Guest Blogger Nicole Rollender on Necro-poetry and Memory

Since joining a Facebook page where local writers gather, I’ve discovered many more Garden State writers, including Nicole Rollender. A 2017 NJ Council on the Arts poetry fellow, she is the author of the poetry collection, Louder Than Everything You Love (Five Oaks Press), and four poetry chapbooks. She has won poetry prizes from Gigantic Sequins, CALYX Journal, Princemere Journal and Ruminate Magazine, and her work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, The Journal, and West Branch. Nicole is associate editor of THRUSH Poetry Journal, and holds an MFA from the Pennsylvania State University.

Please welcome Nicole Rollender.

Have you heard of micro-chimerism, where a mother holds her children’s cells in her body – in her brain, hand, foot, even floating around, for her whole life? It’s an amazing concept, that our bodies are part of other bodies. That’s how I look at poetry – my words becoming part of other people’s memories, part of their bodies. In this way, I know why poetry is important and essential.

From a young age, poetry stirred something inside me – I felt excited, alive, tingling and connected while reading and writing poetry. I was obsessed with its technicalities: enjambment (line breaks), slant and internal rhyme, caesuras (internal line pauses). I devoured every poetry book I could find, looking at how poems were made, how I could poach that technique, that angle, and make it my own. How I could make my own poems sing and become a plank a reader can walk across (echoing James K. Baxter who says the poem is “a plank laid over the lion’s den”). I wanted to make poems to help other people feel less alone. I wanted to become part of other human beings.

Matthew Zapruder calls the poem a machine. The poem’s also a room, a house, a country, a world, a space of encounter as tiny or large as the poet or you, the reader, want it to be. Poems are meant to be read and passed on, and when you read a poem it’s easy to imagine the poet is speaking to you or for you, or writing you a letter from far away. Poems can also bring us news from a vantage point in the past or future, or from another continent. And, you don’t have to know exactly what the poet meant when writing the poem – the poem’s meaning is what you need in your life at that moment.

Aren’t we all afraid to die? Poems can help us come to terms with death. Heavy stuff, right? Many poets, including Robert Lowell, say  their initial encounters with poetry  occurred when facing a human or animal death for the first time. The poem was a way to make sense of the experience. “Necro-poetry” is also about elegy, memorializing others. We can go to a poem when we want to remember or celebrate someone who has passed.

Max Ritvo was a 25-year-old poet who died of cancer a year ago. Much of his work documented his battle with Ewing’s sarcoma, which he contracted at 16. He extended his cancer narrative into a larger compelling collection of work about the body.. He lived his life with such a visceral intimacy: a bowl of blueberries was holy; he’d breathe air in a church, feeling in instant communion with those who’d worshipped there before him.

In his staggering poem, “Afternoon,” he writes, “When I was about to die / my body lit up / like when I leave my house / without my wallet. What am I missing? I ask, patting my chest pocket.” He also writes: “I’m missing everything living that won’t come with me/ into this sunny afternoon.” This poem is filled with a sadness and longing for connection with what Ritvo won’t be able to connect with, what he’s going to leave behind.

In a New Republic interview, Ritvo said this about what good poetry does to you: “When your memories, things you’ve never disclosed to anyone, start appearing in your mind as you read the poem. When you discover that a poem links up to a chain of images from your own life like a song links up to its music video.”  In this way, Ritvo wrote his own elegies.

In Jim Harrison’s short poem, “Sister,” he writes an elegy for his deceased sibling: “You were buried at nineteen/ in wood with Daddy. I’ve spent a lifetime / trying to learn the language of the dead.” Those hard-hitting lines are followed and juxtaposed by this gorgeous line: “The musical chatter of the tiny yellow finches / in the front yard comes closest.” We can hear that gaggle of loud finches; we can hear his sister’s voice. We know we don’t mourn our dead alone.

I’m fascinated again and again by memory’s power to let us mingle again and again with the dead, but also how it teaches us how quickly our lives move away from the current moment.

I live with a strong sense of mortality that often informs my work, and  I often contend with heavier topics like death, the spirit realm, God, saints and the afterlife. Of course, I experience joy in my life, and that permeates my work. I also have a strong sense that what I have (and who and my own life) can just as easily be taken away, so when celebration does enter my work it’s with a sense of caution (it casts its own shadow). My poems live as artifact: They’re my attempt to create something beautiful from the imperfect and temporal world we inhabit. 

My poem, “The Return,” (it first appeared in Word Riot) was influenced in part by the concerns in Ritvo’s  work. My uncle does a lot of family genealogy and just a few years ago told me my great-grandmother’s name – I hadn’t known it -- was Florentine Bia, a woman who fled Russia in the early 1900s. I wanted to memorialize her, but also share the same air. I wanted us both to be alive in the same poem:

The Return
for Florentine Bia

I’ve imagined my great-grandmother in love,
her hands deep in a pig’s meat she rolled

into sausages. Blood’s aldehydic stench. Large clocks
laughing all over the house. Massive dark beds. Her long dress

licking the top of her foot. She remembered the geese
her mother strangled, the sound a whine just before

the final breath, the first time they made love. I didn’t exist.
I wonder if she felt her own death, her hands limp

on the bed after, the wind pulled out of her,
if when she finally spoke, look at the starlight,

look, her voice meeting that light would carry forward
to this day, when I say aloud, Florentine, Florentine,

we are both alive in this poem, my hands deep in tomato hearts,
the man I’ve chosen to love somewhere in the garden,

his words still vibrating: What you do is wake
the dead. You don’t let them sleep.

Sadness and joy  come and go, but weaving their imagery together  does create something indelible that doesn’t fade or  lose its sharp prick – that I will never know my great-grandmother, that my gardens will bloom, fade and die each year. In this poem, I’m celebrating small miracles of joy in the quotidian. This necklace of memories is what makes me nostalgic for a time and a self and others’ lives I can never return to – each day closer to the end of this life, and closer to the next. Frankly, I’m still afraid of death: The thought of leaving my children makes me shudder. I’d need to be dragged into the next world.

I’ll leave you with Audre Lorde’s point that there are no new ideas. We’re all living the same shared experiences. However, she says, there are new ways of making these ideas felt “of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 a.m., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths.”

There’s courage in writing and reading poetry – in building that plank  and also crossing it.

You can connect with Nicole via Twitter and Facebook.

Author Interview with Carol Smallwood on her new poetry book, Prisms, Particles, and Refractions

As part of my MFA research thesis, I interviewed a dozen women memoir writers, and had enough overflow information to write several essays and articles, two of which appeared in Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching, and Publishing (Key Publishing House, 2012). Carol Smallwood co-edited that book, has edited or co-edited several dozen other anthologies and collections, and has written six books of her own poetry. The latest is Prisms, Particles, and Refractions (Finishing Line Press). I read the galley the day of the solar eclipse, awaiting the sky to darken during a bright New Jersey afternoon, which felt right: the timing, the way the light was shifting in my office, what the poems have to say about light. Carol agreed to answer my nosy questions.

LR: As is the case for many poetry books, many poems were first published in journals and websites, over several years. When / how in the course of writing single poems, and seeing some published, do you get a sense of what belongs together in a collection/book?

CS: It is very fitting you asked questions about light on the long anticipated solar eclipse day! After several have been published, one gets an overview on what works and I can see a theme. The new collection I’m compiling now came about from one its poems being in the Thirteenth Annual International Ultra-Short Competition (sponsored by The Binnacle at The University of Maine at Machias: Honorable Mention Ultra-Short Edition 2016). The poem, “We Select”  became the Prologue to A Matter of Selection dealing with making choices, selections.

LR: In the Foreword, Lisa Zaran praises your book for "its vision and identification of darkness". Your Introduction says that your poems are "aimed at capturing some of the aspects of light—light that our eyes detect and light also as metaphor." Can you talk about the inspiration, opposites, and influences of light and dark on your writing?

CS: Poetry with me begins with a clash,  or what is called in creative writing classes: juxtaposition. And of course metaphor is vital also so the theme of light is one full of application.  How we see has always fascinated me especially since taking a college class which examined rods and cones in vision.

LR: One of my favorites is "Cuttlefish" because it asks a reader to consider things that aren't typically thought of together – fish, underwater darkness, light, bioluminescence, being able to change one's body. Can you comment on where this poem came from, and what you like about it as its author?

Cuttlefish

survive by matching their

environment, changing the

color and texture of skin

in a blink of W-shaped

pupil eyes; they dazzle

with light patterns like

some marquee—if that

doesn’t work, they exit

in an inky cloud

CS: This poem was in my first chapbook to be published: On the Way to Wendy’s (Pudding House Publications,  2008). It came from watching a science program on PBS because how they managed to survive was so amazing.

LR: As I read, I was continually reminded of how much depends on light or its lack, how emotions are tied to visual light cues: everything from lacework and its openings that let in light; the light between snow as it falls; the technical upside-down qualities of human vision; the sun, stars, black holes. I'm curious if light is something you have always observed? After writing so much about it, are you still seeing the world as light? Or does that keen focus wane after the themed poetry collection is complete?

CS: You covered the light cues very well, Lisa. I’ve not even scratched the surface about understanding light and it continues to be something to wonder about; its implications with us are unending. My interest in light perhaps began with a professor having us write questions we wanted to know in a freshman psychology class. He really liked my light questions which reinforced my interest.

LR: I wondered if "Live With It"—a poem about experiencing a seemingly permanent jagged black lightning bolt across the vision in one eye—was perhaps autobiographical and maybe a trigger for the light theme? Or am I just asking that awful question readers ask novelists about what parts of their fiction are "true"?

CS: The jagged lightning did happen (fortunately only once) but it wasn’t the beginning of my collection on light.

LR: When reading about light, one might expect to encounter gardens, the sun, the outdoors, space, etc. But other physical locations also repeat in several poems – the eye doctor's office, the library, Wendy's,  the hospital, Nicolet City, the deep ocean.  Intentional, or coincidence? What might a reader take away from those less expected settings?

CS: Usually my inspiration comes not far from what I literally see which is a tiny amount of course—each of us has their own worlds, settings, from which we see. I didn’t start writing poetry until years after editing anthologies largely for librarians as I was afraid it was beyond me after literature classes in grad school on classics like John Milton. After retiring from public schools, I wrote a novel and feeling I had nothing to lose after that rough learning experience, tried poetry which was as if jumping off a cliff (had no idea if it was good or bad) and was amazed when I began getting journal acceptances. Writing poetry and editing at the same time provides a good balance for me.

LR: There's an interesting mix of both free verse and formal poems, and some prose poetry. Is that how you write, alternating between forms? Do certain topics demand one specific form over another? Or is it the other way around: you want to write free verse, or you want to write something formal, and so then cast about for a story to tell in that particular way?

CS:  A few days ago I tried writing about Sirius, and The Big Dipper, as triolets and villanelles but what I wanted to convey wouldn’t fit the rhyme schemes so will have to try free verse or maybe a  pantoum, sestina, cinquain, or others. What I saved  trying to write them hopefully will be of use yet.

Learn more about Carol by visiting her page at Poets & Writers, and browse her books here. Another interview with Carol is found over at Literary Mama.

Image: courtesy Carol Smallwood. "Cuddlefish" reprinted with permission.

Guest Blogger Ruth Foley on: Poem Series That Take You Hostage, and Three Possible Escape Routes

I didn't know any poets before pursuing my MFA degree, but at Stonecoast, I quickly got to know many. It was through poets – individuals I liked and listened to, talking about their craft – that I learned to appreciate poetry; so much so that I now begin every nonfiction class I teach with a poem. Ruth Foley was at Stonecoast while I was there, but I really got to "know" Ruth after the MFA, connecting on social media, through mutual writing friends, and alumni updates. (I think I developed a little crush on her with her series of posts about weight loss at her blog Five Things,) Ruth is managing editor at Cider Press Review, a member of the writing faculty at Wheaton College (Massachusetts), and teaches workshops at The Barred Owl Retreat. Her poems appear in many places, including Rattle, River Styx, The Bellingham Review, Sweet, and Bluestem, and her new chapbook, Dear Turquoise, is available from Dancing Girl Press.

Please welcome Ruth Foley.    

I have never intentionally begun work on a series of linked poems, but three times, they have begun work on me.  Each time, I found the experience to be a little like possession—I stare off into space a lot, have trouble getting my other work done, and babble endlessly without making much sense.

As a poet, I'm used to brief possessions, a poem taking me over until it's finished with me, but when it becomes clear that I'm working on not a single poem but a series, I've learned to go along for the ride. A friend told me recently that he's begun to apply a rule he learned in aikido: it is best not to try to stop a powerful force. If you're lucky, you might be able to direct it, but if you try to get in its way, you're in for a flattening.

An individual poem is, in some ways, easy to handle. It's almost always small enough for me to keep in my head, for one thing, which means I can walk away from it once I have a workable draft. I'll go make dinner, walk the dogs, go for a run, take a shower—almost any activity will suffice—all the while turning the possibilities over in my mind. I'll make a mental list of rhyming words; I'll spend some time trying to figure out the right texture of an object I'm describing, the qualities of a specific tone I'm looking to capture, or looking up variations of color names; I'll test out rhythms and line breaks; I'll work out the details of a metaphor. Any aspect of a single poem is available to me at this point, largely because the form is compact, easily contained.

A series, however, isn't so compliant. The poems in a series are likely to take on multiple angles. Some of them might be free-verse, while others are in a received or nonce form. They can use different perspectives and speakers, different language, different tones. Though related in theme, their specific topics often vary. Writing a series is an opportunity to explore a topic in depth, and because of that, there's often no time at all between my finishing a draft of one poem and beginning work on a brand new one. Sometimes, I finish a draft and believe—rightly or wrongly—that I've made it through the generative stage of the series-writing process. Sometimes, I finish a draft knowing there are three more poems lined up behind it, and maybe more behind those.

When a series takes me hostage, often I can do nothing else. I spend all of my free time—and some time that isn't technically free—mulling ideas, thinking about the last poem or the next, wondering when it will be finished with me. I know that eventually I'll have to sort through what I've written, discard the redundant poems in favor of ones that handle their particular aspect of the topic more successfully, and revise the promising poems, but when the series is in control, there's no point in worrying about any of those tasks.

Thus, my advice for living with the creative stage of a series: just go with it.

As with individual poems, when a series is finished with me, I know it. When this happens, I often find myself taking a brief break from poetry, sometimes from literary endeavor altogether—I'll read a crime novel, maybe, or watch some terrible television. Eventually, I start to wonder, What exactly am I going to do with all these poems I just wrote?

While one of poetry's sad realities is its limited market, that is also one of its advantages, as poets can choose between submitting a series of poems individually or together to traditional print literary journals, to online journals and poetry websites, and as part of a longer collection; and we also sometimes have the option of self-publishing, be it online or in chapbook form (though publishing a full-length collection through a vanity press still carries a stigma, and often rightly so). This means that any of my series could appear as individual pieces in journals, as chapbooks, or as part of a larger collection.

For me, the right method of publication for each series I have written so far has been different. The first is a set of what I came to call "the infidelity poems"—they felt personal and real despite being fictional. While they might have made a good chapbook, they also risked becoming overwhelming when read as a whole. For that reason, I decided to send them out individually, where most of them eventually found homes in journals.

The second is a series of poems inspired by the Universal monster movies of the 1930s and '40s. I became obsessed for a time with the archetypes—the mad scientist, the specific visions of some of the monsters, the villagers—developed in those films, and with the actors who helped create them. This is, in some ways, the most complicated of my series, because it's most at risk for misinterpretation. They're not monster poems or Halloween poems, but poems about what it means to be human; and for two years I was unable to decide what to do with them. Some ended up in journals, but because so many of them seem to belong surrounded by others in the series, I eventually decided to put them together myself into a chapbook called Creature Feature, a process I'm undertaking right now.

The final series is difficult for other reasons. Styled as a series of letters written to my cousin Turquoise after it became clear she would not win her battle with liver cancer, these poems are deeply personal. While I've included a small handful of them in the chapbook  Dear Turquoise (from Dancing Girl Press), it felt to me that collecting them as a whole might become overwhelming for a reader. In fact, I was reluctant to send them to journals, even in small batches. There is no gap in these poems between the "speaker" and the poet—both are very clearly me, the poet, and the subject is very clearly my grief. It was important to me that I find the perfect way of putting these poems out into the world—I kept saying that I needed to do right by these poems, because publishing them in the wrong way would cheapen them.

A few months ago, I realized that the poems could serve as thematic anchors for a longer collection, so although they could certainly fill a dedicated section of my book-length manuscript, I've chosen to weave them throughout as guideposts along a larger route through the book. There, they feel settled, at home, honored. Will a wise editor agree with me? That remains to be seen.

I'm comfortable with my decisions about the three series that so far have come to me. Working with a series—both the writing and the publishing options—can teach us more about who we are as poets and the place we want our work to take readers.

 Note from Lisa:  You can watch a video of Ruth reading one of the Dear Turquoise poems (and 2 others) at the Extract(s) site. Two of her monster movie poems ("Dear Dr. Griffin" and "Dear Ardath Bey") are up at Forge.