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In a culture predicated on the perpetual pursuit of happiness, as if it were a fugitive on the loose, it can be hard to discern what having happiness actually feels like, how it actually lives in us. Willa Cather came consummately close in her definition of happiness as the feeling of being “dissolved into something complete and great” — a definition consonant with Iris Murdoch’s lovely notion of unselfing. And yet happiness is as much a matter of how we inhabit the self — how we make ourselves at home in our own singular lives, in the dwelling-places of our own experience.
That is what May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995), who has written so movingly about unhappiness and its cure, explores in her poem “The Work of Happiness,” included in her indispensable Collected Poems: 1930–1993 (public library).
THE WORK OF HAPPINESS
by May SartonI thought of happiness, how it is woven
Out of the silence in the empty house each day
And how it is not sudden and it is not given
But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.
No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark
Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.
No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,
But the tree is lifted by this inward work
And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours
And strikes its roots deep in the house alone:
The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,
White curtains softly and continually blown
As the free air moves quietly about the room;
A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall —
These are the dear familiar gods of home,
And here the work of faith can best be done,
The growing tree is green and musical.For what is happiness but growth in peace,
The timeless sense of time when furniture
Has stood a life’s span in a single place,
And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir
The shining leaves of present happiness?
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
Complement with Bertrand Russell on the secret of happiness and Kurt Vonnegut on the one word it comes down to, then revisit Sarton’s poem “Meditation in Sunlight” and her magnificent ode to solitude.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Detail from the cover art of issue no. 244: Emilie Louise Gossiaux, London with Ribbon, 2022, ballpoint pen on paper.
There’s a thrill of eros to many summer poems. Like in those late-eighties teen movies—Dirty Dancing, Say Anything, One Crazy Summer—you never know when you’ll see some skin. And so it goes in our new Summer issue. In Jessica Laser’s dreamy, autobiographical remembrance “Kings,” the poet recalls a drinking game she used to play in high school on the shore of Lake Michigan over summer vacations:
… You never knew
whether it would be strip or not, so you always
considered wearing layers. It was summer.
Sometimes you’d get pretty naked
but it wasn’t pushy. You could take off
one sock at a time.
Is that easygoing, one-sock-at-a-time feeling what defines the summer fling? Maybe that’s just how objects appear in the rearview mirror; even the most operatic affairs can seem a little comical in retrospect. In his poem “Armed Cavalier,” Richie Hofmann captures the hothouse kind of summer romance, when two lovers lock themselves away “for a whole weekend / and not eat or drink.” I love the wry look he casts over his shoulder at the end of these lines:
Stars, slow traffic,
the summer I wished you loved me
enough to kill me,
but not really.
If you’re curious to learn more about the story behind “Armed Cavalier,” check out our online Making of a Poem series feature on his poem this month. Leopoldine Core, whose poem “Ex-Stewardess” appears in this issue, recently contributed to the series, too—and to my summer playlist. “I was listening to Tangerine Dream, Ryuichi Sakamoto, ‘Dance II’ by Discovery Zone, and this mournful song ‘Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms,’ performed by Mia Farrow in The Muppets Valentine Show in 1974,” Core recalls. I’m listening to Farrow’s Muppets Show rendition as I write this, and Core’s right, she does sound “a little like Nico.”
They say that on hot summer days in the nation’s capital, Richard Nixon would light a roaring blaze in the fireplace of his White House study, crank the air conditioning up to full blast, put on a little Mantovani, and gaze out the window at the Washington Monument. This might be one of the few things Nixon and I have in common; while my fellow Americans are out in droves worshipping the sun, I like nothing more than to retreat to my home office and, thermostat set to eco mode, leaf through poems about summer. In this issue’s pages, fellow seasonal voyeurs will find that Lewis Meyers’s “Summer Letters” delivers “the black raspberry’s passion for a drop of sunlight” without any need for sunscreen. “Summer Letters” marks the late Meyers’s return to our pages after more than a half century; his last poem in the magazine, “Going to Chicago,” was published in a 1965 issue, under the Johnson administration. We’re grateful to Meyers’s widow, Diana, and to the poet Ellen Doré Watson, for sharing the poem with us.
Elsewhere, Sharon Olds muses on her quest to find a better language for sex in her Art of Poetry interview, and John Keene, in his Art of Fiction interview, observes that Portuguese is better suited to that task than English. It should also be said that, although we tried our best, not every poem in this issue is about summer, sex, or summer sex. You’ll also find a philosophical poem about cats by the great Argentinian writer Mirta Rosenberg, translated from the Spanish by Yaki Setton and Sergio Waisman; an excerpt from Imani Elizabeth Jackson’s expansive minimalist sequence “Flag”; and a poetic noir set in the Antwerp of Jonathan Thirkield’s singular imagination. Bon voyage, and happy reading.
Srikanth Reddy is the Review‘s poetry editor.
Leopoldine Core’s aura photo, courtesy of the author.
For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Leopoldine Core’s “Ex-Stewardess” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 244.
How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?
Often a poem begins wordlessly. It’s as if the text is a reply to some cryptic spot in the back of my brain that I have become attracted to. I’m alerted to the presence of something that isn’t solid. It has more to do with feeling, tempo, scale, and temperature. I’m so focused on that emanating region that, even though I’m using words, my experience—the start of it—is wordless and meditative.
How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? (Are there hard and easy poems?)
Some poems come quick and others take a while. But maybe the one that took years was easier in the end—I don’t know. Certain poems require many rounds of rewording. When this happens I will rewrite one line forty or more times, then narrow it down to thirty, then fifteen, then five, then choose.
But this poem was realized fairly quickly and required zero rewording. That happens sometimes. I tried rewording certain parts at different points but always wound up reverting to the original. The editing I did consisted of deleting maybe seventy percent of what was there, changing the order, capitalizing certain letters, and adding line breaks. I might have added a comma but I don’t think so.
Were you thinking of any other poems or works of art while you wrote it?
Occasionally my friend Jane Corrigan will send me pictures of her paintings and drawings. There are two she showed me around that time—one is a pen drawing and the other is a Xerox of that same drawing that she drew over with pen and colored in with pencil. Jane’s images are infused with such narrative possibility—I like to stare at them for a long time, putting order to the plot. This one seems like a scene from some lost Jane Bowles story.
I wasn’t thinking consciously of these drawings while writing the poem, but there’s something so joyful and stimulating about discourse with friends. I like talking about art that isn’t mine.
Courtesy the author and Jane Corrigan.
Courtesy the author and Jane Corrigan.
What else were you listening to / reading / watching while you were writing this poem?
I was reading a collection of interviews with the filmmaker Claude Chabrol. I underlined this sentence—“I like mirrors, because they are a way of crossing through appearances.” He was talking about manipulating space but I was drawn to a conceptual meaning of the statement—how something solid that reflects the surface of things can also function as an entryway, a portal.
I was listening to Tangerine Dream, Ryuichi Sakamoto, “Dance II” by Discovery Zone, and this mournful song “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” performed by Mia Farrow in The Muppets Valentine Show in 1974. I love how sincerely she sings to that puppet. She sounds a little like Nico. And there’s something about the confluence of optimism and despair in her voice that might have influenced me.
It also seems relevant to mention that I had gotten an aura photo taken around that time—I kept looking at it. The aura photo I had taken a few years before was mostly red with a cloud of yellow and orange. I was told at the time that the color red implies a closeness to Earth.
But this one was so blue. I kept wondering what that meant. Where was my spirit in relation to Earth? Was it farther from Earth now? I was—am still—grieving the loss of someone I love dearly, and looking at the photo made me think of a sky within.
What was the challenge of this particular poem?
Writing in code. And leaving room for interpretation. The metaphors are there—the stewardess, travel, the dog, the sky, et cetera—but they can also be taken literally. They are what they are and they are something else too.
The poem could be about someone who really reincarnated all these different times and remembers those past lives—though I was thinking more about how we reincarnate many times within a single lifetime, both in terms of how we are seen and in terms of how we really are. We are reborn in the sense that we transform. And yet we carry impressions of the interminable past within us.
I was also thinking about the experience of being objectified over and over. And how those experiences can shape one’s worldview, their sense of what is possible and impossible—and also their sense of time. Stewardess is a dated term that seems, in the poem, to be asking, But has anything changed? Can one really be an ex-stewardess if the treatment is the same? Then it becomes a question of hope—what it might be made of. The poem ends with the act of drawing “an imaginary / animal,” by which I mean the self, and “a field and the / sky”—by which I mean the world. It felt important to depict selfhood in the throes of the imagination—one who works to escape an external gaze, knowing they are not limited to how they are seen, knowing they are multiple.
Leopoldine Core is the author of the poetry collection Veronica Bench and the story collection When Watched, which won a Whiting Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Paris Review, PEN America, Apology Magazine, The American Poetry Review, BOMB, and The Best American Short Stories, among others. She has taught at NYU and Columbia University.
If George Eliot was interested in religious coexistence, she was also interested in unbelief.
The post B-Sides: George Eliot’s “The Spanish Gypsy” appeared first on Public Books.
Image by NASA via Flickr
He — earth-bound vessel
that he is, god that he
is not — instructed me to write, and so I wrote
∙
∙
∙
∙
∙
∙
∙
I gave you this voice, and you’ve used it to find me. Fool.
— Geffrey Davis, “Like a River”
∙
∙
∙
∙
∙
∙
∙
Like peanut ochre
Like penny grass
Like five-day sentience
Like armor brass
Like evening sprout
Like double mouth
Like lips abeyant
You talk to me
Before I Knew You
Before I knew you I dreamed of you.
In the desert’s glassy dark, your body spread out
on thread grass, I raised a handful of snow
to your lips. You who will teach me silence
in the full light of day, who will take the words
from my mouth with bare hands. Joyful
and at the same time, wretched —
this is what you’ll do to me.
By morning you’ve disappeared,
the sand has settled in my black hair
and I know you well.
Conversation / Incantation
Faceless angel, look at me —
you say you want to run from men
but I am still here.
You are a dream of yourself: a metaphor
for language. Pale in comparison.
For many years, I will live free of guilt
and the lies it makes of our body.
Look, there is something in your hand —
an empty beer bottle
or a dead fish. The earth
is wild with coincidence.
I must confess: once, I held a white dove
by the throat, tore its wings
from its body.
It’s simple, I want to know what violence means.
Compassion
does what it says. And I know this wing which has carried me
can also carry you
if you let it.
Forever the Body / Forever the Self
And some days I fear that if nobody saw me I would not exist.
If I had a story to tell trust
it would not be mine. Patches of darkness,
sky as cloudy marble
tabletop over which we eat and drink. My dear
epicurean, let me scrawl a red ribbon across your throat
with wine.
Let us lock the windows of memory
with the iron shackles of faith.
Forever the body.
Forever the self.
Whatever you think of me now, know
that I have been much more and much less.
Sometimes I forget — and are you not guilty
of this yourself? —
Raphael’s Madonna, beautiful in her crown
of gold leaves, was in fact painted for nobody.
In the painting, the baby Jesus hands a rose to a child
clothed in wolf skin as Mary looks on, cautiously.
Having brought myself before god I bring myself
before you —
my skin burning like the shed skin of a desert snake.
Fields of Indigo
I am scared of what you’ll do to me.
Once I came to you with a fever. You took off
my glasses, spread sesame oil
along the contours of my face
then handed me a cup of dead wasps
and told me to drink. Perhaps I never really knew
what you promised: paradise nothing more
than learning how to draw the bars of my own cage.
It sounds harmless, like a lamb suddenly emerging
from the bush. And what will they say
of our journey? No matter.
How you crawled through fields of indigo
to tell me your secret
as if crawling back to my arms
from the afterlife.
walk toward my voice
What do you want to say, Simon? Light the paper
lanterns
and let them go
this measure of darkness, this ridiculous
ransom.
It’s only the second time you’ve found me
shirtless, walking through each room
a plate brimming with water
balanced on both palms.
The light of the fire has so much
to say to the water
and already I’ve forgotten who you are.
Photo by E. Diop / Unsplash Autumn. The perfect place for a homeland —
dilapidated, thick, stocky.
The wasteland of a deserted construction site
overgrown with magnificent weeds,
decorated with fainted stair flights to the heaven,
unfinished, unaccomplished like teenage poetry.
Lumps of concrete with rusty gristle of reinforcement rods.
Patrols of big-eyes, nostalgic dogs,
which are stuck between their melting love to the man
and progressing faith in the wolf.
There’s neither politics nor culture here,
only solid primordial AWOL.
Here both angels and chimeras
lose their useless wings.
Here the scraggy baby dragons of yellow maples
are barely pinned to the goosebumped space
with black pins of rooks,
and the wind licks the stamps of sorrow —
empty, damp windows.
Photo by Rene Böhmer / Unsplash
My parents were scheduled to divorce on Valentine’s Day.
I was there in the beginning, sat next to my grandmother,
in her teal blue dress and hot combed strands. As a rule,
she refused to appear unrefined. In a warm church in Trinidad,
a wedding evening in hurricane season, we wore our Sunday best,
my mother and I, in matching white lace and wide eyes.
Why shouldn’t this bond be marked by an angel with an arrow,
tasked to put an end to the sorrow of suffering alone
love meant to be shared. The sugar apples of my mother’s cheeks,
rouged more than the red carnation pinned to my father’s smokey
blue suit. I search his handsome jaw and boyish grin for clues. We keep
the happy secrets of these fleeting Trade winds, in the family album,
so old, the memory and the artifact have become one. Pigment sealed
to plastic for eternity, a reality that cannot be undone or loosened,
only destroyed. Marriage is a valentine that misses me
though I have imagined myself able to walk up the aisle,
if not back down it, which is partly why I am disappointed
when the court rescheduled without a reason. Perhaps
the judge on the docket, newly in love, refused to chance the karma
of divorce court. I can say it now, these years later,
I was eager to be asked to witness our legal dissolution.
The annihilation of vows that were broken. Tell me
what’s louder: the pluck of the arrow, or the bang of the gavel,
or the everlasting gaze of the firstborn daughter.
In many ancient creation myths, everything was born of a great cosmic ocean with no beginning and no end, lapping matter and spirit into life. In the cosmogony of classical physics, a partial differential equation known as the wave equation describes how water waves ripple the ocean, how seismic waves ripple rock, how gravitational waves ripple the fabric of spacetime. In quantum physics, a probability amplitude known as the wave function describes the behavior and properties of particles at the quantum scale. Virginia Woolf described the relationship between consciousness and creativity as “a wave in the mind.”
Waves lap at the bedrock of being, beyond the scale of atoms, beyond the scale of stars, to wash up something elemental about what this is and what we are.
This dialogue between the elemental and the existential comes alive in a splendid poem by the astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson (January 2, 1960–May 19, 1999), composed as she was dying in the prime of life, included in her superb posthumous collection A Responsibility to Awe (public library), and read here by Amanda Palmer to the sound of “Optimist” by Zoë Keating:
SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE OCEAN AND THE UNIVERSE
by Rebecca ElsonIf the ocean is like the universe
Then waves are stars.If space is like the ocean,
Then matter is the waves,
Dictating the rise and fall
Of floating things.If being is like ocean
We are waves,
Swelling, traveling, breaking
On some shore.If ocean is like universe then waves
Are the dark wells of gravity
Where stars will grow.All waves run shorewards
But there is no centre to the ocean
Where they all arise.
Couple with Rachel Carson on the ocean and the meaning of life, then revisit Elson’s poems “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” “Theories of Everything,” “Explaining Relativity,” and “Let There Always Be Light (Searching for Dark Matter).”
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Amanda Gorman reciting a poem during the inauguration.
Original illustration by Anne Le Guern
miscarriage 9/24/2021
A cheap print of an aspen grove
In the exam room — it’s not bad,
Cross-lines of bark, long straight lines for the trunks,
Brown and black and gold in the foreground,
Receding to white in the back — the farthest trees, then,
Just a line or two, a white line suggesting
The whole tree.
If I were teaching, say, a child, say
You, I could tell you that it’s called
Abstraction, the line suggests the tree but isn’t,
See the shapes the lines make in your head and it’s a tree
But also isn’t, faint and fainter. But if
You and I were in a forest, if we were in a birch forest in the snow,
Then it’d be a tree and still a tree, a real tree, even if it was so far away we couldn’t see it,
So far so white against the terrible white cold, a tree, a real tree
Just so small and white against the snow it disappeared.
Abstract Trio by Paul Klee / Artvee
What happens when fantastic
becomes fan-fucking-tastic
was not something I considered
until I tried to learn Tagalog,
the f-bomb in this case an infix,
element that sounds vaguely criminal
but is old as fuck itself.
Motherfucker on the other hand’s
much younger — you low-down mother-
fuckers Sidney Wilson wrote to
the Tennessee Draft Board in 1918
can put a gun in our hands
but who can take it out? Black soldiers
like Pvt. Wilson fought in the Philippines
twenty years earlier & before that saved
Roosevelt’s skin at San Juan Hill.
Before the Spaniards they fought Indians:
Kiowa. Comanche: whose children were forced
to forget numu tekwapu — the Comanche
for Comanche — in English-only schools.
Tagalog agglutinates. Stems
glom tense & tone
like coconut flakes on rice balls.
Kain / eat becomes kumain / will eat
by subsuming um (in English a sound
of uncertainty). Mamatay / perish
fibrillates to mamamatay —
one day you will die.
The infix marks the shift: ma,
as though to go from death
the infinitive to death as future tense
one need only bury their mother.
Original art by Pedro Gomes
After “En La Galleria” (1991) by Santiago Carbonell
Finally at the gallery, the couple (all fiction of them),
she in that white bustier, he with the cutout
look of a dandy, his fedora as if caught in dreams
of another century; she with that thick black
belt made to hold the waist in, the one that will
grow with the truth, and the red corduroy, and her
body doing that thing, you know, one hip going up
and the other down, to look alluring. When the viewer
is the art and the art is me or my tribe, this is how
we blacks are framed, lurking in charcoal lines
and untidily fragmented, the lines random,
and the work to reflect reality undermined by
the shifting forces of our century. This is not art,
this is the slightly open curtain, the window looking
out to a dark wet night, and I am filled with the burden
of sorrow of the kind that a man has no words for, no words
to describe the inexplicable fear that his love has changed
her mind and chosen to place every single one
of his canvasses in the cellar. Her lurid walls
are now covered with the random art she’s picked up
at yard sales; and she gives no explanations for this,
though he asks and asks in so many different ways.
It is not you and me standing together before the wall —
those are fictions as I said before. Of course, it is
us in the way that we colonize art, and for every crack
curving down the wall I see a loose strap of a dress
dangling delicately and nakedly from your shoulder.
We live in a world of stains, a world of broad
strokes and thin lines, and the masks of despondence.
Illustration by Anne Le Guern I’m afraid of what’s beyond the dishes
we wash in retrieved lake water. The knowledge
that pines keep private. The sap you hide
in urns over skin is the world I seek.
The way it knows itself.
The way it sustains despite the unsustainable.
I tell you of the hummingbirds enslaved
people in an enslaved country kept in cages.
Outside they dart from feeder to feeder.
They protect the feeders they claim.
Intruders are pierced chased left to die alone
as chairs without people rock on the porch.
All of the clean dishes could
fall pieces on the pine floor.
I’m looking at the paper hummingbirds
stuck to the spice shelf. They are
blue creased strange beneath
coriander cardamom cumin.
The girl who made them is now a woman
afraid of hummingbirds: their blueness wild
wings what they know.
You ask what is broken?
I walk to the porch.
I walk to the lake.
I walk.
I walk.
I walk.
Illustration by Anne Le Guern Spanish
English
I look in the mirror
I look at the Indian women
I look at the colonizer
I spread my legs
and shove
flowers
cactus
animal
god
the cosmos inside me
I explain to the god
with a female bird’s face
that I have nothing inside
that it’s just a creator’s fantasy
that in me no one can be born
because nothing survives
***
exiled
illiterate
errant
b o r d e r l i n e
I want to be
gold india morena
Una india
who makes them
forget my history
and a part of yours
Bird doesn’t want to be god
or to have the face of a bird
She has existential attacks
and would like to read anything
other than a calendar
She wants to dance this night
of skulls without flags
to smoke on buds in bloom
between seas
cactus and desert
between jungle and dew
***
To lie outstretched beneath heavenly bodies
of ancient gods
and reject her forefathers
I called her
Ngünechen & Quetzalcoatl
Negrita Ñaña Compa
We speak in tongues
of sad days
and of hunger
a hunger that can only
be spoken
when you are hungry
She didn’t want to be an ancestor
I tell her that I didn’t either
And so we say our goodbyes
listening to songs
on this old wurlitzer
that snuffs the glow of war
in this final dance.
To the Formless God
By mid-morning the grey fog burns off Biscayne Bay.
Land surfaces, a silver glint under the veil.
I trust it’s there—I’ve seen its bottlenose before.
For years I’ve prostrated before marble, black stone, brass, burning incense, repeating
God’s name.
There is no one to ask me anything.
Rain floods the highway under construction.
The Bible says, Add enough clay and it becomes slip: sediment and water at once.
No matter how much I read, I am a city of charred rubble folding my
streets-turned-canals in prayer.
On the highway I cross the bridge.
Mist vapors up from the water like the Holy Ghost, like resurrection.
When the city burns away does sea ferry rock back to its prior self?
What becomes of the idol where there is no one to ask anything of—clay doesn’t know
itself as clay.
I’ve never been more flooded yet parched with hymns.
I strain my eyes searching the streets for dolphins.
The Garden Walls Fail
It’s summer and I don’t believe myself nor
my meds of gila monster saliva transfigured
into a chemical that lowers A1C, my summer
body buried so far in the past, it was never a body.
My overall plasticity of joint, of grey matter
long since began its decay. I once prized
your squash, salting slices, squeezing water,
breaking the web of cheese cloth. I can’t recall
what I made of all that yellow. Or your face
in marvel. We too, one summer past the summer
before, no miracle serpent to spit antidote. For now
I’m lost in the strawberries, my hands in cow shit.
The house of us stands. Renovations can wait
until next year. Yes. Next year will be better.
***
Author photo by Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada
Charif Shanahan’s second poetry collection, Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023) is a stunning tryptic that powerfully explores themes of mixed-race identity, time, mortality, and queer love. At the center of the collection is the poem, “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a meditation on the meaning of belonging, home, and the mysteries of fate. Shanahan wrote it after sustaining serious injuries in a bus accident in Morocco, while he was a Fulbright Scholar researching his mother’s homeland. Shanahan’s poems ask difficult questions for which he provides no easy answers. He encourages us to engage with complexities, nuances, and narratives that may differ from our own. There is pain in these poems, but also joy and hope. At the heart of Shanahan’s work is love and the belief we are all interconnected, changed by every encounter we experience. One cannot read Shanahan’s words without being changed.
Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and a Lambda Literary Award. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Shanahan is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco. Originally from the Bronx, he is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University.
I had the great pleasure of speaking with Charif Shanahan over Zoom about identity constructs, the complexity and nuance found in life, and the “spiritual fact” of our oneness.
***
The Rumpus: Congratulations on this truly amazing collection. Can you share how it came about?
Charif Shanahan: In 2015, I left my job and my apartment in New York and went to Morocco for what I thought would be a year on the Fulbright to research my family genealogy and representations of Blackness in the Maghreb. About two months into my time there, I was on an overnight bus that crashed. I was badly hurt and medevaced to Zurich, where I was in the hospital for two months. I had three surgeries. After I left the hospital, I ended up back in the Bronx, where I was born and raised, for a long convalescence—in my childhood bedroom.
That experience is the genesis of the book, and its center. The other two sections of the book, which is a tryptic, take up themes of mixed-race identity, time, mortality, queer love and sexuality.
The beating heart of the whole thing, of my first book also, and probably of my vision as an artist, is love, in all its expressions, what denies it and what makes it possible. The grief that accompanies that love has to do with the separateness of our species, how we have divided ourselves, sometimes in ways that feel positive, sometimes in ways that are apparently neutral, and sometimes in obviously corrosive and violent ways. I believe that a unified sense of “us” is our initial state of being in the world– before we are named, gendered, raced, and cultivated into a self, a person. In my poems, I am trying to return us there, to bring the singing voice of the poem and the reader back to that space.
Rumpus: Let’s talk about the poem that centers the collection: “On the Overnight from Agadir.”
There’s tension, deciding whether to make the trip to your mother’s homeland, the tension between the desire to discover and the desire to disappear—or maybe to just get a dog. The search for place, for home, for meaning, your thoughts about time, about the meaning of your work. The poem is so huge in its reach and heart. While you were recuperating, in a forced stillness physically, did you do a lot of writing? Even if it were just in your head?
Shanahan: Poetry was nowhere near my consciousness in the acute moments after the accident, or in the months after. There was supposed to be only one surgery, then there was a second, then a third. With complication after complication, I just wanted to get the fuck out, to get to the other side of it.
I began to explore the experience in poems when I arrived in California, the September after the accident, and it’s amazing how fate carried me into that process. My first book was picked up shortly after I had arrived in Morocco, so my intention that fall had been to apply for fellowships and university teaching positions around the country, to see where I would end up after Morocco.
The accident happened at the time when I would’ve started doing that. While I was in the hospital one morning, between surgeries two and three, I thought to myself, If you get out of this, you’re going to need something to do! It was December 2. I remembered that the deadline for the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford was December 1, so it had passed that midnight. I was disappointed. Then it occurred to me that because Zurich was nine hours ahead of California, the deadline hadn’t yet passed in local time! I had thirty-five minutes to throw together the application, which I managed to do, using pre-existing application materials. Months later, recovering in the Bronx, I was lamenting my circumstances, wondering what was next, when ding! an email came in from Eavan Boland. I arrived in California that September, and it was there that I began to metabolize the experience creatively.
Rumpus: It feels like this was a poem you had to write.
Shanahan: The experience was so complex and layered that I needed to process what had happened to me, and language is one of the tools I use to contemplate, to process experience. The poem was the eventual byproduct of that process, which, at its start, was about something else, about integrating experience. Somewhere along the way, the processing had occurred and I began thinking aesthetically.
Rumpus: How did you decide to put that poem in the middle of the book?
Shanahan: The first question I had was whether it could be a book-length poem. I generated many, many, many, many pages. In my discussions with Louise Glück at Stanford, from whom I had the privilege of learning, and in my own thinking about the poem, it became clear that it could be a book-length poem, but didn’t need to be. I whittled down the pages and distilled the poem into its current form. In its shortened version, it would exist alongside other work, and centering it then felt intuitive to me.
Rumpus: You write a lot about social identity and physical positioning. All of this is done to find the place of belonging we call “home.” Has the accident, the aftermath, and the process of metabolizing the experience into poems changed your concept of what constitutes home?
Shanahan: It returned me to an understanding, a wisdom, that had always been inside of me that I had lost touch with somehow. There is a truth, I believe, inside each of us, whether we are connected to it or not, that we are at home wherever we are. We are at home in the body. Sure, certain spaces might comfort or energize us more than others. There are places where we feel a sense of kinship to the physical earth, the people, the culture that’s expressed there. But we are diminished, I think, when we begin to depend on something outside of ourselves for a sense of safety, or self-possession.
I have an older poet friend who, in a long spiritual conversation we once had, said, completely earnestly, “Home is a sentimental fantasy!” I understand now more clearly what she meant.
Rumpus: “‘Mulatto’ :: ‘Quadroon,’” a brilliant poem that appears early in the collection, begins with what seems like a universal need to express one’s self: “I want to tell you what for me it has been like.”
The barriers you experience to that expression are not universal, however: “To speak at all / I must occupy a position / in a system whose positions / I appear not to occupy.” You are both, as you say, “A part and apart.”
This feels like a really impossible situation. Can you speak to how that position/non-position and language are connected and how existing in that liminal space adds both an urgency to the need to be heard and, at the same time, a questioning of whether that’s possible?
Shanahan: The poem meditates on that very question and, importantly, I think, doesn’t reach a conclusion. I’m not really interested in posturing at irrefutable conclusions, or easy answers; I want instead to put a spotlight on complexity, on nuance. I believe that racial discourse in this country is often flattened into one of a few mainstream narratives, probably in part because many people are resistant to even the clearest and most urgent issues—police brutality, for example. I don’t mean to say those narratives, or the portions of the conversation, that are most central today should not be as central as they are. I’m saying that there are many narratives. If you are in a body, you are racialized. You are having a racialized experience. What if integrating an experience, like my own, seemingly adjacent to larger mainstream narratives, or other narratives that are less familiar, into the larger racial discourse, can actually help us advance that discourse? I believe it can and does.
As for the poem, one cause of the limits on expression is the tendency to conceive of race, myopically, in terms of a static presence or absence of privilege, when privilege is dynamic. I have privilege in one room, then I absolutely do not in the next. And the reason I lack privilege in the second room is the reason I have it in the first. How do you “position” (name) that? So yes, let’s keep talking, let’s put everything, and everyone’s experience, on the table.
Rumpus: The way you write about your mom is so beautiful. I’m thinking of “Not the Whole Thing, but a Large Part of the Story,” of “Trace Evidence,” and of “Two Rooms Down the Hall,” in which you write “When she tells me not to put forward that I am Black, she is saying I love you. / She’s saying I want you to live. I see now. When she told my brother she wished / He’d just find a nice blonde girl and settle down, I took her by the face / And, staring into her even-keeled nonchalance/ told her I love you, and you are crazy.”
Your mom taught you a lot about identity, and while her own view of herself seems solid, it didn’t match the spaces in which people saw her.
Shanahan: That dissonance has been a primary question of my own identity and has required me to examine the instability of identity constructs, and in particular racial constructs, over time and space. My mother is from the Maghreb, born and raised in Morocco, identifies as Arab, as Muslim, as Moroccan, as woman. These were the identity markers germane to her experience.
It wasn’t that the color of her skin did not have meaning in Morocco. It of course did. But when my mother arrived here, to a new cultural and national context, with its terms of identity, its pathologies, her Blackness took on new meaning, new significance—and often contentiously. Now, it’s not that I think a person in her circumstances would need to revise their self-concept, but I think it becomes especially important to consider those circumstances when children are involved, when a first-generation Black American experience is happening outside of an African American lineage. I’m writing into that generational dissonance. As I ask in a poem that didn’t make it into the collection, “Why are the parts of her that she cannot see / the only parts of me that I can?”
Rumpus: This title made me laugh: “While I Wash My Face, I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me,” because, Charif, you ask impossible questions all the time!
Shanahan: Guilty.
Rumpus: What I found interesting in this poem and several others is that you address yourself in the second person. You directly ask yourself questions. How did that choice come about?
Shanahan: The first piece is the distancing effect of using the “you as I,” the permission it grants you to inhabit a different mind space around your subjects, to separate from them in a way. The self that I’m addressing is part of me, is inside me, but I’m able to inhabit or situate myself in a different internal position vis-a-vis the material at hand.
The gesture is also necessitated by something I believe and that I think a fair amount of people I know would find difficult to trust: the self speaking to you right now, is not the self I inhabited (or that inhabited me) at the beginning of this conversation. We have changed one another in this dialogue of thirty or forty-five minutes. It doesn’t mean that this change needs to be profound, or on a constitutive level. It means a shifting occurs, by virtue of our “contact.” There is information about living, art, human connection, language, race—about everything that is alive inside this interaction—that you have integrated, or that at least is inside you waiting to be integrated. The same is true for me.
Rumpus: We talked about interpretations, and the way people bring with them their views of others when they meet them. Is it scary to put yourself on the page this way, while knowing people are going to hear what they hear and see what they see through their own lens?
Shanahan: I love what you’re saying because it’s an element of my work that can be easily misunderstood. A reader might say these are “confessional” poems or poems that seem generated by a psychological or emotional compulsion to reveal, to be seen. I wouldn’t agree with that at all. I think honesty, or transparency, is an aesthetic choice.
We shouldn’t assume anything that happens within the body of any poem is an event that has actually been lived. In the moments when I am most apparently honest about experiences that one might be expected to hide or keep to themselves, I am more than sharing myself or reflecting myself to an individual, I am reflecting the reader back to the reader. I am reflecting you back to you. One of the lines in “Fig Tree” is, in a similar vein: “Do I apologize? I am of this same world.” I didn’t ask for any of this, and I have nothing to be ashamed of.
I genuinely believe that I am you. It’s a notion that, again, many find hard to accept, or trust. I don’t mean to flatten our differences or to suggest that we’re having the same experience. The constructed world, though constructed, is real. In a way, it’s the first level of experience. My story has to be your story on some level, and yours, mine. We are beholden to one another. We are here at the same time.
Rumpus: What would you like people to get from this book?
Shanahan: I would like them to recognize themselves in a life that isn’t theirs, or maybe even like any they’ve known. I’d like them to be reminded of, again, the spiritual fact of our oneness—in a way that doesn’t feel irrelevant to how we live but can actually animate how we live, that can shape how we move through these lives and these bodies, at this time. I hope there are people who inhabit identity positions very different from my own, who can nonetheless see themselves in this book. I hope the book will awaken some people to the complexities of racial identity, especially today in an increasingly globalized world. I hope that the book can reach people’s hearts and souls and generate new conversation around the subjects I’m exploring.
Rumpus: Do you find that message, this book is especially necessary today?
Shanahan: I often ask my students, “The world is literally and figuratively on fire. Of all the things we could do with our lives, why write poems?” There are many answers to that question, of course, but chiefly, for me, it’s about the elevation of consciousness, the understanding of portions of human experience, even when that experience is far from our own, that poetry enables.
As a species, we can’t even agree, for example, that the climate crisis is real, or, as I put it in a poem in the book, that “we are all the same animal.” We can’t get on the same page about scientific fact, even when it requires our urgent, collective attention if we’re going to make it. And that must be rooted in the competing priorities generated by our separateness.
So yes, I think now is as good a time as any to spread a message of oneness.
Rumpus: What’s next for you?
Shanahan: I am working on a memoir that treats, in prose, the same subjects as the books of poetry, and I’ve also started my third book of poetry—a book-length epistolary poem to Whiteness. The poem is poly-vocal, written by many “authors,” and moves across time and space. There’s a section that comes out of the seventh century Arab slave trade, for example, preceding a section that comes out of the contemporary Bronx. It’s very global in orientation, as I am as a person and a poet, and I’m excited to keep ‘finding’ it.
***
Author photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
By Craig Stewart Johnson.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Craig Stewart Johnson is a visual and audio artist based in Gateshead, UK. His artwork focuses on the detail and nuance of everyday textures and places. Developing from an interest in underground music, there is an obsession with the aesthetic aspects of diy culture. Analog methods of production are an ever-present inspiration, the imperfections flowing through the work informing a search for beauty and catharsis in decay. He has exhibited at various location in the UK and further afield, as well as having multiple sound works published though record labels such as Kirigirisu Recordings, Crow Versus Crow and Modern Concern. His mostly recent publication of collage work, Dead Negatives, was published by Paper View Books, Portugal. He is currently a postgraduate researcher at Northumbria University researching self-organisation and DIY culture in underground experimental music.
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