The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening, pt. 19: Katrinka Moore

The Pleasures Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2015 

by Katrinka Moore

  

 Throughout the year I kept returning to Shakespeare. In the spring I read Tina Packer’s Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays.  An actor and director, Packer is the founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts.  Her premise is that the playwright changed in his attitude toward women over the course of his career, eventually writing fully realized female characters — women who “own” their sexuality and find their own means of power.  She imagines him learning and reveling in an equal relationship with the Dark Lady of the sonnets, which experience led him to create Juliet, who is Romeo’s equal in love and better in speaking and action.  

In the book’s prologue, Packer describes her project:

 The story of this book is a simple one.  It follows the progression of the women in Shakespeare’s plays.  Then, from the way in which Shakespeare wrote about women, we follow his spiritual growth. And I have a hope that understanding the spiritual growth of an artist of Shakespeare’s magnitude may provide a road map for the kind of creative action and understanding we need to alter the dangerous course the world is on — for Shakespeare pulled back from the apocalypse of Lear, Coriolanus, and Macbeth and found a way to the regeneration of The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.

Over the summer I reread Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt, which describes the society in which Shakespeare lived — the religious tensions, the recurring plague, class and education and how these affected Shakespeare and his writing.

Best of all was the London-based Donmar Warehouse production of Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, which I saw at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in the fall.  This is an all-female cast, set as a play performed in a prison.  Jade Anouka’s Hotspur and Sophie Stanton’s Falstaff stood out.  My favorite scene was the first in Act III, when Hotspur, Glendower, and Mortimer divide up England on a map, which is drawn on the floor with different colors of spray paint.  Hotspur dances on her section, insisting she will straighten the borderline river — just to annoy Glendower.

 I bounced around with fiction, mostly reading books friends and family recommended.  I’ll mention a few that meant a lot to me.

Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish tells the story of Zou Lei, born in Central Asia to an Uighur mother and a Chinese father, who lives as an undocumented immigrant in Queens. She meets Skinner, a veteran of three tours in Iraq, and Lish takes us through a period of their hardscrabble lives, affected by political events beyond their control.

Like most of America I read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels.  These complex stories and characters give a sense of life in Italy in the post WWII years, the battles women and activists faced, the cultural and political upheavals.

I’m not normally a Richard Ford reader, but Canada is a dreamlike tale of a shy boy who escapes to Canada when his parents go to prison.  The writing is a lyrical portrayal of an inner life.

Jennifer Egan finished Look at Me in early 2001, but the plot is prescient, covering extreme selfie culture and business people who promote it. 

I saw three films about girls in Muslim cultures, all worth watching: 

Mustang, directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven, is the story of five free-spirited sisters in rural Turkey who come up against the patriarchal culture when their uncle moves in with them and their grandmother. 

Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu takes place in Mali and shows a young girl’s herding family at odds with a new order of jihadis. 

In Haifaa al-Mansour’s Wadjda, a ten-year-old Saudi girl enters a contest reciting the Koran to win the prize money — she wants to buy a bicycle.

It was a good year for poetry. In Agua, Fuego (Finishing Line Press), Guillermo Filice Castro writes about the passing of his parents. He opens with a poem about his mother.

 On A New Anniversary of Her Death I Make Myself Buckwheat Pancakes

One scoop

And a world is born

In this skilled skillet

With gravity

And a clumpy mixture

That flattens into

An almost round

Moon so hot

Blueberries begin to bleed

And smear eye shadow

Across the pock-

Marked face

I flip

& judge

Its less bubbly

Darker side

With my spatula’s

Bird foot

Under which

The tart and naked disc

Firms up

Hissing a wish

To be

Cooled

& cheered

By sliced strawberries

Then forked into my mouth

Filling with the murmurs

Of water and milk

And the one egg

That in cracking

Bound it all

Reprinted by permission of Guillermo Filice Castro.

In Vexed (Wipf and Stock), Elizabeth Poreba examines her relationship to religion, and in this poem she puts her own spin on the tradition of a dialogue between body and soul.

One-Sided Dialogue Concerning the Soul

Like the old friend who calls

only to tell you about herself,

the mind does all the talking.

It’s so interesting.

Besides, it thinks

that the soul is not very bright.

In that place within the many mansions,

the mind doubts that the soul

would know where to hang the pictures.

The mind is almost ready to give up on the soul,

except it hears a humming somewhere,

something knitting together, 

like a great tree in full leaf.

Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Poreba.

Louise Glück’s Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus) is dark without being hopeless.  “Parable” explores the idea of purpose.

Parable

First divesting ourselves of worldly goods, as St. Francis teaches,
in order that our souls not be distracted
by gain and loss, and in order also
that our bodies be free to move
easily at the mountain passes, we had then to discuss
whither or where we might travel, with the second question being
should we have a purpose, against which
many of us argued fiercely that such purpose
corresponded to worldly goods, meaning a limitation or constriction,
whereas others said it was by this word we were consecrated
pilgrims rather than wanderers: in our minds, the word translated as
a dream, a something-sought, so that by concentrating we might see it
glimmering among the stones, and not
pass blindly by; each
further issue we debated equally fully, the arguments going back and forth,
so that we grew, some said, less flexible and more resigned,
like soldiers in a useless war. And snow fell upon us, and wind blew,
which in time abated — where the snow had been, many flowers appeared,
and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line
so that we had shadows again; many times this happened.
Also rain, also flooding sometimes, also avalanches, in which
some of us were lost, and periodically we would seem
to have achieved an agreement; our canteens
hoisted upon our shoulders, but always that moment passed, so
(after many years) we were still at that first stage, still
preparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;
we could see this in one another; we had changed although
we never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, traveling
from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed
in a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purpose
believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free
in order to encounter truth, felt it had been revealed.

 At the Basilica SoundScapes in Hudson, NY, I heard Holly Anderson and Chris Brokaw read from Anderson’s The Night She Slept with a Bear (Publication Studio) accompanied by music Brokaw created for the book. Bear is full of narratives and mesostics.  One of my favorites is “Signe”:

Look, it’s Aunt Signe yanking bleached sheets across my empty white page.  Thin

fingers stained with bluing. Bed sheets hung to dry, slung high on a line strung

from the red cabin to her wood pile to the sauna on the shivery river.  Water sings

stories.  Wood is always speaking.  Tight tongue-in-groove conjures wainscoting in

Signe’s kitchen and the outhouse with spider forever spinning in a far corner. A

fierce turtle lived under her clanking plank bridge. Signe liked to tease that crank

hiding in the shadows.  He could snap her stick in half.  He would and we’d laugh

— terrified.  Blue crayfish pinched toes we poked under the splintery dock and we’d

shriek with joy. Fear delicious as the cake doughnuts Signe had waiting most morn-

ings. The dough mixed and proofed then fried and sugar dusted by dawn.  Soon we’d

tumble out of the sleeping porch slung over the murmuring river and begin. Again.

Watch two syrupy-red nectar feeders hung on a low branch and hummingbirds

blurred to green gauze.  Always feeding. Always darting off like dreams.  There’s

never been deeper sleep than on that screened porch when all was still ahead and

shimmering. 

Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Poreba.

Katrinka Moore is the author of Numa (Aqueduct 2014), Thief, and This is Not a Story.  She is at work on a collection of lyric and visual poems for Pelekinesis Press.

           

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2014, pt. 23: Katrinka Moore

The Pleasures of 2014
by Katrinka Moore

Elements of wildness run through what I’ve been reading, and through the events I’ve had the chance to see and hear over the past year.

Early in the winter I went to The Drawing Center in New York to see an exhibit of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts written on envelopes. It was very moving to view the actual artifacts, and I felt that the handwritten poems on cut and torn pieces of paper diminished the boundary between the poet’s inner intensity and the reader standing on the outside.

Sometimes Dickinson filled the available space with words. For example, she wrote “In this short Life that only lasts an hour” on the triangular flap of an envelope, making each line shorter down to the single word at the bottom. (The final — or anyway, the printed — version of the poem is two long lines.) On the other hand, she wrote a draft for “A not admitting of the wound” on only half the available space, an opened-out envelope. And “Glass was the Street – in Tinsel Peril” she fit in two columns on a torn envelope.

Whatever her purpose in using these paper fragments for writing drafts of some poems — thrift, convenience, design — she saved them. I liked these “scraps” so much I cut out odd-shaped pieces of paper to give to participants in a visual poetry workshop I taught later in the year. Some people filled up the space, others wrote around the edges. Each poet approached the space differently.

The envelope manuscripts are reproduced in The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems, edited by Jan Bervin and Marta Werner. You can see some of them here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/246738 and scroll down]

Viewing the exhibit led me to begin an informal study of Dickinson’s work, starting with Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. I find Vendler very helpful, from her deconstruction of individual poems to placing each one in the framework of the poet’s work and life.

But mostly I read contemporary poetry this year. Caroline Beasley-Baker’s For Lack of Diamond Years (Pelekinesis, 2013) has more than one kind of wildness. There’s family in “pre-school/the eyes & ears”:

i spent my first 4 years in a beer joint in downtown
Kansas City on the edge of hillbilly and honky tonk —

…

my aunt lola sitting on my father’s knee — my mother
leaping
                                      from off the top of the juke box:

And then there’s the outside, as in “nativity/early spring in 3 colors”:

heliotropic
hectare — punchdrunk
— i’m stunned in nascent

luxe:
ruched/dew-sugared
ground greening in-sync
— ur-pleasures
reified/demitassed
dark — replete.

deliver
me rinsed/
tricked out/clean —

Blueish
Gooseberry Blond
dyed Snow Pink.

Beasley-Baker is also a visual artist and once did graduate work in myth and folklore. Reading her book is like swirling around in colorful, mythic landscapes. http://www.cbeasley-baker.com
 

Sarah Stern mixes erotica and family in But Today is Different (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2014; http://sarahstern.me). She writes about her mother in “After the Stroke”:

I bring her memoirs to read.
She likes them.
She tells me I lost my ass.
I reach back
and there it is

smaller, true, but still there.
I love my ass and tits.
Always have—thighs another matter,
now that I’m older
I’m liking them.

They’ve been there for me.
I feel her slipping away….

And then there’s the wild love of — maybe everything — in this part of “Tongue/Fire/Eclipse/Groove”:

I knew then at 3 a.m.
Out on the terrace 23 degrees
I shouted it at the moon
Copper/yellow/egg
An iota of nothingness in my winter coat
And my son’s basketball sneakers,
I looked up, the stars shining
With a light that pierced/changed me
My voice echoed over the park and Henry Hudson
I was standing in the night air
Shouting for all time
I love you to no one—to you.

George Held writes about the seasons in Culling (Poets Wear Prada, 2014), but with the sadness of extinction and climate change hanging over. In “Natural Quiet” he writes about the loss of silence:

I’ve known natural quiet only once, In the core of the Swedish forest, where Lost alongside a lake one moonless night, Too rapt for fright, I heard cicadas chirr, Hooves thump, mink drink, fish splash, although the roar Of blood deafened me, and dark sealed my sight.

Molly Bashaw is a poet and musician who grew up on small family farms. The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It (The Word Works, 2014) is a mythical version of her childhood. Here is the ending of “There Were No Mirrors in That Farmhouse”:

                                 It must have been
because we had been separating stones
from pebbles from stones so deeply gone
they could not touch the plow, stones
from boulders for our wall, that the hay bale
we threw down from the loft, held together
by two short pieces of twine,
seemed weightless and full of light.
The whole field still moving inside it.

I also read and viewed lots of wild poetry and art online. Here are a couple of pieces from MungBeing, a journal that has everything — art, music, all kinds of writing.

Elizabeth Poreba begins with an epigraph by Thomas Berry in “The Invention of Photosynthesis”:

“…when living forms had consumed the conditions of their own survival…photosynthesis was invented…” --Thomas Berry. The Dream of the Earth

You’d think we’d have taken the hint to fade
back to cosmic dust, but we were still cells,
single, not sensitive to rebuff. The oxygen was gone,
but we still had hydrogen and sun,
so someone, some optimist, some
entrepreneur of air, got an idea,
and made sugar out of carbon. The invention
caught on, and we’ve made a fortune.

A classic tale: When handed a lemon...
don’t crave Coke. Work with what you’ve got.

http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_57.html?page=33

And Holly Anderson’s mixed media “Botanical (Spring Collage)” is worth a closer look online: http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_55.html?page=25#4093.

~ ~ ~ In the summer my husband and I went to the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival in Oak Hill, New York, a days-long event with a wide range of musicians rooted in Americana but taking their own ways — Carolina Chocolate Drops, Elephant Revival, Barleys Jacks, The Steel Wheels, Gangstagrass (yes, bluegrass hip-hop). What a scene — families living in tents and trailers for the duration, everyone bringing chairs to set up on the lawn. Then there’s the Dance Tent, a stage and a wooden floor for the audience, fairly close quarters — nothing like listening to Rhiannon Giddens & company while dancing with friendly people of all ages, kids and dogs running around.

Late in the summer I read Gary Snyder’s A Place in Space, a book of essays published in the mid-1990s but with pieces going back to the 1970s. As always, Snyder writes beautifully about existing in nature, but I was disheartened by the environmental problems he detailed that have only worsened, with no progress made at all.

Here’s Snyder on wildness and language:

Wildness can be said to be the essential nature of nature. As reflected in consciousness, it can be seen as a kind of open awareness — full of imagination but also the source of alert survival intelligence. The workings of the human mind at its very richest reflect this self-organizing wildness. So language does not impose order on a chaotic universe, but reflects its own wildness back.

As it turned out, Snyder’s essay “Writers and the War Against Nature” helped inspire Meredith Monk’s performance piece On Behalf of Nature, which was the culminating wild event I saw at the end of the year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Snyder imagines the role of the artist as a “spokesperson for non-human entities communicating to the human realm through dance or song.” That pretty much describes On Behalf of Nature. Monk and her co-performers dance and sing, and both their wordless songs and their simple movements are haunting, calling up knowledge and feelings so ancient they mix not only animal and human but wind, water, fire. Monk is a shaman. I hope we are listening.

Katrinka Moore’s epic poem Numa was published by Aqueduct Press in 2014. She is the author of two previous poetry collections, Thief and This is Not a Story. She lives in New York.