Contributor Spotlight: Vanessa Couto Johnson

I tend to think of there being two modes of writing: writing linear to the self (writing based off of the writer’s experiences or the writer’s imagination and thoughts; this is generally the more common mode of writing) or lateral to the self (writing done through interaction with another medium, most likely another text or texts). I like to do both, alternating.

The thesis manuscript for my MFA consisted of my early lateral writing done during my second and third year, some writing that is what I call “constraint-based erasures.” I would choose a book and invent a constraint in which I would use the book as source text (for example, treating each page as a word bank for a line in a poem). Lateral writing can be a meticulous process, but once there is a method already planned, it is primarily a matter of sitting down and doing the work. After I get in the proper mental state and rhythm with the source text, a couple poems can be produced with each dedicated, uninterrupted sitting.

Lateral writing can feel quite productive while being challenging in a way different from linear writing. While in linear writing the challenge is between the writer’s mind and the blank page, in lateral writing the challenge is between the writer’s mind and the source text, with the blank page waiting. This can feel like revising, but of course without a need to preserve the original meaning—indeed, with a desire to be as far as possible from the original meaning/intent, to see how the same sort of language can say something new.

I wrote “presence” and “ferrous” as I wrote a sequence of sixty-five prose poems in three weeks, often writing three or four poems a day—a productivity rate in linear writing that I had never experienced before (and have not yet experienced since), a productivity rate that anomalously rivals the rate I have experienced in lateral writing. This sequence was written just after I returned from studying abroad for five weeks in Ireland in summer 2013. I only wrote one or two poems while there, and while recently back in the U.S., I felt so liminal in my sense of location and “home” that I had to write as much as I could before the fall semester would commence (my final one, and I already had my thesis manuscript written, so I could dedicate myself to this work).

I will not get in to why I wrote the poems I wrote, of how much my time in Ireland was significant to me; my hope is the poems themselves can express that. That said, I can explain some of the poetics behind the work.

In these poems I wrote, I wanted to explore location in every sense of the word: not just geographic, but also temporal; not just of the self, but also the self relative to others; not just external, but also the internal, cognitive location (awareness and meta-awareness, living-in-moment and slipping into nostalgia or imagination). 

My concern was also epistemic: what can the traveler manage to know?  In what ways does not permanently living somewhere restrict knowledge or enable knowledge? Also, being an outsider in a postcolonial culture can feel odd, as one seeks to assert oneself as having an identity while simultaneously seeking to assert and learn the local presence’s identity/what makes them who they are.

At this point in my writing, I had written three brief sequences in prose poem form, and the prose poem felt like the appropriate form for this work. As I have said in a post on my blog:

I believe the prose poem can be an ideal form of expressing complexity: it exists as a “lump” of being, not spaced into digested piecemeal. While a sentence itself is a linear existence, other sentences function directly lateral to that sentence. I think the prose poem can express simultaneity, as there isn’t the overt sequential nature of linebreaks (granted, there still is sequence because sentences are in an order). The simplicity of the prose poem form also allows it to harbor/counter the odd/bewildering more easily. The form does put emphasis on content (and content as a unit).

My first efforts at writing prose poems actually were a hybrid of linear and lateral writing: I took selections from a physics textbook’s concept questions and broke them in to lines; then, I wrote a prose poem in surreal “response” (more like running wild with the concepts) to the questions. I am honored to say this work became my first chapbook, Life of Francis, published by Gambling the Aisle in December 2014.

During my third year of grad school, I made the site meansofpoetry.com, essentially a blog on my poetics and aesthetics. I began it especially with the hope of encouraging others to write both linearly to self and laterally to self—to be willing to shift and experiment, to not wear thin a singular mode or pattern. Let us not become weary when there are so many possibilities. Let us be curious in/when writing.

Contributor Spotlight: Ruby Hoy

RUBY HOY

I was introduced to poetry in childhood, and became fascinated with the idea of painting a picture with a few words. The first poem I memorized was Robert Frost’s "Birches," and that may have influenced my habit of looking at life through the lens of the natural world.  Trees, rocks, lakes and rivers, the sea, otters and birds, wolves and cats, the moon, all inspire me. I am intrigued and inspired by other writers, from Frost to Billy Collins, from John Hewitt to Mary Oliver, and always by my friends Keith Taylor and Marc Sheehan.

I have never considered the form of a poem first, but start with the feeling, and see what form it wants to take. I could, I suppose, set out to write a sonnet, but I think it would not be as good as writing a poem that wanted to be a sonnet.  This is not to say that I ignore or disdain meter, rhyme, or any of the forms that poetry may take. Kenneth Koch called it the language of poetry, and I think it has many languages, all of them valid.

The wise and funny Billy Collins said:  "Poetry is the only history we have of human emotions. Most history books, what we call history books, are stories of battles and treaties, negotiations and beheadings and coronations. But poetry is the only reminder of this very essential part of being human, which is one’s emotional life and all the dimensions it entails”. I agree, for poetry has been in large measure, my emotional autobiography.

I practice my “craft or sullen art” as Dylan Thomas put it, and will continue to do so, because the only way to write well is to write.  Poetry is a gift, a celebration, therapy, prayer, and a connection to the wheels of the world that turn us ever toward the light, if we let go and listen.

Contributor Spotlight: Daryl Farmer

MEMORY and IMAGINATION 

For years now, I have used a specific writing practice that has resulted in nearly two thousand pages of text. My process is this: I rise early, and before fully awake, place a CD (or, since about a year ago, choose one album from Spotify) in my drive, boldface the titles of all the songs in a list, hit play, and for each song I free write. When the songs change, I make a shift, too: new voice, new characters, new tone, new point of view, etc. Some of the writing is nonfiction; some of it is purely imaginary. A lot of it sucks. (Part of the joy of the exercise is that I don’t have to care—it’s play and it’s practice. I call it playing scales. A friend who is a musician and does something similar on his piano calls it doodling. For both of us, the process seems to spark a flow of creativity). Much of what results seems to pull from what must be the same place as dreams: a random mix—or conflation--of memory and imagination.

Often a memory is reconfigured in this process and I’m left not certain where the truth begins and ends. While the work I produce with this process is generally rough and unpolished, it does often lead to writing that is surprising and instructional, and sometimes I can develop sections into more polished work. And when I’m stuck, I have this to fall back on: 5:00 AM, headphones on, song titles typed, GO.

In the persistent talk about truth and its complexities in nonfiction, often lost is the less discussed but no less interesting examination of the relationship between memory and imagination. Together they can present an instructional map into the subconscious of creativity. In fiction writing that is largely autobiographical, memory—that is, a mind’s own preservation of what the sensory and emotional self once observed and experienced—often combines with imagination: what might have happened, or actually happened but is skewed for dramatization or effect on the page. The result is a genre that we have no word for. Fiction comes closest, because it best allows space for the imaginary, and avoids the uncomfortable issue of whether the thing that happened actually happened, and if so whether it happened the way it is written to have happened. Still, in work that is autobiographical enough to recount experiences from  memory, is it not equally dishonest to hide the memory behind the mask of fiction? My goal is not to suggest that the finger wagging that happens to nonfictionists should happen to fictionists as well; it is merely to suggest that maybe what is amiss is not scruples but terminology. Hybrid is a useful term, and goes far to address the issue. But hybrid suggests the merging of two separate instincts, each discernable from the other. In hybrid, Memory and Imagination are progenitors of the final work, each external to it. But I’m not convinced that is the case with a lot of what we call hybrid. Perhaps a better term is conflation which suggests a process that is internal, a fusing of memory and imagination particles, a fusion so tight that the memory/imagination mix becomes nearly indiscernible. 

I bring this all up here because my flash fiction piece “Flight,"  published in the most recent issue of Split Rock Review, came out of the process described above. I call it fiction, because it is non- nonfiction, but to be honest, fiction doesn’t feel like the right term, either.  In writing it, I pulled from a couple different pieces of the free writing described above, written years apart, and then I added, shaped, honed. To illustrate what I mean by conflation, here are a couple lines from the last paragraph of this fiction/nonfiction/hybrid/conflation/whatever:

"And where is that love now? Hunkered down like a soldier in a bunker, hiding from itself and all that hovers to devour it. Like a potato in the cellar, its eyes growing, reaching, bending."

I’m not even sure the metaphors work here—soldiers, potatoes—but, and I hope you’ll forgive me this, I like it. These three sentences are pure stream of consciousness, and I wrote them while listening to Josh Ritter’s “Temptation of Adam.” Ritter is from Idaho, and once, when I saw him in concert, between songs he jokingly mentioned about how everyone in Idaho has so many potatoes they can’t give them away, so they keep them in cellars, and the potato eyes grow and spread there.  “Temptation of Adam” is a love song about a couple in a bunker seeking to escape nuclear apocalypse. One of the lines states, “Fusion was the broken heart/ that’s lonely’s only thought.” (It might be interesting to know that I only looked back at this after the piece had been accepted by SRR. There was nothing about loneliness or broken hearts in my initial section of free writing; that came genuinely from lived experience). I liked the idea of old love just sort of creeping around in a subterranean void. Because I think that no matter how well we move on from past relationships, the love we felt once never fully goes away. (Or the heartbreak for that matter, though I like to think the love lasts longer). Anyway, the song, my own past, imagination, writing in early morning while still waking, all of it thrown together in a blender, the result a layered mix. Conflation.

Though the conversation about truth in nonfiction will continue, I find myself less and less interested in literal truth in writing that is memoirist. (Literary journalism is a different matter). As a reader, what I really want is to see an active mind at work, to not have my intelligence insulted, and to be made aware that even in our various isolations, we are all connected. 

Contributor Spotlight: John C Mannone

BACKSTORY of "BLUEFISH"

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Introduction

Often, I’ll write a poem to a prompt, but this was not the case here. Rather, it was a confluence of widely different thoughts and events that converged to become the headwaters of this poem: a recent workshop, an emotionally stirring poem, a rummaging in the den and reminiscing on a box of found fossils, an everpresent thought of food (because I was thinking about a collection connecting food and family), and finally, a conversation that made me think of bluefish. (I’ll mention a couple of these things in more detail below.)

The image of a bluefish is what triggered the memoir-like poem about my children. They lived in Maryland with their mother, and I would visit them whenever I could since I lived almost six hundred miles away in Tennessee. I rented a cottage (Matoaka Beach Cabins, St. Leonard, MD) for the weekend a couple of times on Calvert Cliffs, where I’d hunt for fossils when I was in my twenties. Believe me, I wanted to include a section of my children’s wide-eyed discovery of fossils, just as I had experienced, but I decided to stay focused and save that thought for another poem.

Most of the narrative is true, and not necessarily occuring in one visit to the cottage, so technically, the poem is fiction.

Genesis

“Bluefish” was drafted in late February 2013 less than two weeks after I attended a poetry workshop in Grailville, OH led by Cathy Smith Bowers, a former poet laureate of North Carolina (2010-2012). She spoke of the “abiding image” as a way to mine the past for poems. She introduced me to Ellen Bass’ freshly published work, “What Did I Love” (The New Yorker, Feb 4, 2013) whose opening line might sound humorous (What did I love about killing chickens? Let me start) but quickly devolves into something serious, even holy, and closes with an image that has abided in me since then, influencing several poems, including this one. There was something holy about that whole experience with the bluefish and my children.

Who understands the workings of the creative mind? Nevertheless, I sense that there must be a complex interplay of thoughts, especially when juxtaposed, to make tangible associations grow from the subconscious. How else can we even start transforming that blank page into a piece of our heart?

Crafting

My usual style, up to that point, was to write short poems that were highly lyrical and deeply imagistic. Wanting to write longer poems and  broaden my style, I experimented with narrative forms. It is very difficult to sustain the lyric intensity in short poems and to avoid sounding prosy. But sometimes the text is prosy, and when it is, it must be lifted into poetry. That was my challenge, to keep the writing in the realm of poetry and not prose. (I eschew cut-up prose.) My remembering Elizabeth Bishop was encouraging. She was a master of the narrative poem. At least subconsciously, her  poems, such as “The Fish” influenced this work. “Bluefish” has hints of Elizabeth Bishop’s aesthetics that are found in her poetry. The Poetry Foundation states, “Her verse is marked by precise descriptions of the physical world and an air of poetic serenity, but her underlying themes include the struggle to find a sense of belonging, and the human experiences of grief and longing.” I dare to say I share similar aesthetics, but I struggle to achieve her standard.

So, what crafting elements lift this work with its conversational tone into poetry? This work strives to achieve the following: impeccable rhythm, a structure with at least some good line breaks and gives breathing room for the detailed imagery, internal music and resonances, and deeply symbolic meanings. If I succeeded, it is clearly a poem.

More about my aesthetics is found in a May 2014 interview by Changming Yuan, editor of Poetry Pacific.