Crumbling Binaries and Porous Overlaps: Two Poems in Issue 38.1

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Shailen Mishra, Blog Editor & Series Contributor

As I read the two poems “Picking Pole” and “The Machete” by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra that appeared on SRPR’s Issue 38.1, I was intrigued by the crisp diction, details, and thrifty narrative. I paused and tried to dig deep for meaning and purpose behind each word. But soon I became distracted. I was thinking of the historic conversation on the English language that has preceded this poem in the Indian literary movement. One does not have to be aware of this conversation to understand the meaning of the two poems; yet, it helps one to get a sense of Mehrotra’s aesthetics.

The historic conversation is about the “chutnification” or “biryanization” of the English language. When Salman Rushdie entered the world stage with Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, he had set in motion the chutnification process in the most eye-catching manner (though previous Indian authors have made similar attempts to some degree). For authors like Rushdie and the Indian characters in their novels, English has ceased to be a “colonizer’s tongue” that needed to be approached with caution and trepidation. Why, by that time English had become the everyday or even first language for many. And English was getting chutnified, getting influenced by local languages in varying degree. So the polyphony of Englishes that are manifested in Rushdie’s narrative is a bold affirmation that Indians do have a legitimate claim to the English language. And while Rushdie termed this chutnification, the Indian poet Agha Shahid Ali called it biryanization. The emphasis was on a complex whole without being simplistic about which ingredient played a more dominant role than others. Ali who hailed from the Muslim community of North India wished his readers to “hear the music of Urdu” in his English poetry (4 Twelve Modern Indian Poets). Even though English was the conveying medium here that did not put it on competing ground with Urdu.

Mehrotra admits of “chutnification” or “biryanization” in his own works and any writing in “Indian English” for that matter. But he is of the firm opinion that the intersections between languages are messy, and that any neat model of linguistic convergence/collaboration must be debunked as simplistic. When a fellow poet and critic (Rajagopal Parthasarathy) offered a layered model of linguistic interaction (i.e. Indian languages–the mother tongue–at the bottom, Hindi as the national language in the middle, and English at the top), and authors using one language (read English) as a vehicle to capture the linguistic essence of their mother tongues, Mehrotra scoffed at the idea. He writes: “A problem with this model is that it treats Indian poet as someone who chiefly transports linguistic and cultural material from the bottom to the surface…it tends to narrowly equate Indian poetry with Indianness” (5 Twelve Modern Indian Poets) What Mehrotra criticizes is the essentialism that views English as the “other”, hence incapable of capturing “Indian” experience because of its “un-Indianness.” Against such dichotomic separations Mehrotra rails, and his inclusive approach and hybrid sensibilities are not simply limited to linguistic spheres. In his book The Transfiguring Places: Poems, Mehrotra writes: “…As the bus gathered speed, / I saw it quivering in the heat-haze, / A place whose name I hadn’t known or asked, / Which I sometimes think was Shiraz, or a firth / In the North Sea from where the skalds set out” (7). Thus a moment in the obscure region of Uttar Pradesh (India) transforms and transcends spatially and temporally to ask an unsettling question: who is narrating here? An Indian, Persian or Scandinavian poet? Is the answer that straightforward?

Mehrotra’s belief seems to be that what we take to be rigid boundaries are in fact porous. And for an artist it is not enough to acknowledge and reveal this porousness, but to enlarge it further to an unsettling, questionable degree, where the things that were formerly oppositional, dichotomic, and separated are found “alongside”, their boundaries not just touching but overlapping each other. Mehrotra provides the brassiest example of this porousness in his translation of songs of Kabir, a fifteenth century Indian mystic whose popularity lies in advocating a casteless, inclusive, and benign side to Hinduism. Into Kabir’s simple and ironical expressions, Mehrotra inserts modern day slangs and anachronisms: “When death already / Has you by the balls” (78), “Smelling of aftershave / And deodorants” (72). What irreverence it may seem? But for Mehrotra it’s about breaching the time barrier between the ancient and modern expressions; thus, “elaborating” upon a point that Kabir is trying to make about the slipperiness of Hindu/Muslim, abstract/concrete dichotomies.

When binaries are disallowed, hierarchies are dismantled, and an awareness of “alongside” is introduced, we see things in juxtaposition, where dualities and multiplicities are preserved, without reducing one thing into the other or without separating one from the other neatly. But, how to express these dualities or multiplicities? Or to say in Mehrotra’s sense, how to “elaborate” upon them? His two poems, “Picking Pole” and “The Machete”, present the inside/outside in a seamless poise. In “Picking Pole”, the time has stilled. The Rangoon creeper is about to sneak in to the house and birds have taken to the roof quite comfortably. While their watcher is outside the house, at the “border” of mango trees, with a pole in his hand to pick mangoes, to sever them from their host bodies. Like an intruder he stands (like the plant or birds), and the act of breaching is mutual here: from inside to outside, and outside to inside. Change the implement in hand from picking pole to machete and another intrusion occurs in the next poem: “Dragging it [the young tree] across the yard, / I almost didn’t see the nest…It looked warm, / Habitable, like the house I entered / To put away the machete…” The irony lies in the narrator’s realization, his juxtaposition of the “inside” of the house with that of the nest. Who is the outsider here? The bird who nested in a tree in the narrator’s property, or the narrator whose dual act of violence (upon the tree and the nest) calls into question his entitlement?

In an anthology titled The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, Mehrotra writes in the introduction to the poet Arun Kolatkar’s works: “Details are the cornerstones of our visual world” (54). Moreover, these details need to expose the familiar in a novel way. Mehrotra’s two poems are replete with exquisite details. And seeing them in isolation is missing the point; rather, in their juxtaposition they amplify the porosity of what we take for granted as stable, concrete, and unquestionable.

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Shailen Mishra is a book hopper, story whore, poetry pariah, novelist, three times failed guitar learner, and an aspiring didgeridoo player. He holds a Ph.D. from Illinois State University and an MFA from North Carolina State University. In his spare time, he edits SRPR’s blog and manages its website.

Poetics of Emplacement – Map 4

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Lisa Phillips, Guest Contributor

This post is part of a series on SRPR’s ongoing and evolving conceptualization of the Poetics of Emplacement. What do we mean by Poetics of Emplacement? SRPR’s editor, contributing editors, staff members and friends share their thoughts here.

Establishing an appreciation (or awareness) for what a “poetics of emplacement” might look like, or evoke, one that is grounded in understandings of place as a process in flux that is both open to interpretation and revision seems salient to the discussion I see evolving on SRPR’s blog. A poetics of emplacement, to my mind, is entangled with the recognition that places can be in Altha Cravey and Michael Petit’s words “spatially organized as confining . . . manifest a way of knowing, and places are often objects of power created to further particular forms of domination based on gender, sexuality, race, age, class, and physical ability” (102). A “dedication to place . . . better understood as an interest in emplacement” brings forth a nested arrangement of relations both social/historical and geographical/geophysical.

Because I am not familiar with what a poet’s notion of emplacement might be, (and I’m curious) I had to look up the word “emplacement” and its verb form “emplace” to determine the etymological context of the word. On one hand, the word emplacement means the action of placing in a certain position and the condition of being so placed (OED). On another hand, the word relates to placement of a building, a situation, a position. More disconcerting, for me at least, emplacement is a militaristic term meaning a platform for guns replete with defensive epaulements that afford cover from enemy attack. The poetics of emplacement then can be imagined as both a defensive move and an action taken toward others be they foes or friends.

While I would like to imagine a world in which there were only friends that would indeed be a provincial naïveté. Given that the SRPR’s editor wishes “to make it clear that a contemporary and theoretically informed recuperation of place-based poetics is hardly provincial” it may be fitting to consider how emplacements are built to protect and defend borders, for they are not designed to be attacked from behind. That an emplacement will surely have a blind spot or two makes diffractive reading necessary. Diffraction à la Karen Barad assumes that we will not be able to see everything at once. The idea ought to encourage us to look forward to new situations and positions that afford us alternative perspectives. The pages of SRPR provides me the opportunity to do just that as a rhetor with poetic affinity.

Thanks for an inspiring issue of SRPR.

In case you were wondering what an emplacement looks like . . .

WWII Aleutian Island Emplacement
WWII Aleutian Island Emplacement. Unalaska, AK.
(From http://www.city-data.com/forum/alaska/417413-term-alaskan-22.html)

 

Work Cited:

Cravey, Altha J., and Michael Petit. “A Critical Pedagogy of Place: Learning Through the Body.” Feminist Formations 24.2 (2012): 100-19. Project Muse. Web. 22 June. 2013.

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Lisa Phillips is a doctoral candidate in English at Illinois State. One part of Phillips likes to talk about her accomplishments with other folks who are not that curious, and another part of Phillips is humbled by what other folks do despite enormous obstacles. Middle ground is useful…”I write about things that occur to me, and I try not to embarrass people.” If you’re curious, you ask more questions. If you’re not, you won’t.

Poetics of Emplacement – Map3

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Arielle Greenberg

This post is part of a series on SRPR’s ongoing and evolving conceptualization of the Poetics of Emplacement. What do we mean by Poetics of Emplacement? SRPR’s editor, contributing editors, staff members and friends share their thoughts here.

When I moved to a small town in rural Maine after a lifetime of living in big cities and suburbs, I struggled to imagine how I might shift my poetics to suit my new landscape and life.  Maine is blessed with a long and important lineage of place-based poets, but I myself have little expertise or passion, and thus little to contribute, to the many great poems about the sea, the woods, and the farm.  I live in town.

(I was about to say that here in Maine, I do enjoy spending more time outside by choice, interacting with that thing we call “nature,” than I did when I lived in New York City or Chicago…but I’m not entirely sure that’s true. In New York, I walked everywhere, and made decent use of Central Park.  In Chicago, I ran along Lake Michigan several times a week.)

What seemed important to me, though, was to find my own role, my own voice, as a poet “of Maine,” and of this new life which I did in fact choose for reasons related very much to place: access to local food, to clean air, to small communities, to small farmers.

The poetry I’ve ended up writing, almost exclusively, since moving to Maine, is not what I expected to be writing, but it’s a direct response to this notion that I am here, and no longer in a city, living a more “wholesome” life.  The poems, a series, are engaged in the notion of the pastoral—and in ferreting out both the wholesome and the earthy “dirtiness” of that tradition.  These “country” poems are the most sexually explicit, culturally taboo, and provocative things I’ve probably ever written, and in each one, I am thinking about the very direct correlation, to my mind, between issues like clean air and water and issues like gender politics, BDSM, the human as (sexual) animal, and graphic language.

It seems to me this is writing on a  kind of border, yes?

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Arielle Greenberg is the author of several books, including My Kafka Century and, with Rachel Zucker, Home/Birth: A Poemic. She writes a column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review and teaches out of her home in Maine and through the new low-res MFA program at Oregon State University-Cascades. At the moment, she is interested in all things “primal.”

Poetics of Emplacement – Map 2

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Emily Ronay Johnston, SRPR Managing Editor

This post is part of a series on SRPR’s ongoing and evolving conceptualization of the Poetics of Emplacement. What do we mean by Poetics of Emplacement? SRPR’s editor, contributing editors, staff members and friends share their thoughts here.

As Kirstin Hotelling Zona (SRPR Editor) writes, “A poetics of emplacement is interested in borders and thus borderlands: beings and ways of being that are often overlooked.” A poetics of emplacement looks—looks over, looks beyond knowing and into the generative realm of wonder. Knowing becomes a beginning, a starting point, not the destination. The destination, rather, is rupture. I am totally on board with not knowing. I mean, how cool is it to have permission to write my way into rupture rather than out of it, avoiding messy-ness at all costs?! When I need to light a fire under my intellect, to override that insatiable addiction to knowledge, I turn to Rumi, Jelaluddin Balkhi. His poetry emplaces me squarely in temporality, in permeability, calling us (human beings) to house the guests of our emotions, regardless of their actions in and through our beings, to “Welcome and entertain them all!/Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,/who violently sweep your house/empty of its furniture” (from “The Guest House”). We mustn’t stop at emotion, though. A poetics of emplacement beckons us to welcome the violence of emotionality, not to indulge in suffering, but quite the opposite: to love. To be sure, “The door there/is devastation.//Birds make great sky-circles/of their freedom./How do they learn it?//They fall, and falling,/they’re given wings” (from “On Children Running Through”). We might say that a poetics of emplacement is not only “interested in” that which is overlooked, it is also the road there, the looking beyond itself, the surrender to being “filled with you [love]./Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul” (from “We Three”).

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Emily Johnston's PicEmily is from Boston, San Francisco, Fairbanks, Alaska, and Central Illinois. Holding a Ph.D. in English Studies and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry, her work emerges at the intersections of writing studies, social justice pedagogy, trauma theory, film theory, and narrativity. In particular, she researches and publishes on students’ literacy learning in relation to issues of sexualized trauma. She has taught courses in academic writing, public writing, creative writing, gender studies, literature and film, and English as a Second Language. Emily is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Writing Pedagogy at The University of Delaware, and Managing Editor of Spoon River Poetry Review (SRPR).

Critical Alchemy: On Seth Abramson’s “The Golden Age of American Poetry Is Now”

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Michael Theune, SRPR Review Essay Editor

**Seth Abramson’s entire essay is now Available for free access**

 

The new issue of Spoon River Poetry Review (38.1 (Summer, 2013)) is now out, and it is chock-full of treasures, including new poems by the likes of Rusty Morrison, Lyn Lifshin, Michael Burkard, Virginia Bell, Danielle Pafunda, Kevin Craft, Susan Briante, Sharon Dolin, Kit Robinson, and featured Illinois poet Allison Joseph.  Along with this new work comes Seth Abramson’s review-essay, “The Golden Age of American Poetry Is Now.” [read the entire essay]

The thinking in Abramson’s piece comes at the right time.  Abramson recently came to the defense of contemporary American poetry by publishing “Why Is Contemporary American Poetry So Good?,” an extensive response to an article in the Washington Post called “Why is modern poetry so bad?,” itself a meditation on Mark Edmundson’s essay “Poetry Slam (Or, The decline of American verse).”  In his Spoon River review-essay, Abramson lays out in great detail why exactly American poetry currently is in a Golden Age.  Anyone following this debate certainly will want to read “The Golden Age of American Poetry Is Now.”

Indeed, I believe Abramson’s review-essay is necessary reading for all those engaged with contemporary American poetry.  I so greatly admire “The Golden Age” for a number of reasons.  However, here I want to put Abramson’s piece in explicit conversation with Donald Hall’s “Poetry and Ambition”–a conversation Abramson invites by mention of Hall’s essay.  For me, it is by listening in on this conversation that I come to more fully appreciate many of Abramson’s insights.  I also find myself better able to formulate some questions I have about this being a Golden Age of American poetry.

In “Poetry and Ambition,” Donald Hall critiques a great deal of recent American poetry for its lack of ambition, for churning out McPoem after McPoem.  One of the reasons for such debased production is the poetry MFA.  Section 10 of Hall’s essay begins with a cry to “Abolish the M.F.A.!”  And this undoubtedly should be the case if MFAs really are as Hall describes them, as “a garage to which we bring incomplete or malfunctioning homemade machines for diagnosis and repair.”  While recognizing, in section 11, that “[m]ost poets need the conversation of other poets,” Hall still condemns the MFA, calling it an “institutionalized café” one that hires and pays mentors who then “make assignments” that then “reduce poetry to a parlor game.”

Abramson argues, however, that this understanding of the MFA is wrong.  According to Abramson, the café has long been institutionalized.  Additionally, understood phenomenologically, the MFA is a much more complex and multifaceted offering/participatory event.  According to Abramson, the workshop itself provides an “intensely juxtapositive space,” a space which also opens further out: the MFA “is also the space in which MFA-seekers use social media, non- or quasi-academic program events, and impromptu social gatherings to share their other artistic obsessions–be they musical, dramatic, studio-art, couture, or literarily ‘off-genre.’”  Abramson says that the avant-garde consistently has worked to move beyond objectification and commodification to more closely approach “the praxis of life.”  Similarly, he tries to move discussion and assessment of the poetry MFA away from the (mere) objectification and commodification (and demagoguery) one might find in an analysis such as Hall’s to an understanding and appraisal of the MFA as praxis, as it is lived, experienced, and even co-created.  In short, it is wrongheaded to think of the MFA (merely, or even centrally), as Hall does, as an assignment-giving institution.

And just as the writing program needs to be understood and investigated as praxis, so does the writer herself–and Abramson, I believe, does a masterful job of describing “the ‘Golden Age poetics’ produced by the children and step-children of the Program Era” (on page 110 in Spoon River Poetry Review (38.1)–this is vital reading).  Again, Abramson notes that “Golden Age poetics cannot be treated primarily as a locus for canonization practices”–rather, now, we must “witness poetry as practice, as culture, as civic engagement, as way-of-life.”

Abramson’s review-essay is a masterful critical work, one that demands that its readers experience and interact with the full praxis of today’s writers and writing.  However, even though Abramson’s piece generally eschews (and sometimes critiques) assessment–defined one time by Abramson as “making self-aggrandizing stabs at permanent assignations of value”–one part of the practice of contemporary poetry is evaluation.  Judgments of value are being made all the time.  So: if evaluation (a practice at the core of an essay like Donald Hall’s) is the blinkered remnant of old ways of conceiving poetry, how might the protocols of poetic evaluation be done away with, or productively revised?  Should they be?  Can they be?  Can we even refer to the contemporary era of America as a “Golden Age” without some degree of evaluation being incorporated into that description?  “Golden,” at least, often designates the best.  (Why not simply refer to our current era as a “Very Productive Age”?)  And, at least to my thinking, it simply is the case that there’s some amazing poetry being produced nowadays, including, for example, Frederick Seidel’s Ooga-Booga, Jorie Graham’s Place, D.A. Powell’s Cocktails, Arda Collins’s It Is Daylight, Laura Kasischke’s Space, in Chains.  It is because of such works (and many others) that I feel we just may be in a “Golden Age of American poetry.”  But without such excellent work I would not be as apt to make this claim.  Is this an outmoded way to think?

I look forward to many, many people reading Seth Abramson’s truly significant review-essay, and continuing the conversation–perhaps here, or else in other venues–it has so powerfully engaged.

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Michael Theune is Review Essay Editor for Spoon River Poetry Review. Theune also is the editor of Structure and Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns (Teachers & Writers, 2007), and the host of the Structure and Surprise blog. Along with Kim Addonizio, he co-edits Voltage Poetry, an online anthology of poems with great turns in them, and discussion about those poems. Theune’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications. He is an associate professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Poetics of Emplacement – Map 1

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Kirstin Hotelling Zona, SRPR Editor

This post is part of a series on SRPR’s ongoing and evolving conceptualization of the Poetics of Emplacement. What do we mean by Poetics of Emplacement? SRPR’s editor, contributing editors, staff members and friends share their thoughts here.

Contrary to popular belief, SRPR is not associated with Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, but was titled after the river in central Illinois that was itself purportedly named for the freshwater mussel shells used by the region’s Native Americans and early colonists as eating utensils—as spoons. I love the connections held in tact by our magazine’s name: waterways and words, poetry and sustenance, innovating and naming, observation and transformation. Such associations insist on the interconnectedness of language and place, of knowing intimately one’s surround because such knowing erodes not only one’s sense of self as disconnected but, just as importantly, upends one’s conception of place as equivalent to “environment,” that paltry misnomer that occludes the enmeshment of all vibrant matter and thus preserves anthropocentric paradigms in the very name of “saving the earth.”

When I came on as editor, I wanted to build upon SRPR’s dedication to place along these lines—to make it clear that a contemporary and theoretically informed recuperation of place-based poetics is hardly provincial. The “new” SRPR, then, is interested in a place-based poetic that is less concerned with regionalism’s attention to realism than to writing that leads us to the limits of our comfort zones so that these zones (what we might think of as aesthetic ecotones) are first of all exposed—made palpable and felt—so that we might experience the borders of our own known worlds as permeable, as sites of connection instead of sites of uncontestable difference.

In this way, SRPR’s current dedication to place may be better understood as an interest in emplacement—that is, of the many ways we are situated in and through language, the earth, and each other; in and through our histories and our blind spots; in and through our protests and complicities. As such, a poetics of emplacement is interested in borders and thus borderlands: beings and ways of being that are often overlooked.

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Kirstin Hotelling Zona’s first collection of poems, Drift, was published in 2011. She is also the author of a book of criticism, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson: The Feminist Poetics of Self-Restraint (Michigan UP), and editor of Dear Elizabeth: Five Poems and Three Letters from May Swenson to Elizabeth Bishop (Utah State UP). Kirstin lives with her husband and two children in Maine and Illinois, where she Co-Hosts PoetryRadio and edits SRPR. She is an associate professor of English at Illinois State University.

SRPR @ ASLE Conference

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Poets & writers, ecological activists, environmental educators, cultural theorists, ecstatics, & visionaries: Don’t miss out on this year’s 10th Biannual Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) Conference, at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, 5/28-6/1:

http://asle.ku.edu/

Be sure to check out SRPR’s panel on Wed, May 29th from 1:30 – 3:00: “The Poetics of Emplacement: SRPR Poets Read.” Line-up includes yours truly, William Stobb, Joshua Corey, Holms Troelstrop, and Adrian Matejka.

Lucia Getsi Reading Series 2013 – Image Gallery & Audio Recordings

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Welcome to the inaugural SRPR Lucia Getsi Reading! The night was a smash success, thanks to SRPR poets Joshua Corey, Naomi Buck Palagi, William Stobb, and Holms Troelstrup, who rocked the Ewing Manor’s old stone bones with stunning performances to a standing-room-only crowd. Lucia Cordell Getsi, SRPR’s long-time editor and benefactor, flew in for the event from South Carolina: thank you Lucia! Enjoy the pics, and check out below the audio recording of the readings!

Photo Credits: Sarah Berryman

 

We dumped the option of video-recording the event and posting it on YouTube. Not that technology intimidated us or our readers were video-shy; rather, we think the AUDIO-ONLY version will keep the distraction to minimum. You can close your eyes and listen and let the words burn into your somatic memory with a sparkful hiss. There’s a risk of post-concussion. But since when has that stopped admirers of sexy poetry?

 

Credits: Live audio recorded and mixed by Brian Hedgepeth

 

Joshua Corey’s Reading:

Naomi Buck Palagi’s Reading:

William Stobb’s Reading:

Holms Troelstrup’s Reading:

The SRPR Lucia Getsi Reading Series

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We are thrilled to announce our new annual reading series, The SRPR Lucia Getsi Reading Series, named for SRPR’s long-time beloved editor, Lucia Getsi, and sponsored by WGLT’s Poetry Radio, ISU’s Creative Writing Program, and ISU’s Department of English.

Our inaugural event will feature FOUR fabulous SRPR poets, and will take place at the Ewing Manor in Bloomington, IL, on April 4th from 7 – 10:00 pm. Poetry reading will be followed by a reception at the manor.

SRPR’s featured poets are: Bill Stobb (Winner of SRPR’s 2012 Editors’ Prize); Joshua Corey (SRPR Featured Poet, issue 37.1); Naomi Buck Palagi (SRPR Contributor, issue 37.2), and Holms Troelstrup (SRPR Contributor, 37.1).

The event is free and open to the public, and we will have wine and homemade appetizers, on the house. Depending on the weather, fireplaces will be roaring or we’ll be milling about in the gardens. Donations will be gladly accepted, though they are not required.

Save the date, and bring a friend!

First off…

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SRPR now has a blog. This is our community and announcement space. We will use our Facebook and Twitter accounts primarily to send out updates about upcoming events, contests and issues. But we realize that sometimes we’ll have more to say than what FB and Twitter message boards can accommodate. Hence, this blog.

Oh, we’re going live with our new website on November 30. Find us there, and occasionally here.