magazine Podcast for April 2014. I'm Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: And I'm Lindsay Garbutt, assistant editor for the magazine. On the podcast this month, we'll hear readings from Ishion Hutchinson.

ISHION HUTCHINSON (CLIP PLAYS FROM POEM):

And light sprinkled my hair.

DON SHARE: And from Gabrielle Calvocoressi.

GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI: (CLIP PLAYS FROM POEM):

You've gone and lost the both of them. You're your very own Pol Pot.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: We'll also speak about poetry and the end of the world with Michael Klein.

MICHAEL KLEIN: The end of it, it's kind of boring. The way that we interpret that is much more interesting.

DON SHARE: Of course, we have a lot more in the April issue than what's on this podcast, including poems by Sarah Lindsay, Charles Bernstein and his amazing "Me and My Pharaoh," which is kind of a little epic poem for Poetry Month you could say, and Valzhyna Mort. And to get started, I thought I would read part of a poem I actually heard the poet read here in Chicago when we had her visiting the Poetry Foundation. It's Sheryl Luna, her first appearance in Poetry magazine. This poem is called "Lowering Your Standards for Food Stamps." It's a wonderful poem, but I'll just read the middle section of it. It's about working in a convenience store.

Cola spilled on hands, so sticky fingered,
I’m far from poems. I’d write of politicians,
refineries, and a border’s barbed wire,
but I am unlearning America’s languages
with a mop. In a summer-hot red
polyester top, I sell lotto tickets. Cars wait for gas
billowing black. Killing time has new meaning.
A jackhammer breaks apart a life. The slow globe
spirals, and at night black space has me dizzy.
Visionaries off their meds and wacked out
meth heads sing to me. A panicky fear of robbery
and humiliation drips with my sweat.
Words some say are weeping twilight and sunrise.

(CHUCKLES)

So there's quite a bit of what it's like to be on the other side of the counter in this poem.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: Yeah, it's very moving. I love that second line you read there. "I'm far from poems" being in this convenience store, whereas actually she's written such an amazing poem out of it. You know, even in a convenience store, you're not far from poems.

DON SHARE: Yeah, in another line of the poem, she says, "I have no poem to carry, no material illusions". Wonderful poem.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: Yeah. I'd like to read a poem as well. This one's by Samiya Bashir. It's also her first appearance in the magazine. This poem is called “Consequences of the Laws of Thermodynamics.” And she has another poem in the issue called “Carnot Cycle.” So they both take these kind of scientific titles and turn them into really beautiful musical poems. Here's “Consequences of the Laws of Thermodynamics.”

When Albert Murray said
the second law adds up to
the blues that in other words
ain’t nothing nothing he meant it

not quite the way my pops says
nomads don’t show emotions
but more how my grandmother
warned that men like women

with soft hands blood red
nails like how Mingus meant
truth if  you had time for it
facts if  you got no time that

years pass. Zero
one two three and
the man you used

to flirt with you can
no longer flirt with
thank goodness.

He’s now a man
you can’t wear
your  jaw out on

about weather
news or work

a perfect
strawberry

buried
beneath

a peck.

DON SHARE: (CHUCKLES) I really admire how you take something that's part of cultural criticism, Albert Murray's writing, the great cultural critic, and it becomes part of poetry, you know, Albert Murray saying the second law of thermodynamics adds up to the blues. And this poem sort of really converts that in into a wonderful poem that has blues in it and has that intellect going for it as well. But it's also just a terrific poem that takes off into its own atmosphere.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: Those first three stanzas are all one sentence and they kind of blur one into the other. You can't parse where the phrase or sentence ends exactly. And then right in the middle of the poem is that "zero / one two, three," kind of as if you're counting out a beat of a song and it slows things down and it becomes all these one-syllable words or very short syllable words. I love how it winnows into that very last perfect strawberry buried beneath a peck.

DON SHARE: Yeah. In the New York Times, Teju Cole recently called Ishion Hutchinson "the future of American poetry," and we're happy to have a glimpse of that future with his work in the April issue. It's his first appearance in Poetry magazine.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: Ishion Hutchinson is an assistant professor at Cornell University, and he's originally from Port Antonio, Jamaica. We have two of his poems in the issue, plus two poems from a longer series, which we asked him to describe.

ISHION HUTCHINSON: It's a meditation on living away from Jamaica. I was living in Utah when I was writing them, reading a lot of Berryman at that time.

DON SHARE: Ishion says he was struck by one of John Berryman's “Dream Songs,” which happens to mention Utah as a paradise on earth.

ISHION HUTCHINSON: I was particularly struck, too, by the sort of fragmentary nature of Berryman's poetics, and I've never really written that way. And I thought as a way to understand this shift in climate and season and this sort of exile in the desert, to put it pompously, I would, in a sense, imitate that form, that brokenness. And that's how these poems develop.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: These poems don't have titles, so we're just calling this one by its first line. "At nights birds hammered my unborn."

DON SHARE: Colchis comes up in the poem. In ancient times, Colchis was a real kingdom on the eastern coast of the Black Sea. And in Greek mythology, it was the final destination of the Argonauts and the home of Medea.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: And one last note: poui trees bloom white, pink, or yellow, and they're common in Jamaica.

ISHION HUTCHINSON:

At nights birds hammered my unborn
child’s heart to strength, each strike bringing

bones and spine to glow, her lungs pestled
loud as the sea I was raised a sea anemone

among women who cursed their hearts
out, soured themselves, never-brides,

into veranda shades, talcum and tea moistened
their quivering jaws, prophetic without prophecy.
Anvil-black, gleaming garlic nubs, the pageant arrived with sails unfurled
from Colchis and I rejoiced like a broken

asylum to see burning sand grains, skittering ice;
shekels clapped in my chest, I smashed my head against a lightbulb

and light sprinkled my hair; I rejoiced, a poui
tree hit by the sun in the room, a man, a man.

DON SHARE: He reads it so beautifully I don't feel like saying anything about it.

(BOTH LAUGH)

LINDSAY GARBUTT: Let's just leave it at that.

DON SHARE: I mean, the rhythms of the poem are just gorgeous. They're wavelike, which I think is not only in his voice and in the poem, but it's in the places evoked in the poem as well. That sort of sea-like undulation is a kind of poetics, I think, for this poet, but also the particularity of bringing that home to the birth of, the impending birth of his child.

ISHION HUTCHINSON:

At nights birds hammered my unborn
child’s heart to strength, each strike bringing

bones and spine to glow, her lungs pestled

LINDSAY GARBUTT: And then to say that "her lungs are pestled loud as the sea." It's such like a grinding force to make this child. It's… it's really rather beautiful.

ISHION HUTCHINSON:

                          and I rejoiced like a broken

asylum to see burning sand grains, skittering ice;
shekels clapped in my chest

DON SHARE: I think what's happening partly is that this is a poet who's kind of been all over the place, you know, from Jamaica but he's ended up in places like Utah. So in a sense I think there's a lot of implicit danger there. You can see that in a sense he's looking for some kind of sanctuary with his family. But it's a dangerous kind of voyage being described.

ISHION HUTCHINSON:

                          and I rejoiced like a broken

asylum to see burning sand grains, skittering ice;
shekels clapped in my chest

The sort of currency, you know, of ancient times is still rattling around.

ISHION HUTCHINSON:

               I smashed my head against a lightbulb

and light sprinkled my hair;

DON SHARE: It's quite a great moment for me in the poem because just when it gets literally heady, there's sort of something humbling about that. And like all poets, he's kind of looking for light in unlikely places and rejoicing at things that might kind of depress or suppress other sort of less robust and courageous spirits.

ISHION HUTCHINSON:

                              I rejoiced, a poui
tree hit by the sun in the room, a man, a man.

DON SHARE: Ishion's taking to heart the geography he's experienced in his own real life, his emotional life, the lives of his child's ancestors, all brought gorgeously together in this poem.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: Let's hear the second poem we have from this series. This one we're also calling by its first line, "A furnace In my father's voice; I prayed for the coal stove's."

ISHION HUTCHINSON: The coal stove is a typical thing that you find in every Jamaican home. I used to sit down and watch my mother making the fire in the coal stove, knowing that soon there'll be food. And so you watch the dying light of the coal stove and so on.

DON SHARE: Ishion also reminded us that Coleridge referred to the imagination as a dying coal.

ISHION HUTCHINSON: So every day I was in the presence of Coleridge's idea of the imagination as a dying coal.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: Here's the poem.

ISHION HUTCHINSON:

A furnace in my father’s voice; I prayed for the coal stove’s
roses, a cruise ship lit like a castle

on fire in the harbor we never walked,
father and son, father drifting down

the ferned hell his shanty shone, where,
inside, in my head, the lamp was the lamp.

The market, the park, the library not a soul
but grandmother’s morning wash lifting toward heaven,

the barrister sun punished my sister, I stared at my hand
in a book, the horizon declined in my mouth.

My little earthshaker, visored in placenta,
wonder of wonders, tremulous in amniotic

shield, ensouled already, father in the veritable
night, without house or harbor,

soon sea in a voice will harrow
a scorpion’s blaze in me, to the marrow.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: These poems make such a nice pair. There's so much similar vocabulary and also similar themes of father and son, forging, light, the sea, obviously.

DON SHARE: He uses the phrase "my little earthshaker." An earthshaker, you know, could be an earthquake or the kind of earthquake that creates a tsunami. In other words, it can really agitate the oceans and create a disproportionate effect, you could say. I just love the idea of his referring to his unborn child as a little earthshaker, tremulous in the amniotic shield.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: One of the things that strikes me the most is that phrase, "the lamp was the lamp."

DON SHARE: Mm-hm. Mm-hm.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: Because there are so many similes and metaphors in this poem, and then there's that moment where it's just "the lamp was the lamp." It makes you question, well, is a lamp ever just a lamp? That might be getting very philosophical but…

(BOTH LAUGH)

DON SHARE: Well, it is philosophical because that burning coal of the imagination, not only that but the very Wordsworthian kind of child is the father to the man thing. I mean, you sort of don't get Coleridge without the Wordsworth here. But I think, you know, that's a very lovely kind of connection also to not just the poet's father, but other father poets. So for instance, I often think of Derek Walcott here where Derek, and Ishion too, I think, very clearly are taking the rhythms and inheritance of epic and mythology and other seafarers like themselves and sort of updating it and maintaining a line of transmission. And technically it's borne out by such things as the lovely ending words of the last several lines of the poem that modulate from harbor to harrow to marrow.

ISHION HUTCHINSON:

ensouled already, father in the veritable
night, without house or harbor,

soon sea in a voice will harrow
a scorpion’s blaze in me, to the marrow.

DON SHARE: So that you could see this isn't just, or merely a literary connection, but it's in the marrow. It's actually in the soul, ensouled already, he says, in his unborn child. If you're talking about being, as the poem says, without house or harbor, the sea, these things are in the voice, in the soul, in the marrow. That's how they're transmitted. Those syllables also are almost a kind of lullaby. At least I hear them that way. I can hear him in communication with his unborn son in both of these poems.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

DON SHARE: This is also Gabrielle Calvocoressi's first appearance in Poetry. She's the author of two books of poems, Apocalyptic Swing and The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart."=

LINDSAY GARBUTT: Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the senior poetry editor at Los Angeles Review of Books, and she teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

DON SHARE: We have three of her poems in the April issue, all with the same title, “Captain Lovell.” There's a reason for that.

GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI: These are three poems from a book-length project I'm working on right now called “Rocket Fantastic,” and there are three voices in this story.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: The voices of three siblings. There's Babe, the older sister who has left home to live in the hills in Southern California. There's the middle brother, David, who's fighting in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI: And this voice that's in Poetry agazine this month is the voice of the youngest sister, and her poems are all written as direct addresses to Captain Lovell.

DON SHARE: Jim Lovell was a famous Apollo astronaut in the late 1960s when the events in 'Rocket Fantastic' take place. And I'm actually old enough to remember that. He was a hero of mine. Anyway, that youngest daughter, the speaker of the poem that you're about to hear, is not named.

GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI: And she lives with their father, who is a rocket scientist. He works at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: This poem recounts a visit to the house from Aunt G.

GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI: (READS POEM)

“Captain Lovell”

Dad calls her the Dowager but I call her Aunt G.
Aunt G. at the Polo Lounge. Aunt G. drinking gimlets
by the pool. Aunt G. asking about Babe even
though she’s the only one who sees her that much
anymore. She wears ten rings. Seven on her
right hand, which Dad calls the Seven Stars.
They make the glass seem like it’s going to crack.

She doesn’t like me very much. I know it.
I’m not her kind of girl. I won’t wear dresses
and when she placed the ring inside my hand
I just said, “No, thank you.” Not even thinking
how rude that might sound. What would I do
with a ring like that? I’ve got my own stars
and she doesn’t really want to give

me presents anyway. She gave Babe a car,
her dark brown Aston Martin. And she gave
David a watch to “remember home by.”
She gave my Dad a look when he said, “David’s
a good soldier.” Like he gave her something bad
to eat. She just shook her head and said,
“I’ll never understand what kind of man you are.”

And then she said Dad would have that young boy’s
blood on his hands. Which I don’t understand.
Or why she said, “You’ve gone and lost the both
of them. You’re your very own Pol Pot,” while looking
through her purse. It shone so bright it blinded
me. For a second I saw spots and couldn’t focus
on the thing. One clear stone that caught the light

and made reflections on my glasses. I didn’t want
it. I don’t wear things like that. “Who are you?”
she asked, not in a mean way but like she truly
didn’t know. And didn’t really care. She took it back
and asked me if  I’d talked to Babe and I said
I had not and no one else had either.
I said, “She’s living in the hills.”

And she looked at the ring for a minute
and put it back in her purse.

DON SHARE: It's an odd kind of history that's being woven here against the backdrop of a kind of epic history. I mean, Captain Lovell was, people might remember, the guy who was on the almost ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, which was very dangerous. And then prior to that, he was on Apollo 8, which was the first American spacecraft to have people on it orbiting the moon prior to the moon landing. So what I like about that is that this is like a kind of a real American family life being woven together, reconstructed in the fabric of these poems, kind of never losing sight, in a way, of what's happening in the rest of the world. The way these things would creep in or have crept in at the time, like references to Pol Pot.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: Mm-hm.

DON SHARE: The way people got news was through newspapers and TV. They weren't like minute-to-minute thing. So a lot of things would seep into one's consciousness and sort of turn up. And obviously, the idea that a family member might be in the military in Southeast Asia and so on. So I kind of like that texture here. It's almost like a family quilt in words.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: And the fact that this persona, who's very conversational and just sharing these moments of her life, is writing to an astronaut who's in, I mean, is in space.

DON SHARE: (LAUGHS)

LINDSAY GARBUTT: Like, these are the kinds of things he's missing while he's out there. And, you know, this is what he'd want to know. These daily little fights, or not accepting a ring that your aunt has tried to give you.

DON SHARE: Yeah. The stuff about the rings, seven on a right hand. There were seven original astronauts.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: Hmm.

DON SHARE: Some people might recall the seven stars. We were talking about Berryman before. But there's something dream songy about these to me, the kind of word-obsessed but also relationship-obsessed diction of the poem. It's really sort of marvelous, but eerie and unusual.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

DON SHARE: The idea of the end of the world has been around as long as there have been people walking around in the world. But in recent times, with the threat of nuclear annihilation and now of climate change and species extinction, it has taken on more than a metaphysical urgency.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: In the current issue, Michael Klein writes about the contemporary poetics of the end of the world with writers like Laura Kasischke, Dana Levin, and Jack Gilbert.

DON SHARE: Michael Klein is a poet, memoirist and essayist, and his most recent book of poems is The Talking Day. He joins us by phone from New York. Hi, Michael.

MICHAEL KLEIN: Hi, Don. Hi, Lindsay.

DON SHARE: You know, Michael, our younger listeners have grown up under the specter of climate change. But you and I grew up thinking that a cataclysmic nuclear war could incinerate us at any moment. So tell us about how you experienced that era and how it informs your life even now.

MICHAEL KLEIN: There was somehow or another, there was a threat. Always, I always felt there was a threat, and it was usually very specific to China or Russia. They had these really powerful weapons called nuclear bombs, and they were going to-- they didn't like us, and they were going to kill us. You know, as I got older, I realized that that kind of fear was being played out in the culture at large and in movies and in books and-- not so much books, but certainly in movies and television. But I also felt very alone thinking that because, like money, it's a subject that nobody really wants to talk about. And I think that's actually true today. One of the things that I was discovering for myself when I was writing the essay was that it was the first time I really faced the subject, even though it had been with me for such a long time. And the fear was different. I think, I think as time goes by, I think the fear certainly it changes into something else. The fear that I felt as a kid certainly is different because I'm not a kid anymore. And I know what fear-- I know how fear can dictate a life and not tell, and not be truthful in a certain way.

DON SHARE: So the real question is, and I mean, it's a question you take up in the essay. Given all that, why are we going to be reading poems in the face of annihilation? I mean, what do poems do for us, and why do we have time for them, and why are we thinking about poems?

MICHAEL KLEIN: Yeah, because I mean it's the place to go to sort of be saved, I think. I mean, it always is. But the poems that are specifically about that particular subject, I think they're so fascinating to me because they're not really that many of them. Even though it's been around for such a long time, it's still a subject that's calling us, and that more people actually are reading about it, which is why, you know, I started thinking and writing an essay about it to begin with. I went to a reading of Dana Levin's in New York, and the first thing she said was, well, how long do you think we have?

(ALL LAUGH)

MICHAEL KLEIN: That was the question to the audience. I also think, I have this weird-- you know, I'm a magical thinker. Like most poets, I think. It's not a great phrase to apply to oneself, but I think the poems that used to feel dangerous to me, over time feel less dangerous. And the more we sort of write about it, I think we are actually postponing it. That it is a metaphor because it hasn't been enacted.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: When you're writing about these poems, you say, "It's not only the world that ends, but a kind of thinking about the world, too." Could you explain that a little bit?

MICHAEL KLEIN: Yeah, exactly. It's sort of what I was just thinking of. I mean, the end of it, it's kind of boring. The way that we interpret that is much more interesting, using different kinds of methodology and different strategies and not only be ecological, not only be political but to face one's death. I mean, one of the most interesting concepts that I came across in writing the essay, and it was from that poem by Mark Conway, how, you know, the dilemma of the 21st century is that we don't get to choose our death, with that threat of nuclear annihilation that somebody decides for us. I think writing from that idea gives you a whole array of questions that you may never, and answers that you may never have thought about when you're writing whatever it is that obsesses you as a poet. You know, whether it's nature or otherwise, or the sense of self or the idea of self, the psyche and what happens to a psyche that collapses because of their fear.

DON SHARE: One of the things that I really love about this essay is that it's delightful.

MICHAEL KLEIN: (LAUGHS)

DON SHARE: So it's sort of amazing to me that you managed to make this grim subject delightful. But I think in the piece itself, you learn this from poems. And so let's talk about some of the poets who turn up in here. One of them is obviously Jack Gilbert.

MICHAEL KLEIN: Right.

DON SHARE: And you talk about his poem, “A Brief for the Defense.”

MICHAEL KLEIN: Right.

DON SHARE: And you quote the poem, which people can read in the piece. "We must risk delight."

MICHAEL KLEIN: Right.

DON SHARE: "'We must risk delight,' the poem instructs us, and to live to an end that has magnitude; to take on happiness, in spite of the world trying to eat happiness." (CHUCKLES) I mean, that's just so marvelously delightful in itself. But who are these poets and how do you find them? It seems like an unusual thing to come across these poems about the risk of annihilation, but you've sort of almost compiled an anthology here.

MICHAEL KLEIN: Oh, absolutely, and I mention some of the books in the piece and maybe I'll just talk about a couple of them. And the Gilbert poem, I really think, I mean, one of the things, and I hadn't really realized this, I didn't realize it, certainly, when I first read the poem. But that is it's almost like one day. I mean, it's the idea that you hold both in the same hand, right, the knowledge of your living and the knowledge of your death. And what Gilbert is saying, which is so brilliant, is how the women on the corner of Calcutta are still laughing. That no matter what happens, you always have to risk delight. You always have to find something to be happy about, basically. Because you're awake, you're alive, you're still moving through the world. There was a wonderful book that was published this year by a woman named Cynthia Lowen. It was one of the National Poetry Series winner. I think it was chosen by Nikky Finney. It's called 'The Cloud that Contained the Lightning'. And they're all poems that are written in the persona of J. Robert Oppenheimer about the dilemma of being the father of the atomic bomb. Also I've always been really moved by Chase Twitchell’s work in the last ten years. I think all of her work is sort of addressing the threat of an empty universe. There's her book The Ghost of Eden. Louise Glück, I've always felt that she was talking about it even when she wasn't talking about it. Kasischke, obviously. Adrienne Rich, certainly, and Claudia Rankine's book Don't Let Me Be Lonely, I think, is the greatest document that I know that really talks about this stuff. And it was, it was published right after 9/11. I think it's more probably specifically toward 9/11. But certainly it was a subject that she had taken up. And Dana Levin, who again, I mean, without Dana this essay really wouldn't have come into being. I felt that her poems really were the closest up to that subject that I can think of, contemporary examples of Americans.

DON SHARE: Now that said, obviously, there are real differences from generation to generation. So what are the differences in today's kind of poetry from the poems written in the face of annihilation just a generation or two ago? As our thinking about this stuff changes, sounds like the language has changed.

MICHAEL KLEIN: Yeah, I think it has. I think it's become, and again I'm thinking of Dana just in particular, just because, you know, I'm such a fan of the way that she sort of frames the discussion. I think the language can be quirky and really inventive. And there's a curious almost resistance to have any kind of strict lineation on the page. And there's a lot of jig-jagging around with lines. All of that stuff is very reflective of the kind of-- I think there are poems about trying to make up your mind in a lot of ways, and that's what's different. I think Dana, possibly, is the only one that I can think of that actually really does use it as subject matter more than once. And Cynthia Lowen. I mean, her whole book is about that, where it's laid out as an obvious subject. I think people will have one or two poems, maybe, in a collection, but not certainly spend that much time with it, always.

DON SHARE: Well, hopefully the world will keep going long enough (LAUGHS) for there to be more significant accumulation of these things.

MICHAEL KLEIN: I do too, and that is why I wanted to make it delightful.

DON SHARE: Well, you did.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: It's very delightful. Yeah.

DON SHARE: It really is a delight. I think readers will be… will be given heart and instruction from your piece and the poems and poets quoted in it. So thank you so much, Michael. This was great.

MICHAEL KLEIN: It was great to talk to you.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

DON SHARE: You can read Michael Klein's essay and everything else you heard on the podcast in the April 2014 issue of Poetry magazine.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: Let us know what you thought of this program. E-mail us at [email protected].

DON SHARE: The Poetry Magazine Podcast is recorded by Ed Herman and produced by Curtis Fox.

LINDSAY GARBUTT: The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. I'm Lindsay Garbutt.

DON SHARE: And I'm Don Share. Thank you for listening.