By
Abriana Jetté
Sayreville, NJ, USA
In the early weeks of
October, I attended the third annual Creative Writing Studies Organization
conference. Attendees of the conference gathered in the Black Mountain region
of Western North Carolina. It began as any other ordinary day, but from the
start of the first panel all sorts of intriguing conversations took place
regarding poetry and pedagogy and the craft of writing. One thing in particular
I’d like to share with you that came about throughout the conference is the
rethinking of the term “craft.”
“Everyone wants to know what is inside a girl. There are many ways to find out. One is
getting the girl to sing a madrigal. Another is asking a girl what color maxi shirt she’d
like…”
When craft is taught, it is often under the
notion of making. We consider the structure, rhyme-scheme, plot, syntax, and/or
setting of a written piece. However, as was encouraged at the CWSO Conference, writers
must also think about the original definition of the word as, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary, “a lost knowledge.” Creative writing scholar Tim
Mayers defined craft as “a way of being in the world.” This definition got me
to thinking. If craft is a way of being, then my job is not just to identify
the meter and literary devices at work, I must also consider what the poem
teaches me about intellectual skill, about wisdom, and about the philosophical
concept of inspiration. This is essential to “being” as the form which holds
the “being.” That is, craft is not only “how is this poem made,” but “what is
this poem doing by existing?”
In geometry, the term tesseract is used to describe a cube within a cube within a square. The three-dimensional figure goes by many names: eight-cell, octachoron, tetracube, and hypercube, to name a few. No matter the nomenclature behind it, the tesseract is as philosophically intriguing as it is mathematically necessary. The tesseract unveils the complex layers of the ordinary thing. As it is unfolded, it reveals the edificial construct of the cubes housing the cubes that house the square. The idea of peeling back the layers, of trying to get to the explanation for the form behind the thing, resonates behind much of Depass’s work.
DePass’s use of parentheticals to interrupt the body of a word alters meaning(s) throughout the poem. In the above example, the speaker may discuss both the urge to write and/or the action of recoiling with distress. Perhaps the two are one in the same. Or, perhaps, the intention is to get readers to consider the anatomy of language. Throughout the poem, the speaker is hyperaware of the language’s aesthetic and sonic qualities and calls the reader’s attention to the splendor of words within words.
I mention this because the poets I want you to
read this Fall demonstrate this dual sense of craft. That is, their poetry exudes
a knowledge of making and a knowledge of being. Kathleen Balma, Trace DePass,
and Christine Hamm write poems that burst off the white-space and manipulate
everything from length of line to the spelling of a particular word. While they
are poets of word-play and concision, they are also poets who are unafraid of
confronting issues like sexual assault, racism, and depression. In that sense,
they exist because they must. Without these poets, we’d lose important
knowledge in regard to understanding the how and the why of poetry’s place in
contemporary America.
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Kathleen Balma’s voice ranges from an honesty
that courts abrasiveness to the deeply intimate. Her comic gestures evoke
sincerity as they consider some of the more harrowing realities of human
history. Her chapbook, Gallimaufry & Farrago, approaches topics from
GMOs to Abraham Lincoln to sexual assault. If Gallimaufry & Farrago suggests
one thing about Balma’s poetry, it’s that there is not a person, word, theory, or
character that is off limits.
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| Kathleen Balma |
Balma’s poetry offers a light-hearted voice that
bears an attractive colloquial nature. The tones of her poetry mimic that of
some of the most personal essays and diary entries, harboring a voice that
assumes the reader will listen. And readers listen because Balma has a natural
knack for storytelling.
Take, for instance, the prose poem “no”, which
details one night when the speaker drove a friend to a party, which was “not
really a party but three men sitting around a kitchen table.” The speaker is
forthright, strong, a model of tact, adroit. When the three men continuously
offer her beer, she insists on water. When “one of the men starts massaging”
her shoulders, she tells him “thanks, but no thanks.”
Balam’s use of hypotaxis – extended syntax –
throughout the poem, in addition to the purposeful pulling away from
punctuation throughout the lines, strings readers through the drama. The prose
form, the lack of stanzas, the poem’s square shape resembling that of the kitchen
with the three men, the speaker, and the friend, so boxed in, so tight,
establishes an atmosphere of danger. But the speaker reminds us, it was not
danger, but “BOREDOM.” When her eyes say “HELP” … Their eyes say, “Hm.”
Coming from behind her, one of the three men
places a hunter’s knife on the speaker’s neck. He asks if she likes it. She
manages a “phoneme, but it comes out with the greatest effort.” The fearless
speaker feels fear. Still, she manages the word, and with that, in a moment
that feels as heavy as long-lasting hours, walks her and her friend out the
door. What word? “You can guess”, she tells readers, before the poem’s close.
Or you can just consider the title.
Such sneaky winks, purposeful moments of
withdrawing a word or detail, or a coy sense of wordplay are pertinent to
Balma’s voice. The trait is not total cheekiness or even sarcasm; more so, it
is a demonstration of humorous intelligence. Of wit. Of a sense of global
history and pop culture and the itch to revise.
Balma’s wit resounds in her poem “Dramatic
Dichotologue.” The title fuses together the words “dichotomy” (two things which
are inherently opposite) and “monologue” (a long speech by one person), to
create a word you will not find if you search through the English Oxford Dictionary,
but a word, it seems, perfectly fit to describe a poem that features a
speaker’s dueling selves. “Dramatic Dichotologue” begins:
“It’s good to be
bilingual. Almost makes up
for the other bi thing about me.”
for the other bi thing about me.”
The speaker continues to refer to herself as the
forgotten member of the family, “great doohickey twice removed”, but assures
readers that she is “something / more like your Aunt David.” As a means of
deflecting readers from considering her poems too confessional, the speaker
turns her focus on historical figures, literary characters, John Wayne, and, in
the case of “Dramatic Dichotologue”, David Bowie. After admitting to readers
that she prefers circles to lines, the speaker reveals that Bowie was the
closest she has ever felt “to the throne.” The idea of the throne bears
significance to me for two reasons. Previously within the poem Balma refers to
“the Knights of the Round Table” and a “circumference of metal-clad men.” With
the acknowledgment of this literary trope and the assumption that the one who
sits on the throne is the leader, not just of the family, but of the community,
the evocation of the throne suggests that the speaker feels, or felt, accepted.
Why? Because of Bowie. Perhaps if the pop-culture icon were still alive, he
might compose his own “Dramatic Dichotologue” between the voices of David Bowie
and Ziggy Stardust.
Balma’s poetry demonstrates a knowledge of
comedic timing and syntactical precision. Her work is refreshing as it is
haunting. Kathleen
Balma is a librarian, teacher, and translator. Her poetry has appeared in Hotel
Amerika, The Journal, the Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology, New
Orleans Review, Prelude, Rattle, Spillway, and Sugar House Review. Her
awards include a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright grant in Spain, and a
Writer-in-Resident Fellowship from Rivendell Writers' Colony. In 2018, she was
a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her first chapbook, Gallimaufry
& Farrago, is available from Finishing Line Press.
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In geometry, the term tesseract is used to describe a cube within a cube within a square. The three-dimensional figure goes by many names: eight-cell, octachoron, tetracube, and hypercube, to name a few. No matter the nomenclature behind it, the tesseract is as philosophically intriguing as it is mathematically necessary. The tesseract unveils the complex layers of the ordinary thing. As it is unfolded, it reveals the edificial construct of the cubes housing the cubes that house the square. The idea of peeling back the layers, of trying to get to the explanation for the form behind the thing, resonates behind much of Depass’s work.
 |
| Trace DePass |
DePass utilizes the tesseract as a medium to
explore the variety of selves within the body in his poem “the tesseract
tethers rooms”, which appears in his collection Self-portrait as the space between us. The poem is not just
concerned with the speaker’s body, or to the bodies that have felt they never
belonged, but also to the body of the poem: its shape and use and structure. In
particular, acute attention is paid to the body of sentences. For instance:
“i tire of death,
relative to me, no passing, in 3D. i need this divorce.
you go writ(h)e”
you go writ(h)e”
DePass’s use of parentheticals to interrupt the body of a word alters meaning(s) throughout the poem. In the above example, the speaker may discuss both the urge to write and/or the action of recoiling with distress. Perhaps the two are one in the same. Or, perhaps, the intention is to get readers to consider the anatomy of language. Throughout the poem, the speaker is hyperaware of the language’s aesthetic and sonic qualities and calls the reader’s attention to the splendor of words within words.
In “the tesseract tethers rooms” DePass considers
the “black body” of the speaker, the body he “knew could never keep up.” The
poem asks for respite from feeling trapped under societal expectations and
investigations, at feeling like he represents “everything that did not make me
beauty enough.” The speaker’s body “coaxed oxbows not oxygen.” As the oxbow
offers a break or meandering in the scheme of a river, readers can interpret
the speaker’s black body as a symbol of separation from its main source,
whether one would call that the spirit or the soul. The disconnect persists. The
body causes the speaker to recognize his difference. It breaks him apart from
the rest.
The notion of “breaking apart” is present from
the start of the poem, in which the reader is placed in a room, an ordinary
room, alone with the speaker and his thoughts. The speaker reveals his plan to “sit,
stay, and spin congruent with hypercubes.” In other words, the speaker is about
to undergo an evaluation of the self. In other words, the speaker is about to
pull back the layers, about to uncube himself.
The contemplation of the body, the consideration
of structure, the analysis of the bones of the poem, the omnipresent presence
of death, and the self-doubt are concurrent themes throughout DePass’s poetry. The
way in which these themes are crafted, however, tend to vary. For instance, “Mike
Brown is Eighteen” and “a tesseract tethers the room” diacritically oppose one
another in regard to poetic structure. “A tesseract tethers the room” is a two-page,
experimental piece that spans across the white space. It does not adhere to
specific stanza forms, manipulates language with punctuation, and searches
across realms: from dreamscapes to reality to the past. “Mike Brown is
Eighteen” is a poem structured with four lines per stanza on focusing solely on
the coming-of-age celebration that never would be for the slain teenager.
However, similar to the way “A tesseract
tethers the room” utilizes punctuation to accentuate meaning, much of the
action within “Mike Brown is Eighteen” happens between moments of punctuation,
in this particular case, within brackets. Brackets pose as a whisper, as
indications of the could have been. The only words that appear outside of
brackets within the poem are “Now” (first stanza) and “Might as well” (last
stanza). What happens within the brackets in the poem, what is hushed, hidden
with punctuation, is crucial to the poem’s goal. What happens when Mike Brown
turned Eighteen only occurred in the speaker’s imagination, for Mike Brown was
not on this earth to celebrate. Within the poem, the speaker asks:
“What is a young black
life?
But, thick hair,
good organs for the taking,
and crying mothers”
But, thick hair,
good organs for the taking,
and crying mothers”
An attractive quality of DePass’s work is the
continuous switch in style and structure. Some poems are finely-tuned forms
that adhere to stanza shape or syllabics. Other poems use the blank space on
the page as a pool in which to swim laps, stretch the body, and experiment. A
word is not just one word for DePass, but a possibility of words. The poem is
not a single poem, but a collage of experience.
Trace Howard DePass is the author of Self-portrait
as the space between us (PANK Books, 2018) and editor of Scholastic’s
Best Teen Writing of 2017. He served as the 2016 Teen Poet Laureate for the
Borough of Queens. His work has been featured on television and radio—BET
Next Level, Billboard, Blavity, and NPR’s The Takeaway—and in print—Anomalous
Press, Brooklyn Rail, Poetry Foundation, Entropy Magazine, Split This Rock, The
Other Side of Violet, and Bettering American Poetry (Volume 3). DePass
is a 2018 Poets House Fellow.
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Christine
Hamm’s collection, Notes on Wolves and Ruin, blends elements of
drama, poetry, and fiction to dismantle the paradigms often imposed on
product(s) of creative writing. Unlike many of the poets I’ve featured in the
past, the poetry in Hamm’s collection remains untitled. That is, rather than
use titles, Hamm uses numbers to work as a means of organizing and/or identifying
poems. Before each poem is presented, an epigraph appears, doing the work a
title might do. Together, numbers and epigraphs welcome readers into the
particular theme, idea, or tone of the poem; they guide readers in some
way.
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| Christine Hamm |
Take the way
Hamm prefaces a poem numbered “2” with an excerpt from the shooting script for An
American Werewolf in London by John Landis (1981). The character,
David, asks the dog, “What did I do?”, and in return “The dog begins barking
ferociously, the little girl tugging on his leash.” After the quote, Hamm’s
poem begins:
“Everyone wants to know what is inside a girl. There are many ways to find out. One is
getting the girl to sing a madrigal. Another is asking a girl what color maxi shirt she’d
like…”
Landis’s
scene evokes the idea of the human as the creature, and Hamm’s poem continues
with this, except in her poem, it is the girl’s body that is the mystical and
dangerous. “Everyone wants to know what is inside a girl”, the poem begins, and
then offers a litany of things one might do to become intimate with the “insides”
of a girl. For instance, “one way to find out is to hand her a knife or a
knitting needle.” Though the image of a metallic reflection from a blade is
sparked from the thought of both of these objects, the connotations that go
along with a knife and a knitting needle are typically of different worlds. The
notion of needling and weaving brings many readers back to Homer, and Penelope’s
trickery on her suitors; Odysseus’s wife used intelligence not violence to work
towards her goal. The power of a needle. The use of the knife evokes actions
that are not so pleasant, borderline violent. In any case, the opposing objects
represent social binaries of the good woman and the bad woman, Madonna vs. Mary
Magdalene, Betty vs. Veronica. The poem leans in support of such
binaries.
The
speaker considers how “some girls, despite wearing flowered violet blouses” are
transparent…and “people can immediately see” what’s inside them. This divisive
nature of the female is intentional, meant to bring reader’s back to the transformation
of the wolf and the two selves often harboring within us all. Towards the end
of the poem, the speaker offers the consensus that “one you have seen what is
inside a girl, you will never want to see it again.”
As
mentioned previously, “2” relies on litany, in this case the litany of “some
girls”, a phrase which holds together the poem’s musical and rhythmic
structures. “2” is composed as a fourteen-sentence prose-poem; seven of those
sentences start with the phrase “Some girls”, while the other half offer
syntactical variety.
The
epigraphs throughout Hamm’s work directly and indirectly evoke the idea of
transformation, of the wolf being set free. Before readers encounter a poem
numbered “1”, we are introduced to section from the Metamorphosis when Ovid describes the transformation. Ovid writes: “his
limbs became crooked / a wolf – he retains yet large traces of his ancient
expression.”
The
epigraph deals with physical transformation, while the poem turns to the
pathetic fallacy of the seasons changing to express a desire for change. It
begins: “Leaf-shadows shimmer from the windows.” Wolves lean in from the walls.
The speaker trips “over the dark carpet” which is not carpet “but water.” The
dream like sequence ends with the image of the speaker, five years old, “in a
navy and yellow striped two-piece”, being pushed down, tasting water. It
is a quick poem, imitating the fleeting quality of a nightmare during which a
mere second can cause the dreamer such a fright that it forces them from sleep,
and the trauma carries over into reality.
Christine Hamm has a Ph.D. in American Poetics and is an MFA candidate at Columbia University. Her
publications include A is for Absence, The Transparent Dinner, and Notes on Wolves and Ruins.
Links:
Abriana Jetté
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Abriana Jetté is an internationally published poet, essayist, and educator from New Jersey. Her work has appeared in dozens of journals, including the Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review, The Iron Horse Literary Review, The American Literary Review, and 491 Magazine. She teaches at St. Johns's University and the City University of New York, writes a regular column for Stay Thirsty Magazine that focuses on emerging poets and she is the editor of The Best Emerging Poets of 2013 that debuted on Amazon as the #3 Best Seller in Poetry Anthologies, the author of 50 WHISPERS that debuted on Amazon as the #1 Best Seller in Women's Poetry and the recently released 50 WHISPERS - Vol. II. Her newest anthology, Stay Thirsty Poets - Vol. 1, will be released in December 2018.