Buzzed Books #76 by Will Rincon

Because Everything is Terrible by Paul Guest

Paul Guest’s fourth poetry collection, Because Everything is Terrible, wastes no time pulling the reader into his world. “First this happened: you woke in a dim glade, / pine trees leaning in, all around.” The twenty-two-page opening poem, “After Damascus” is broken into thirteen sections. Guest forces readers to experience the poem’s narrative that weaves war with dreams by writing in second person perspective. Trained killers are sweethearts, you smell your own blood, and “imagine what must feel like to drown.” Downtrodden to the point where you weep after John Wayne films, the narrative youis lost “inside your skull” and wishes “to be more intensely American.” The prose, while lyrical, drags you through mud and waste, making you realize that beauty can still be found in terrible things. Guest’s ability to find the good in the bad becomes therapeutic until you become comfortable with pain and accept that “your body is strange.” Through stillness and singing, you can learn to love chaos.

The remaining sixty-six pages explore everything that is terrible. America is a big focus, and Guest sprinkles the current climate of the nation throughout: “Nothing will be again as it once was,”  “nothing will be said of grief,” and “everyone I know is mad.” His poem, “Thinking about Disappointment” captures the uncomfortableness we often find ourselves in after waves of bad news in the media: “I want to be terrified. I want to sleep beneath / something so antique / even beasts won’t bother / to look beneath / no matter the ravening gush of blood in their ears.” Guest isn’t afraid to criticize what has become normalized: “the news / reads like a story of fire / and death and endless, insufferable / seasons” and an “industry / which will most harm you / upon its inevitable demise.” Often, his poems leave you with the somber realization that you have been wading through madness and there is no end in sight.

Guest’s obsession with destruction is somehow loveable. In his poem, “Being Reasonably Certain,” he pulls you down the spiral of accepting that “you’ve done the wrong thing, / even though it’s up for debate, / even though philosophy is no help / on the walk home, in the middle / of distraction in the aisle of a store / you swear is evil itself.” Like a beach current, you get pulled out in the tide. You know “that you will not be saved,” everything is in motion and “you’ve been thinking about obliteration. / All the time [you] spent swept up in its romance.” It is gospel, it is truth, it is “the idiopathic dumbness of dawn.”

And yet, Guest avoids melancholy. This destruction is celebrated for its utter completeness. The beauty is something to behold and it all feels like one long moment where you don’t want to look away. Such bleakness is shared by contemporary poets like Ephraim Scott Summers and James Longenbach. Guest embraces his approach and how few people will see his big picture in, “Eros Poetica”: “Always bad form to announce, this is a poem. / I’m not sure why. As if the few of us / who’ll ever read these lines / might think it anything else: / a letter to a dying monarch; / a guide to constructing something / without discernible parts. Like love.” And in a way, his collection is a guide. A hand to hold through all the bullshit that rolls downhill. A book to hug when we find ourselves in a muddy pit while the privileged look down on us. A part of ourselves that we are afraid to listen to or even consider.

Will Rincon is an MFA candidate for fiction at the University of Central Florida. When he is not depriving himself of sleep, he enjoys board games, anime, and spending time with his family. He highly recommends you watch Battlestar Galactica.

Buzzed Books #71 by Will Rincon

James Longenbach’s Earthling

Few poetry collections can connect with both poetry aficionados and newcomers alike the way Earthling does. Professor and critic, James Longenbach exemplifies contemporary poetry with his fifth collection, one that draws readers in with simplicity into the themes of childhood, mothers, and nihilism. The speakers of these poems wander between reality and metaphor, animals and forests, while memories of mother intrude in poems much like everyday life.

“The Crocodile” explores the perspective of the “pebble worm” and the speaker’s final moments with his mother. “I survived the great extinctions, / I pretended to be myself.”  But, beyond that, primeval themes of hunting, evolution, and self-discovery are explored through the giant lizard. “If called to, I could wait beneath the water a long time. / I could let a bird pick leeches from my tongue…My throat / Was capable of many different sounds but the pleasure / was in keeping it silent, letting parts of me be seen.” The style and the analogy is deft.

Reality is often bent when entering the forest throughout this collection. Dogs disappear with “no shadow, no narrative,” wear raincoats, and run free. They desire to escape, and we are to follow their example, remember what it was to run free in our youth. Subtly, readers find themselves wishing to be lost in the woods and not be tied to the leashes of employment and responsibilities. “Running in circles, / getting tangled in the leash. // It’s hard remaining human in the forest.”  Longenbach’s symbolism is haunting throughout. Dogs and death reappear, echoing the untamed. His love for nature is often reminiscent of Robert Frost with a similar sullen air that reminds us of where we come from.

Ultimately, Longenbach explores what it is to be an earthling with calm, controlled poems rooted in soul and wonder. The truth in his words should make an impression on any reader: “I love you, earth. / What space I inhabit / You’ll fill with water or sky.”

Will Rincon is an MFA candidate for fiction at the University of Central Florida. When he is not depriving himself of sleep, he enjoys board games, anime, and spending time with his family. He highly recommends you watch Battlestar Galactica.

Buzzed Books #70 by Amy Watkins

Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando,

edited by Roy G. Guzmán and Miguel M. Morales

In the aftermath of tragedy, there’s poetry. I don’t know if that’s a universal truth, but it looks like one. Gregory Orr says that poetry exists at the threshold, which is why we feel compelled to write poems in moments of great emotional disturbance, when we’re pushed to our limits, forced to change or confront a hard truth. The Pulse nightclub shooting was a moment of incredible emotional disturbance for Orlando and LGBTQ and Latinx communities worldwide, and it’s no wonder poetry has been part of confronting and expressing shock, anger, sadness, fear, and defiance in the two years since. Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando (Damaged Goods, 2018), edited by Roy G. Guzmán and Miguel M. Morales, is one artifact of that emotional poetic work.

For anyone with even a tangential connection to Pulse, it’s likely to be a hard read. One poet quotes the text messages victims sent their loved ones that night. Another writes in the persona of a mother whose son is killed. Another quotes a family member who says, “They got what they deserved.” But it’s not all fear and sorrow. Many poets in the anthology write about the joys of community, sex and love, self-knowledge and acceptance. Others write defiantly about claiming their places in the world, including the world of poetry, and call out those who would silence their voices or appropriate their experience. Though the anthology is chapbook-sized (and priced), the slim volume took me almost a month to read; each poem carries such raw emotion that I could only read one or two at a time.

In the book’s foreword, the editors write, “We left the typical constraints and expectations of MFA workshops away from our selection process, and for that we are proud.” Some of the poems in the anthology are extremely polished, in the MFA workshop sense; others seem more visceral, less filtered. Some of the poets have significant publishing histories; others are newer to poetry or their accomplishments are in performance rather than page poetry. All of their perspectives are valuable, especially since this anthology serves as both art and artifact. A work of witness, such as this book is, has different requirements, a different job to do than the average anthology or journal issue.

In “Intruder (Home as A Fallacy),” June Beshea writes, “no, love does not protect us against bullets / all this dance and joy do not protect against destruction.” After the Pulse shooting, a mural went up in Orlando: rainbow stripes, 49 birds, Marvin Gaye’s face, and the words “Love conquers hate.” I appreciate the sentiment, but love won’t conquer hate if love is platitudes. If love conquers hate, it will be messy, sorrowing, angry, defiant love–love expressed in all these poems and small acts of kindness, in celebrations and protests, in voting for better political leaders and standing up to small and large-scale bullies. That love might eventually turn civilization toward a better future.

The proceeds from the sale of the anthology will be donated to QTPOC organizations.

Amy Watkins (Episodes 124, 161, 164, 192, and 209) grew up in the Central Florida scrub, surrounded by armadillos and palmetto brush and a big, loud, oddly religious family, a situation that’s produced generations of Southern writers. She married her high school sweetheart, had a baby girl and earned her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. She is the author of Milk & Water (Yellow Flag Press, 2014) and the art editor for Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine.

Buzzed Books #68 by Freesia McKee

Adrienne Rich’s Selected Poems: 1950-2012

When I was a 19-year-old gender studies major, I took my first poetry class. Writing my first burgeoning poems, I tried to connect my lived experiences to what I was learning about feminism. Mid-semester, I had an individual conference with the professor. He asked me if I had heard of Adrienne Rich. You might like her work.

Nearly a decade later, Rich’s work remains, for me, essential reading. Her poetry has taught me that the new ideas may require new poetic forms; the old forms may no longer accommodate the poet. New poems may also require a new approach to setting, pronoun usage, and levels of abstraction.

Rich’s 62 years of poetry are a tour de force. This month, Norton issued Adrienne Rich, Selected Poems: 1950-2012, selected by Albert Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, and Brett C. Miller. Reading Selected Poems provides a useful outline of the 25 books of poetry published in Rich’s lifetime.

Rich’s work seeks to map out constellations of memories and forgettings. Many of the poems in this collection deal with the concept of time: personal time, national time, global time, times of gender and sexual identity, racial time, and dream time. She writes, “This place is alive with the dead and with the living/I have never been alone here.”

As a writer committed to questioning her own assumptions, Rich unsurprisingly also discusses the unreliability of memory. In “Eastern War Time (1989-1990),” she writes, “Memory says:       Want to do right? Don’t count on me.” Memory is a well of information and meaning, but relying on it can hurt us by distorting reality.

In the late 50s, Rich began annotating each poem with the year she wrote it, a practice she continued for the rest of her life. These annotations provide the poems with context, and when we understand the details of Rich’s life, the subject matter of abstract poems becomes clearer.

The eldest child of two sisters, Rich grew up in Baltimore, where she was first homeschooled and then attended private schools in the 1930s and 1940s. Her parents encouraged her intellect, but in some ways, she was a token “smart girl,” trained to please and impress her mentors.

After high school, Rich attended Radcliffe (women weren’t allowed to go to Harvard) and won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize in her early 20s. The poetry she wrote and the life she described in this period is carved and molded, reflecting an early 20^thcentury architecture. The feminist themes are nascent, and would be until her anger bled through the page in her third book Snapshots of a daughter-in-law.

Rich had three sons in her 20s. Motherhood was a role that politicized her. In the selections from her 1969 book Leaflets, we see Rich’s feminist resolve continue to galvanize. The last lines of “On Edges (1969)” read, “I’d rather/taste blood, yours or mine, flowing/from a sudden slash, than cut all day/with blunt scissors on dotted lines/like the teacher told me.” These sentiments are a far cry from her poems written in the early 50s. For example, take these lines from “At a Bach Concert”: “Form is the ultimate gift that love can offer—/The vital union of necessity.”

Readers of Selected Poemswill notice the ways in which Rich later politicized form. Her poems lengthen and become more experimental as time progresses, much in the way that memory itself stretches and folds into layers. Rich began writing sectioned, numbered poems, some of them skipping numbers or presenting them non-chronologically. Part of this departure from convention is connected to greater acceptance of artistic experimentation over the 20^thcentury, but I think Rich also discovered that form is an elastic tool to convey difficult ideas.

Rich’s marriage to Alfred Conrad, a Harvard professor of economics, dissolved in the late 60s. In the early 70s, she came out as a lesbian. This period of Rich’s work marks a shift in course, a move away from imitations of the white male “canon” to a passionate engagement in intertexual feminist conversation. Echoes of Judy Grahn, Audre Lorde, and other feminist geniuses reverberate through Rich’s work.

Like many in the feminist renaissance of the 1970s, Rich reached back, pulling history’s timeline arm-length by arm-length into the present. “Did you think I was talking about my life?/I was trying to drive a tradition up against a wall,” Rich writes in Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib).

Language can be a dangerous terrain, especially for those working at the margins. To be a language worker can mean constantly questioning what we think we know. However, some jobs have physical dangers, and while I think Rich would be the first to point out how many writers have been blacklisted and disappeared even in our own country, she would also point out the privilege of the writer’s safe perch at her desk.

Rich lived a life that in some ways, society didn’t have language for. She was the daughter of a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, a lesbian who was also a mother, a partner in a committed interracial relationship, a woman intellectual. Of her family’s suppression of their Jewish identity, Rich wrote about feeling “split at the root.” As Rich wrote in “XIX” of “Twenty-One Love Poems (1974-1976),” “two women together is work/nothing in civilization has made simple.”

I bring up these examples to highlight how Rich’s poetry measures proximity. Sometimes she uses the currency of memory, sometimes identity. I think that one of Rich’s lifelong critical questions was how someone could besomething, but deny their proximity to it. Even if the denial of identity is done for survival, it is a certain kind of lie. The thinking around this question concerns trauma, safety, and “the truths we are salvaging from/the splitting-open of our lives.”

Rich considered this question from the other side as well, the side of privilege: why do artists supposedly committed to truth telling not involve themselves in real activism? Why do white feminists deny our culpability in white supremacy? How do Americans grapple with the painful truths of nationalistic violence, both here and abroad?

No matter what subject matter she dealt with, Rich committed herself to the heavy lifting required of feminists. Her focus on memory and history didn’t cement her in time. It did the opposite. Rich visioned and revisioned her opinions whenever she learned more. As she wrote in “Sources (1980)”, Rich’s work calls herself and each of us to become “the woman with a mission, not to win prizes/but to change the laws of history.”

Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, Huffington Post, and Sundress Press’s anthology Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity. Freesia lives in North Miami.

Buzzed Books #67 by Freesia McKee

Adrienne Rich’s Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry

In college, I learned as a gender studies major that feminism encourages us to understand our lives in the context of larger social movements. Situating our experiences within larger trends helps sustain emotional and psychological survival.

Adrienne Rich’s Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and published by Norton this month, shows us how Rich spent her lifetime making personal-political connections and communicating the legacies of other feminists. The editor is a feminist literary scholar, and readers with diverse feminist interests will find much to glean from this book.

The institution of motherhood, capitalism, lesbian existence, female tokenism, racism, nationalism, and power are just a few themes Rich tackles. Included is Rich’s extensive commentary about her literary foremothers, among them Dickinson, Hurston, Bishop, Brontë, Rukeyser, de Beauvoir, Chopin, and Woolf. She also engages with her contemporaries: Lorde, Jordan, and Smith-Rosenberg, among them.

The essays themselves are readable, personal, and relevant. Decades after their initial publication, these words remain necessary. As I become an older reader and feminist, occupying new roles in my community, Rich’s prose resonates for me in evolving ways. I found myself extensively annotating even pieces I’d read multiple times before. Part of the joy of reading another’s life’s work is that you can return to it again and again, understanding her growth anew as you change yourself.

To study Rich’s prose is to study a writer committed to the long-game of feminism. “It was an astonishing time to be a woman of my age,” Rich writes of her feminist awakening during the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s in “Split at the Root.” By the time Rich was in her 30s, feminist social dissent confirmed the impulses and analyses she had long pondered.

Rich came out as a lesbian in the 1970s. She began analyzing more deeply the influence of tokenism, sexism and homophobia, and class and racial privilege in her life. Even in her earliest years of writing and publishing, Rich knew that there were “problems for the woman writer: problems of contact with herself, problems of language and style, problems of energy and survival” (“When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision”).

Feminist writers who use the raw material of lived experience tell a powerful story. Rich’s essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” about the “lesbian continuum” examines “why women’s choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, community has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding and disguise.” In this essay, Rich is not simply describing sexual or romantic relationships between women. Her idea of the lesbian continuum encompasses many different kinds of relationships.

Rich goes on to write in this same essay, “If we consider the possibility that all women…exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not.” She frames the lesbian continuum as “the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support.” Many more people fit within this frame than what Rich calls a “mostly clinical,” traditional definition of lesbian.

Rich’s writing about the lesbian continuum is vivid terrain to re-examine now. We can conceptualize the lesbian continuum through “re-vision,” a word that Rich famously discusses in “When We Dead Awaken,” one of her earliest essays. Rich defines revision as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entertaining an old text from a new critical direction.”

We can re-envision Rich’s “lesbian continuum” using queer theory, which challenges the gender binary and moves us away from essentialism. We should do more than simply substitute the word “queer” for “lesbian.” The lesbian continuum could articulate and encompass all the actions, emotions, and existence that lie outside of repetitive patriarchal modes. Rich’s lesbian continuum can represent a socially and historically inclusive vision of queerness, one for which we often still struggle for language.

As we learn through reading her essays, Rich held an unwavering commitment to analyzing her relationship to feminism and revisioning feminism’s role in our evolving world. In Rich’s later life, in the 1990s and 2000s, she wrote extensively about capitalism. She points out in “Arts of the Possible,” “Capitalism lost no time in rearranging itself around this phenomenon called ‘feminism,’ bringing some women closer to centers of power while extruding most others at an accelerating rate… We are learning that only a politics of the whole society can resist such assimilation.”

This quotation speaks to tokenism, a concept with which Rich was well acquainted as a token “smart girl” in the 1930s and 1940s. Tokenism, though, pits the token against the group she came from, dis-identifying her so that she cannot or will not change the power structure. A token gives the illusion of change while maintaining the oppressive apparatus.

CIA Director Gina Haspel, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, and other white token women’s climb toward power and prestige have led to the murders of thousands of people around the world. It’s important that people of all genders cut through capitalism’s co-optation of feminism. We must fight daily for an intersectional feminist existence where no token is allowed to get away with murder.

Feminism, Rich reminds us, is about more than simply filling a seat. She knew that when one is put into a role of authority, it’s important to dissent against oppressive power structures. As one example described in “Arts of the Possible,” Rich refused the prestigious National Medal for the Arts, questioning publically how a country incarcerating more people than anywhere else in the world could give medals to artists.

The lesbian continuum framework helps us think about how relating to one another authentically is, in many ways, policed and punished. Rich’s framework also helps us dream about the world we strive for. Her writing about patriarchy, racism, tokenism, and other social travesties implores us to acknowledge the parts we play in violence and greed. Her writing about feminist literary foremothers and “blood, bread, and poetry” (the original title of one of her prose collections) gives us another kind of map: one that helps us mobilize as feminists.

Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, Huffington Post, and Sundress Press’s anthology Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity. Freesia lives in North Miami.