CHRISTINA PUGH: The Next Big Thing

What is the title of your book?

Grains of the Voice.  Visit its Amazon page here.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

The title alludes to Roland Barthes’s essay called “The Grain of the Voice.”  In it, Barthes discusses what excites him in certain opera performances:  “… the grain, the grain of the voice when the latter is in a dual posture, a dual production—of language and of music.”

I’ve tried to locate that liminal “grain” by writing short poems that are influenced by the sonnet tradition--and that host spectral lines from pop songs and from poets like Milton and Shakespeare .

  

What genre does your book fall under?

Lyric poetry.  In particular: poems that are influenced by, or “ghosts” of, the sonnet tradition.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

They’d be musicians rather than actors:  Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, Mark Kozelek, Duran Duran, Mono (the Japanese post-rock band).  Not that there are really any characters as such.

 What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

From the book’s back cover:  “The human voice, musical instruments, the sounds produced by the natural and man-made worlds—all serve at one time or another as both the framework of poems and the occasion for their lightning-quick changes of direction, of tone, of point of reference.”

 

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

The book has just been published by Northwestern University Press (TriQuarterly Books).

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I don’t number drafts, and I don’t tend to time things in quite that way.  But the entire process took several years from start to finish.

What other books would you compare this book to within your genre?

David Biespiel’s Wild Civility; Eamon Grennan’s The Quick of It; Josh Corey’s Severance Songs.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The eternally prismatic sonnet tradition in English poetry, especially Milton’s “On His Blindness.”  The enduring inspiration of singers like Young and Harris.  And just the rapture of musicality in the everyday--something I’m always trying to preserve.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

There’s a cross-dressing lotus flower, mascara spilled on the beach, and cameo appearances by Thomas Jefferson and Jacques Derrida.

I was tagged by Daniel Bosch.  I hereby tag: Chris Green 

Click on the names above to read about these writers' Next Big Things.

THE NEXT big THING!

My Last Not Very Big Thing Self-Interview

Thank you Andrea Cohen for tagging me.  Check out her self-interview here!

The title of my book is Octaves.  It's actually a pretty small thing! (see photo)

The idea for the book came from writing more than 32 mock-triolets over the course of a summer.

The genre of Octaves is short lyric poetry. 

No human actors could play parts in a movie rendition of Octaves.  There are no parts to play in the book.  But if a movie or a film-strip version of Octaves were to be made, and if it required a voice-over, my spouse would appreciate it very much if Ralph Fiennes, Ryan Gosling, and Michael Fassbender could be convinced to record the poems, each actor taking on one of its three signatures.

Octaves does not lend itself to synopsis.  It can be described, however, as 32 short poems in the same form, each of which is deliberately but obliquely addressed to a vivid bit of language emitted in the 20^th century by a notable person (boxer, artist, writer), but in no case emitted in a poem. 

Here's a sample that was published in The Istanbul Review last year:

       "Perhaps a bird was singing and I felt for him a small, bird-sized affection."

                                                —Jorge Luis Borges

       Come spring, I'll build a nest

       Of knotted hair.

       On my bare chest,

       Come spring, I'll build a nest

       That you might rest

       Forever there.

       Come, Spring!  I'll build a nest

       Of naughty hair.

The first draft of the manuscript took about 3 months to write.  If summer vacation had been longer, the book might have come out as 42 poems.  If I were able to write triolets more quickly, Octaves might have become The Octaviad.

Octaves is comparable to any book which collects a substantial number of short works which were made by following the same relatively strict rules.  Books I had in mind when I was making Octaves include: Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Feneon’s Novels in Three Lines, Cummins’ The Whole Truth, and Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

I was inspired to write Octaves by my desire to meet the challenge of the triolet to the best of my abilities, such as they are.  I admire strong triolets by Hardy and other writers, and I wanted to imagine that the form could be used to produce a particular kind of coherent book-length project.

Octaves is proudly self-published. Much of the folding, collating, trimming, sewing, and pressing-under-piles-of-heavy-art-books was done at my family dining table by Lisa Lee and Michaela Bosch.

It might pique the reader's interest in Octaves to know that it is a chapbook made with three signatures in a clever format called the  “do-si-do”:  Octaves has a front and a back, but it also has three spines!  (You can order a copy from me via email, twelve dollars postage paid.) 

Look!  A baby picture, taken when Octaves was just a few hours old.

For next Wednesday, I have tagged poets Caitlin Doyle, Eric McHenry, Christina Pugh, John Sparrow and Rory Waterman.  Click on a name when it becomes a LINK (very soon!) and read about some really big things that are on the way!

Poems That Keep Paintings Alive

Did you read "The Aquarium," Aleksandar Hemon's riveting first-person account of his family's loss of a very young daughter to cancer?  (The New Yorker, June 13, 2011) This powerful non-fiction is an answer to the question "How would one write adequately about such a loss?"

Hemon repeatedly alludes to W.H. Auden's ekphrastic poem about Breughel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus."  The painting's silence, translated in part by Auden's lines, shimmers anew in the light of Hemon's story.  Through Auden's poem, Hemon finds words and images to characterize the divide between those who experience grief and those who only witness it.

Such mysterious and persistent acts of translation from the visual to the verbal are the focus of "The Ekphrastic Problem," one of two courses I'm offering starting September 15th.  (The other course is called "The Difference.")  Both courses promise to be spectacular.

Levine and Dickman, or How Well Has Free Verse Aged?

A brief consideration of a great juxtaposition of poems in the August 29 The New Yorker is legible at:

http://artsfuse.posterous.com/free-verse-at-eighty-three-and-thirty-six

And don't forget that Enrollment Period for my two fall classes is open until September 15th!

What Lines Sound Like

 The Kenyon Review is running an interview with U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin that takes up two important features of my upcoming course, “The Difference,” a poet’s concern with sound, and the “lineliness” of verse.

Got two minutes?  Then listen to the first 1:31 of this show. You will hear a master poet reading a contemporary poem with a strong emphasis on the line as its fundamental unit!

Notice how Merwin reads each line as a line, and lets the consistent enjambment he’s noted for do its work silently.  (Under his reading of the lines, we hear syntactical units that do not correspond to the line, like “you will be all right whether or not you know” and “long ago my mother said I am going…”)

Here’s the text:

Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago

my mother said I am going now

when you are alone you will be all right

whether or not you know you will know

look at the old house in the dawn rain

all the flowers are forms of water

the sun reminds them through a white cloud

touches the patchwork spread on the hill

the washed colors of the afterlife

that lived there long before you were born

see how they wake without a question

even though the whole world is burning.

W.S. Merwin, from The Shadow of Sirius

The interview as a whole is worth hearing.  Merwin expresses his concern that today’s writers have forgotten—or haven’t realized—that poems begin in sound. 

“The Difference” will resoundingly enhance each writer's sense of what that means.

The Ekphrastic Problem: A Sample

How does one know when one has written enough—and well enough—about a work of art?

Consider the case of Cathy Song’s poem “Girl Powdering Her Neck,” which is addressed to Utamaro’s wonderful ukiyo-e print from the late nineteenth century, reproduced below:

           Utamaro Kitigawa (1752-1806), Musee Guimet, Paris

Song’s ekphrastic poem “Girl Powdering Her Neck,” closes with an understated and moving metaphor.  These three lines handle Japanese motifs (the chrysanthemum and the poetic form, for example) lightly.  Their account of Utamaro’s work is conveyed by evocation of an imaginary scene parallel to, but not depicted in the print. This use of indirection makes the lines especially strong with regard to the likeness and difference we perceive between the girl and her reflection, and charges the poem with mystery:  

Two chrysanthemums


touch in the middle of the lake


and drift apart.

(ll. 50-52)

Isn’t this almost-haiku an almost perfect poem?  But what, then, are we to make of the other forty-nine lines Song has written?

Welcome to the ekphrastic problem! A poetry workshop framed around such inquiries will commence in mid-September.  

Tinkering with Tinkers: A Sample Lesson from "The Difference"

The following is an example of the kinds of thinking about the line that makes “The Difference” such an exciting course.

The power of verse can be demonstrated by putting a well-made piece of prose through some changes.  (Note:  No prose was harmed in the production of the comparison below!)

Here is a vivid passage from Paul Harding’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel Tinkers.  Read it silently, sub-vocalizing if you like, and then say it aloud:

What if she breaks Daddy's mouth? George thought. Get the stick in, Georgie—the end. Get it in. Work it in. Howard's head banged the floor and banged the floor and banged the floor again. George managed to wedge the end of the stick in between his  father's teeth at the side of his mouth. Kathleen instantly took the stick and ferociously worked it deeper. Without looking, she grabbed a seat cushion from the floor and slid it under her husband's head in between bangs on the floor. Howard's feet kicked at the legs of the table. Darla stood in the doorway and shrieked. Margie gasped for breath. Joe squealed. Daddy's broken! That's it, Georgie; that's almost it, little lamb.

This crucial moment in the strange narrative told by Tinkers is alive with voices.  Its sentences are varied and intricately knit. It is the product of a hundred artful choices, very few of which feel, in the context of reading the whole novel, heavy-handed or contrived. I’d like to say that Harding’s language here is a kind of poetry.  I think many poets who publish today would be hard-pressed to come up with fourteen sentences in a row that are so interesting, so responsive to each other. But it is not verse, but prose.  As much as this passage does to your lungs and lips when you read it aloud, none of the decisions Harding made when he constructed this passage had to do with the line.

What will we learn if we find verse lines for Harding’s prose?  From the limitless linear measures we might choose to introduce, I’ve chosen two possibilities.

The first versifying of Harding’s prose, in blue, is broadly speaking, traditional, in that it seeks a strong but not rigid regularity of line length based on syllable count.

Say the passage in blue aloud. How different Harding’s language feels when it is parsed out at six, seven, or eight syllables per line!  Written (and read) as verse, purposely built of lines of a certain kind, the language of Tinkers does all that it does as prose, and—without saying that it is better in verse—we can feel that it does “more”: 

What if she breaks Daddy's mouth?

George thought. Get the stick in,

Georgie—the end. Get it in.

Work it in. Howard's head

Banged the floor and banged the floor

And banged the floor again.

George managed to wedge the end

Of the stick in between his

Father's teeth at the side

Of his mouth. Kathleen instantly

Took the stick and ferociously

Worked it deeper. Without looking,

She grabbed a seat cushion

From the floor and slid it

Under her husband's head

In between bangs on the floor.

Howard's feet kicked at the legs

Of the table. Darla stood

In the doorway and shrieked. Margie

Gasped for breath. Joe squealed. Daddy's

Broken! That's it, Georgie;

That's almost it, little lamb.

The content of the prose is preserved, but how differently the passage reads when it is lineated as verse!  This “more” than prose that verse does to readers could be expanded here for the length of a book.  But let’s defer that now and instead get a sense of how different decisions about the line will in each case produce a different “more.”

Say the following passage of “free verse” aloud, attending to its lineation. Do you recognize this as Harding’s prose?  Again it is the same words, and the same sentence syntax.  On a second or third read-through, you might begin to track the particular differences that inhere in this modern, sprawling, twin-columned structure that breathily emphasizes and contrasts the effects of one, two, three, and four syllable lines, below, in green:

What if

                                  she breaks

Daddy's

                                  mouth? George

thought.

Get the                      stick in,

Georgie—                  the end.

Get it in.

                                 Work it

in.                             Howard's

head                          banged

the floor                    and banged

the floor and

banged the floor

again.

                                  George

managed

                                  to wedge

the end

                                  of the stick

in between                  his

father's teeth

                                  at the side

of his

mouth.

                                  Kathleen

instantly                     took

the stick

and                            ferociously

worked

                                  it

deeper.

Without                      looking,

She grabbed

a seat

cushion

                                  from the floor

and slid it

under

her husband's

head

                                  in between

bangs

on the floor.

Howard's                   feet

kicked                       at the legs

of the table.

                                  Darla

stood                          in the doorway

and shrieked.          

                                  Margie

gasped                        for breath.

Joe squealed.

                                  Daddy's

broken!                    

                                  That's

it,                               Georgie;

That's                          almost

it,

                                   little lamb.

These green lines transform Harding’s language even more radically than the blue lines do—the “more” they achieve is powerfully different from that achieved by the lines in blue.  With the passage above still on your breath, try to recall the feel of the original prose.  And compare, for a moment, the particular emphases achieved by the blue and the green lineations.

Wasn’t it Frost who wrote about two roads diverging? In this comparison, we see how powerful lines are, and how the choice of one line over another line can make “all the difference.”