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Where I’ve Been and Where I’m Going, Part 1

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I’m not sure what I feel like writ­ing about tonight, just that I feel like writ­ing. It was a hec­tic day. I woke up early to get a lit­tle bit of work done on my Shah­nameh intro­duc­tion – noth­ing new, mostly typ­ing up notes I took while I was in DC last Wednes­day – and then, after I dropped my son off at school and came back here to make myself break­fast, I rushed out to school to get some paper­work and email­ing done before my first class of the day, Asian Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture. I gave my stu­dents the assign­ment for The Joy Luck Club, which most of them have not yet fin­ished read­ing. That’s okay, though, since they will have two class peri­ods to work through the short essay ques­tions in groups before they go home to write the assign­ment up. If they don’t fin­ish the book dur­ing that time, it’s their own fault.

Teach­ing Asian Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture has been inter­est­ing. First, it’s not my field, which has meant that I’ve had to learn not just about the three eth­nic Asian com­mu­ni­ties whose lit­er­a­ture we will be read­ing – Chi­nese Amer­i­can, Fil­ipino Amer­i­can and Iran­ian Amer­i­can – but also about the field of eth­nic Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture in gen­eral. It’s nice, for a change, to be teach­ing some­thing that teaches me some­thing, but that is not actu­ally what inter­ests me tonight, sit­ting here in my office while my son goes to sleep and my wife takes a shower. The fact that I am teach­ing a course that is not in my field has started me think­ing about just what, pre­cisely, my field is. Because it’s been some time since I’ve felt like I have one.

In terms of cre­den­tials, my field is Teach­ing Eng­lish to Speak­ers of Other Lan­guages. That’s what it says on my Master’s Degree, and that cre­den­tial is largely why I was hired by the col­lege where I now teach. Indeed, I spent my first five to seven years there doing almost noth­ing else but the work of the ESL pro­gram that the insti­tu­tion was in the process of build­ing. I loved the work, though I have not taught ESL classes for some time now and don’t plan to any­time in the near future. Indeed, if I were to be com­pletely hon­est, I think going into TESOL was, in the first place, a way for me to avoid the fact that what I really wanted to do was write.

I fin­ished my TESOL MA in 1987, three years after I grad­u­ated from Stony Brook Uni­ver­sity with a dou­ble major in Eng­lish and Lin­guis­tics. In Fall 1984, right after my senior year, I enrolled in the Cre­ative Writ­ing MA at Syra­cuse Uni­ver­sity – this was before they had an MFA – where I stud­ied with Tess Gal­lagher, Philip Booth and Hay­den Car­ruth. I lasted just one year. I was 22 at the time, and I was sure that writ­ing poetry was what I wanted to do with my life. I fig­ured I’d make my liv­ing as a teacher, but it was as a writer that I intended to leave my mark. I t was not long before cir­cum­stances at Syra­cuse con­spired to make me real­ize how young I was, and how arrogant.

It was Philip Booth who sat me down towards the end of the Spring 1985 semes­ter and told me that, while I cer­tainly knew how to han­dle a line of verse, and while I also very clearly knew my way around a sen­tence, there was not yet a real cen­ter to my work, no set of con­cerns out of which my poetry grew. That absence, he sug­gested, would make it very hard to write the the­sis – a book of poetry – that I would have to write in my sec­ond year. What I needed, he said, was to live a lit­tle bit and there was just no get­ting around the fact that liv­ing would take time. So why didn’t I take some time away from school, he offered, and see what that did to my writ­ing. Mr. Booth’s words – I never got to the point where I felt com­fort­able call­ing him Philip – meant a great deal to me, and if I had to say now what I learned from them it would be that you don’t have to go to school to become a writer.

So I went to my grad­u­ate advi­sor and told him I wanted to take a year off from school to work on my writ­ing. I was not expect­ing his response. “If you want to go com­mune with your muse,” he sneered at me (and, yes, it was a sneer), “that’s your busi­ness, but you came to school – or at least I assume you came to school – to learn some­thing and that’s not going to hap­pen sit­ting alone beneath a tree try­ing to cap­ture the wind in a song!” This was dur­ing what I have heard peo­ple refer to as The The­ory Wars, when lit­er­ary the­o­rists and cre­ative writ­ing fac­ulty were, quite lit­er­ally, at war with each other over the legit­i­macy of their dif­fer­ent pur­suits. My grad­u­ate advi­sor was clearly in the the­o­rists’ camp, and I guess I have him to thank that not only did I take time off from Syra­cuse, but also that I never went back. I think I have led a much more inter­est­ing life than if I’d stayed at Syra­cuse and got­ten my MA, though it is also true that if I’d known then what I know now about acad­e­mia, and if I’d known then that I would end up as an aca­d­e­mic, I might have made very dif­fer­ent choices.

Writing and Pain; Community and Hope

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I haven’t been writ­ing and it hurts; it’s a tight­ness in my chest and a twist in my gut, and there is a part of me that wants to scream. Well, maybe not scream, but at least to grunt, let out some excla­ma­tion of frus­tra­tion that I have not been mak­ing poems, and I have not been work­ing – or only recently started work­ing again – on the fore­word I need to write for the trans­la­tion of the begin­ning of Shah­nameh that has been sit­ting on my desk more or less com­pleted for the last cou­ple of months. The other day, while I was wait­ing in a hotel lobby in Wash­ing­ton DC for a friend to call, I was able to get just a lit­tle bit of work done on that intro­duc­tion, but it wasn’t writ­ing. I was tak­ing notes on a book that has been sit­ting on my shelf for at least a month wait­ing for me to read it. It’s an inter­li­brary loan, and I am sure it is very, very over­due. (I find it funny that they abbre­vi­ate inter­li­brary loan ILL; when­ever I get an email telling me that a book I have requested has arrived, the sub­ject head­ing is some­thing like “Your ILL Request,” and it just makes me smile. I have a strange sense of humor that way.) Any­way, I was tak­ing notes on this book and just that lit­tle bit of work made me so happy. Because it was my work, not for school, not to make money, but just the work that I do, or one kind of work that I do, to make my life mean­ing­ful, to make mean­ing­ful and beau­ti­ful things to send out into the world.

The book is called Fer­dowsi: A Crit­i­cal Biog­ra­phy, and it’s by A. Sha­pur Shah­bazi. Fer­dowsi is the pen name of the poet who wrote Shah­nameh, an epic poem of about 50,000 cou­plets that tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran, from the nation’s mythopo­etic begin­nings to the moment right before the Arab Mus­lim con­quest in the 7th cen­tury CE. Shah­nameh is often called Iran’s national epic, and for good rea­son. Not only do the sto­ries in the poem still res­onate in Iran­ian cul­ture, in ways that few poems or poets do in the West, but as the Ger­man scholar B. Spuler puts it in the excerpt of his work that Shah­bazi uses as an epi­graph to the book:

In the last analy­sis it was The Shah-nama […] that became the mile­stone for the self-affirmation of the Iran­ian iden­tity. [T]he impor­tance of the poems of Fer­dowsi (and sub­se­quently of later poets) for the preser­va­tion of the Iran­ian char­ac­ter can in no way be over­es­ti­mated. They pro­vided the entire Iran­ian folk – nobles, towns­peo­ple, arti­sans and peas­ants – with that “Ira­ni­an­ness” which despite all social dif­fer­ences united them, per­fectly mir­rored their image, and allowed them to iden­tify them­selves as fully and totally Iranian.

The book is called “a crit­i­cal biog­ra­phy,” at least in part because Shah­bazi arrives at his under­stand­ing of Ferdowsi’s life through a crit­i­cal read­ing of Shah­nameh. The poet left no note­books, no mem­oir and the infor­ma­tion that we have about his life from out­side the epic, as Shah­bazi shows, is entirely apoc­ryphal. Indeed, an inter­est­ing ques­tion raised by this book, though I doubt Shah­bazi intended this to be the case, is whether and why we ought to pre­fer a truth­ful account­ing of a great writer’s life to the myths and leg­ends that grow up around him, espe­cially when the work he is famous for is as impor­tant to a nation’s cul­tural iden­tity as Shah­nameh.

So, for exam­ple, the tra­di­tional story of the poem’s com­po­si­tion has the peas­ant Fer­dowsi labor­ing for 25 years to write the poem, hop­ing to earn from it a dowry for his daugh­ter. When, through the good offices of an inter­me­di­ary, he presents the poem to Sul­tan Mah­mud of Gazna, how­ever, the intermediary’s ene­mies among the Sultan’s advis­ers con­vince the ruler that the poem really is not worth all that much, espe­cially since Fer­dowsi is a Shi­ite and there­fore a heretic. Tak­ing his advis­ers’ advice, the Sul­tan pays Fer­dowsi only 50,000 pieces of sil­ver, not gold, an amount which Fer­dowsi sees as an insult. So, instead of tak­ing the pay­ment for him­self, he divides the money between two peo­ple who have served him. He then flees to another ruler’s court, where he attacks the Sul­tan in a satire of which only a small num­ber of lines sur­vive. Even­tu­ally, he returns home, though he con­tin­ues to live in con­stant fear of the Sultan.

One day, some­thing hap­pens in Mahmud’s court that reveals to him the great­ness of Ferdowsi’s poem, and he repents of his ear­lier to deci­sion to under­pay the man. So the Sul­tan sends along with a suit­able apol­ogy, 60,000 gold coins, a 10,000 coin increase over the amount Fer­dowsi had orig­i­nally expected. Just as the couri­ers arrive with the money, how­ever, Ferdowsi’s corpse is being car­ried out of his house so he can be buried. Ferdwosi’s daugh­ter, accord­ing to this story, refuses the Sultan’s money, and so it is used to repair a local hostelry.

Shah­bazi shows that this story is com­pletely false. It is now gen­er­ally accepted, he points out, that Fer­dowsi was not a peas­ant, was never in Sul­tan Mahmud’s court and never had a daugh­ter. Yet which story is bet­ter, which one should be the story about Fer­dowsi that gets told? The one I have just told you, or the truth: that Fer­dowsi was a mem­ber of the landed gen­try, that he com­posed the Shah­nameh while liv­ing on his own income, that he had a son who died at a young age. It’s easy enough to say that what really mat­ters is the truth, but the lessons in the apoc­ryphal story are also truths that are impor­tant to tell and the way that Fer­dowsi and his daugh­ter behave when con­fronted with the dif­fer­ent pay­ments from the Sul­tan embody val­ues it is worth emu­lat­ing, or at least hon­or­ing. I’m not sug­gest­ing that we should accept false­hoods as his­tory, but one of the things I like about Shahbazai’s book is how the false­hoods become part of the his­tory, part of Ferdowsi’s biog­ra­phy, even as he (Shah­bazi) claims to be arriv­ing at as accu­rate a fac­tual biog­ra­phy of Fer­dowsi as can be gleaned from the text of the Shah­nameh itself.

But I started writ­ing about how painful it is to be not to be writ­ing, which is ironic, of course, because I am writ­ing this blog post, and I will admit that sit­ting here in my bed, half lis­ten­ing to the TV pro­gram my son is watch­ing in the next room, peck­ing away at these keys is mak­ing me feel bet­ter. Except that my foot is start­ing to hurt with the onset of another gout attack. I’ve been in the mid­dle of one now for a cou­ple of days, the result of hav­ing lost a decent amount of weight in a short period of time because of a liver detox­i­fi­ca­tion reg­i­men my doc­tor put me on. The pain is start­ing to dis­tract me and so I have lost track of where I wanted to take this blog post next, but it does make me think about the degree to which writ­ing seems to reduce the pain. Or, since I am sure it does not actu­ally reduce it, the way writ­ing is able to take my mind away from the pain, and so I am won­der­ing about the con­nec­tion between the pain I feel when I am not writ­ing, the pain of my gout, and the way writ­ing seems to alle­vi­ate both.

I think it was in Elaine Scarry’s book The Body In Pain that I read about how peo­ple expe­ri­ence pain as some­thing alien, some­thing other, some­thing not of the body. Which is ironic, of course, since it is the body that is in pain. The prepo­si­tion is sig­nif­i­cant. Metaphor­i­cally, it sug­gests that pain is some­thing phys­i­cal we can be in, like a lake, or a car, or the world; and yet, if Scarry is cor­rect, and if I under­stand her – or my mem­ory of what she wrote – cor­rectly, we expe­ri­ence pain as some­thing inside of us that we need to get out of us, some­thing that can­not be inte­grated into who we are. It can be forced on us, as in tor­ture – and the first part of Scarry’s book is a dis­cus­sion of tor­ture – but it is not some­thing that we can inte­grate, that we can make a part of our­selves, the way we make plea­sur­able sen­sa­tions wel­come within us, make them part of who we are in the world.

Lan­guage (I think this is Scarry too) is not just the one way we can give pain mean­ing – lan­guage, after all, is how we give every­thing mean­ing – but it is the only way we can make the real­ity of our pain com­pre­hen­si­ble to some­one else. Indeed, per­haps on some level we need to make our pain com­pre­hen­si­ble in ways that we don’t need to do with our plea­sures. After all, it is – at least for me – per­fectly pos­si­ble to keep one’s plea­sures entirely pri­vate, not to name them, and still find them immensely sat­is­fy­ing. It is not that way with pain. To deal with pain, espe­cially but not only emo­tional and psy­cho­log­i­cal pain, I need com­mu­nity; I need to be able to tell some­one, and while I some­times may be the only one I tell by writ­ing about it, that is never an entirely sat­is­fac­tory solu­tion. I need to know there is some­one else who under­stands me or who has at least tried to under­stand me.

And so I won­der about the degree to which com­mu­nity, the human need for com­mu­nity and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, is rooted in pain, and I won­der if the pain I feel when I don’t write is my body remind­ing me to reach out, that I need to reach out. Because that is what I do when I write. No mat­ter how deeply inter­nal and per­sonal and inte­rior the moti­va­tion to write may be, no mat­ter how soli­tary the act of writ­ing is, every­thing I write is also an invi­ta­tion to com­mu­nity the goal of which is not so dif­fer­ent from the way Spuler describes the Shah­nameh as being “the mile­stone for the self-affirmation of the Iran­ian iden­tity.” Some­times, espe­cially when I feel like no one reads what I write, that thought fills me with a deep sad­ness, because I know I will keep writ­ing any­way, even if no one else ever reads a word I put down on the page. Now, though, I am filled instead with a giddy hope­ful­ness, and that makes me happy.

The Ironies of Getting My Second Book Of Poetry Published

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Two days ago, I received a let­ter from Milk­weed Edi­tions reject­ing my sec­ond book of poems, which is called All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown. In explain­ing his deci­sion, the edi­tor wrote, “Although I rec­og­nize here an orig­i­nal and com­pelling per­sona, I felt that the pre­pon­der­ance of first-person poems with an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal slant lim­ited the poten­tial appeal.” In other words, if I under­stand him cor­rectly, he thinks that the first-person nar­ra­tives dom­i­nat­ing the book will make it hard both to sell and to get a decent level of crit­i­cal atten­tion. Whether or not that is true, his per­cep­tion of the man­u­script is accu­rate – it is made up almost entirely of first-person nar­ra­tives – and, given that accu­racy, if he can­not find within his own aes­thetic sense and/or his sense of where poetry is these days and/or his sense of the mar­ket enough enthu­si­asm for pub­lish­ing my book, I think his rejec­tion is a fair and rea­son­able one. It’s also ironic, because CavanKerry Press, pub­lisher of my first book of poems, The Silence Of Men, rejected All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown because there was not enough of an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal slant. “I’ve seen this a lot,” CKP’s pub­lisher told me. “A poet whose first book is deeply per­sonal will often write a sec­ond book that is just the oppo­site. You’ve writ­ten a good book; it’s just too imper­sonal for our list.” This rejec­tion (more irony here) also seems to me to have been fair and rea­son­able. For while All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown is, to me, deeply per­sonal and auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal, it pos­sesses and explores those char­ac­ter­is­tics dif­fer­ently than The Silence Of Men does, and if CKP’s list is slanted towards the kinds of poems that are in The Silence Of Men, then it makes sense that CKP would also reject my sec­ond book.

I have a lot of respect for the work that small press edi­tors and pub­lish­ers do, not just because it is so often un– or under­paid work – which it is, and which is some­thing that any writer who deals with them needs to under­stand and appre­ci­ate – but also because pub­lish­ing books requires a com­mit­ment to under­stand­ing, artic­u­lat­ing and either implic­itly or explic­itly defend­ing one’s own aes­thetic sense in a highly sat­u­rated and com­pet­i­tive mar­ket­place. Espe­cially when it comes to poetry. Some­times it seems to me that every­one and her or his aunt or uncle in the United States thinks that he or she is a poet whose work the world absolutely must have between the cov­ers of a book or burned onto a CD or DVD. More to the point – at least in my expe­ri­ence – more than a few of the peo­ple who think this way haven’t read (or at least write like they haven’t read) a sin­gle book of con­tem­po­rary poetry. To be a small press edi­tor and/or pub­lisher in this kind of envi­ron­ment is to sub­mit one­self to a mind-numbing onslaught of lan­guage, which takes a level of com­mit­ment that most lit­er­ary peo­ple I know, includ­ing myself, can­not and will not make; and that com­mit­ment ought to com­mand our respect, even when it means that a given pub­lisher decides not to pub­lish a book we have written.

Please don’t mis­un­der­stand me. I think any­one who wants to write poetry should write poetry. The impulse towards poetic expres­sion is a pow­er­ful one; wit­ness the way peo­ple turn to poetry in times of dif­fi­culty, from per­sonal tragedies like the death of a loved one to national tragedies like the Sep­tem­ber 11th attacks. More­over, the good that poetry does for the peo­ple who write it, and for the peo­ple who read it, what­ever kind of poetry it is, is not some­thing that can be mea­sured by either the dol­lars and cents that a pub­lisher com­mits to putting a book out or the unpaid hours that the poet sweats through try­ing to make her or his lines bespeak the par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence he or she wants to com­mu­ni­cate. Still, there is a dif­fer­ence – actu­ally, there are prob­a­bly many dif­fer­ences – between being some­one who writes poems and some­one who wants to pub­lish books of poetry, not the least of which is that once you decide you want to pub­lish books of poetry, you have made the deci­sion to treat your work as a com­mod­ity. You have entered, whether you like it or not, the world of (usu­ally very small) busi­ness; and so I have to con­fess that the let­ter from Milk­weed Edi­tions is one I should never have received. Instead, I should have writ­ten to them and with­drawn All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown from con­sid­er­a­tion because a third press had already agreed to pub­lish it.

I didn’t con­tact Milk­weed because I’d allowed my record-keeping to become sloppy and so I’d actu­ally for­got­ten I’d sub­mit­ted the book to them; and so I am relieved that Milk­weed rejected my book, since it means I do not have to deal with the awk­ward­ness of hav­ing to choose between two very fine pub­lish­ers. The world of small presses is not like the world of com­mer­cial pub­lish­ers, where the bid­ding war that can result from hav­ing more than one edi­tor eager to pub­lish your book can be a very good thing. There is not enough money in the small press world to make such a bid­ding war pos­si­ble. I may have only a ver­bal com­mit­ment from the press that has accepted All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown–which is why I am not nam­ing that press in this post; our agree­ment will not be offi­cial until I have a con­tract, and a lot can hap­pen between a hand­shake and a con­tract – but pre­cisely because of the aes­thetic and other kinds of un– or under­paid edi­to­r­ial com­mit­ments I was talk­ing about above, the ver­bal com­mit­ment I have with this press means some­thing to me, and so it is a com­mit­ment that I want, all else being equal, to honor. If all goes accord­ing to plan, I will be very proud to pub­lish my book with this press, as I would have been proud to pub­lish with Milk­weed, or with CavanKerry Press. But here’s the final irony: The press that accepted my book did so for pre­cisely the rea­sons that Milk­weed rejected it, because of “the pre­pon­der­ance of first-person poems with an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal slant,” which the edi­tor feels will help to gar­ner All That Strug­gled In You Not To Drown some seri­ous crit­i­cal atten­tion, while at the same time mak­ing the book some­thing that peo­ple will want to buy. Go fig­ure.

A Campaign Ad From Iran’s Election

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Got this from Andrew Sul­li­van, where it is attrib­uted to Kar­roubi, one of the oppo­si­tion can­di­dates in Iran’s recent election:

Here’s the translation:

1 (Girl in street): Defend­ing civil rights
2 (Boy next to old man): Coun­ter­bal­anc­ing poverty/deprivation
3 (Boy push­ing away dona­tion box): Nation­al­iz­ing oil income
4 (Man stand­ing on rooftop): Reduc­ing ten­sion in inter­na­tional affairs
5 (Boy sit­ting next to satel­lite dishes): Free access to infor­ma­tion
6 (Girl sit­ting besides her mother): Sup­port­ing sin­gle moth­ers
7 (Girl with cast): Knock down vio­lence against women
8 (Boy): Edu­ca­tion for all
9 (Boy infront of man lock­ing car): Increas­ing pub­lic safety
10 (Girl on rooftop): Eth­nic and reli­gious minor­ity rights
11 (Man on rooftop): Sup­port­ing NGOs
12 (Girl in front of wall): Pub­lic involve­ment
13 (Boy and girl): We have come for change
14: Change for Iran

Now, a cam­paign ad is a cam­paign ad, and it’s very easy to be cyn­i­cal about them. Just imag­ine for a minute, though, in the con­text of Iran, how chutz­padik–it’s a Yid­dish word mean­ing auda­cious, ballsy, and it’s the only one that fit my response to see­ing the ad – it was for an Iran­ian politi­cian to say he wants to accom­plish these things; and notice as well the promi­nence given to two issues related specif­i­cally to women’s sta­tus.

Better Late Than Never Self-Promotion

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In Novem­ber of last year, I was inter­viewed by Marina Yoffe, founder and direc­tor of Jack­son Heights Poetry Fes­ti­val, an orga­ni­za­tion whose advi­sory board I sit on, and I never got around to post­ing a link to the excerpts from the inter­view that JHPF put up on its web­site. There were, I think, bet­ter moments from the inter­view that they could have used, but I like this nonethe­less. Any­way, bet­ter late than never. So here ’tis:

Here is the text of the two poems I read. (If I had a tran­script of the inter­view itself, I would post that too, but I don’t.)

Melissa’s Story

The doc­tor gave instruc­tions like a spy:
Be there, seven pm, on the dot.
If you’re not, I’m gone. Don’t even think about
another appoint­ment. Got it? That day,
of course, there was traf­fic, and the money
had to be in small, old bills. You will get
in my car as if we were lovers. At the spot,
you’ll step out first. Walk when and where I say.
Make a mis­take and I leave. Under­stood?
I did. Some­how it went with­out a snag,
and there I was, legs open on a bed,
with a man crouched between them like a dog.

He reached into me and scraped away the life
I’d almost made, not yet mine to give.

///

The Silence Of Men

A man I’ve never dreamed before walks
into my apart­ment and sits in the green
chair where I do my writ­ing. He car­ries
in his left hand a large erect penis
which he places silently on the floor.
The phal­lus begins to waltz to music
I can­not hear, its scro­tum a skirt;
its tes­ti­cles, legs cut off at the knees.

I want to know why this dis­fig­ured
man­hood has been brought to me. I look up,
but my guest is gone. His organ, deflat­ing
in short spasms like an old man cough­ing,
spreads itself in a pool of shal­low blood.
The silence between us is the silence of men.

If you want to know more about my work, my web­site is www​.richard​jnew​man​.com; and if you’d like to buy my book, you can find it on Ama­zon or Barnes & Noble, but I would ask that you either buy it directly from the dis­trib­u­tor, UPNE, which directly helps my pub­lisher, CavanKerry Press, which is a fine small press that can use the help, or find an inde­pen­dent book­store on indiebound

I Hate Gout

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So I am lay­ing here on the couch at 2:38 AM with my right ankle inflamed and excru­ci­at­ingly painful — though not as painful as before — and I am test­ing Word­Press’ mobile fea­tures because I have been hav­ing a ridicu­lously hard time get­ting back to sleep. We are hav­ing com­pany tomor­row and I am sup­posed to be cook­ing and I am won­der­ing how I am going to stay on my feet. At least the food I am going to pre­pare is easy.

I wish I knew what brought this attack on. If I could be sure it was the lit­tle bit of meat I ate this past week, that would be okay. At least I would know. And if I could be sure it was the Apis — home­o­pathic rem­edy — that would be okay too. Not know­ing, though, leaves me feel­ing, again, kind of help­less in the face of this con­di­tion. I don’t like it that I have had to take colchicine again; I was so happy with how good I was feel­ing up until the attack started last night. And I don’t like the feel­ing that I must have done some­thing “wrong,” not in the moral sense, obvi­ously, but in the sense of some­thing that has set me back in terms of what I need to do to man­age this condition.

Ah well, that’s enough kvetch­ing for now. I am going to try to sleep.

Review of Joshua Kryah’s Glean

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My faith lies else­where. When I fin­ished read­ing Joshua Kryah’s Glean (Night­boat Books, 2007) and started think­ing about what I would write in my review of the book, that is sen­tence that came to me, almost as if it had been wait­ing — who knows how long? — somewhere in the back or just below the sur­face of my con­scious­ness for me to read the final lines of “Come Hither,” the last poem in the book:

Who will draw you out, now
that you’ve given your­self over?

                Who dis­solve
your body like a host on their tongue?

What stop­ping place will be pro­vided, what
rest?

Where am I in this emer­gence—
who comes?

The “you” here is God, or, rather, the god that faith places on the other side of the absence that is all, accord­ing to the monothe­ism I was taught grow­ing up, human beings can ever really know of the one divine being. Yet the first two ques­tions here are not about this god per se, but rather about those whose task it is to draw this god out into the world and take him into them­selves. In the face of the absence that is also the divine — and that is, there­fore, in itself per­haps the deep­est and most fun­da­men­tal test of faith — who will those peo­ple be? At the same time, the speaker of the poem is clear that some­thing is emerg­ing — some­thing which, based on the first two ques­tions, we can assume the speaker believes to be God. Then, out of that clar­ity another ques­tion emerges. What is the speaker’s posi­tion in the emer­gence, not in rela­tion to it, as if he were stand­ing out­side of it, watch­ing what was hap­pen­ing, wait­ing to see the end result, but in it, as part of it, and once the speaker places him­self within this emer­gence, who is emerg­ing is no longer clear. The pos­si­bil­ity exists in the lan­guage that it is the speaker who is emerg­ing, that he is watch­ing him­self become, that he has dis­cov­ered his god within him­self, that he has come to accept that he is him­self, some­how, within his god.

Ques­tions of faith have been impor­tant to me since I was a teenager and I believed my future lay in the rab­binate. When I set aside the faith that being a rabbi would have demanded of me, how­ever, I did not set aside the strug­gle to come to terms with the final, indif­fer­ent and absolute absence that will fill the space where I used to be in the moment after my death. It is a mea­sure of Kryah’s suc­cess that, despite the fact my faith lies some­where very other than his — and since this is a review of his book, I am not going to turn it into an essay about my own spir­i­tu­al­ity — the poems in Glean nonethe­less con­fronted me with the ques­tion of just where, pre­cisely, my spir­i­tu­al­ity does lie. In large mea­sure, the poems accom­plish this through metaphors that ground the issues they raise firmly in the body. Here, for exam­ple, are the first few lines of “My Easter:“

Breath­bloom, the res­ur­rec­tion lily
spent on its stem,

        the pale throat thrown back
    announcing — what?

Behold, all at once,
         the flesh-like knot
undone, each petal released, their beauty un–
mis­tak­ably and

already gone.

And here is “O Hiero­glyph (for­got­ten word, spread your lips around me)” in its entirety:

As if the wet vowel might speak.

As if, plun­dered,
        it might give up its blank stare, and
sud­denly, shud­der in my mouth.

We exchange a lan­guage
             dumb as flesh, pressed into and bruised
beyond recog­ni­tion, its only response the black eye’s dull cir­cle of speech.

Blue, blue-brown
         each color off­set by the sur­round­ing skin,
the cal­cite thought of your return­ing again.

I can­not muster
        what I should have lost, and in the wish gained
more stead­fast: your curio, what swings from a locket upon my chest,

a mes­sage that now only speaks
with its fist.

The note I wrote to myself on the page below this poem says, sim­ply, “Donne?” The fist in the final line recalled for me Holy Son­net #14, “Bat­ter my heart, three-personed God,” and, indeed, I found myself think­ing of Donne’s Holy Son­nets often while read­ing Glean, so much so that I read through the sam­pling of them in the edi­tion of the Nor­ton Anthol­ogy that I have on my shelf before I sat down to write this review. Donne’s poems, too, are rooted in the body, though very dif­fer­ently than Kryah’s. For while Kryah metaphorizes — if I can coin a term — the body, and the phys­i­cal world in gen­eral, to give pres­ence to the absence in the face of which he ques­tions, asserts and main­tains his faith, Donne posi­tions the body in his poems as Other to his god, whose pres­ence in the world the poems them­selves — at least the ones I read — do not doubt for a minute. I also thought of Donne’s Holy Son­nets while read­ing Glean because, despite the fact that Kryah’s poems are writ­ten in a very free verse — the sen­tence frag­ment and the uncon­ven­tional spac­ing of the poems seemed to me just about the only two for­mal devices used con­sis­tently through­out the book — his poem’s share with Donne’s a sense of lan­guage as some­thing phys­i­cal, some­thing to be felt, held in the mouth, savored and then released.

In all hon­esty, I don’t know that I will pick this book of poems up again. It has said to me what it has to say, and it’s not some­thing I need to hear again. Still, I admire, deeply, the craft and com­mit­ment, the hon­esty and courage that went into writ­ing it. It is the kind of book I think every­one should have to read once, the kind of book that those to whom it truly speaks will trea­sure for the rest of their lives.