Kyrie

Ellen Bryant Voigt’s book of poems, titled Kyrie, is a poignant and troubling work. Each poem in the collection is its own emotional trip. However, the poem that I found most fascinating and spoke to me the most begins with “Oh yes I used to pray” (43). The poem seems to revolve around the birth of a child that went wrong, possibly a miscarriage or a stillbirth. The poem retains an interestingly straightforward structure, as there is only one stanza and no apparent rhyme scheme. The first few lines contain the literary technique of repetition with the phrase, “I prayed…” Following the first line “Oh yes I used to pray,” this use of repetition evokes the feeling of hopelessness and puts in the mind of the reader a picture of a helpless mother, crying desperately for the salvation of her child. Though not demarcated by any physical breaks in the format of the poem, the second section is about the narrator’s “nearest neighbors,” who were also sick in some way and whose prayers the narrator emulated when she prayed for her own child. Both the neighbors and the narrator prayed in the same fashion, “heads down, hands wrung, knees on the hard floor.”

Ironically, only the neighbors “survived” as a result of their prayers to “the Merciful Father.” And with that, the narrator asks, “…do you think they’re still praying?”  Finally, in the last two lines of the poem, the reader discovers that the actual reason for the suffering was a stillbirth: “She was so tiny, we kept her in a shoebox on the cookstove, like a kitten.”

This poem tackles a number of themes and emotions. First off, it retains an incredible feeling of hopelessness from the beginning until the end. There is no resolve for the horror and the suffering. Furthermore, the poem not only raises the question of prayer as a useless activity, but also suggests the seemingly arbitrary nature of life events. According to the narrator, it is perplexing why her “nearest neighbors” survived their hardships while she (and her child) did not.

This poem speaks out to me so powerfully mainly because of the voice within. As a poet and an artist, I am, for some reason, extremely interested in the plight of mothers. So, every time I read this poem, I hear a mother’s voice in my head, but it isn’t crying. It isn’t hoarse from all the nights of wailing. It isn’t angry or frustrated with the way things played out. There is an underlying tone of acceptance throughout the poem, and that is the most haunting part. It sounds like that the poem was written years and years after the incident and after the mother has time to process what has happened and been able to move on. But yet, you and I know that she hasn’t gotten over it. There is no way she could have. She still thinks about it every second of her life. She still weeps to herself at night. 

Deep Lane, Mark Doty

I wasn't planning on going to this (or writing about this reading), but I went with a friend at the NYU CW house because she had to attend a reading for her class last week, so I decided to tag along.

I didn't know much about Mark Doty before going, but I had heard of him from discussions in other classes and knew that he owned a home out in eastern Long Island, which is a place I enjoy going. I've gone to a lot of different farms and "hotspots" further east than I'm form (I'm considered eastern LI but definitely close to central, whereas Doty is much further out east). That being said, I felt kind of inclined to attend this reading and support a fellow resident.

I read Robin's review of this same reading and didn't really think he looked older than I had expected, but that might be because I had seen him before. I happened to be caught in the same thunderstorm on my way to the city, which was TERRIBLE!

"Deep Lane" really stuck with me, because I enjoy writing about location and have been exploring that a lot more this semester, and I really thought that this piece was not only written well, but was also read well that day. I am very sentimental about the street my parents live on in Florida, so I connected with it well (we joke that they live on the "other Park Avenue", the less exciting one). Anyway, this poem made me want to visit Deep Lane, which I believe is a good indicator of the quality of a location-piece: it makes you want to go there, and I shared Doty's sentimentality.

One thing I really appreciated was the way that Doty really explained the background behind his work, which Robin also touched on in his response. I kept imagining what I would have been like if I were reading my pieces to a crowd. I'm sure that I would have explained them a bit, but probably not as in-depth and personally as Doty did. However, I appreciated all of the personal pieces of information he told us, like how he hadn't spoken to his dad in years, or how he thought it felt to lose someone was like losing a leg. I lost someone really special to me last semester, and when he compared the loss of a person to the loss of a limb, or a part of a limb, I had to catch my breath and just take a moment to relate that. That's exactly how it feels.

Overall, I'm glad my friend dragged me to this reading, because I wouldn't have appreciated any of the things I ended up noticing about Mark Doty and how great his work is. I would absolutely go to another one of his readings if the opportunity arose.

Monotaur Noir Night at KGB Bar

I attended a reading at KGB Bar on 4^th St., an event titled Monotaur Noir Night, with readings by Dan Friedman and Steph Cha. Both have just completed mystery novels, which I didn’t know before I went, but I found very interesting. I feel like not many young writers are writing mysteries today.

Friedman’s book, called Don’t Ever Get Old, revolved around a WWII veteran who pursues a Nazi fugitive who had tortured him during the war. He had thought the Nazi had been killed, but a fellow veteran calls the protagonist to his deathbed, where he tells him that the man is still alive. The tone of the book does not quite reflect the plot, however. Told from the first person perspective of an 87-year-old man, there was a lot of comic edge to the section Friedman read—he complains a lot, doesn’t want to be bothered, he claimed the hospital where his friend was “stank of piss and death” and complained the entire time he was there. I thought Friedman did a great job of capturing the mindset of a grumpy old man.

Friedman also read from a new novel he is working on, written from the perspective of the poet Lord Byron when he was attending Cambridge in 1807. It read very much to me like a Sherlock Holmes story, as Friedman wrote Byron as an arrogant, drunk, silly young poet who has a sel-perceived knack for detective work. In the story Byron is “investigating” a murder which occurs on the Cambridge campus. Friedman said of the novel, “except for a few biographical details, I completely fabricated it, to make it better.”

Steph Cha, who said she is new at the reading thing, seemed it. She had a very awkward and self-deprecating nature. Cha’s novel, her first, is  called “Follow Her Home.” It is also a mystery, and is, as Cha called it, a homage to both Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe, his famous detective. Cha was not kidding about the homage thing—she points out passages which are almost directly from Chandler, which she wanted to write from a feminine perspective, as her protagonist is a woman who falls into investigating a murder when she discovers a body in her trunk after a night at a party. Cha had a great way with language and detail, creating beautiful passages with such abundant and intense detail, but eloquent enough that it wasn’t overwhelming. I thought her writing was great.

Alex Dimitrov and Marie Howe Reading

I attended a reading at the Lillion Vernon Creative Writer’s House with Alex Dimitrov and Marie Howe. Dimitrov is a young, new writer who attended NYU a d studied under the more distinguished Howe. She served as his mentor.

The reading celebrated the release of Dimitrov’s new book of poetry, “Begging For It,” which Dimitrov said came from living in “an America in which we sell ourselves,” which I found very evocative. Dimitrov’s poetry felt very self-indulgent. His language was very frank, and much of his work was inspired by his personal experiences. He referenced Facebook and the “Like” button in one poem, and playing his poem “on repeat” in another, which gave them a very young, current vibe. His introducer described them as “easy to describe as shameless, but more accurately depicted as without shame,” another statement which stuck with me as Dimitrov read. He writes about sex, homosexuality, rejection and poetry bluntly. He speaks to the reader a lot, and refers in his poetry to “this poem” (“This poem is concerned with language on a simple level,” one of them read). While I appreciate Dimitrov’s making poetry very much about the world that we are currently living in, I didn’t find that his poems quite got there for me personally. I didn’t really connect with them.

Marie Howe was not what I had been expecting. We all discussed her abundant mane of hair, which seemed to take up more of the podium than she did. She spoke for a few minutes before she read, and spoke philosophically with her authority over all us aspiring writers: “making poems is a worthless act, and therefore priceless, because it somehow cannot be bought.” Howe’s poems were very different from Dimitrov’s, more elegant and feminine—she wrote about her brother who died of AIDS in 1989 and about historical religious figures, of which she said, “they were the archetypal characters I grew up with.” This didn’t seem to connect with many of the young people there, which was interesting. It just seemed to show how much things have changed in terms of religion, how it factors into our lives and the choices that we have the ability to make about how it does. 

Grand Slam Review

A while back ago, I attended the preliminary rounds for the NYU Poetry Slam team, the competition that would decide who made it on the team and would compete at the CUPSI tournament that I wrote about earlier in the semester because of how amazing it was. This took place at the beginning of the semester and was held at Palladium on the top floor right around the corner of where I eat brunch every Sunday (because the brunch is amazing. They got a cake bar, yo.) The competition was divided as one would expect a Poetry Slam competition to be organized, each poet would have 3 minutes to perform a spoken word piece and the randomly chosen judges (selected based on their lack of affiliation with anyone competing) would throw up their scores at the end of each poet. They scorekeepers drop the lowest and the highest and tally them up and at the end of the round the poets are arranged by score and proceed the next round in that order. These are the rules of Poetry Slam (and no props. Or talking about Poetry Slam, but that's the third rule) So, this particular slam was actually one of my favorites because the two poets I enjoy the most performed (one of which actually went to attain the highest score at CUPSI Finals), Conner Sampson and Joe Amoedi (I am not spelling his name right). Conner's poems discussed the darker sides of relationships, but in a way that denotes a sense of perversion and betrayal where the speaker carries with them the trauma of things that could not be unseen and undone and settle the reader with not just amazement at his wordplay but also the unsettling feeling he leaves us with. His delivery is charming, boyish almost, but his voice carries such a poignancy. Joe, my personal favorite, is a social intellectual, his two poems decrying the porn industry and Occupy Wall Street movement in a way that infuses effective references and honest phrases that are delivered with simplicity and eloquence all at once and the slight slick of Italian hot blood is noticeable in his voice when he speaks. I wish Joe had made it to CUPSI. Of course, there were a good amount of other fantastic poets, others who I felt were partially cheated, but that does not mean I disagreed with the team's composition by the end of the night. Some of these poems were beautiful, haunting and mesmerizing all at once, some crafting images I would consider downright inconcievable, and some actually sang, but it was good (even though I think singing is gimmicky).
So, yeah. I present to you another wonderful Poetry Review by yours truly. Arrivederci y'all. Have a good summer (P.S. you, those that read this, are all my Workshop crush...in a not weird way.)

Mark Doty's Deep Lane

I attended Mark Doty's reading from his book Deep Lane on Thursday at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writing House. He was much older than I thought, and read his poems in a calm, matter-of-fact manner, even thought he had just been caught in a thunderstorm coming from Long Island. Two poems stuck out for me. One of them was "Deep Lane", which was an actual road near his house in Long Island. I was surprised that such an acclaimed poet could be inspired by something so simple as the road in front of his home. He commented that it was the most beautiful name for a road that he had ever heard. The other poem he read was called "Ghost" and it was about his family. Doty said that he has not written a poem about his family for many years, especially after his father did not speak to him for the last five years of his life. It was interesting to hear how artists have periods in their lives where they write about certain topics, or don't write about certain topics. The poem was really interesting though. One thing from the poem that I remember is that a man is sitting on the bench, and when he gets up, he notices that his left leg is a couple inches shorter than the right. And, I thought that it was such an interesting way to represent grief. The death of one person affects you as a leg being shorter would. In that way, grief is annoying, always, and irreparable.

Fire and Forget: Short Stories From the Long War - Response

I attended a reading on Thursday April 2th at 7:00 at Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, between 5th and 6th Ave. At this event there were readings by Matt Gallagher, Phil Klay, and Roy Scranton, author for "Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War". Going into the reading I had an idea of what to expect due to the title of the book and I was curious to hear a creative take on such a upfront, violent subject. This was also particularly interesting to me because as a nursing student I would like to write about my experiences in a hospital, breaking away from the creative writing mold in a similar way. All there writers attending the “NYU veterans writing workshop” which I did not know existed and would like to see something similar along the lines of “writing about medicine”

         There were three stories read by three different people. The first story was about a solider who was on leave and had to go back to war. This detailed the struggle between real life and life once deployed. I was surprised to hear that the solider was actually bored by his civilian life and had mixed emotions about going back to war. The second story was about the flight back to America after a tour in Iraq. I was particularly interested in this one because it seems as though that would be an incredibly exciting and terrifying prospect. Struggling with the desire to get back to normal life and not knowing what the world he is coming back to will look like. The third story was about the interaction between two soldiers who were on guard. They were not in particular danger and this brought to light the monotony of daily life in the war if you are not on the front lines. These stories were not what I was expecting. There were no gunshots and tales of bleeding children but rather they dealt with the state of mind felt by these individuals. It inspired me to write about the day-to-day life of a hospital. Often all we read about is the exciting, drama filled battle scenes, however there is a lot more that goes into a war and I respected the authors for shining a light on that experience. 

Natural History: Dan Chiasson

Dan Chiasson’s Natural History is a fantastic book of poetry published in 2005, by Random House Inc. Dan Chiasson is an American born poet who attend Amherst university.  His first book was published in 2002. I really enjoyed how Chiasson used references to himself. This brought a smile to his readers face as well as showing that he understood flaws and things about himself.

“I “obsess” as you say, about my tone of voice.

People change. Sometimes at night, curtains drawn,

They turn infinite upon each other, just for fun.

I want fried clams, the ones with gritty fat bellies.

If I strike the apocalyptic tone you like, won’t you

Drive up Route 1 with me, right now, to find those clams? “ (Tulip Tree)

 Often I find in poetry that the author takes him or herself too seriously and this is an unattractive feature o poetry. I liked how Chiasson was able to almost laugh at himself through his poetry. This also created a sense of closeness that is hard to attain when the author looks to seriously at his own life. I was hooked by the first poem. This is a short poem entitled “Love Story (smelt)”

“When I say “you” in my poems I mean you

I know it’s weird: we barely met.

You must hear this all the time, being you” (Love song)

 I really loved this poem; at even put it on my own blog. It is so simple and beautiful. I really loved the imagery of a traditional Russian table, and having spent a great deal of time with a traditional Russian family, I felt as though I could feel and taste the meal that they had shared and I could smell the salty air mixed with alcohol on people’s breath. I greatly enjoyed this style of cultural reference. I also liked the reference to his own poetry. A poem that recognizes it is a poem can be very powerful and in this case made me think about who the “you” is in my poetry. It made me want to try and switch up who the “you” is and maybe try and pick someone I have just met, someone I do not know much about. Maybe I will try writing a poem to a stranger or someone I have just met. I was also very impressed with his love poems. This is sexist however I often associate love poems as being written by women and he shows that his does not have to be true and writes a series of “love songs” that are incredible beautiful. My favorite perhaps being “Love Song (Sycamores).

            “I said, Stop there, but you followed me

            Even when I tore our bed to pieces,

            I did that, I brought anger into the bower

            And the sycamores became menacing shoulders.” – Love song (Sycamores)

This is such a beautiful poem and really spoke to me. I though about how I can use this in my own writing and create my own love song.