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SM: Pigafetta is My Wife is an impressive debut and an ambitious project. Can you tell us a bit about your process?

JH: Process for me (and everyone) contains elements of structure and freedom. Structure came from my research into the Philippines, post-colonial theory, the literature of “discovery,” and the application of this research into a manipulation and amendment of Pigafetta’s journal into a critique of its original self. Structure in the second section of the book also came from a determination to use sestinas and pantoums when approaching history and relationships. I allowed myself freedom within and outside of the limits of these structures. I reserved the right to fuse my own image-generating imagination with Pigafetta’s and elaborate and extend his most fantastic or bizarre “discoveries.” I have nightmares and indulgent daydreams, and it was good to find a structure in which to activate them. I also wrote poems about my relationship with C in the context of DC, Indiana, and separation in whatever form felt most appropriate at the time. So at first I was always writing two things at once—the collage pieces and the letters of address—and then these two streams started to cross. This is hindsight, however. These rules/parameters evolved over the course of the project. I started knowing I wanted to infest personal and historical narratives with each other. That was the basic premise.

SM: Why the address to Cheryl?

JH: To hold myself accountable to the content of the writing, to put something at stake in the process and remove the writing from the realm of pure “experiment.” And also because I wanted to feel through our relationship in the most ecstatic, stringent terms I know so that I could make the right decisions in regard to it. I also wanted to make something “for” Cheryl.

Beyond this book I have continued to write in address to someone else. I’m convinced that the muses and the general poetry reading public are both fantastic myths, so I might as well write toward the people that are going to read what I’m writing and they can love it or hate it and tell me so.

SM: The idea of circumnavigation, do you see it as inherent in both form and content— the sestina and pantoum, are they the journey as well?

JH: This is a great question. Thank you. Hmm. Yes, I suppose so. In that I wanted to travel to the limits of the formal world—from dramatic monologue to fractured heaps of words with the sestina and pantoum exerting some kind of centripetal force on all this material. I love the way these forms organize information and assert its significance through repetition but also destabilize/complicate meanings through the accumulation of that repetition.

Along these lines, one thing that drew me to the literature of discovery was the mapping of the unknown and how that mapping inflects how one constructs meaning from the perceived new. You are always a slave to the knowledge you accept as true and it alters stimuli for acceptable entrance into that economy of knowledge. You draw a line around the world. You limit it. You go somewhere so you can return, go home, sleep. But in the meanwhile maybe you died. Which is the difference between song and narrative. What was known about C is unknown and in waiting.

SM: I’ve read on your blog that war is always on your mind. Do you consider the book to be dwelling in a general realm of violence informed by the references, or is it more specific to its references?

JH: Oh no. My blog…

Much of the violence is the violence caused by a colonial or occupying power within South East Asia—one group violating the space of another group and the underwriting of this violation through violence to and control of bodies. The specificity is important; I do not want to simply signify violence; the violence does escape its context…

SM: The theme of violence is present alongside the contemporary love poem—how do you see them operating together?

JH:…through these juxtapositions which do not have a single goal or rational effect which I am able to explain. I very much wanted to write about love—about another. I wondered what happened to the contemporary love poem in more fragmented poetics until I started trying to write a love poem. I found it very difficult to celebrate or make a poem about love. Even the language of physical description is fraught. I could only think about love through the self and how desire for the other reconfigures the self—the approach toward increasing intimacy, contact and how intimacy, a sustained complex intimacy radically changes/deranges/mutilates/remodels etc etc etc each other. Like two tornadoes passing through each other, it just became more of a poem about love as a process.

SM: What advice would you give to our readers?

JH: Slaughter a pig, plank okra, join the commune, build a structure with indigenous materials, persecute your enemies, embrace your friends.

Most award winning poetry is just awful.

Buy my book.

For every procedure used to write a poem, develop and implement a counter procedure. You can sort it out at the end.

Pray to your god.

Stay in shape.

Don’t buy my book.

Write.

James H. Billington- Librarian of Congress

We were so poor I had to take the place of the

bait in the mousetrap. All alone in the cellar, I

could hear them pacing upstrairs, tossing and turn-

ing in their beds. “these are dark and evil days,”

the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear. Years

passed. My mother wore a cat-fur collar which

she stroked until its sparks lit up the cellar.

Charles Simic- The World Doesn’t End

PROMPT

Use your imagination.

Write weird.

Write miniaturist.

Poetry/July-August 2010

I’m interested in how the arts involve, and in some sense are, technologies: “A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words,” says W.C.Williams in his introduction to The Wedge. …We say (as I just did) a “work” of art: that is, an arrangement of breath or sounds or images or materials that does something. The characters or voices or sounds or pictures move us, as actual human sounds move us. Keats made “Ode to a Nightingale”, and what he made, that exact arrangement of the sounds and meanings of English words, works to give me emotion. The “Ode” is a machine in Williams’ terms.

Robert Pinsky in Q&A in Poetry/ July-August 2010

PROMPT

Write a verse play in which you develop characters with distinct poetic voices.

Charles Wright

It must have been Ischia, Forio d’Ischia.

Or Rome. The Pensione Margutta. Or Naples

Somewhere, on some dark side street in 1959

With What’s-Her-Name, dear golden-haired What’s-Her-Name.

Or Yes-Of-Course

In Florence, in back of S. Maria Novella,

And later wherever the Carabinieri let us lurk.

Milano, with That’s-The-One, two streets from the Bar Giamaica.

Venice and Come-On-Back,

three flights up,

Canal as black as an onyx, and twice as ground down.

Look, we were young then, and the world would sway to our sway.

We were riverrun, we were hawk’s breath.

Heart’s lid, we were center’s heat at the center of things.

Remember us as we were, amigo,

And not as we are, stretched out at the wrong end of the rainbow,

Our feet in the clouds,

our heads in the small, still pulse-pause of age,

Gazing out of some window, still taking it all in,

Our arms around memory,

Her full lips telling us just those things

she thinks we want to hear.

“I think of them as being populated with people who are whispering stories in my ear which I then launder in my own way and present, and by the time the poem gets presented, all the people are gone and nothing’s left but the whispers. Once the people go, there goes your narrative.” Charles Wright- storySouth  interview by Daniel Turner

In this interview with Turner, Wright talks about the cinematic influence on his writing. Also, Turner describes his images as  ‘moving pictures’ rather than ’static’. Notice how the poem, in its beginning, is driven by the uncertainty of the narrative/place/person–the complex noun phrases and the catalogue of locations dwelling in an absence of narrative. Then Wright commands the reader’s attention with the imperative “Look” and turns to beautiful beautiful imagistic lines which drive the poem towards its end.

PROMPT

Write a poem which borrows from Wright his kinetic imagery. You may write a narrative poem, but try and let the imagery be what propels the poem forward at a certain point.

Between Going and Staying

Between going and staying the day wavers,

in love with its own transparency.

The circular afternoon is now a bay

where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,

all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,

rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats

the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall

into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,

watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,

I stay and go: I am a pause.

PROMPT

Write a ghazal where you preserve one word from the first line of Paz’s “Between Going and Staying”. The word can be from any part of the line, so it’s really something of a loose scaffold.

Prayer for Marilyn Monroe

Lord accept this girl
called Marilyn Monroe throughout the world
though that was not her name
(but you know her real name, that of the orphan raped at nine
the shopgirl who tried to kill herself when aged sixteen)
who now goes into your presence without make-up
without her Press Agent
without her photographs or signing autographs
lonely as an astronaut facing the darkness of outer space.

When a girl, she dreamed she was naked in a church
(according to Time)
standing in front of a prostrate multitude, heads to the ground,
and had to walk on tiptoe to avoid the heads.
You know our dreams better than all psychiatrists.
Church, house or cave all represent the safety of the womb
but also something more…

The heads are admirers, so much is clear (that
mass of heads in the darkness below the beam to the screen)
but the temple isn’t the studios of 20th-Century Fox.
The temple, of marble and gold, is the temple of her body
in which the Son of Man stands whip in hand
driving out the money-changers of 20th-Century Fox
who made your house of prayer a den of thieves.

Lord, in this world
contaminated equally by radioactivity and sin,
surely you will not blame a shopgirl
who (like any other shopgirl) dreamed of being a star.
And her dream became “reality” (Technicolor reality).
All she did was follow the script we gave her,
That of our own lives, but it was meaningless
Forgive her, Lord, and likewise all of us
for this our 20th Century
and the Mammoth Super-Production in whose making we all shared.

She was hungry for love and we offered her tranquillizers.
For the sadness of our not being saints
they recommended psychoanalysis.
Remember, Lord, her increasing terror of the camera
and hatred of make-up (yet insistence on being newly made-up
for every scene) and how the terror grew
and how her unpunctuality at the studios grew.

Like any other shopgirl she dreamed
of being a star.
And her life was as unreal as a dream an analyst reads and files.

Here romances were kisses with closed eyes
which when the eyes are opened
are seen to have been played out beneath the spotlights
but the spotlights have gone out,
and the two walls of the room (it was a set) are taken down
while the Director moves away notebook in hand,
the scene being safely canned.
Or like a cruise on a yacht, a kiss in Singapore, a dance in Rio;
a reception in the mansion of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor
viewed in the sad tawdriness of a cheap apartment.

The film ended without the final kiss.
They found her dead in bed, hand on the phone
And the detectives knew not whom she was about to call.
It was as
though someone had dialled the only friendly voice
and heard a pre-recorded tape just saying “WRONG NUMBER”;
or like someone wounded by gangsters, who
reaches out towards a disconnected phone.

Lord, whomsoever
it may have been that she was going to call
but did not (and perhaps it was no one at all
or Someone not named in the Los Angeles directory),
Lord, answer that phone.

Tranlated by Robert Pring-Mill

PROMPT

As in Cardenal’s “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe,” write a prayer for someone famous or fairly well-known, emulating the specific language/ diction one uses for such an occasion. Or, you can write a variation of a psalm or the Lord’s Prayer too.

Lights

Translated from the Spanish
by Jonathan Cohen

That top-secret flight at night.
We might have been shot down. The night calm and clear.
The sky teeming, swarming with stars. The Milky Way
so bright behind the thick pane of the plane window,
a sparkling white mass in the black night
with its millions of evolutionary and revolutionary changes.
We were going over the water to avoid Somoza’s air force,
but close to the coast.
The small plane flying low, and flying slow.
First the lights of Rivas, taken and retaken by Sandinistas,
now almost in Sandinista hands.
Then other lights: Granada, in the hands of the Guard
(it would be attacked that night).
Masaya, completely liberated. So many fell there.
Farther out a bright glow: Managua. Site of so many battles.
(The Bunker.) Still the stronghold of the Guard.
Diriamba, liberated. Jinotepe, fighting it out. So much heroism
glitters in those lights. Montelimar — the pilot shows us:
the tyrant’s estate near the sea. Puerto Somoza, next to it.
The Milky Way above, and the lights of Nicaragua’s revolution.
Out there, in the north, I think I see Sandino’s campfire.
(”That light is Sandino.”)
The stars above us, and the smallness of this land
but also its importance, these
tiny lights of people. I think: everything is light.
The planet comes from the sun. It is light turned solid.
This plane’s electricity is light. Its metal is light. The warmth of life
comes from the sun.
“Let there be light.”
There’s darkness too.
There are strange reflections — I don’t know where they’re from —
on the clear surface of the windows.
A red glow: the tail lights of the plane.
And reflections on the calm sea: they must be stars.
I look at the light from my cigarette — it also comes from the sun,
from a star.
And the outline of a great ship. The U.S. aircraft carrier
sent to patrol the Pacific coast?
A big light on our right startles us. A jet attacking?
No. The moon coming out, a half-moon, so peaceful, lit by the sun.
The danger of flying on such a clear night.
And suddenly the radio. Jumbled words filling the small plane.
The Guard? The pilot says: “It’s our side.”
They’re on our wavelength.
Now we’re close to León, the territory liberated.
A burning reddish-orange light, like the red-hot tip of a cigar: Corinto:
the powerful lights of the docks flickering on the sea.
And now at last the beach at Poneloya, and the plane coming in to land,
the string of foam along the coast gleaming in the moonlight.
The plane coming down. A smell of insecticide.
And Sergio tells me: “The smell of Nicaragua!”
It’s the most dangerous moment, enemy aircraft
may be waiting for us over this airport.
And the airport lights at last.
We’ve landed. From out of the dark come olive-green-clad comrades
to greet us with hugs.
We feel their warm bodies — that also come from the sun,
that also are light.
This revolution is fighting the darkness.
It was daybreak on July 18th. And the beginning
of all that was about to come.

PROMPT

Write a pre-revolution poem in the 1st person plural. See Cardenal’s “Lights” on page 301. Your speakers can be part of either a real army that fought in a revolution or an imagined army. If you’re writing a fictional-army poem, there should be some indication of whom you’re fighting against. Let there be a single idea that works through the poem at the metaphoric/symbolic and literal level similar to Cardenal’s “light.”

Ode to Salt

This salt

in the saltcellar

I once saw in the salt mines.

I know

you won't

believe me,

but

it sings,

salt sings, the skin

of the salt mines

sings

with a mouth smothered

by the earth.

I shivered in those solitudes

when I heard

the voice of

the salt

in the desert.

Near Antofagasta

the nitrous

pampa

resounds:

a broken

voice,

a mournful

song.

In its caves

the salt moans, mountain

of buried light,

translucent cathedral,

crystal of the sea, oblivion

of the waves.

And then on every table

in the world,

salt,

we see your piquant

powder

sprinkling

vital light

upon

our food. Preserver

of the ancient

holds of ships,

discoverer

on

the high seas,

earliest

sailor

of the unknown, shifting

byways of the foam.

Dust of the sea, in you

the tongue receives a kiss

from ocean night:

taste imparts to every seasoned

dish your ocean essence;

the smallest,

miniature

wave from the saltcellar

reveals to us

more than domestic whiteness;

in it, we taste infinitude.

PROMPT

Write an ode to someone/something that, unlike Neruda’s Ode to Salt, does not mention the addressee at all.

Grabriela Mistral

Decalogue of the Artist

I. You shall love beauty, which is the shadow of God
over the Universe.

II.There is no godless art. Although you love not the
Creator, you shall bear witness to Him creating His likeness.

III.You shall create beauty not to excite the senses
but to give sustenance to the soul.

IV. You shall never use beauty as a pretext for luxury
and vanity but as a spiritual devotion.

V. You shall not seek beauty at carnival or fair
or offer your work there, for beauty is virginal
and is not to be found at carnival or fair.

VI. Beauty shall rise from your heart in song,
and you shall be the first to be purified.

VII.The beauty you create shall be known
as compassion and shall console the hearts of men.

VIII.You shall bring forth your work as a mother
brings forth her child: out of the blood of your heart.

IX. Beauty shall not be an opiate that puts you
to sleep but a strong wine that fires you to action,
for if you fail to be a true man or a true woman,
you will fail to be an artist.

X. Each act of creation shall leave you humble,
for it is never as great as your dream and always
inferior to that most marvelous dream of God
which is Nature.

PROMPT

Write a decalogue or a set of ten commandments addressed to a person/entity (an artist, for instance, as in Mistral’s “Decalogue of the Artist”) or a work of art (a poem, a painting, perhaps even a certain kind of cuisine or dish).

The Flower of Air*
I met her, not by chance,
standing in the middle of the meadow,
governing all who passed,
all who addressed her.

She said to me: “Climb the mountain–
I never leave the meadow.
Cut me flowers white
as snows, crisp and tender.”

I climbed the mountain
and searched where flowers whiten
among the rocks,
half sleeping, half waking.

When I came down with my burden
I found her in the middle of the meadow.
Like a crazy one, I covered her
with a deluge of lilies.

She never glanced at their whiteness.
She said to me: “Now bring me
red flowers, only the red.
I cannot leave the meadow.”

I clambered up crags with deer
and searched for flowers of madness,
those that grow red and appear
to live and die of redness.

* I wanted to call this “The Adventure”,
my adventure with Poetry. (G.M.)

PROMPT

Write a poetry adventure poem. The objective is to describe a metaphorical “poetic journey”—the process of discovering the poem (or conversely, the process of the poem eluding you). Try using either dialogue or a “uniform” stanzaic form (couplet, tercet, quatrain).

Her precision with using language extends to her surreal mode of writing (as opposed to a mere Objectivist label). The sound progression of her condensed forms (mirroring an unfolding in meaning and/or image) functions in lieu of language.

Niedecker in describing the mechanics of her surreal poetry said: it means that for me at least, certain words of a sentence,-prepositions, connectives, pronouns— belong up toward full consciousness, while strange and unused words appear only in subconscious. (It also means that for me at least this procedure is directly opposite to that of the consistent and prolonged dream— in dream the simple and familiar words like prepositions, connectives etc… are not absent, in fact, noticeably present to show illogical absurdity, discontinuity, parody of sanity.)

‘For Niedecker the subconscious is a trace or sedimentation within language, a texture resistant to syntactical order in so far as it retains a certain original density and materiality’
Rural Surreal- Peter Nicholls

Check out Niedecker’s poems and essays in EPC

                  My Life by Water
My life
  by water--
    Hear
spring's
  first frog
    or board
out on the cold
  ground
    giving
Muskrats
  gnawing
    doors
to wild green
  arts and letters
    Rabbits
raided
  my lettuce
    One boat
two--
  pointed toward
    my shore
thru birdstart
  wingdrip
    weed-drift
of the soft
  and serious--
    Water

PROMPT:

Borrowing from Niedecker’s condensed forms and the transformation of the surreal and subconscious from content into a practice of writing and a poetics, try to use sound patterning, typographical layout and syntactical discontinuity to write poems abstract and subliminal in their private workings rather than in subject matter. When being economical, try to think of sound and space as substitutes for words, and the rhythm of the poem as the disjunctive and connective between images or moments.