Letter to Theo

By Sam Ross

Two fighters

sparring under

the park’s biggest hawthorn.

The brow of the smaller split,

red swathe growing wider.

Their violence is

a simulation. And it isn’t.

A Rottweiler

leashed to the tree watches

footwork as if trying

to discern practice

from the real thing,

as if wondering whether

to show allegiance,

pull back the dark curtain

of her lips, join the attack.

But it is evening,

training is over

and when she is untied

she softens, the pink band

of her tongue moving over

the expression of a man

embarrassed of being hurt,

insisting he isn’t, not really.

I think of it later

reading Vincent’s letters

to his brother, his description

of the asylum in San Remy:

walls papered grey-green,

chestnut tapestry slung over

the chair’s worn arm,

a field’s gold ripples

far outside the cell and finally

curtains framing

a barred window:

virescent, flimsy, marked

in a pattern

of faint red roses.

The School of the Future Looks Just Like the Past

By Jiordan Castle

only now bright index cards tetris the windows—teen dreams taped up: Graduate. Get my braces off. Fall in love. Pass gym. Today when I passed by a group of kids stirred the breeze with obscenities, meaning summer had arrived. Like the summer I was thirteen below the ferris wheel at my hometown Y. A boy I hadn’t seen since grade school said nothing before he ignited his lighter against the hard curve of my chin in a broken circle we called our friends. You remember—Whack-a-Mole, the squirt gun game, the claw machine. The belly-up goldfish in a plastic bag. The spark & his grin, a ring toss.

Kawabata has no twin in logic and the poem must be less than knowledge.

By Lena Walker

Like eating hot rice in a downpour,

ducks growing fat on crackers,

calling a fist a lake.

Who doesn’t want to be loved

not for their tenderness,

but for their false teeth?

Who doesn’t envy

the diligence of cattle egret?

Look, here is the blue dress I wore

in that other life.

Here is the mail left unopened.

Here is the flourish of books

unordered on the shelf.

Here is the oval fruit

I eat myself sick on.

after drag

By eae Benioff

priorly a non-compartment

for storage things like rage

rent the non-soul

zoned between the bladder

& gomorrah, & without coordinates

slipped between the fingers like phylacteries

to hypothesize a memory:

in those days, i yearned by rubbing two wishes

on a circle, passion entered my heart through

a vestigial organ, whose somber grating crackled like a radio

into the greater dark, i was thoughtful & happy, preconditions

for the greatest sadness i would know, it spread before me

like a field whose parameters were endless, it was a blessing

without any other likeness, it heaved against my position & i, likewise,

observed my heft.

Essay on Beauty

By Hannah Matheson

i.

“Maudlin” appears in Late Middle English,

deriving originally (read: “sin”)

from the Latin magdalena.

What use are the transitional fossils

of our language? The half-lives

of words in circulation?

Well, let’s say Mary represents

a case study in hunger,

hers and theirs, which together

beget blame. Did you dare

to want the thing grieved?

Did you drink holy wine and wail

at his tomb? We thwart

your desire and we

detest you for it 

ii.

I’ve been telling people

you remind me of someone

as a means of conveying

you are unknown to me but

also a kind of homecoming

I thought it was adjacent to grace,

to recognize someone in someone

else, but the other day it was said

to me, and I hated it: the accusation

of being iterable. And then I hated

that I hated it. How about that,

all of us dying to be original?

iii.

Oh god                another

book cover I’ve got my hair grease

all over; another (self)argument

about pubes, whether I should or

shouldn’t pay literal money

to have a hot tongue

of wax uproot the time

I spent growing older,

capable of nudity.

If I hate beauty, its spliced

tape, why do I wallow

when I feel unbeautiful?

Possibly we hate Mary because

she was wanted, because when she lost

what she wanted she wanted

to cry. If I pretend to exist

outside this economy plotting

aesthetic against desire

in order to determine price,

I lie. Like her, weep

to mourn perished principles

or consummate a pitiful

performance. My mouth waters

after beauty, because, yes, I still want

you to look at me and love me

as is, to long for me specifically

like this. For ex. when I was

approaching pubescence

my mother was horrified by my stomach

had never heard of a happy trail

but I found it lovely, like

stepping stones in a lazy

river, dough-soft morass

of my belly. Would I want

to be more aerodynamic,

less labyrinthine? The truth is

I’m partial to this body composed

of pathways, corridors: birth canal,

esophagus, aorta, etcetera.

A poet I know once said he’s so tired

of hearing the word “body” 

in poems and I agree,

but what stands in for the

physical fact of the body?

Alternate corpora:

a butter sculpture,

a bloodbag, a hive

of apologies.

iv.

This etymology of appetite

ends in profligate tears,

whorish sadness.

v.

Oh       once again

I have wearied the hem of this morning 

God     how do you trust

life to be more than a mouth

opening and closing?

from Umbels

By Iris Cushing

In the winter, there were days in which

I never stepped outside. Enclosure

in nourishment and texture. Kitchen,

soft bed, warm water, wood carried up

from the basement to the fireplace.

A day when, your node newly rooted

in me, I couldn’t get my car out

of the snow piled beside the road.

Now the turn from night to day becomes

porous. The windows always open.

When it rains, your father and I take

off our clothes and run in the high grass.

Our skin lets the world into your house.

Bruce Smith & Hunter’s Poetry MFA

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“Spill” is a book of political implication — as opposed to being a book that is overtly political. The crosscurrents of American culture all sort together in the poems, from classic soul music to literary criticism to economics to oblique autobiography. The centerpiece of the collection is a prose-memoir. The poem’s persona worked as a teacher at the Lewisburg penitentiary and it tells “the sentimental education of a young man comedically portrayed as a neophyte” to both the inmates and the historical events sweeping him up: the Vietnam war, the draft to which he is subject to and the counterculture of the 60’s (which really got underway in the 70’s). “Spill” is self-portraiture doubling as a portrait of the age. At least the age from the point of view of someone interested in the blues, jazz, philosophy “prison narratives, captivity narratives, slave narratives, puritan conversion narratives,” and all of this as an attempt to come to terms with the  “construction question of the other.” That other, as it turns out, includes the speaker, who seems to both mock and believe in the role of the poet as being in solidarity with whoever the other is at any particular moment in history. For that’s the rub, as Smith well knows, identities are fluid, history is fluid, the victims keep changing faces and the perpetrators always see themselves as victims. The kaleidoscopic way that moral perspectives keep changing in the poems is their ultimate claim to moral authority.  The rapid shifts in idiom and reference, the way the poems move among many registers of experience, and the impressionistic quality of the writing — as opposed to its objective grounding in lyric narrative — is how these poems embody the queasy sense that the victims and perpetrators turn into one another with unsettling ease. That said, the prison in the long prose-memoir is of course a real prison, and it speaks to Michelle Alexander’s vision of America as a vast penal colony in which mainly African American men are the inhabitants of a gulag. And so the poem’s use of music as a way out of the self and history, and into a transhistorical place where we could all lose our differences is never actually achieved. It always remains a potentiality as opposed to a genuine source of cultural cohesion.  And this is why the poems themselves rove over so much linguistic terrain line to line and why the development is highly associative. They are trying to capture a tone of living and feeling that you can only grasp in the time that it takes you to read the poem. The poets longing for transhistorical and transcultural understandings through music keeps running against the moment when the song ends. Outside of the poem and by extension outside of the realm of artistic perception there isn’t a way to discover a common meeting ground. This book would seem to say that you can talk all you want about politics and justice and freedom and all other high-minded ideals but the problem at the root is always the authoritarian need of both Right and Left to control the story. That’s why Smith’s poems are so unusual and so necessary. They embody the contradictions they have no impulse to resolve and by leaving them unresolved the poems leave behind the impulse to try to force the utopian vision, Right or Left, down the reader’s throat. “Spill” shows us what it means to be responsive to all sides at once, disposed to be negatively, as opposed to positively, capable.

— Tom Sleigh

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Solar: The centerpiece of “Spill,” the lyric essay/prose memoir “Lewisburg,” moves between modes of lyric and essay with a really kind of wonderful swing.  It’s a striking shift from the poems that precede it, as it spills or manages its spill very differently. Could you talk a bit about the poem’s form and how it came to take that shape?

Bruce Smith: Working back to what was said in the introduction about “prison narratives, captivity narratives, slave narratives,” there’s some of that story that I think I tamp down a little bit when I do the poems on either end [of “Lewisburg”]. It’s more a beat that I’m following in the other poems. But [in Lewisburg] I thought, here’s a chance to tell that story: “I got out and turned to words.” I don’t know how you feel about this but the “I” is always hot for me. So the narrative form wants to allow that to happen. But to just do that was to insist on an “I” that was in process and fluid in terms of being determined. So after that I was going to do a little tap dance about the age, the context in which I found myself — both in central Pennsylvania with Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine, and Republican politics, and then in the jail which is so dramatically different, with a dominant black population, the Berrigans and the anti-war movements and the inroads of other kinds of consciousnesses of the age. So I wanted to intentionally linger on the “I” narrative but then leap to another mode — modal and acoustic moves rather than straightforward narrative moves.

Solar: In terms of the content of the lyric essay, how do you get to the point where you realize “okay, this isn't a poem or a series of poems, this is something larger that I need to delve into in a different way...” How do you get to the point where you realize the content needs the lyric essay as opposed to other forms?

Bruce Smith: I think we're poets first. We see the world in that way. I didn't know what it [“Lewisburg”] was going to be. I was just going to record in a way I'm reluctant to do, which is to place it in time. In lyric poems I'm always out of time or inside but jumping around. It's all dance and mystery. I think at some point [in the poem] I say that I was now being relied on as a witness. Usually I was relied on as being a knucklehead, nothing was asked of me in that regard as a football player, so to be a witness was revelatory to me. It seemed I had to do justice to that time and to put it in time. But it would be completely boring to do things straight-ahead, like “and then I drove in to teach the inmates...” I think I talk about the teaching very little because what was interesting were those moments of fugue: the I Ching moments, listening to my teacher's aid “S” talk about music, or talk about Timothy Leary and psychedelics, or talk about his first offense, possession for marijuana — he got 20 years — so to talk about his court case and talk about his life... I wanted to do the work of time but I also wanted those fugues and digressions, they're important.

Solar: I noticed that in your poems you don't seem so interested in “I must explain this to you” but in the lyric essay it seems a lot more “No, you must understand what happened” — is that a benefit of the lyric essay?

Bruce Smith: Yes, I think so. I don't think you want to read a Puritan conversion narrative that’s all lyrical flights. I think you want some of the ‘this actually happened…’ I think that’s a compelling part of [the lyric essay.] It’s also interesting in the texture of the lyric essay to have “what did people smuggle into the jail?” I want to know that. For instance, why did tropical fruit lifesavers get to be fetishistic objects that you would kill for? But I didn’t say “the value system was rather skewed,” I would say “the palm frond…” It’s the power of the lyric…

Solar: The lyric essay does seem to be something poets have a love-hate relationship with…

Bruce Smith: I did get editing help from a former student who was going to make it more essay, who’d say: “get rid of your flights of fancy here,” and ask instead, “what happened then?” When I was writing the essay I always kept that voice in my head. I had to please him too. You keep that poetry voice, Emily Dickinson, over here, and then over there you keep the old-school newspaper editor with the cigar too, saying, you know, “give me the copy!” [Laughter]

Solar: I was curious about the length of time between the lived experience and the construction of the essay —

Bruce Smith: 40 years! [Laughter]

Solar: What was the catalyst that brought it together at that point in time?

Bruce Smith: I don’t have a really good answer. Frank Bidart said something like “you hate the book that you wrote beforehand and psychologically, in order to begin your new book, you kind of have to turn your back on what you’ve done and do something different.” I thought that “Devotions” was a little prolix, you know, too many notes. So I was going to write a formative, foundational story about what hurt me into poetry. Like Auden said about Yeats: “mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” I was asking myself at some point, “what the hell am I doing, how did I get into this,” and I kept returning to the Jail. The language of the jail, things under pressure — like identity under pressure, the soul — forces that were colliding at that time. And those were places that I had never really explored. I describe the prison chapters [of “Spill”] as a history of my ignorance — going into the jail so ignorant that I didn’t know the extent of my ignorance. There’s an encounter I mention in the book where the Muslims are doing grammar exercises from a programmed workbook and I correct them on their grammar and they say to me “whose grammar?” So every encounter was a daily interrogation of my grammar, my whiteness, my privilege…

Solar: You were writing a novel on and off for a while, how does that play into this poem, did you learn anything from that process?

Bruce Smith: Yes, that I’m really bad at writing a novel [Laughter]. I think the novel was a way to show myself that I couldn’t do it, that I had to return to poetry. It was something to push back against, to find what propelled the lyric poem. It was like trying to cook a roast in order to learn that I just wanted a rice bowl.

Solar: When it comes to ordering the poems into a manuscript, how do you think about putting them together?

Bruce Smith: I’m particularly bad. My energy and focus seems to be on the poem and I really have to rely on others a good deal when it comes to the ordering of those poems. When Dickinson sent her stuff to Higginson, she said something like “I could not weigh myself.” I really do have to rely on other readers. For instance, in “Spill,” the section after “Lewisburg” originally preceded it. But the people who read it said “no, you’re wrong.” And of course your first reaction is “who are you to tell me, fuck you, it’s my poem,” and then about a week later I made the switch because I realized oh yeah you wouldn’t want to enter the book that way. The juice from the individual poems comes from you but the ordering mind is a different mind. I’m an old guy, I should know by now but I still get help. I used to have three people: one was a tough line editor, one was a kind of metaphysician, and then I always wanted to have a female sensibility, someone different from me. So I still try to do that. When I think I have a sequence, I ask them what they think. Outsourcing is what I’m suggesting. [Laughter]

Solar: I’m interested in the four grounding epigraphs at the beginning of “Spill,” had they been bouncing around in your mind as you wrote “Spill” or did you realize, after you had finished, that they might be a way to help ground the book?

Bruce Smith: In the poems of “Black Magic” Amiri Baraka was still called LeRoi Jones at the time, and it was such a great, subversive book and so important to the African American inmates. So I had that quote of his, and then the others were like the other three on my all-star poetry basketball team: Dickinson, Herbert, Stevens, Baraka. The four compass points; my North-South-East-West. The devotional Herbert, the radical Baraka — I have mixed feelings about all of them in a way and yet they are polarities that I wanted to bring together to say: you might read the book through this lens, one of these lenses, or all of them.

Solar: In an interview with Peter Mishler, you talk about these four epigraphs, and you say “Stevens is a mentor and tormentor. He’s the vortex and engine of an exotic imagination, an originator of a ‘curious puffing’ and a demon who I want to hate…” Can you explain the demon part of that?

Bruce Smith: [Laughter] Well, let’s see. So we love Stevens for his imaginative prowess, that God and the imagination are one, and yet there was something about his magisterial heights, particularly in the later work of his, the old philosopher in Rome kind of thing, that I resist in some ways. So “Mentor and Tormentor”… I like those early poems. That poem I quote, “curious puffing” which is “The Plot Against the Giant” you know the end, where the third girl says: “Oh, la...le pauvre! / I shall run before him, / With a curious puffing.” I think it’s poetry’s way to subdue the giant. I love those poems from that part [of Stevens]. And I think all of them are in a way mentors and tormentors. What’s your relationship with Stevens?

Solar: He was the first poet I really fell in love with.  More like you, with the lyric side of Stevens rather than the philosopher side of Stevens.

Bruce Smith: Don’t you find you have to like eventually kill Stevens and eat him? I mean prepare him well of course, like a nice dish, not just leave him there like a dead raccoon but you have to internalize him and then you can…[Laughter]

Solar: I was curious about how you think about structure and phrasing in your poems. I noticed especially in “Devotions,” there would often be a refrain that would pop in at an early part of the poem and then we would abandon it for a very long time, with these long sprawling sentences, and then it would return toward the end — or a motif would do that — is this something you actively think about in the drafting process, or is it that you simply follow the poem wherever it goes?

Bruce Smith: I think it’s more of the latter. I thought of the book before “Devotions,” as death by craft, you know? It got crafty, small and well made, and no one will say anything bad about them because they are really well made. [Laughter] The idea with “Devotions” was to let more in. To have a second thought, and to let the second thought also in, and maybe even a third thought, a digression on the second thought. You used the word motif. Sometimes it’s an acoustic motif — that I’m going to grab that sound again. Sometimes I’ll find myself asking “how did I get here in the middle of the New Jersey Pine Barrens with only ketchup packets??” [Laughter] Do you remember that part in the Sopranos? It’s like “how did I get here and how do I get myself out of it,” so I would go back and mine the language and ask myself what was I about, what was the impulse that got me where I am? Motif is a really good way to understand that and I think those are reader friendly acts too. If there’s a tick there’s a tock...

Solar: That plays out in some of the more narrative poems, “Devotion: Baseball,” for example, or even the poem “Devotion: The Garment District” …

Bruce Smith: Can I read the laundromat poem?

Solar: That’d be great!

Bruce Smith: This is the first poem in “Devotions,” it’s called “Devotion: Coin-Op.” The first line is “When I can’t make or do anything” so it’s that moment that we all have in our writing where we’re stuck. It’s an Ars Poetica in that way. Of course, it’s about this coin-op laundromat in Boston. When I had a grant-year and I was living in Boston I would lug my stuff there and sit. It was such a great space. It was a clean space. Making a clean space, Seamus Heaney talks about that — that the job of poetry is perhaps to do that. Also “Walla,” in radio and TV is a sound effect meant to imitate a crowd murmuring.

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Solar: One of the things that happens in “Spill,” “The Other Lover,” “Devotions,” and all of the work really, is this kind of genius for mixed idiom, can you talk about that?

Bruce Smith: I’m interested in that range. Like in “Devotion: Coin-Op,” I’m interested in entering the world of the laundromat with Spanish soap operas playing and Ethiopian shirt-dress tumbling. It seemed to be a particularly American, Whitmanesque moment where our garments are being tossed together like this and in that way who we are, our costumes… So that’s provocative for going high and low in the language. Maybe the metaphor is jazz, where you lay down this groove and then you play high and low off of that. I like that mix.

Solar: I know you have a huge number of reference books, particularly of slang, could you tell us about that?

Bruce Smith: Let’s see, my favorite reference book is “The Slang of Sin,” it has great illustrations by Istvan Banyai. I’ll just read you the chapters: Chapter 1: Alcohol, Chapter 2: Gambling, Chapter 3: Drugs, Chapter 4: Horse Racing—Sex, Deadly Sins, Crime, The Wages of Sin. For me it’s the culture pushed through the sieve of language. For instance, nurse slang, I just heard this one “Mrs. White’s gone camping” and it’s slang for “put in an oxygen tent,” or “put in a pre-ventilator condition.” I also liked “Mrs. White is an M.I.” which meant monetary insufficiency in nurse slang. I think slang becomes this really great vehicle to be able to talk about the worst things. Cop and nurse slang do this all the time — to have to deal with death in your job everyday, you develop this supple medium that is encoded to your peers, and yet eloquent about what’s happening. So yeah, “The Slang of Sin” is a must. [Laughter]

Solar: What gets you first into the poem, do you pick out your slang and build your poem or do you start from a higher demon?

Bruce Smith: Nothing higher. It’s mostly the language. I was listening to Rakim do his Tiny Desk Concert and he said “check the intellect and inspect the thighs” and that’s something I wrote down. I don’t know if it’s the kind of metaphorical phrase I will use [Laughter] but I think it’s language first and then from there I see if that’s provocative of something else. “Shot dead in the middle of Little Italy, little did we know that we riddled some middlemen who didn’t do diddly.” That’s Big Pun. Again, I just love that phrase. It’s never going to appear but I love the force of the quadruple rhyme. More now, in this book, I’m interested in rhyme. I have a couple ballads. I have a couple unfashionable rhyming things. I don’t want to be dismissive of the demon stuff but I like the collision of language. Sometimes, like Tom said, the high and the low, the Stevens versus Big Pun, can get me some fission, some spark…

Solar: How does the sonnet, as with Herbert, play into your thinking about form, and rhyme, and where to break the line in conversation with that form?

Bruce Smith: I find that the sonnet is really instructive to me. As you said, here’s the phrase and then how are you going to bend that around the line. Walcott says: “Rhyme remains the parentheses of palms shielding a candle's tongue, it is the language's desire to enclose the loved world in its arms.” I’m interested in how that can work for you formally and then how you can break it. How you can ruin it and from those cracks that you’re making the light gets in.

Solar: In the “Other Lover,” there’s as much narrative, semantic insistence as there is sonic, and then that shifts in “Devotions” toward, it seems to me, more of a preponderance of the sonic. “Spill” seems to split the difference between the two. Could you speak a bit about that?

Bruce Smith: That’s often the struggle, haiku and hysteria, the two poles. Or you know, the overwhelming beyond language experience — in prison, in the I Ching, in music — and then the language catching up to that. I think it’s about immersing myself in the medium more, rather than strictly one of those two poles. Adam Zagajewski, in his book of essays, calls it “fabric” and “statement.” Sometimes it’s fabric, acoustic fabric, but there’s also a pull to have what he calls the statement. So when I look at it, especially the poems that follow the prison section in the middle, I think they’re trying to figure that out. Like “Meat,” is the first poem after “Lewisburg” and my note says: “the crisis of art making, the crisis of identity, the physical body versus the aspiring body…” Maybe I should just write notes instead of poems. [Laughter]

Solar: I’m always fascinated by how artists work and what kind of schedules they structure for their creation, do you have a writing schedule, do you have techniques for getting into writing?

Bruce Smith: I ask my students, are you an ox or a cat in your work habits? The cat sleeps all day and gets up at night and hunts. The ox gets up at sunrise, plows, and makes the line. I think I am more of an ox. When I go out to dinner with Tom Sleigh I try to appear like a cat [laughter] but I’m really a very boring ox. I get up at five-thirty in the morning and I walk the dog for an hour and sometimes I’ll leave a message for Tom in chalk when I go by and then I try to have those hours where I look at my notebook, and I often do these writings where I try not to lift [the pen] and I try to fill a page, but I’m also trying to see what’s in the notebook from last time and what I’m gathering from my reading. I’ve been reading “These Fevered Days” by Martha Ackmann on Emily Dickinson, and I finished “2666” by Roberto Bolaño, Hanif Abdurraqib’s “Go Ahead in the Rain” about Tribe Called Quest, and I never read Denis Johnson’s last book “The Largess of the Sea Maiden;” it’s beautiful and moving. I read “Camera Lucida” by Barthes, “So Rich, So Poor” by Peter Edelman… so I go to those books to generate and for phrases. I’ll try to work until noon. I’m on a crazy intermittent diet because of my wife [Laughter] so I’ll go down and eat something at noon and then I’ll go back at it again and try to write some more.

Solar: Do you have a commonplace book where you put phrases? And when you say you have a page-full, what’s in that page?

Bruce Smith: Once I can generate a draft, I type it up and put it on the wall but a lot of it is just the commonplace book, writing down my I Ching for the day — there’s a great new translation by David Hinton of the I Ching that’s more poetry than scholarly. One of the things that I do is I put drafts of poems on the wall. I used to be married to a print-maker and she used to make a print and put it up on the wall. That way she would see it and make changes to it all the time. When I would write a draft I used to put it in my notebook and then I would never see it. So with the help of OfficeMax, I now have clipboards where I place the drafts and there’s always something I’m working on. I put it up [on the wall] so when I come up the stairs I can see it and start to work on it that way.

Solar: In the Lit Hub interview, you say “inspiration is for suckers.” I love that. Can you elaborate on that?

Bruce Smith: Well, I don’t necessarily believe that you should sit on the train, on the way to your job, and wait for an angel to come in, kiss you on the forehead, bring you a latte and then suddenly you’re inspired. I guess I was making fun of that kind of inspiration. I do think the work that you described, the work with gathering language and resisting language, I think those resistances are very important. When I say, “work the work” I mean really get down to the language-word-syllable level. For me, that’s more conducive, it foments more for me than inspiration. I don’t really know what inspiration is for me. I know Lorca, duende, the angel, but for me it comes in the very tactile way of language. Even writing long-hand on paper, the physicality of that is greater than the angel or the muse.

Solar: One of the things I was wondering about — because “Spill” is so referential and because you have the index as the closing poem — is whether you thought about including a notes section, something a little more directive in it.

Bruce Smith: When I read here at Syracuse that was a complaint, students would get up and ask questions and it was always: “how come your references are super obscure, I had to look up so many things?” I hope some of those we can share, have in common — Nina Simone, or Marvin singing at the NBA all-star game. In my mind it is immediate for me. When Marvin Gaye sang it was an immediate shaking of the foundations. And going back to the Chitlin’ Circuit when Marvin Gaye was out there singing in all black clubs — that’s a history that I would like people to know. On one shoulder there’s that person saying “the references become a mask, stop doing that.” That kind of talk… 

Solar: Yesterday in class, this came up, it was exactly this question. One of the poems had a reference to Joe Exotic and Tiger King. It was an interesting conversation because the question became, what do you do with these contemporary references? But “The Day Lady Died” is probably as obscure as “The Wasteland.” Nobody knows who Mal Waldron was, The Five Spot, who Billie Holiday was. What do you think of all that, does the poem have the right to know things that the reader doesn’t?

Bruce Smith: Think of the referential work that Pound does. Seeing one recently, I had this “Oh my god, this is all referential of Provençal poets and troubadours!” So for me I like the rich cultural context of it. I think that’s what happens with O’Hara: I do this / I do that / I go out and get a bottle of Strega — but this horizontal in the poem is interrupted by that place at the end, so it’s referential but it also does that break. I think when the references work well they have some other function besides requiring a Wikipedia search. My graduate students at Syracuse taught that poem to undergraduates and they had the same problem. The way they dealt with it was to watch a lot of YouTube. But I don’t mean it to be a secondary experience. I really think of it as a primary experience. Ravi Shankar apparently played with the Beatles once and he was tuning his sitar — this is the story I heard — and everybody in the crowd applauded like crazy, and he said “I hope you like the playing as much as you like the tuning.” I think that’s the idea of white people listening to the sitar for the first time and not knowing what the hell is going on —

Solar: That was at Woodstock, right?

Bruce Smith: That’s right! I guess I heard it on the album or the film. There’s a reference!

Solar: I know, somebody might think that it’s a bird in a Peanuts cartoon. [Laughter] In reading “Spill” it does feel like your laundry poem in “Devotions.” It feels like all this culture mixing together. I have a request. Most of the references I knew. I felt like I was reading my diary in a certain way, except I had never seen Marvin Gaye at the all-star game. I’m not a big sports person but I watched it today and I went back to the poem “Marvin Gaye Sings the National Anthem, 1983,” and it was such a knockout! I can’t believe I missed such a big cultural event. Would you read the Marvin Gaye poem?

Bruce Smith: That’s really helpful to me, thank you, I would love to. I’ll say a few things that I probably wouldn’t say otherwise. One obstacle [with that poem was]: how do I introduce basketball and basketball playing to poetry people? The other thing I want to say is that I heard that the origin of the word “nomenclature,” Roman in origin, refers to the servants of Roman dignitaries who were called nomenclators. The dignitaries would have these servants run ahead and introduce them to the other dignitaries walking in the streets of Rome and then the servants would come back. So, for me, the act of nomenclature as this going back and forth is what references do when they work well.

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Solar: You have some references to visual art in “Spill,” how has that art form influenced your poetry?

Bruce Smith: Living in Syracuse I’m not so much a New York museum-goer but I still find [visual art] interesting as another language, primarily. I remember talking to Stanley Kunitz about this and he told me that photographers often wanted to get his poems and collaborate but he always resisted because he felt that photographs had their own vocabulary, syntax, and grammar. I think that’s true for me. It’s fascinating to hear artists talk about their work. They’re either absolutely fascinating or absolutely at a loss for what to say like “I don’t know, I just needed a bridge shape there.” I think that’s the same with poems, like “I don’t know, I needed to put some laundry in my poem at the end” like Neruda did in “Walking Around” where the laundry is hanging up “from which slow dirty tears are falling.”

Solar: I love the idea of art as another language.

Bruce Smith: I’m just learning on Duolingo, I’m up to lesson three on art. [Laughter]

Solar: In that interview with Peter Mishler you talk about Philip Guston and his drawings of Richard Nixon. The quote is great, Philip Guston says “so when the 1960s came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world” — and what I assume Guston is talking about here is that he’s been an abstract artist now for awhile and he suddenly wants to go back to figurative work, suddenly he’s starting to draw more caricature, and he’s done a whole series of what looks like Ku Klux Klan hoods, anyway, the quote continues — “what kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything — and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue? I thought there must be some way I could do something about it.” And then, Bruce, what you say is “I didn’t wanted to be a man adjusting a red to a blue.” Can you talk about that a bit?

Bruce Smith: I guess, again, it’s the impulse of being an aesthete, being tied up in your color scheme versus this feeling of a larger rage. Turning less to the colors and making those fine-tuned adjustments, and more to address the character and caricature of the people, to have them be more representational and grotesque. So I think there are the two urges: you want to make something beautiful, you want to have your colors, but you also want to say something about Trump…

Solar: I’m thinking right now of your Nina Simone poem in 1960’s Harlem “Are You Ready to Smash White Things?” but also of your gestures to music throughout “Spill” and even in our conversation, your analogy to the jazz piano … Often your references feel to me like many songs carried forward in another song — I wonder if you can identify a particularly instructive moment of music, formative to your poetry, where you perhaps thought “I wish I could do that.”

Bruce Smith: When I meet real jazz heads who really know their jazz, like when I talk to Fred Moten, it’s clear that I don’t know Jazz. But I do like the idea of improvising within the tradition that jazz affords and for me that’s the impulse. But concurrent with any kind of scholastic notion of poetry was the early rhythm and blues people that I grew up with in Philadelphia. There were these two great radio stations WDAS and WHAT. WDAS had Georgie Woods “the man with the goods” and he would play Otis Redding, Etta James and Solomon Burke. Solomon Burke was someone who was really influential to me. My dad — who came back from the Second World War believing in integration and childhood education and became an elementary school teacher — would take me to hear Solomon Burke, a 13-year-old kid who was preaching with a full tabernacle choir behind him. That just rewired my cerebellum forever. Solomon Burke, listen to him and you’ll be a fan too. I had so little poetry as a high school student. I think it was early R&B as much as Eliot. It was the power of that song, the power of Etta James. Like Whitman experienced too, I think, the voice going full-tilt — that’s why I love the song of section 26 “Now I do nothing but listen.” That voice.

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This interview was conducted as a virtual conversation between Hunter’s poetry MFA students (Jenna Breiter, Christine Degenaars, Grayson Wolf, Mari Pack, Jamie Smith, Kate Levin, Michael Jefferson, Vanessa Ogle, Sam Reichman, Tess Congo, Ryan Clinesmith) Hunter MFA faculty (Tom Sleigh, Donna Masini, Catherine Barnett) and the poet Bruce Smith.

Maybe I’m Just Simple, Real, and Human After All

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Robert Lax. Photo by Ad Reinhardt, 1958. Courtesy of the Ad Reinhardt Foundation

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By Alex Dimitrov

My title is a sentence Ad Reinhardt wrote toward the end of one of his writings called “The Artist in Search of an Academy, Part Two: Who are the Artists?” It’s nine o’clock on a Sunday. I’m thinking of everyone who can’t be with me this morning, listening to the Laudate psalms on iTunes, making tea, and writing this here about Robert Lax and Ad Reinhardt (who can’t be with us), art and people (who are with us), art and art (perhaps), and art—where does it come from, what does it know (at any point during this I may walk out of my apartment in New York—Allen and Houston—and have a walk to take a look).

The poet Robert Lax and Ad Reinhardt met in the 1930s as undergraduates at Columbia University. What interests me about their close and lifelong friendship, other than the obvious creative force of the poet and the painter sharing similar concerns and finding each other in one lifetime, is the impersonal way in which their work wrestles with the most personal and serious questions. Here’s one.

How do we live in reality (why do we live in reality)?
How do we live in reality (why do we live in reality)?
How do we live in reality (why do we live in reality)?

For me this is a spiritual question (for Lax it may have been a Catholic one, a Jewish one—he explored both religions at different times—certainly a mystical one—for Reinhardt it may have had to do with form, in how form is a disciplined devotion faithful to wrestling with the unknowable). It’s also a question that flits through my mind when reading many of Lax’s poems (though especially his 1962 collection, New Poems, and 1981’s Nights & Days), and a question that Reinhardt’s black paintings point to (though they may not point anywhere specifically—for me, they’ve always seemed activated by the viewer’s own unconscious, fears, fantasies). It’s a question that, in any case, is central to my life as a poet today.

I’m not sure what reality is or why it’s here. Similarly, I’m not sure what art is or why it has to do with us. I think these are two more concerns Lax and Reinhardt think through in their work, and respond to differently. Looking through scans of Reinhardt’s personal writings on art, in a folder he labeled “Art-as-Art Dogma,” on a sheet of notes, he’s typed out the following: “Art comes from art alone, always, everywhere, never from life, reality, nature, earth, or heaven. Art has only its own formal problems and attentions. Visions, images, symbols, representations, sensations, impulses.” Suddenly we find ourselves in another world. This is where Reinhardt has taken us. A world with its own rules and allegiances, a world divorced from ours, though surely we need to be in this one as Reinhardt was and you and I are, to perceive or imagine the other.

In the 1985 exhibition catalog for Reinhardt’s Timeless Painting, Lax writes:

I’m beginning to think
r was wrong

not r, but an idea i had
of him that i practically
worshipped

that said life was the
opposite of art

& art was the opposite
of life

& proud of it

but i think life
has something 
to do with art

& it’s just a matter
of finding

the special point

at which the
two of them
get together.

And I have to tell you, at this point I’d rather be having dinner with Reinhardt and Lax instead of writing this. Because art-making in my mind is haunted by this “special point,” where what we know (our lives) and what we don’t know (what art attempts to give shape to, not fill in) meet, or maybe not, perhaps they touch or glance or mimic one another’s difference. Both of these artists dedicated a huge part of their lives to giving shape to the unknowable. What I find radical and moving about Lax’s poetry is his commitment to the repetition of a limited number of words, when a poet could use many (the first poem in New Poems consists of the usage of only 7 different words), and often times words that are signifiers for the most ineffable of human experiences or impulses: “death,” “never,” “is,” “yes,” “no”—Lax fills entire pages in New Poems with only these words—over and over, one after the other. As much as these poems are thinking about form (his focus on the column rather than the line), and may be conceptually driven, they’re mantras obsessed with the reality that we have been thrown into bodies, put under a sky (another word—“sky”— which Lax fills the page with), and given time—Time—to contend with. That’s what I felt and couldn’t say when I first looked at one of Reinhardt’s black paintings in New York, in the summer of 2008, at an exhibition the Guggenheim called “Imageless: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting.” Time. Reality. Life. What is that. What is that. What is that. And this is what it feels like looking at a Reinhardt black painting now, in 2013 (this is my favorite Lax poem, from New Poems):

the first goodbye
the second goodbye
the third goodbye
the fourth goodbye
the fifth goodbye
the seventh goodbye
the eighth goodbye
the ninth goodbye
the tenth goodbye
the eleventh goodbye
the twelfth goodbye
the hundred & twenty-first goodbye
the hundred & forth-fourth goodbye
the hundred & eighty-ninth goodbye
goodbye
goodbye
goodbye

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This essay was originally published in the 2014 Ad Reinhardt Centennial Issue of the Brooklyn Rail.

Contributors

eae Benioff is a trans poet, socialist, and service worker. eae lives in Brooklyn.

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Jiordan Castle is the author of the 2020 chapbook All His Breakable Things. A Pushcart-nominated essayist and poet, her work has appeared in Hobart, New Ohio Review, Third Point Press, Verdad, Vinyl, and elsewhere online and in print. She is a resident poet and essayist for the LA-based quarterly food and culture magazine Compound Butter, as well as writer and curator of the Pigeon Pages quarantine-inspired series The Long Pause… Jiordan has an MFA in Poetry from Hunter College and currently lives in New York City with her fiancé and their dog.

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Iris Cushing is a poet, scholar, educator and founding editor for Argos Books, an independent poetry press. She is the author, most recently, of Into the Long Long Time: How Mary Korte Saved the Trees (Ink Cap Press, 2019) and The First Books of David Henderson and Mary Norbert Korte: A Research (Ugly Duckling Presse, forthcoming 2020). She lives in the Western Catskill mountains.

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Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, Love and Other Poems, which will be published by Copper Canyon Press in February of 2021, Together and by Ourselves, and Begging for It. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Paris Review, and Poetry. In addition to NYU, he has taught writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and Barnard College. Previously, he was the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the popular series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine. With Dorothea Lasky he is the co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac. He lives in New York. 

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Hannah Matheson is an MFA candidate in Poetry at New York University, where she is a reader and assistant social media editor for the Washington Square Review. Previously awarded scholarships to attend The Frost Place Conference on Poetry, Hannah’s work has been published or is forthcoming in The Dartmouth, Four Way Review, and Pigeon Pages.

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A finalist for the Thom Gunn Award, Sam Ross's first book Company was selected by Carl Phillips for the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. 

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Bruce Smith is the author of six books of poems. The Other Lover was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. Devotions, the winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize and finalist for National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and LA Times Book Award precedes his latest book, Spill. He teaches in the MFA program at Syracuse University.

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Lena Walker lives and writes in Maryland.