SYCAMORE REVIEW » NEWS

Wislawa Symborska (1923-2012)

Sycamore — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:54:32 +0000

By Elizabeth Petersen

I take Szymborska’s lead when I say the hardest sentence of an elegiac blog post is the first. Well, now that one’s behind me.

In many cases, when a poet passes a small part of the world mourns. This little world of poets and poetry readers feels a tingeing of their hope, but soon a this too shall pass sigh becomes a sort of resolution, and they (we) try to carry on. Szymborska, though, feels different. After decades of remarkable work that spoke both to the social issues many poems fear to enter and the weird wonderment that many poems fail to achieve, I realize, in a childish way, that I never thought Szymborska would ever leave the world, that she was too good, too smart, for anyone to pull a fast one on her. And part of me thinks such thoughts would make her grin.

Coming from the movement of Polish postwar poets, Szymborska made a way for herself among the dark, the guilt-ridden, the exiled, and the reactionary to create poems that meant something to everyone who read them. Her poems grew to take up the whole world, and the world noticed, offering her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, a prize that was difficult for her to make sense of. Her translator Clare Cavanagh said in a recent interview, “Her friends called it the Nobel Tragedy…It was a few years before she wrote another poem.” Which I think just attests to what a genuine person she must have been.

From the title poem of her latest book, Here, she wrote, “I can’t speak for elsewhere, / but here on Earth we’ve got a fair supply everything.” And ain’t that the truth? Because that’s the thing with Szymborska, she says it before anybody else could—about pierogies and cultured microorganisms and the words we think we know. She was the best sort of riddler. As Charles Simic said, Szymborska was “[n]ot only one of the finest poets living today, but also one of the most readable.” Readable but layered, her images simple but expansive.

Which is why I am happy we got one last book, one last morsel to save in our cheek. Szymborska is the poet I save for bad weather—so that I can coop myself up and spend the day staring first at her words, then the ceiling, then the window.

In her book, Monologue of a Dog she has the line, “When I pronounce the word Nothing, / I make something no non-being can hold.” Give it to Szymborska to make nothing into something, literally, abstractly, literally. She inspires me to try and do the same.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Petersen is a first year poet in Purdue University’s MFA Program.

Congratulations to Greg Schutz!

Sycamore — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:03:23 +0000

by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor

We here at Sycamore Review were honored to publish Greg Schutz’s beautiful story “You are the Greatest Lake” in Issue 23.1, so we are thrilled that the story has been selected for New Stories from the Midwest 2012 (Indiana University Press), guest edited by Rosellen Brown.

The forthcoming New Stories from the Midwest 2011 will include contributions from Charles Baxter, Christine Sneed, Dan Chaon, Rebbeca Makkai and Anthony Doerr. We think Greg’s story will find a nice comfortable spot in equally good company in the 2012 edition.

Order a copy of Issue 23.1 for a look into some great writing from the Midwest and beyond. Take a look at an excerpt of the story and a short interview with Greg Schutz if you need any more convincing.

...MORE

BINOCULAR VISION a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle fiction award!!!

Sycamore — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:02:49 +0000

by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor

It’s been exhausting trying to keep up with Edith Pearlman lately. She contributed a wonderful story, “Last Words,” in issue 23.1 before publishing her collection of new and selected stories Binocular Vision. After receiving the Pen/Malamud Prize for short fiction, she was nominated as a National Book Award finalist. The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle awards were announced this weekend and guess who is a finalist: Edith Pearlman. Pick up your copy of issue 23.1 today and read “Last Words” to see what all the fuss is about.

If you live within shouting distance of West Lafayette, be sure to join us on Tuesday, March 27th when we’ll be honored to have Edith Pearlman on campus for a reading and Q&A session. I have a feeling we’ll have a lot to talk about! Find a preview of the conversation with our review of Binocular Vision and interview with Edith Pearlman from last year.

“surrounded by cannibals who are nice”: Ron Padgett is cooler than you

Sycamore — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:30:13 +0000

by Jacob Sunderlin, Co-Editor of Poetry

Ron Padgett, poet, author of some twenty volumes, memoirist, collaborator, badass, septuagenarian, translator, Okie, grandfather, has earned himself the right to start a poem thusly:

There’s not a lot of time to think
when one is assailed by activities and obligations
and even less time to do it
when one is free of them
because then one spends one’s time thinking
about how little time there is.

Sometimes, when talking about poems, poets, or recent collections with poet friends, I’ll try and distinguish between poets I like “as a writer of poems” (read: poets whose techniques I find “fresh,” whose “voice” I respect, whose “language” is “interesting”) and poets whose work I like “as a Jacob” (read: poets I want to drink for breakfast). This is sometimes an unpopular (read: schizophrenic) perspective, but—for me—is the difference between Karen Volkman and Susan Wheeler, between C.D. Wright and Elaine Equi, between Alex Lemon and Zach Schomburg, between Ashbery and Koch, between—shit—between the Beatles and the Stones, Ghostface and Raekwon, Joni Mitchell and Townes Van Zandt.

Point being, Ron Padgett is in both categories, comfortably. He takes a nap in one, wakes up, makes Earl Grey in the other, splatters brains on the wall, and goes back to sleep. The poem above, titled “Thinking About a Cloud,” from his 2011 collection, How Long, continues: “That’s what it’s like to be in America / early in the twenty-first century” and I really believe it, because Padgett writes with the kind of innocent brilliance, the childlike wonder, at—brace yourself—“The Everyday” that we’ve become too cynical, too esoteric, and too distracted to appreciate in contemporary poems. That poem is an existential conversation between the speaker and—yes—a cloud.

Like Johnny Cash, Padgett defeats irony. The prevailing theme here is death, which strikes Padgett as funny, without cynicism—“The Death Deal,” a catalogue of possible options for the poet’s end, ends:

I’m oddly almost cheered
by the thought
that I might find out
in the not too distant future.
Now for lunch.

Are we allowed to have this much fun in a book of poems? Who cares. Read Ron Padgett, and age with such grace.

How Long (2011)
by Ron Padgett
Coffee House Press, 91 p.
$12.50

“the past, the color pink”: An Interview with David Trinidad

Sycamore — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 19:22:13 +0000

by Jacob Sunderlin, Co-Editor of Poetry

When I was seventeen, I ganked the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry from the public library and found three poems by David Trinidad anthologized between Bob Kaufman and Woody Guthrie. This was—to my mind—pretty much the coolest thing ever. In his newly-published and completely-addictive Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems, Trinidad has given us a prismatic funhouse of contemporary poetry, full of Yardley Slicker lipgloss, NRFB (never removed from box) collectible Barbie outfits, and Sylvia Plath. In this cultural detritus, Trinidad finds something thrilling, something human, and a poetry as formally unexpected and inventive as its subjects. He was kind enough to speak with Sycamore Review recently and discuss some his most recent projects.

Sycamore Review: This was a big year for you—your selected poems were published, as well as the collected poems of your friend Tim Dlugos, which you edited and introduced. What was the experience of working on these two projects together? Or did you consciously try to keep them separate?

David Trinidad: I worked on the books concurrently, usually alternating between the two projects. Tim’s presence was palpable throughout. I actually welcomed his influence on my own work—just as he’d influenced me when he was alive. The way he was able to dive into a poem, and run with an inspired idea, in particular, had an effect on me, gave me courage to face writing my new poems.

SR: Did working on A Fast Life change the way you thought about your own volume?

DT: It did give me a sense of finality, in a way. Tim was almost twenty years dead when I was working on A Fast Life. I had to reach into the past and retrieve all of his poems, reconstruct his life. Because I was also working on my selected poems, it made me look at my own poems through an archival lens. Maybe that would have happened anyway. The idea of discrete books, for instance, fell by the wayside. The poems now exist independently—in a more open chronological framework, not just within the confines of individual books. Each poem’s now part of this larger picture, or puzzle. A life’s work, if you will.

SR: Many of your poems seem to come from prompts—lists, ephemera, haiku for each episode of Peyton Place. The poem has a kind of goal for itself. What does the prompt give you, as the poet? What is the advantage?

DT: I’ve always said that prompts, especially forms, are toy-like. They turn writing into a sort of game. Challenging, but fun. A riddle you have to solve. But every poem, prompt or not, is a riddle you have to solve, or try to.

SR: In general, you’re a poet of many obsessions—’60s pop culture and Barbie, especially. Do you think of these obsessions as muses? Do you sit down specifically intending to write about Barbie stuff, say, or does it attack you?

DT: I guess I would agree that my obsessions are muses. Obsessions drive you, spur you on. It’s not always such a conscious decision, the things I write about. I suppose it’s too simplistic to say it just happens. I’m always trying to make writing happen. It just doesn’t feel like I’m in total control of what comes out. In fact, a large part of the work seems to be about relinquishing control, so the unexpected perception or admission can take place. That’s why the prompts, the forms, are useful: they distract you, or preoccupy you, while something magical transpires. At least that’s the hope.

SR: Some recent poems likewise seem to pick up on similar little artifacts, objects, rooms, occasions, from the life of Sylvia Plath. It seems to be less a literary obsession than one of celebrity, of adulation. One of my favorite of your new poems is “Underlined in Sylvia Plath’s Copy of Tender Is the Night.” How did Plath enter into your life? How and why does she remain there?

DT: I first encountered Plath when I was an undergraduate in the early ’70s. I was assigned Ariel in one of my lit classes. I’ve been interested in her ever since. It hasn’t been a constant thing; my interest has waxed and waned over the years. It was reignited, in a big way, about three years ago. I discovered that one of the Plath archives is in Indiana, at the Lilly Library in Bloomington, within driving distance of where I live. So I made a pilgrimage. That’s where I saw her copy of Tender Is the Night. It’s an amazing experience to be able to hold and study something like that, to touch something that Plath herself touched, underscored. Fetishistic, perhaps. No, that’s a put-down. It’s an intimate act, one that connects you with a writer, his or her energy, in a very personal way. It’s that intimacy, with Plath, that I find so exciting. To get that close to the source of such tremendous vitality, creativity.

SR: The long poem “A Poem Under the Influence” from The Late Show, included here in Dear Prudence, involves many “confessions.” One of them (“Confession: last Monday (February 21) at Columbia College, I gave my poetry workshop / a writing assignment (Joe’s I remember) and went to my office to bid on Bride’s Dream”) even mentions a workshop I was in. In the book, you’re engaging sometimes with the material of confessional poetry in a unique way, but do you think of yourself as a “confessional” poet?

DT: I can’t believe you were in that workshop! I suppose I do consider myself a Confessional poet in some respects, insofar as I have things to confess, that I feel driven to confess, that I’m not afraid to expose. So many poets are; they hide behind their intellect in order to evade the personal. But that seems to be what I crave, what I look for in other writers. Maybe it’s because the Confessional poets had a big impact on me early on—Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. When I began writing, they were the popular poets. More than that, though, there was a true affinity. I had been raised Roman Catholic; a strong belief in the redeeming power of confession was ingrained in me.

SR: The poem circles back around and mentions previous poems in the collection, previous “characters” we’re already familiar with having read your previous poems arrive to greet us again as they might in a memoir. It even mentions itself, the writing of the poem. How did you approach writing it? What is the “influence” of the title?

DT: I’d thought, when I started it, that I would write an instant New York School long poem: twenty page-long stanzas, one a day. I think I wanted to have something to show for my summer. It ended up taking a year and a half to complete. I still wrote each stanza in one sitting, just not over consecutive days. There were other “rules”: the first line of each stanza had to contain the word “pink,” each line had to exceed the margin and wrap, and (big surprise) I had to confess something in each stanza. The poem is obviously under the influence of the New York School long poem, specifically James Schuyler’s “The Morning of the Poem” and “A Few Days.” I’d read a page or two of Schuyler each time I sat down to work on my poem, as warmup. The poem is also under the influence of the past, the color pink, as well as innumerable other things.

SR: Often, the poems in the book seem to bounce back and forth between humor and catharsis, subverting our expectations in a kind of self-aware way. It’s like Barbie punk rock. The beginning of “April Inventory” starts: “This is typical / autobiographical / stuff” which is quite disarming for the reader, in a wonderful, satisfying way that seems to be a trademark of yours. How did you arrive at that? What influenced it? What turns you on in the poems you read?

DT: Like the Confessional poets, the New York School poets influenced me, so perhaps the relationship between humor and catharsis has something to do with that. Frank O’Hara, Schuyler, Joe Brainard, Alice Notley’s poems from the early ’80s. And of course Dlugos. All very intimate and open. Friendly. Funny. We relate, don’t we, when someone lets down their guard and reveals who they really are. Both these aesthetic impulses—Confessional and New York School—strike me as incredibly generous. I like poems that disarm me in some way, make me laugh, cry, feel human. That surprise or delight. As when I’m looking at art in a gallery or museum, I simply know what I like when I see it.

SR: It’s difficult to estimate the number of great poets you’ve hipped me to personally, just by reading the dedications in some of your poems—Dlugos, Amy Gerstler, and Elaine Equi to name a few. Who are you reading lately?

DT: I’m just finishing Ted Hughes’s Moortown Diary. His intricate, even baroque descriptions of farm life. It’s an amazing book; the poems totally took me by surprise. One, “Struggle,” moved me to tears. I’ve also been reading Truman Capote’s short stories. And Schuyler’s art criticism. And Eula Biss’s essays. And every haiku I can get my hands on, as I’m writing a whole book of those Peyton Place haikus. Bashō. Issa. I’m always reading Emily Dickinson. Her poems blow my mind.

SR: I’m curious about your revision process. So much goes into your poems, what comes out?

DT: A lot. I revise quite a bit. I don’t take anything for granted. What does A.R. Ammons say: “one must write and rewrite till one writes it right.” I question everything I put on the page—sometimes endlessly, it seems.

David Trinidad’s most recent book, Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems, was published in 2011 by Turtle Point Press. His other books include The Late Show (2007), By Myself (with D.A. Powell, 2009), and Plasticville (2000), all published by Turtle Point. He is also the editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (Nightboat Books, 2011). Trinidad teaches poetry at Columbia College Chicago, where he co-edits the journal Court Green.

Doing What They Feel They Must: A Review of Patricia Henley’s OTHER HEARTBREAKS

Sycamore — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:54:15 +0000

by Rob Davidson

Every good story collection has its governing metaphors, those common notes that blend the individual crooners into a concert of voices singing harmony. Restlessness defines the spirited characters in Patricia Henley’s fine new collection of short fiction, Other Heartbreaks. In these stories, people’s lives break down and are reassembled; there are changes of allegiance and sexual orientation; there are moments of great sweetness and moments of insufferable loss. As one narrator puts it, these are tales of “broken hearts, mended hearts, eternal stories of love lost and gained.”

Henley moves across the territories of her stories with deceptive ease, ranging back and forth in time, layering with moves both small and large, gradually filling in the context for a dramatic present that is always tied in interesting and complicated ways to the past. Henley’s stories require (and reward) a reader’s patience. “Sun Damage” is a fine case in point. Meg is adept at travel and reinventing herself. She’s changed her name a few times. She likes to keep moving, to keep things new. After her father’s death, she returns home to see her mother and younger brother with a “reluctant heart.” We gradually learn why: returning home means confronting some difficult memories concerning the mother’s brutality. These are “Secrets she knew how to keep…. Memory serves us in ways that allow us to go on with a little dignity. She could stand to recall everything. But there was no sense telling everything. At some point what you told became only gossip on yourself, stirring up old trouble. And no good can come from that.”

As “Sun Damage” concludes, Meg is hard at work coming to grips with her difficult past. Her mother, who has also changed, reaches out: “Don’t be afraid of me, Meg.” Meg tries, but it isn’t easy. With every new step she takes, she feels the tug of memory. This is as it should be. In “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James famously declared that “Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads… catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.” This is the atmosphere of Other Heartbreaks: a finely-wrought web of memories, fears, and hopes connected to a tender, tenuous present.

Relationships between women are paramount in Other Heartbreaks. In “No Refunds in Case of Inclement Weather,” Ellen and Claire, an autumn-spring lesbian couple, slowly grow apart. Claire’s old flame Tommy, a widower, needs a companion and a stepmother to his young child. Claire is ready to play those roles. In a wrenching conclusion, the much younger Ellen spies this nascent family at play in a park, watching as her partner embraces a man with tenderness and love—precisely what’s been lost in her own relationship with Claire. Ellen cannot deny the obvious: “What they have is so pure that they didn’t even feel guilty when I walked up,” she remarks. Ellen learns that “love is stronger than guilt. Not that it’s pure, only stronger.” It’s a hard lesson, and one Ellen will both accept and act upon.

Place and character have always been tightly joined in Henley’s fiction. In the section of this collection entitled “Other Heartbreaks” we find a series of three interwoven stories about a family in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Joe, descended from the eastern Europeans who settled the neighborhood many decades ago, is loath to leave; the name of his baseball memorabilia shop, Home Plate, says it all. Joe clings to his past—embodied in his uncle’s decrepit country farmhouse—even as it rots around him.

Joe’s wife, Emma, longs for new adventure and travel. In the second story in the sequence, “Emma Compartmentalizes in Ireland,” she distances herself both literally and figuratively from her family. What she finds overseas is oddly liberating. Danny, Emma’s former student, has dumped his wife and run off with another woman; Danny’s mother enjoys an active life as an older, single woman; and Danny’s friend, the joyous, flirty Liam, is divorced but on surprisingly good terms with his ex-wife even as he dates other women. Emma finds it all rather inspiring, and in one of the most powerful endings in a book filled with powerful endings, she prepares to do something that will almost certainly lead to the end of her marriage. “It comes to her,” Henley writes, “not all at once like a pearl of wisdom, but in distasteful increments…. And walking down to find Liam, she blinks back tears, thinking—but not for long—of how she has deceived herself. And will.”

Such is the ethos of this powerful collection. Henley’s characters don’t have Joycean epiphanies. They roll and tumble through life, take bold risks, allow themselves to do the things they finally feel they must. Other Heartbreaks is a good and honest book, true in every way that matters. The stories are polished, exquisitely-cut gems, written in the sharply-observed prose we’ve come to expect and treasure from this master of the form.

Other Heartbreaks: Stories
Patricia Henley
Indianapolis: Engine Books, 2011.
178 pages / $26.95 hardcover, $14.95 paper, $6.99 E-book

2011 Wabash Poetry Prize Results!

Sycamore — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 01:05:27 +0000

By Jessica Jacobs, Editor-in-Chief

After Sycamore editors carefully culled 20 finalists from a Wabash Contest record of nearly 600 entries, former U.S. Poet Laureate Louise Glück has selected Maya Jewell Zeller and her poem “Caterpillars” as the winner of this year’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Glück also chose Carrie Causey and her poem “Woman in the Wall” as this year’s contest runner-up. Both of these poems will be showcased in Issue 24.1, Winter/Spring 2011, along with work from selected finalists.

Thanks to all who submitted. We hope you will continue to support and enjoy Sycamore and will consider submitting your work to the 2012 Wabash Prize for Poetry next year.

Complete Results: 2011 Wabash Poetry Prize

Winner:

Maya Jewell Zeller

First Runner-Up:

Carrie Causey

Second Runner-Up:

Michael Tyrell

Third Runner-Up:

Grace Marie Grafton

Finalists:
Terry Blackhawk
Sage Cohen
Geffrey Davis
Rebecca Morgan Frank
Jennifer Hancock
Lauren Hilger
Stephen Massimilla
Matthew Minicucci
Brad Modlin
Bern Mulvey
Emilia Phillips
Jonathan Rice
Kristin Robertson
Meredith Stricker
Sara Talpos
Greg Wrenn

Edith Pearlman’s BINOCULAR VISION a National Book Award Finalist

Sycamore — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 20:16:05 +0000

by Conor Broughan

It’s been a big year for Issue 23.1 contributor Edith Pearlman. In January, Lookout Books published Binocular Vision, a career spanning collection of new and selected stories. In June, she received the prestigious Pen/Malamud Award by the Pen/Faulkner Foundation. Today, the National Book Foundation announced that Binocular Vision is finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Congratulations!

Oh yeah…she also contributed her wild and wonderful “Last Words” in Sycamore Review’s Winter/Spring 2011 issue. Be sure to check out our review of Binocular Vision and interview with Edith Pearlman before you pick up your own copy of Issue 23.1 here.

Reading Series: Mary Leader

Sycamore — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:13:55 +0000

by Lindsey Alexander, Visiting Writers Series Coordinator

More than 120 people crowded Krannert Auditorium to hear Mary Leader read from her latest collection, Beyond the Fire, last week. These poems explore themes of heritage—Leader’s hometown, Pawnee, Oklahoma, appears in the text—but also feminism, romantic love, and family. Alternating wonderfully personal moments of self-doubt with voices that seem to come from “anonymous scribes,” Leader shared with her audience the new expressions possible in her experimental poetic forms.

Her poem “They Vibrate,” which replicates the texture of woven art and blurs the sound and appearance of pairs of words across many different lines, was projected on a screen behind her during the reading.

Leader said her obsession with the colors red and blue, as well as their optic effects on the mind, has seeped into Beyond the Fire. In the Q and A, the colors and visual textures in her poems led to a discussion of how textile arts affect her work. As an illustration of this influence, she treated the audience to a poem from her new manuscript. “The Distaff Side” plays on women’s links to textile arts and matrilineal relationships.

As Leader finished several manuscripts this summer, there is certainly more to look forward to from this poet.

For the next reading, we will welcome Purdue alumni Ely Shipley and Aaron Michael Morales at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 6 in the Krannert Auditorium, room 140. For more information on our reading series, please click here.

Beyond the Fire
Mary Leader
Shearsman Books—September 15, 2010
88 pages/$15.00

Patricia Henley’s OTHER HEARTBREAKS

Sycamore — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 01:29:12 +0000

by Conor Broughan

Patricia Henley, a faculty member in the Purdue creative writing program, has a new collection of short stories Other Heartbreaks that will be published on October 11, 2011. She recently wrote a post on the Glimmer Train website about her publishing experience for this book.

Robert Olen Butler called Henley’s new collection “splendid” and that “the sweet sadness of life shimmers in these tales. Patricia Henley is one of our culture’s finest chroniclers of the human heart.”

Check out the book trailer for Other Heartbreaks and be sure to pick it up at your local bookstore or Engine Books on October 11th.