I wasn’t familiar with Henry Hughes’ work until a local poet, Celeste Thompson, introduced us. His second full-length collection, Moist Meridian (© 2009, Mammoth Books) arrived shortly thereafter, and I was quickly wrapped up in Hughes’ use of language, as well as the clever and playful way his poems approached topics around intimacy and human relationships. A professor of English and Creative Writing at Western Oregon University, Hughes and I met briefly at Wordstock, then got together at a Portland coffee house were we sat under the front awning and watched the rain come and go. Our conversation started with Hughes’ role as a poetry critic and reviewer for Harvard Book Review, then circled back to his own work.

HH: I feel dead about some current poetry.

DJ: How so?

HH: A lot of it feels like it’s just been ground out of the poetry machine. And poets will speculate. I’m not particularly curmudgeonly about “the death of American poetry.” Some people blame workshops, or just the overly democratic poem, or the overly accessible poem, or even the overly inaccessible poem.

DJ: When you’re doing a review, do you have to jump out of your sensibilities of “This is how I write, this is not how I write?”

HH: Sometimes it’s about wearing the intellectual cap and being the more objective critic. Sometimes it’s just about being open-minded to different styles. Like in music or the visual arts, which I pay a lot of attention to, I like a lot of different things. I’m not someone who has to have this certain kind of thing, this certain kind of genre or style, or else I get turned off. I tend to have very broad tastes, which is helpful in writing reviews. Sure, in the end, who I am as a writer, and what I think is really great, or what I really love, is going to play into a review. I think we expect that out of our critics and editorialists. We want to hear their opinions.

I like writing reviews. They break me out of….you know, when you’re writing a poem, you have to really believe that you’re writing the most beautiful thing in the world. I really think that. You should love the stuff you’re writing. Otherwise you should change it, because obviously it’s not really and completely you. When you write a poem, you should say, “This f—ing poem is great.” At least in that moment. And the next day, if you still think it’s great, then you got something. In reviewing, you really have to back off from that love of your work.

DJ: Backing off from that, even if the poem you’re reading doesn’t come across as a great poem, you still have to do…what?

HH: You have to look for what is admirable in the work. Is it doing something that you can’t do? Is it doing something well? Is it making you think about something? Is it handling syntax in a way that’s very athletic and inventive, yet is still intelligible?

If this were a scientific evaluation, you could apply different tests and apparati and get interesting readings. So I try to think of it from these other angles.

DJ: Have you ever gotten any backlash on a review?

HH: I don’t really pan anybody. If I really dislike a book, I pass on it. You know how it goes…in the world of journalism, if you don’t like something, then the thought is that you should just trash it. They certainly do in reviews of theater in the NY Times, and occasionally in the book reviews.

Not often, but once in a while you’ll see someone really really trash a book. I don’t do that. Let someone else do that. I don’t know…maybe I’m a coward.

DJ: Or you’re being fair.

HH: Well, if I can’t say something more sophisticated than, “I hate this book,” then I don’t really need to say anything.

DJ: And you get positive response.

HH: I get a few emails from time to time. Most of the time I don’t hear back. I’m not really networked, I suppose. I have reviewed a number of major poets. Merwin most recently. I’d love to get a note from W.S. Merwin that says, “I read your review and you had some insightful things to say.” That’s my ego, too. But also, maybe it would be sustaining. Like anything with poetry, we don’t get paid much.

I hear back from people who read the reviews…students and people doing dissertations. So I do get follow-up questions. It’s nice to know that I may be part of the dialogue. That’s why I like reviewing. You’re part of the conversation. It’s nice to be there.

DJ: To be there…there’s also the passion of being part of it all. You mentioned ego; it’s nice to be acknowledged for what it is, but there’s also that simple desire to be in the pool, so to say, just because you like how the water feels.

HH: That’s right.

DJ: I think that drives a lot of the interconnectedness of being associated with poetry on any number of levels. As a reviewer, a writer, a networker.

What are your writing funks like?

HH: My only problem with writing is finding the time. The world would love for you not to write. The world would love for you to take out the garbage, mow the lawn, do more service at the university, be better prepared for your classes, paint your house, call your father, write that letter to your friend who you haven’t returned the letter to in three years. The world always demands those things of you, and you have to say “No.” That’s my biggest battle.

DJ: Saying no?

HH: Saying no and finding the time to work consistently. Right now I have about two mornings a week. I have one full day. I go out to my house in Falls City on a Tuesday afternoon. I have Wednesday morning, all day Wednesday and maybe Thursday morning where I’m not disturbed. I don’t even have email out there. No student stuff, no family stuff even. Although if something comes up, I have to be there for my wife and step-sons.

Most people don’t live that way. Most people are not artists. For a long time, I was embarrassed to even say I was an artist. It sounded egotistical. It sounded pretentious. . . “Oh, I’m an arteest.” I didn’t like that, but I’ve learned I actually have to think that way.

DJ: Do you ever have any trouble calling yourself a poet?

HH: I used to be embarrassed by that. Now I say it. But I’m careful. I still don’t have cards that say, “Henry Hughes, Writer.” Some people do. Or stationary, or web sites full of their enchanted gardens.

Being an artist in busy America, or anywhere, is challenging. That’s my biggest obstacle. I’ve always loved to write. What are your funks?

DJ: I was trying to get the last layer on a poem that involves a firewalk. Earlier drafts would get to the firewalk…the poem would resolve after the firewalk, but I was skipping the walk itself. I’ve never done a firewalk.

The poem is highly imaginative, but I kept getting to that same place. It was one of the few occasions where I actually knew what I was avoiding. So I took a day off…and this is a meaningful poem to me. I was grinding on it. I took a day off and went to hang out at an artist friend’s studio. I was hanging out with her and another friend of hers. I was just sort of soaking up this feminine energy, I guess. I told them about the poem and they said, “Just shut up and write it.”

HH: Best advice I’ve ever heard.

DJ: The next day I went for a hike, just kept staying away from it, then I came home and wrote out the firewalk. The funk there, I guess, was that I kept grinding and getting to the same place, knowing exactly what I had to do but not knowing my way through it.

HH: Most people would stop at that grind, and they would finish the poem and that would be it, or they’d never finish it. A real writer goes back to it again and again. After a long hike…after a number of years. I don’t think you were in a funk. I think you were in a place that required another full flight of stairs, another few swings of the pick, another hundred miles. I know that place well. Even people who write every day get to those places. They probably get to them more often. That’s where, you know, we need time to work.

DJ: How long were you in Asia?

HH: I was in Japan for three years and China for two years.

DJ: Is there a carryover of that Asian aesthetic into your work?

HH: To some degree. The East Asian aesthetic, which I’ve always admired, has found its way into some of my writing, and certainly into the way I just, you know, keep my room a little more stark and simple, the way I look at painting. There’s a certain austerity, especially of Japanese forms and of some Chinese too, that certainly is present.

I’m very interested in East Asian history and culture. It really woke me up to the world. Prior to that I had never really traveled, except for drunken exploits in Mexico or to Canada for fishing. This really woke me up to a whole other world, and politics, and poverty, and beauty, and time, and history. That changed my writing, and made me, I feel, a much better human being.

DJ: That was before Men Holding Eggs?

HH: Yes. There are Japan and China poems in there, and there are many poems in that collection that were informed by the experience.

DJ: I wanted to ask about what seems like a uniqueness I’ve seen in your work, and “Parking Lot in Portland” is a great example. Sometimes your lines go way out in this fanning sort of way. Can you tell me a little bit about that? What are you hoping for with that style, whether you’re looking for something more from the story itself or something else, and if this was something you were doing in Men Holding Eggs.

HH: Less so in the first book. I think Moist Meridian is a more mature book, and I feel a deeper sense of rhythm and the mind’s music, as I call it.

Many of my poems are stories. An easy way to tell a story in a poem is to write a narrative poem. Good old William Stafford, “Traveling Through the Dark,” or Donald Hall, take you out to grandpa’s farm sort of stuff. I do a lot of that in Men Holding Eggs. I like the narrative poem. I grew up with James Dickey and Dick Hugo. I just wanted to tell stories in cool sounding language that did some funky things, that transformed in places I wasn’t expecting. I couldn’t write fiction all that well. It wasn’t that interesting somehow. People didn’t really like it.

If I’m going to write stories in poems, then what can I do? One thing I do is I start of kind of slow, kind of tentative. I start reaching…reaching…reaching. The line seems to reach. I find that that’s kind of the way I read them too. I gain momentum and kind of stretch out to the margin. I guess I’m approaching prose, at least in the spirit, not so much in the rhythmic motions, but in the spirit of wanting to tell a complete story.

Then I kind of come back. I’m going to close it off. I’m not going to write a novel. I’m going out to tell you something and I’m going to come back.

It feels natural. I’m not the kind of poet that sits down and says, “I’m going to write a sonnet, or I’m going to write a villanelle,” or God forbid a pantoum or something. I really write what I want to say, and then end up looking at the lines after. It seems to me that I’ve found this motion naturally. I say this unpretentiously. I wasn’t taught to do it. I’m not trying to emulate someone or some style. I’m sure critics can look at it and say, “Oh, well, that’s a C.K. Williams line that’s been truncated front and back.” That’s for critics to do. To me, it just feels right.

DJ: You used the word ‘motion’. There is that motion to it, from what I’ve noticed. The book as a whole…there’s a lot of sailing in there.

HH: Yes, yes.

DJ: So going from the title then inward, there’s a water quality to a lot of what’s happening in the collection.

HH: I love water.

DJ: The poems feel as if they go out like waves and then come back. When you first started to write in that form, did you try to stop it at all, or find yourself saying, “What the hell is this?”

HH: No. I just rode the wave.

I’m not very resistant to a lot of things in my life. I tend to go with things. I’m a very flexible person. If a group of us is going out for dinner, I’m pretty easy. I’ll walk pretty far. It doesn’t bother me. Or I’ll stop right here. I’ll eat Mexican, I’ll eat Chinese, I’ll go to a gay bar, I’ll go to a straight bar. It doesn’t bother me.

I feel that way about certain motions in my writing too. I don’t really resist them.

When you edit, you have to cut things back, because there’s a lot of bullshit and clunky exposition in there. Then you have to be tough with yourself. It’s like cleaning out the closet.

But in terms of my original creative process, if it feels right, I just kind of go with it.

As for others…I can see sort of the neo-formalists saying, “Henry Hughes is rather undisciplined,” or, “Just more free verse. Where’s the rhyme, where are the metrics?”

I don’t care. Clem Starck, with whom I read at Wordstock, he said something wonderful at one of our readings. He’s a great and interesting man.

He said, in response to a question about formalism, “It’s fine if you want to write formal poetry, and I admire form. But it’s hard enough just to write in very spare language, in a minimal number of lines, something meaningful and still sound human.” That’s a paraphrase, but he said it at one of our readings when someone asked a question, and it makes so much sense to me.

I want to say something meaningful, I want to say it in as few lines as possible, and I want to sound human. If I have any artistic agenda, it’s to sound human but not careless.

–

Read five poems from Moist Meridian, as well as a review of the collection. Watch Henry Hughes and Clem Stark read at Wordstock 2009.

Henry Hughes grew up in Long Island, and has lived in Oregon since 2002. He currently teaches at Western Oregon University. The poems in his most recent book, Moist Meridian (© 2009, Mammoth Books), come to life on the page through Hughes’ ecstatic voice and willingness to be both playful and sublime. His first collection, Men Holding Eggs (© 2004; Mammoth) won the 2004 Oregon Book Award for poetry. Hughes’ commentary on new poetry appears regularly in Harvard Review. The following poems from Moist Meridian appear here with his permission.

SKELETON PIRATES OF AMERICA

Oil drunk,
masts gnawed away,
we burn black slicks
for a Chinese cargo of toys.

Never dead enough, juggling
cannonballs and Arabs,
brown galley boys
fry fat
to fill our clothes.

Unpaid women pinch
note-wrapped rats between the planks,
and the sun
burns so hot

even sharks
can’t digest the shimmering curse.
I’m George, says the air-conditioned captain.
See all the blue
for my eyes.

DEVIL KNOWS DIFFERENT

Watching them gulp
garbage and skinny eels–two gaunt sharks,
open-mouthed in appeal–I nod,
they pass.

Now, you. You come back with me.
Smell the salt, the oily churn of a twin-screw cruiser,
drunk and wide as the Fifties.
See your parents, the sandy woman
and sable rodded man, telling you to feel the bite,
feel it.

Feel the flounder’s deck-flutter,
taste its whiteness. All the baked clams,
boiled lobsters and barbecued bass
they’ve eaten and served
to fuel the business of living,
of making you.

Parents gone now. It’s your chance
to feed your teenage daughter
more than money. Umbrella beach days without her mom.
Your lectures still too hot to bear.
She wades the blonde bar, waving to a yacht. Sharp sharks
shilling into the scent
between her legs. People say, What we eat
can’t imagine being eaten
Devil knows different.

NEW YEAR’S WITH CHRISTINE

Transmission busted. It’s late
and I have to drive home alone, in reverse,
from Saint Mary’s singles dance,
Bing’s White Christmas on AM.
I see the first small snow
in my taillights, and in ten minutes
the defrost sweats off a storm.
Flakes blow up
finding clouds again.

What if I kept rolling,
New Year’s Day, 1982. Driving us
in love, silly, still drunk
down that terrible hill to your house,
sliding in crystal terror
over the curb

into Neil Cohen’s handsome snowman.
His bottom sphere smushed gray
and that broom jammed in our bumper.
I held his crunchy head,
lifted that gold pipe
and said, Here, have a smoke. And you knelt,
suddenly knowing
to wear that hat meant change.
And you put it on.

HOW I FOUND THE SKY

It was the only time
my father asked me for anything.
Why don’t ya make me a duck for da office?
It was the only time I went to the library
for a book: Waterfowl of North America.
And it was the only time moribund Mr. Brown
gave me a decent piece
of unknotted pine, and put his coffee down
to show me how to bandsaw
without losing a finger.

I cut those penciled lines,
shaped the block, hollowed the center,
glued the body, shaved the head’s fragile bill
and narrow crest, leaving those buffed cheeks–
some ruddy joy
a lonely bird might fly to on a cold morning.
Joy? I don’t know.
I was rasping through recessed confusion,
burning in feathers, drilling shallow sockets
for the glassy red eyes of high school.

And when I carried that blond mallard
through the halls, it was the only time
beautiful Miss Herman, the art teacher
I loved and failed for three terms, spoke to me
of colors: burnt umber, raw sienna, cobalt blue
brushed across the folded wings.

MOVING

We were friends
years before
the night among the boxes,
unlabeled for fast stacking in the old pickup.
We’re not finished, I said.
There’s wine, and I’m not taking it with me.
Tipping that last ocean view,
you said, I’ll miss you so much, before that half-light kiss
pressed a bloom
straight through the island. Our hands
sands a wave makes
without music, without a bed. A motion
awaited, undressing like a storm
just ahead. So close
without my glasses. Can you see? you smiled,
one hand touching my face, the other driving
the dented guardrail
over the bridge.

–
A review of Moist Meridian will appear Thursday, December 3. Our complete interview will be live on Friday, December 4.

Jeff Selin, along with his wife, Rachel, founded Writers’ Dojo in the hopes of creating an incubator for evolving literary projects and a space that would attract amazing authors from around the world. The Dojo sits in the heart of Portland’s St. John’s area, along with Selin’s brother’s martial arts school. Since its founding in January, 2008, the Dojo has grown to include a thriving online journal, and has become a frequent gathering place for Portland’s literary and creative communities. Beyond his endeavors with the Dojo, Selin has worked as a copywriter, an advertising and branding professional, and is presently at work on a novel. We met at the end of February, 2009, to discuss online publishing, the Dojo, and his life as a writer.

DJ: At a time when people seem to going to poetry as a way to reflect and take solace in the world, there’s the question of how small presses and online journals continue to put it out there for the public to consume while also making it financially viable on their end. You must see this with WritersDojo.org.

JS: What’s interesting is it’s not an issue in Portland. The community here is incredible. It blows me away. We hear time and time again where big name poets come to town and they’re shocked. Literary Arts puts on an event and the place is sold out. The poets can’t believe it. How are we selling out the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for poetry? It’s unbelievable.

For WritersDojo.org, we’ve never had an issue finding and publishing amazing poetry. And our readership for poetry is off the charts. I know publishers in other states and other cities are struggling to find the amazing submissions and to find the readership for it. In Portland it’s not an issue. We’re something of an anomaly.

DJ: So we should change the name to Poetland?

JS: Along with all the other names…Stumptown, all the others.

We just published a podcast not too long ago by Diana Abu-Jaber. She was saying in the Middle East, people look at poets as the serious authors. For years and years, it didn’t matter if you were a professor or what genre you were in, if you were an intellectual, you wrote poetry. In Middle Eastern culture, in a lot of places, the poet is a very serious person, a person a letters, the elder statesmen of literary folk. And the novelists…the idea is, who can take a novelist seriously? You’re writing fiction.

DJ: Whereas here it’s the opposite.

JS: I think many people look to the poets here as…well, you’re a poet. It certainly puts an assumption on your politics, for example.

DJ: I mentioned to some of my workshop students that I write poetry, and the kids were beside themselves. “You write poetry?” And I said, “Yeah.” And they said, “Well, you don’t look like a poet. You don’t act like a poet.” These are 10-year-old kids. We went around the room and each kid described what a poet should look like. They had the weirdest impressions that involved everything from wearing moth-riddled sweaters to smelling like cats to walking around with your nose in the air.

JS: I think the idea of the poet, and what a poet is is changing all the time. And obviously poetry itself keeps changing. More and more, the younger crowd is looking toward spoken word poetry. Or kids realize that rap music is poetry. Somebody, maybe it was Rod Stewart or someone like that, back in the 80s was asked where all the great poets have gone. He said, “They’ve become musicians.”

DJ: I saw a Dylan quote recently where he said, “If I can put music to it, it’s a song. If I can’t, it’s a poem.”

JS: Exactly.

DJ: Jumping to your own work, outside the Dojo, how is the balance for your own writing right now?

JS: For the last 15-years I always had one foot in advertising and also in journalism. Every creative professional I know, whether they’re a copywriter or a graphic designer, has this balancing act. Everyone wants to just do their creative work, but they have to put food on the table. Obviously, with the economy the way it is, it’s even more of an issue.

Lately I’ve been able to step away for the most part from advertising and work on my fiction most days. We’re very fortunate, and not a day goes by that I’m not happy for it. But I’m also looking at freelance work again because I have to. For me, it’s about prioritizing and keeping my creative work as a priority. What works for me…this idea that financial advisors have of paying yourself first. So every morning I pay myself first with my creative work. It’s when I feel most connected to the page. I spend the morning hours with my creative writing. Regardless of what happens with my professional life, I’m not going to let that go. I think that’s what happens with many professionals. They feel like they need to focus on whatever it is…writing for newspapers or magazines, or working with editors who might change their stuff too much but they feel like they need to take the gig. Or maybe they’re in advertising or PR and they let the creative stuff slide. And as the days and weeks and months go by, it’s harder and harder to get back to the page.

DJ: It is a challenge.

JS: I’ve been working on a novel for quite some time, and I’m getting close to finishing. The times that I’ve stepped away from it for something else, whether it’s a short story, or life happens, or whatever’s going on, it’s much harder to get back into it. Where am I, where’s the story arch, who are these characters? When I’m working on it every day, or I’m thinking about the story every day…if I step away for a month and try to go back, it’s challenging.

DJ: Everything becomes frozen in that spot where you’ve left it. I’m wondering if there’s ever any crossover between this work and that, or where this work (professional ) informs that work (the creative), where one begins to seep into the other?

JS: In the advertising world I’ve always been more of the brand, headline, creative type of copywriter. The concept of what is creativity and how do you access it on command – mood has nothing to do with it. As a professional, you need to wake up and have creativity on tap. What does that mean exactly? When do I feel more creative? It’s an idea I’ve been thinking about for some time, so in that sense it overlaps. And when I was working in advertising full-time, I would write and do the marketing stuff sometimes for 12-hours a day, then come home and still have to find time to write. That’s where I developed my morning writing habit. Before I go give my creative energy to sell some widget, I’m going to write for myself.

Finding that creative juice, regardless of what you’re doing – my brother is an entrepreneur and a martial artist. Artist is right there in the title. For the Dojo, we’ve adopted the metaphor- and this concept connects to the martial arts, this idea of being a center for excellence. In business you’ll find it takes a lot of creativity to generate the energy of creating new business.

In advertising, I worked with designers, photographers, producers, web developers, etc., in creating this bigger brand concept. I always thought of it as creative. So the question wasn’t, “How do I stop doing this dry, boring stuff?” Because the energy and the project was always creative. The question was, “How do I stop focusing on selling products and services that I don’t really have a passion for?” Does the world need another BMW? I don’t think it does.

But there’s a mixed feeling in me about that. On one hand, products bring a lot of value, because they brings jobs, and the list goes on and on for how things play into the community and the economy. But if my passion isn’t 100% there, am I doing a disservice for my clients?

DJ: That’s a good point about the work itself being creative, because the work IS creative. The challenge is that idea of whether or not I want to support this, or if I’d rather be doing something else all together different.

JS: And on the other side of it, the fiction writing, I’m trying to be a professional writer. To me that means two big things. First, thick skin. I’m going to send things out, and they’re going to be rejected. Second is the showing up every day aspect. I’m going to write from this time to this time everyday, just like a full-time job. Where does mood come into it?

Having the discipline to come to the page every day…in the marketing world, it’s obvious. You’re going to sit in your cube, or wherever, and do stuff that you don’t want to do. That’s part of the distinction between the serious, professional writer, and someone who loves to write as a hobby.

The Dojo has a lot of members. Everyone’s serious about writing. When they come through the door they focus on their writing, and that’s what they’re here for. Many of those folks have other jobs or do other things, and there’s this sense of solace and community with other writers. The core members are professional writers. They use the space as their office. They’re here working.

When you see the amount of work they do, and the amount of daily effort that’s required to show up and keep plugging away every day, it’s a huge inspiration. The folks that are well published, the ones whose names are well recognized – they’re the quietest about what they’re doing. They’re here, their white earbuds go in, and they’re in their zone every single day, just writing, writing, writing, writing, writing. The level of prolificacy is phenomenal. For me, since I’ve been working on the same novel for four or five years, it’s especially interesting and inspiring.

-

Shaindel Beers’ poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is currently an instructor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, in Eastern Oregon’s high desert and serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary Magazine. She hosts the talk radio poetry show Translated By, which can be found at blogtalkradio.com/onword. The following poems from Beers’ first full-length collection, A Brief History of Time (Salt Publishing Ltd) appear here with her permission.

© 2009 Shaindel Beers

CICADAS

Where will we be the next time
they emerge, in 17 years,
when brood X nymphs first wriggle their way
out of exit holes, climb the trunks of oaks and maples,
sun themselves on viburnum,
pale and helpless, before their wings dry
and darken
so they can fly safely to trees to mate, lay eggs,
and die?
I’m not sure I have a concept of 17 years.
I remember Ronald Reagan was President,
I was jealous of my friend Lindsey because
she had a Debbie Gibson hat.
The Princess Bride came out, and is still
my favorite movie.
Seventeen years in the future seems daunting.
The boys at the little league field behind my house
will be men, the neighbors’ dog will be dead
and the tree in my backyard
will no longer be mine.
I could be living anywhere—
not one to put down roots, I can’t even guess.
Just yesterday, I realized, looking out your window,
that in less than two months
new trees will greet me from another window.
No longer the canopy of hardwoods,
but lush, tropical greens year-round
1,300 miles away from you.
And though we’ve talked about this,
I wonder what you’re thinking,
what you would like to be doing
with the seventeen years that this year’s
nymphs will spend underground,
burrowing, living on the roots of all those trees.

ELEGY FOR A PAST LIFE

I miss the honest life we used to lead
scraping up odd jobs so we could see
a movie the next town over,
and stare for a few hours at people
on the drive-in screen who weren’t
like us — who didn’t wear too big hand-me-down
flannels and mud-caked boots —
and even if they were playing farm people,
had never known that pinching pain
in the sacral spine that paralyzes
as you heft the bale by the twine
and let it avalanche down to the ground.

For days, after seeing a show, we’d sit in the loft,
legs dangling over the bleating sheep below
and dream about the life we’d live
when we’d escaped. Back then at sixteen
I thought we’d make it out together,
and become writers, the only job we could imagine
where we wouldn’t smell like shit or hay or cows

but too many months passed when I didn’t bleed
and when we were safe, the test negative
and burned in the rubbish heap behind the barn,
you left, too afraid of being trapped
in a cornfield town
to wait for me.

A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR

He was tall, well-built, blue-eyed,
a guy most girls would want to take to bed.
Then he reached for the beer with his left hand,
revealing the stump of his right.

We could tell the second he knew that we knew.
We’d smile, but the smile wouldn’t travel
all the way to our eyes. He’d turn back to the bar,
fold his arm closer so that we could
no longer see

as we rushed off to sling beers for guys
not as good-looking but more whole,
the ones who leered lecherously,
on “Short-Shorts Night”
and left ten dollar tips for two dollar beers

always expecting more, always bitter when we didn’t deliver.
The quiet one, we wounded week after week, a guy
any of us would have considered “out of our league,”
“a long shot,” if he had been unbroken,

the sad, blond man we were afraid to love.

SUNDAY WORSHIP

They used to chuckle at him softly
the way the small-minded do at the simpleminded
when he would snore or fart in church–
And sometimes let him carry the collection plate
while they dropped in a sweat-earned buck or two
from callused, earth-caked hands. But it was her I watched–
Imagining how hard it must have been to have
a Mongoloid son and a husband so cruel he called
the boy “It” and left her out of shame. And yet–
she sat every Sunday of my childhood
beside a forty-something son she still dressed every day
and felt blessed enough with her life
to make me ashamed to pray for more.

REWIND

Fridays Mrs. Wampler would give in
and leave the projector light on
as the film wound from one real to the other.

At six, the world moving backward amazed us
more than the world moving forward,
though that amazed us, too.

Full blooms squeezed back into buds;
seedlings hid themselves underground,
but our favorite was our claymation version

of Beauty and the Beast. We would cheer as each
petal affixed itself to the thorny stem
and the beast grew stronger, clap as Beauty

no longer wept at his deathbed. And soon,
he was a prince again, too polite to ever
insult a crone. This taught us that beginnings

are always best, despite all they say about
Happily Ever After. If we could invent
the automatic rewind, bodies would expel

bullets that would rest eternally in chambers,
130,000 people would materialize
as the Enola Gay swallowed the bomb,

landmines would give legs and fingers
back to broken children.
Right now, teeming cancer cells

would be rebuilding blood and bone.

Brian Turner earned his MFA from the University of Oregon before serving for seven years in the U.S. Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Styker Brigade Combat Team, and Infantry Division. Prior to that, Turner deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovnia with the 10th Mountain Division (1999-2000). Turner’s poetry has appeared in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, American War Poem: An Anthology, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary of the same name.

Here, Bullet, Turner’s first full-length collection, was published in by Alice James Books, an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington. The following five poems are from this collection, and appear with the author’s and the publisher’s permission.

© 2005 by Brian Turner. All rights reserved.

TWO STORIES DOWN

When he jumped from the balcony, Hasan swam
in the air over the Ashur Street Market,
arms and legs suspended in a blur
above palm hearts and crates of lemons,
not realizing just how hard life fights
sometimes, how an American soldier
would run to his aid there on the sidewalk,
trying to make sense of Hasan’s broken legs,
his screaming, trying to comfort him
with words in an awkward music
of stress and care, a soldier he’d startle
by stealing the knife from its sheath,
the two of them struggling for the blade
until the bloodgroove sunk deep
and Hasan whispered to him,
Shukran, sadiq, shukran;
Thank you, friend, thank you.

ASHBAH

The ghosts of American soldiers
wander the streets of Balad by night,

unsure of their way home, exhausted,
the desert wind blowing trash
down the narrow alleys as a voice

sounds from the minaret, a soulful call
reminding them how alone they are,

how lost. And the Iraqi dead,
they watch in silence from rooftops
as date palms line the shore in silhouette,

leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.

DREAMS FROM THE MALARIA PILLS (TURNER)

This time it’s beautiful.
He’s in the kelp beds somewhere
off the California coast, floating
where green leaves touch the sun,
as if he’s disentangled
from thought itself, as if the mind
has come this far, up from the depths
to release him to the crests and shallows
drifting wave by wave back to shore.

He knows there are bombs
washed up on the beach. There are limbs
of people he has never met. Bandages
soaked in blood and salt.
He knows the Qur’an and the Bible
have washed page by page to shore,
their bindings stripped loose, their ink
blurred into the sea.

And if people are crying there,
wading out in the surf to carry it all
back in, then he hasn’t seen them yet.
The ocean sounds in the bones
of his skull, and the albatross fly
reconnaissance over the waves,
searching for a route home.

OBSERVATION POST #798

It is in the watches of the night
   that impressions are strongest
    and words most eloquent.
         —Qur’an 73:1

Tonight, we overwatch the Market District
by the ruins, where we know of a brothel-house:
green light above the door, windows shuttered
in French panels swung open, gauze curtains
hanging translucent in the heat.

It’s over a hundred degrees, even at dusk.
I scan each story with binoculars
and a smile, hoping to glimpse the girls
drawing open the curtains,
their silhouettes edged in light.

When a woman walks out onto the rooftop
smoking a cigarette and shaking loose her long hair,
everyone wants what I hold in my hands,
but I am stilled by her, transported 7,600 miles
away, as a ghost might gaze upon the one he loves,

thinking, how lovely you are,
your pain and beauty a fiction
I bend into the form of a bridge, anything
to remind me I am still alive.

SADIQ

It is a condition of wisdom in the archer to be patient
because when the arrow leaves the bow, it returns no more.
—SA’DI

It should make you shake and sweat,
nightmare you, strand you in the desert
of irrevocable desolation, the consequences
seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline
feeds the muscle its courage, no matter
what god shines down on you, no matter
what crackling pain and anger
you carry in your fists, my friend,
it should break your heart to kill.

Paulann Petersen’s work is deeply rooted in music and presence. Even her musings and reflections remain wrapped in the moment, which guides the reader through the navigable terrain of each poem. As the poet Vern Rutsala notes in the introduction to Kindle, Petersen’s latest collection:

“There are forces in our society which try very hard to put us in a fixed place…but the poet knows that the self is slippery and doesn’t fall easily into any particular slot saying, ‘Hey…you may be here but you’re also over there and maybe somewhere else entirely.’ Petersen says these things but also adds that the place you find yourself is often a transitional one on the way from here to there.”

Petersen is an extremely active member of Oregon’s literary community, a frequent workshop instructor, the recipient of the 2006 Literary Arts Stewart Holbrook Award for Outstanding Contributions to Oregon’s Literary Life, and a board member of Friends of William Stafford. She was kind enough to invite me to her home, where our conversation started off on the topic of another Oregon writer, Ray Carver.

(PP): There was an incredible resonance in Carver’s work, especially for anyone who’s experienced hard times in their life. He was almost improbably sympathetic and generous. Very few people who achieve the type of status and acclaim he received are as unpretentious and generous as he was, and IS in his stories. It’s really there. His profound sympathy for, as Grace Paley may have said, the little disturbances of man. Paley is superb too. “The Little Disturbances of Man” and “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” are short stories…she was an enormously influential writer for people just beginning as writers. Right during Ray’s time. She might still be, though I don’t know how many people are still reading her.

Ray always thought of himself of a poet, which is incredible when someone who is credited with having changed the landscape of fiction would consider himself primarily a poet. A lot of writers cross over into different genres of course. Ursula Le Guin is a great example.

(DJ): And you?

(PP): Just poetry. I’ve written a few prose pieces. Essays, stories.

(DJ): And what about your start?

(PP): I wrote poetry as a young girl. I was in high school in SE Portland won a prize of some kind. I didn’t even know how to pursue anything with it. We had no creative writing classes, and I came from a decidedly non-literary family. Very blue collar. I never thought of this before but there was not a single book of poetry in the house, and just a handful of books in general. I can remember exactly where they were on the bookshelf.

My parents weren’t ill-educated. My mom had done nurse’s training at St. Mary’s in San Francisco. She had a sound background in biology and science. My father wanted to go to college. He was in school for a year, then the Depression started and his family needed him.

They read, but it just wasn’t a family atmosphere where books or literature were a big part of our lives. I think I had some children’s books and nursery rhyme type things.

When I went to Pomona, I took my poems to my English professor, who referred me to someone else who was sort of the resident poet. I remember him saying in effect, ‘Oh, I don’t think so’ (laughter). Something about being ‘lovely images’ but not the cohesion of a poem. And I set it aside.

As a young adult in Klamath Falls, and by now I had young children, I started reading the Saturday Review, which had poems in every issue. I also stumbled onto Philip Larkin’s poetry and began to see that there was a wonderful world of contemporary poetry out there. I started to seek it out.

(DJ): Were you teaching by now?

(PP): No. I was essentially a house wife. We had very little money, not impoverished, but not much money. My husband at that time – we later divorced – was a high school English teacher. His salary was barely above the level where you qualify for food stamps. We didn’t have much extra money, and I spent my time doing things like baking all the bread, canning, cooking from scratch and the things you do to economize. We lived on an acre and a quarter that was surrounded by farmland. It was a busy life.

When my son was in second grade I went back to school and got my teaching degree. I drove back and forth to Southern Oregon University across the mountains. It was wonderful to be in school, even those infamous method courses and the things you take to be a teacher.

Lawson Inada (Oregon’s Poet Laureate) was on the faculty. I met with him to see if I could be in his creative writing class. We talked for a while. He said, “I can’t think of a better position for a writer to be in than to be driving up those mountains and down into the valley, doing that two times a day. All that time to think. That’s perfect! You come on in.”

It was wonderful being in his classes while I was finishing my degree. I wound up getting a Masters there, and Lawson paved the way for me to do a manuscript of poems as my thesis, which was quite unusual at Southern Oregon at the time.

(DJ): Coming from this place as a child without many books on the shelf, what bubbled up within you and to steer you toward wanting to write?

(PP): Through high school and college I was a good writer. I remember just knowing where transitions belonged, where new paragraphs should start, those sorts of things.

(DJ): From when you left school to when you went back, how were you finding time to write between raising family and living the rustic lifestyle?

(PP): I was stealing time, plus reading some wonderful contemporary poems in the Saturday Review. The Atlantic was another one. The county library was wonderful as well. That’s where I discovered Grace Paley. I was reading lots of contemporary poetry, plus following my own threads of language and imagery to learn to write.

(DJ): Where did those come from? Or maybe it’s the same now? What are those triggers for you?

(PP): Usually for me it’s a piece of language that floats in from somewhere. Sound…the sonic qualities of a poem is very important.

I believe a poem is a creature of sound…a creature of heartbeat and breath. If a poem doesn’t have that sound then it doesn’t resonate with me. There are lots of poets who work in very narrative, cerebral styles. I appreciate and recognize how fine their work is, but the poems and the poets I return to are the ones where, again and again, I find an almost phonic-type music.

So I follow bits of language that have sound forms I can hear and feel pushing from them and with them. Often I’ll just start writing. I call it riffing, as a musician might riff. I let the sounds carry me from one thing to another, just pushing and pushing and carrying onto the page. Later I’ll go back and see something that looks like the kernel of a poem, or maybe somewhere in there I’ll find a whole poem in the riff.

Very seldom do I have an idea for a poem, and then write it. Idea poems don’t turn out that well for me. People like to ask, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ That to me is more like, ‘writing a poem about…’ and then having a topic for a poem. That doesn’t work for me.

(DJ): So you follow the sound and music, and then the idea is there…

(PP): The idea emerges, or I can see what in that particular riff – which might be two, three or four pages – coheres.

(DJ): Is it script across the page? Are you already starting to build line breaks in?

(PP): Sometimes the line breaks are there. Once I take something out of the notebook, and start to put it on single sheets, I write long-hand a number of drafts before I ever put it on a word processor.

(DJ): Have you always worked this way?

(PP): Some French theorists have the notion that style is learned through the wrist. I’m not saying it applies to me, but I like the idea of it.

When my first full-length book came out, Confluence Press had me fill out a fairly lengthy questionnaire so they could use information in a press release. of their questions was – and I’m going to ask you this first: To which school of poetics do you belong?

(DJ): My school? I don’t know if it’s a school (laughter). Lots of tragic hero stuff. Human weirdness (laughter).

(PP): The first thing that popped into my mind was the school of Disembodied Poetics, from Naropa. I was trying to think about what schools of poetics there were. If could figure that out then maybe I could figure out where I was. Then I knew. I belonged to the school of Embodied Poetics, because I believe in poems of the body. And I don’t mean poems about the body, but poems that are embodied, almost as if they are part of your very flesh. Poems from the body.

(DJ): There’s a great sense of presence in your poems. The reader doesn’t get lost.

(PP): That’s important to me. We choose at some point what we’re going to do. I’ve been working on a few poems that are quite surreal. I like to work like that, and I can do it, but quite a while ago I made a conscious decision – and it was something I came to over a period of time, that if I was going to err in one direction or the other, I wanted to err in the direction of being accessible to people. I love the idea of a shared voice, an almost archetypal voice that could be coming from any of us.