Clarissa Jakobsons' Poetry Book Art: Integration of Line, Materials, Design.

                                                     by Barbara Sabol

My Lithuania: Land of Myth, Amber and Hope

Graphite, ink, linen, crystal, colored pencils, hand-made paper, poetic vision and artistic talent―these are the ingredients of Clarissa Jakobsons' poetry art books. Clarissa integrates words, color, texture and design to create poetry art that represents a reflective surface of materials that mirror the poems' sense, tone, structure. Her poems become made things in the world by virtue of the paper, ink, thread in which they become more fully enacted - a natural ekphrastacy.

I first met Clarissa Jakobsons in 2005 at a reading and reception for the Akron Art Museum sponsored New Words Poetry Contest, where her poem was awarded first place. She dressed in the character of the poem's speaker and delivered an unforgettable dramatic reading that raised the lines to life. I was delighted to encounter her again at the Cleveland Poetry Salon three years later, and, happily, the paths of our writing lives have crossed and re-crossed through the years since.

The history of the poetry art book dates back to the ancients, no doubt, with papyrus serving as the primary material resource. The contemporary handmade poetry art book is exemplified by Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which he wrote, illustrated, printed and bound, as well as hand-painted the cover. Inspired by endeavors such as Blake's, modern poetry art book forms are endlessly varied and fabulously imaginative: fold-outs, concertinas, shape books, scrolls; the list goes on and on. In a recent exhibit of Clarissa's art books, a wonderful array of book forms and resources, complementing the poems within, provided a powerful visual and literary feast.

Clarissa's creative life is multifaceted, and her work is imbued with the kind of sensory immersion displayed at that reading where we met; she paints, creates book art, writes poetry, all with a signature flair. For the purpose of this article, I will narrow the discussion to just two of Clarissa's paper/poetry art pieces: the handmade book, My Lithuania, Land of Myth, Amber and Hope, constructed of waxed linen cord, stab binding, image transfers, graphite, India ink, color pencil and a variety of handmade papers. The second art poetry piece we'll look at is the poem, "Sakountala ," a persona poem in the voice of Camille Claudel. The media for this poem include a palm leaf style binding, mixed media, hand-image transfers, crocheted cotton embroidery thread and a handmade box. Sakountala is a long, vertical paper and exhibited as a suspended piece that turns slightly this way and that, in animated movement, in a gallery setting.

I chose these two book art pieces because they embody the poet's obsessions: the rich culture and landscape of her native land, Lithuania, and the brilliant and tragic life of the 19th century French sculptor, Camille Claudel.

The six poems in My Lithuania read as a linked homage to the poet's ancestry. A tone of reverence, wonder and discovery resonates throughout the collection. The book opens with a golden glow: "Baltic Amber, Ginataras." Amber serves as the symbol of life, of health, vitality and, as the poet alludes in the book's title, hope. The poet also celebrates that preservative power of amber in the opening stanza of this poem: "Bee stung, buried under pine/sap resin, her hand lifts three-/dimensional animal spirits/into transparent legends." The "she" in the poem is Zvaigzde, Queen of Stars. Indeed, these poems are populated by Gods and Goddesses of Baltic myth and legend. Their presence imparts a mystique, a spiritual depth, and their exotic names lend an added musicality to the poems.

Along with mythic figures, the natural world also inhabits the poems in My Lithuania; the oak tree, in particular, is a central image, representing the strength and rootedness of the poet's culture, and of her ties to it. The collection closes with the poem, "Through Trees," an invocation of "Medeine, Lady of Trees," and to the oak, symbol of the cycles of life. This lovely final poem is fashioned like a prayer, closing this brief collection with a quiet, resonant click:

. . . 

May I always

plant trees, sit on treetops, and walk

below the crescent moon. So may it be.

Sakountala

Clarissa's art book, Sakountala, is her second artist book in a trilogy dedicated to the sculptor, Camille Claudel. The title poem references the embrace of a an Indian prince and the Indian maiden, Sakountala, to whom he kept the promise of his vows. For Camille, sadly, her mentor and lover, Rodin, abandoned her. An image transfer of Rodin's "The Thinker" is on the back of the piece, in literal and figurative opposition to the charged emotional content of the Camille poem.

In the first of three stanzas in the poem, Camille, who is imprisoned in an asylum for the mentally ill, directly addresses Rodin, in a tone of frank desperation:

The linden

bare of single leaf,

it has been so long.

I torment over the feather

that cannot fly, locked inside

our masterpiece. Only you carry the key,

the kiss. Rodin, speak the word,

or I shall grow mad.

Your Camille

and the poem continues down the stitched panels of hand-made paper.

Stitched, bound and laid on hand-made paper, Clarissa Jakobsons' poems have earned their place in her beautifully designed and crafted art books.



Interview with the poet and artist


B: Your poetry and visual art are integrated so beautifully in your art books. I'd like to have a conversation that involves both your creative life as a poet and as an artist. To begin, I wonder if you can talk about the creative inception of an art book. When you have a poetic notion, does the drafting of that poem lead to you paper texture, color, material ornamentation, etc.? Does the muse usually guide you down the parallel paths of text and materials?

C: I delve into personal imagery, sometimes meditating in the spontaneous moment. Each brush stroke, each color is a response, from flowing oils that dance on canvas to my artist books. My heart and soul are forever captured in the process of creating these pieces. I began as a visual artist dabbling in ceramics, weaving, drawing, printmaking, and photography. Everyday colors and forms entice me to experiment and analyze.

At times a poem directs far more than laser print on white paper. I created For the Love of Bly specifically for the Hessler Street Fair by searching through my handmade paper collection for suitable covers that coordinated with insert papers and linen cord. The message of a poem may also direct color choices. At other times, paper takes precedent and I follow its dictates. A successful handmade book is the result of interrelated decisions about structure, technique, material, and poems at every stage of the process.

B: The poems in your book art fit like hand-in-glove. What is typically your first inspiration, the art book or the poem it holds?

C: I fluctuate depending upon the muse, or the event. As for the artist book, My Lithuania, Land of Myth, Amber, and Hope, I chose possible poems then created a small model of the proposed book deciding upon the best binding techniques while pondering over an avalanche of papers. I researched various ethnic monuments to assist with the visual representation of the poems, and to act as a travelogue. Solvent image transfers and color pencils add to the artistry. For the covers I chose a crinkled bronze paper, made in Thailand, meant to echo polished Baltic amber.

B: When the first creation is the poem, what considerations determine what form or shape the book will take, what materials you'll use, etc?

C: My first consideration would the length of the poem; sometimes a poem needs to fit the proposed page. Materials are based upon the binding technique. I delve into personal imagery, sometimes meditating in the spontaneous moment.

B: What have been some of the more challenging materials you've worked with, and, along with that, what are the more difficult (and probably rewarding) pieces you have created?

C: Each book, each technique presents unique challenges, whether working with transparent papers or gluing crinkled ones. For years, I’ve been experimenting altering books into various objects of art with crystals. The cover of My Lithuania, Land of Myth, Amber, and Hope was a challenge. Meditation relaxes my fingers and heart to avoid errors, which could result in starting over from square one. This ritual works well for me.

I am excited to share my work because so much of me went into each book. Not only in content, but paper choices, imagery, and binding selections, which develops from a vision. Boundaries are pushed to create something new and different. The words are there because they came from me. Pages are hand stitched by me. Every element represents the essence of my artistic viewpoint. I hope people stop to consider what it is, and realize it was created with a controlled freedom. I make choices. The books are short in length but I will be happy if they have a long lasting provocative effect upon the viewer.

B: When did you begin creating the art book, and which book art artists or pieces have inspired and influenced your own work?

C: A bug bit my curiosity almost ten years ago! What if I combined my art background with my poetry and created artist books? My daughter, Marielle, and I decided to take a bookmaking course at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center with Peter Madden, who is a phenomenal instructor and artist. I created over a dozen books from day into nightfall. Marielle also created a slipcover for her new musical CD.

B: The Cleveland area seems very resource-rich when it comes to art books. Can you talk a little about the history of the art book in NE Ohio, and which resources you rely on to practice your art?

C: Art BooksCleveland is a local organization which invites the community to appreciate a variety of hand-produced books. Bonne de Blas offered a workshop at Heights Arts in 2008, where we gathered to have fun creating books. Since ABC was born, I have exhibited yearly with them, and we have grown into Octavofest’s offering exhibits at the Cleveland Museum of Art Ingalls Library for the last five years. Other venues include: Notre Dame College, the Morgan Conservatory, Lorain Community College, Shaker Heights Library, etc. I have watched the artist book community grow from toddler into an October giant. It has been a privilege.

B: Your one-woman exhibit at the Moos Gallery this past fall was fabulous. I was enthralled with the variety and uniqueness of your art books, as well as paintings, in the gallery. Your work has been exhibited widely, even internationally. What are some of the venues where your work has been on exhibit?

C: I have exhibited in the above-mentioned shows, as well as at The Box Gallery, in Akron. The Bind-O-Rama 20th Anniversary edition chose to include my crystal book: One Hundred American Poems. The Denver Abcedarium Gallery chose to exhibit Camille Claudel in Bardo. Breath Braces a Tulip Leaf has been on tour with Akron University’s Monumental Ideas In Miniature Books III Exhibit, traveling to San Francisco and Spain.

B: I'd like to talk about the poetry in these beautiful books. There are recurrent themes that could be called the poet's obsessions. I'm always intrigued by the power of certain objects to haunt us, such as Baltic amber, a direct link to your Lithuanian heritage. Could you talk about the significance of amber as more than just a beautiful stone?

C: Baltic amber is fossil resin produced by pine trees over 50 million years ago. Since Neolithic times it is believed to relieve pain and anxiety, releasing warmth via skin contact. (Excuse me while I fetch my amber bracelet.)

They buried Tutankhamen with a chest full of amber beads, the quantity of amber in the Royal Tomb of Qatna, Syria, is unparalleled. Amber was sent from the North to the temple of Apollo at Delphi as offerings. The Amber Road stretched into the Silk Road. Amber has been a cure all since Hippocrates, the father of medicine. Rubbing amber yields a pleasant aromatic scent and makes it negatively electrically charged, attracting hair and thin paper. The word electricity derives from the Greek, élektron.

Lithuanian tribes burned amber to drive away the evil spirits. True amber contains succinic acid, a powerful antioxidant that inhibits aging. (Let us break a moment while I grab an amber necklace and charge my ions.)

Amber comes in various colors such as butter, lemon, honey, green, cognac, cherry, and black cherry. I prefer the cognac variety. It is handed down for generations, all of my relatives revered amber for its holistic qualities. Picture yourself walking across Baltic sand dunes and picking your own perfect gem. But, take heed, synthetic amber floods the market.

There are Lithuanian myths of lost loves living underwater in amber castles while amber teardrops find their way to sandy beaches. According to Felice Vinci, Homer’s tales originated in the Baltic Sea area. (FYI I am wearing two amber bracelets and one necklace.)

B: Other repeating themes connect your poetry, such as the oak tree, such as Camille Claudel. The Camille poems are often written as persona pieces. What about Camille's story stirs and inspires you?

C: The first time I viewed the 1988 movie, Camille Claudel, she simmered in my subconscious only to resurface during my nine-week stay in Paris, 12 years ago. Strolling the Rodin Museum gardens and viewing her room of sculptures opened wounds resulting in years of research into her life of buried secrets. Her mother and brother forced her into public asylums wherein she died 30 years later. She was Auguste Rodin’s student, model, lover, and collaborator. I wonder which of his signed sculptures should carry Camille’s name?

There is a common thread that weaves my work; perhaps it’s about women who were born in the wrong place and time—whether in Germany, during WW II or Camille Claudel during the 1800’s, in France. Perhaps I’ve been captivated by the perceived thoughts of other female artists and what motivated them to live their lives as they did. These are universal questions and I haven’t figured out all the answers but hope people share their thoughts with me.

I am immersed in the creative process while recognizing the sisterhood and brotherhood of all artists, living and dead. After years of riding the tail of the comet muse, I have surrendered to her will. When she gives me words to describe my place in her cosmos, I will paint them on canvas or create one-of-a kind artist books! The emphasis is creativity, full of colorful observations, life experiences, and reflections. A world of possibilities opens doors. Please enter and linger; let us speculate together!

B: What new projects are brewing in your proverbial garret?

C: Currently I am playing with the idea of sewn silk flowers and Saunders papers from England. This idea will linger and grow. Other times, deadlines force prompt action filled with amber and meditations.

Sounds wonderful! Now meet:

Clarissa Jakobsons, the Woman between the Covers

Clarissa Jakobsons is an artist, poet, instructor, five-year associate editor of the Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal. She was twice featured poet at The Shakespear and Co. Bookstore in Paris, and awarded first-place at the 2005 Akron Art Museum's New Words Poetry Competition. Sample publications include Glint Literary Journal, Hawaii Pacific Review, The Lake, Ruminate, Tower Magazine, Qarrtsiluni, The Yale Journal for the Humanities in Medicine and Van Gogh's Ear. She conducted an ekphrastic poetry workshop at the Cleveland Museum of Art, sponsored by the Ohio Poetry Association. Her one-of-a-kind artist books are exhibited at museums and galleries regionally, nationally and in Europe.

Imperial, a Royally Good Read
                                               by Barbara Sabol       

By the Numbers:

Imperial, by George Bilgere

University of Pittsburgh Press

Pitt Poetry Series

Copyright 2014

60 pages

ISBN: 13: 978-0-8229-6268-7

In Sept of 2013 I was fortunate to attend a weekend poetry retreat sponsored by the Ohio Poetry Association at Malabar Farm in Lucas, Ohio, which included a two-day workshop facilitated by George Bilgere. In the course of the weekend, George read several poems from his soon-to-be-released Imperial. His delivery was that of a raconteur whose signature wry observations are tempered by good-natured wit.  Or perhaps the other way around―an impish wit tempered by philosophical musings on the nature of being human. Either way, the audible music of good poetry was reinforced  by the poet's reading, and inspired me to give Imperial, Bilgere's sixth collection of poems, a closer read for review in Poetry Matters.

As in each collection before it, the poems in Imperial are eminently accessible, in the best way possible: Bilgere is a shrewd observer of human behavior (his own included), a lyric storyteller whose narratives dip below the concrete surface to hint at the beating heart of a day-to-day life. An evening walk through a suburban neighborhood takes a "mystical and obscure" turn in "Scorcher;" an obsolete set of Encyclopedia Britannica becomes the ghost of an era when people watched ". . .Gunsmoke/through a haze of Winstons," and which now sit ". . .on a card table in a light rain" in the poem, "Yard Sale." A Duncan Imperial Yo-Yo, with its power to "Split the Atom./Shoot/theMoon," becomes a talisman for  "the lost ten-year-olds of America" in the title poem. In this centerpiece poem, a-brim with a boy's and a nation's sense of wonder and fear and possibility, the nostalgia for America's Camelot is perfectly captured.

As with the Yo-Yo in "Imperial," objects serve as a conduit for memory and for the nostalgic tone that washes, like longing, over the poems in this book. "I love the hoses of summer" begins the wonderful poem "Hoses." In this poem, a common object conjures a childhood memory infused with equal parts sadness and happiness:

     . . .

     I think of my father, armed

     with his scotch and garden hose

     probing the dusk

     with water, the world

     in flames around him,

     booze running the show.

Yet the same memory contains delight, via the garden hose:

     . . .

     my sisters and I would run

     in our swimsuits through the grass

     while he followed us

     with a cold beam of water.

Likewise, in "Coupons," a photograph of the speaker's grandfather conjures the story  of his grandmother as "a pretty sixteen-year-old" who catches the grandfather's eye, while, in present tense, the grandson cuts coupons for his arthritic grandmother. The grandmother recounts that first encounter, when he smiles at his lovely bride-to-be,

     "And that," said Grandma,

     "was that." I snipped out

     another coupon for Campbell's Soup,

     or Borax. Milk of Magnesia.

     Chicken pot pies. Denture cream.

 In the space of five lines, the romantic girl becomes a pragmatic grandmother, via the tell-tale world

of objects that inhabits the grandmother's "stuffy apartment." The fragmentation of syntax into punched out noun fragments at the end of this list of objects further reinforces the implied limits of a once vital life.

Bilgere takes on the poet's task of witness: signaling not only object and action, but delving into dimensions beyond the tangible, directly observable realm. In "Lint," the great topics of love and death are conjured via a wad of lint:

     . . .the lint itself

     is the palpable bond of our union,

     our clothes whirling together and mingling,

     our selves, our very lives,

     becoming lint.

The notion that in every good poem at least two subjects reside is borne out by the work in this collection. The surface wit of the poems shimmers above deeper layers of reflection, so that while the reader may chuckle at a line, the truer and sometimes sad, always poignant meaning bubbles to the surface. However, the reader is not drawn into sadness, as the poet maintains a light touch on the tableaux his poems create. The true subject of  "Musial," for example, is a father's alcoholism and a downward  financial and marital spiral. Stan Musial (the ace Cardinals pitcher from the 50's), is the shining foil against which the failings of the speaker's father are revealed. The poet balances such darkness against wit's lightness when, in the final stanza, he compares Musial's legendary visit to his father's dealership thus:

     . . .

     as when,

     in the old myths, a bored god

     dresses up like one of us, and falls

     through a summer thunderhead

     to shock us from our daydream drabness

     with heaven's dazzle and razzmatazz.

Here, not only the vision of baseball player as mythic god but the music of the those last three lines, in particular, lift us out of the ". . .dark mouths of garages on our street" into a sonically delicious and spirited energy. 

Among the four temperaments, Imperial  is strongest in story and imagination. The poems are context-rich―the reader never has to work out the place, time or figures of a poem. Context is fleshed out by tangible elements that lend a highly imagistic backdrop to the narrative of each poem. Character and setting are forgrounded in these poems, so that we are transported to "summer twilight" in ". . .one of  the green, old,/more or less identical/streets of our neighborhood" in "Scorcher;" in "Desire," we are standing in the grocery store line behind a beautiful young woman, and the reverie angles into the speaker's fantasized future: "The way her dark hair/falls to her narrow waist/makes me ache/to pay for a washer-dryer combo," and the fantasy continues in a split-screen erotic/drolly domestic progression, while the tension of sexual longing is strung against the speaker's ". . .beer and toilet paper and frozen pizzas" on the check-out conveyer.

In most of the poems, however, the context of the past prevails, manifested through a present-day experience or observation. In "Traverse City," for example, we are driving past  ". . .the toy lake where my family came from. . .//The tiny cottages on the shore. . ." and the speaker detours into a reminiscence of summer boyhoods by that lake, made visible by apt and specific description, such that the smell of wind over the water of that lake lifts off the page. In "Arcadia" we are at "the old/Cleveland public golf course" as it's bulldozed into a Walmart, and, again, the speaker drifts back to the vision of  ". . .those men and women/on the distant clearances/and the twinkle of their silver wands/in the morning light. . ." The magic of those "silver wands" carries us to a halcyon era that has to do with so much more than bygone golf courses.

What binds the poems in Imperial into a reflective and cohesive collection is the silver thread of time. The theme of temporality, and its accompanying tone of nostalgia―a looking back with tenderness, with sadness, w/understanding that comes from time and age―runs through the book. The collection is bookended by elegies that highlight cycles of life, opening with the spreading of Aunt Betty's ashes in the Thames in "As Requested," and closing with "Weather," a tribute to the speaker's father and to familial love that endures every failing:

     My father would lift me

     to the ceiling in his big hands

     and ask, How's the weather up there?

     And it was good, the weather

     of being in his hands, his breath

     of scotch and cigarettes, his face

     smiling from the world below.

The single-stanza poem fast-forwards then to the speaker as a father, lifting his own son, continuing the cycle:

     . . .

     . . .my little boy

     looking down from his flight

     below the ceiling, cradled in my hands,

     his eyes wide and already staring

     into the distance beyond the man

     asking him again and again,

     How's the weather up there?

    

While the structure follows a solid narrative line, this poet's approach to narrative hinges more on a stylistic than structural approach. Signature to Bilgere's style are the concrete language, imagistic rendering of context/scene, informal diction, use of dialogue, and a rhythm created by short lines delivered in a direct style, in a voice that is genuine.

George Bilgere is a poet whose proverbial pen presses firmly on the pulse of human nature, its charming quirks, common drives, universal sadnesses and joys. He is willing to risk the personal to reveal the universal, through this collection of plain-spoken, powerhouse poems, stripped of artifice, pretense, airs. These narratives are delivered via the natural speech line, in colloquial language textured with voices, in a personal, almost confiding manner, so that the reader is drawn in, invested in the tangible details and the insights. We lean into these poems as one would lean across a cafe table to catch the nuance and detail of a friend's story. The poems are populated by evocative objects that haunt the text and induce an atmosphere, a past, a narrative truth that resonates after each poem is read, and re-read. The dynamic of these poems resides in the juxtaposition of the ordinary exterior landscape chafing against the interior emotional life of the poem's speaker, and the power of objects to haunt, to suggest another time and place, memories that shape our perceptions and  take us back to another age, an era when ". . .we entered the Space Age, dogs and men/in orbit,/. . .Cuban missiles pointing/their little heads at us, and voila!" Voila!, indeed.

An Interview with George

Engaging in a close read of Imperial made this collection all the more satisfying. It's the best way to read, I believe, to get down through the strata of a poem, to experience its meaning at the narrative and the symbolic level. Your poetry, at first glance, might appear like straightforward narrative; the mind's eye scans and appreciates the textures and surfaces of your wonderfully tangible and accessible language. However, these poems are deliciously nuanced and layered. There's so much more than meets the mind's eye to each one; an emotional and at times philosophical depth beneath the tangible surface.

One element of the poems in this book is the seemingly very personal "I," the narrator who shares his history, his day-to-day musings, his quandaries and fears. I'd like to begin the interview with a question about the personal nature of the poems. And I would like to thank you, in advance, for this dialogue and for your rich and memorable poetry; book-to-book, I have admired and been inspired by your writing.

The poems in Imperial (and in your previous books, as well) have a very personal feel; a reader can imagine a very fine line between poet and "speaker" of the poem. How much personal risk is involved in writing poems about a dysfunctional family, for example, and about other personal relationships and experiences?

GB: You're right, the two are very close. And I suspect they will keep getting closer. My sense is that the older you get, the farther along you are to being whoever it is you become, the more important it is that you get that person, that self, into the poems. Like most poets, when I was much younger I had much less to say about myself. If I wrote a poem about, say, a turtle, it was pretty much entirely  about that turtle. Nowadays I'd focus more on my reaction to that turtle, to what that turtle speaks to in me. It's important to me, when I'm reading someone's poems, that I get a sense of that person speaking to me. T.S. Eliot's whole "cult of the impersonal" isn't something I find very appealing. So my poems in my recent books tend to be centered around a person very much like me―perhaps an exaggerated version in some respects―moving through the world.

As for the risks of writing about a dysfunctional family―well, do you know of a family that isn't dysfunctional? I mean, if you had a perfectly happy family you'd probably never turn to poetry. In an odd way, we writers have to be grateful for the flaws and foibles of the people who produced us. Without them we wouldn't have anything to write about. To me, the real "risk" in a poem is avoiding the sentimental, the maudlin. And that can be tricky. My own way around this is to try to find the comic edge in the midst of tragedy. I tend to like poems that somehow manage that difficult trick of being both funny and sad.

The figure of the troubled father was prevalent in this collection. You present a rounded perspective of the father, though: there is the drinking, the bravado, the financial failure, yet the speaker expresses tenderness toward the man with "the big hayseed smile." The last poem, "Climate," describes an especially tender memory that says all that needs to be said about love between a parent and child. Have you found poetry to provide a sense of emotional release, a means of reconciling past and present?

GB: I don't know if I've managed a reconciliation between the two. I think the uneasy and always changing relationship between us and our pasts is what fuels so much of our writing. At thirty you think you finally understand your parents. Then at forty you realize you got them all wrong. And at fifty you have to revise the whole thing, usually because you realize that life is much more complicated than you could understand when you were young, and it must have been just as tough for them. I recently became a father myself, and I can only imagine all the bother my son will have to go through figuring me out. I'm already feeling guilty about it. But back to the question: that tension, that slippage between past and present isn't something I think I'll ever resolve. If I do I'll probably stop writing altogether. The dynamic tension between the now and the then is where I locate my poems.

What do you think is the role of poetry in our or in any culture? Do you believe it serves a societal or political function? I was particularly struck by the bald irony in poems like "Mexican Town" and "Far from Afghanistan," which stood out in this collection as statements about the devolution of society via technology-as-interaction and via international conflict.

GB: If you're asking if I think that poetry can serve as an instrument of political change, I guess I'd have to say no, to be realistic. The fact is that most people who read poetry are poets themselves, and are already on our side. It's a strange thing, isn't it, how artists tend almost universally to be liberals, to be on the anti-war, anti-American global domination side of things? I doubt if a supporter of the policies of George Bush or Dick Cheney has ever read one of my poems, and even if they had I don't think there'd be much chance of changing their views. In today's world I think it's the essay, the blog, the viral video, that effects change. The culture has changed a lot since I was young in the '60's. Back then it was actually people mobilizing, marching in the street, demanding that power be taken away from the corrupt and doddering political machine defined by Nixon and McNamara, that got things done, as was the case with the Selma marchers. We tend not to gather publicly and march nowadays. We sit inside and twiddle on our keyboards. I'm sensing a much bigger problem here. . .

Your poems are so wonderfully tangible and textured with specific objects, like lint, hoses, a set of encyclopedias, the Duncan Yo-Yo―the list goes go on and on. (I'm also a child of the 50's and 60's, so many of the tangible references strike a resonant chord.) Please talk about the power or magic of objects, in terms of their evocative power in poetry and also in our lives.

GB: I have a poem somewhere about the rotary phone. I've written about typewriters, bowling alleys. I guess my interest in all that obsolete old stuff comes from my sense that most poetry at its core is elegy. It is the nature of being human to miss the past, to mourn the constant process of change that is always taking everything away from us. We grab onto those old objects of our youth like drowning men. We stuff our attics and basements with the useless junk of the past, perhaps simply to remind ourselves that we really did exist, that we were once at the vibrant center of things. People my age, sixty-ish, watch the kids walk by tapping at their screens and wonder if we're even still here. So those old objects take on an almost talismanic power for us.

Nostalgia seems to be the dominant tone in many of these poems. It's quite the complicated attitude―equal parts longing, sadness, bittersweetness, comfort. I would think it would be difficult to directly translate this full-bodied emotion into one word in another language. Do you aim for the nostalgic touch in your poems or is it something your subjects naturally render?

GB: This is closely related to your previous question. I don't want to seem like some old-timer constantly boring young people with stories of a lost, golden age. But I certainly am prone to severe fits of yearning for the vanished past. Give me my little tea biscuit and I turn into Proust. Again, though, in order to prevent this from becoming incredibly dull I try to find a way to inject some sort of wry humor into my reminiscences. I think you can see that in the encyclopedia poem, "Yard Sale."

Your style of writing is very distinct and  effective in its plain-spoken, direct approach. How has this stripped-down, vernacular style evolved over your years of writing?

GB: My writing is simple, direct, and plain. This is the plainspeak, the common language of my Midwestern forefathers. When I was younger I affected a much high, more vatic language. My influences were people like Yeats and Eliot, Anthony Hecht and Howard Nemerov. But I was just putting on airs, trying, as my grandmother would say, to be better than I was. When I was around fifty―quite old!―I relaxed into speaking the way I really wanted to speak, rather than how I thought a poet should speak. For me, writing in this plain and unadorned diction gives the poems a modest, understated quality, a dry Midwestern sense of humor that isn't possible in the register of a higher diction.

You've been compared to Billy Collins, and that comparison seems apt in the most complimentary way possible. What poets and writers have been your models?

GB: Yes, I can't turn around without someone telling me I sound like Billy Collins. And the similarities are certainly there, especially in terms of the plain diction. But I think many poets are sounding like that nowadays. Just as the High Modernists like Yeats and Pound and Eliot all sound somewhat alike at the turn of the last century, there's something in the air now, or maybe it's in the water, that makes poets like Collins, Tony Hoagland, Steven Dunn, Denise DuHamel, Steven Dobyns, Thomas Lux, all sound a bit similar. We are of our age, and the age is dressed in this rather casual set of clothes. And part of the age, of course, is a kind of highly inflected irony not exactly available to the Modernists, since they hadn't seen Groucho Marx yet, or Woody Allen or Saturday Night Live.

Who are your touchstone poets, the ones you come back to for inspiration and comfort?

GB: I go back to John Donne―always. Thomas Hardy. The great Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner, Wislawa Szymborska, whose voice (though I know it only through translation) seems somehow like the perfect voice for our times.

As an English professor, do you find young students excited about poetry and about literature, in general? Do you feel hopeful that a generation of strong writers and lovers of strong writing is preparing to follow the current generation of established writers?

GB: As for the interest my students, and the students I meet in my travels, have in poetry,  I think they're passionate about it. There are more writing programs in the country now than there ever have been. There are more young poets excited about the possibilities of language and literature than there were, certainly, when I was coming up. I think the future of poetry is in good hands.

I'd be interested in your take on the current dichotomy between "street" and "academic" poetry. Do you feel there are two distinct brands of writing, or that this may be a false dichotomy?

GB: The dichotomy between "street" and "academic" poetry: Yes, I think there's a huge difference, if by "street" you mean rap poetry and performance poetry. In those cases, the emphasis tends to be on the performance itself, whereas in the typical "academic" poetry reading you've got some nice university professor standing at a podium intoning his or her verse. I don't think there's much similarity between the two―which is great. Both worlds have something to offer to the larger conversation.

What project(s) are you working on now? Are there any new themes or subjects you're itching to incorporate into your work?

I was on sabbatical for the past term from John Carroll University here in Cleveland. My wife and little son and I spent the whole time in East Berlin, where I was working on a new collection of poems. My subject, broadly speaking, tends to be America, and I find I write best about it when I'm far away. It was a fantastic trip, and I recommend East Berlin to anyone likes beer and wiener schnitzel!

George Bilgere’s sixth book of poems is Imperial, from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He has won the Cleveland Arts Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Midland Authors Award, and the May Swenson Poetry Award. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins has called Bilgere’s work “a welcome breath of fresh, American air in the house of contemporary poetry.” He has given readings at the Library of Congress, the 92^nd Street Y in New York, and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Cleveland Partnership for Arts and Culture. His poems are often featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and he was recently a guest on A Prairie Home Companion. Bilgere teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Books That Call Us Back

Happy Valentine's Day, poetry lovers! This month three of our blogging team present the poets they consider touchstones―books and writers whose words touch deeper chords, serve as a hallmark of poetic achievement, continually surprise with original beauty. They inspire us with poems that cause us to breathe in, true to the origin of the word; in essence, to breathe more fully into our own perceptions and truths.

Karen George touches on several poets whose work most moves her, with special emphasis on Li-Young Lee's collections. Joel W. Nelson focuses his reader's light on the haiku of Kobayashi Issa in Spring of My Life. Barbara Sabol explores the work of Jane Hirshfield, highlighting in particular the book The Lives of the Heart.

___________

*** KAREN GEORGE: My list of touchstone poetry books that I return to again and again would include all four of Li-Young Lee’s poetry collections (The City in Which I Love You, Rose, Book of My Nights, and Behind My Eyes), because of how his poems are layered with meaning, haunting in their tenderness and longing, deeply spiritual, yet grounded in the world of the senses. I’d also include New and Selected Poems, Volume I and II by Mary Oliver, and W. S. Merwin’s Migration: New and Selected Poems, because of how they teach me to pay attention, and immerse me in their reverence for the beauty and vulnerability of the natural world. Pablo Neruda’s One Hundred Love Sonnets would hold a place on my list of vital poetry books because of his sensuous imagery, and the intimacy, passion and mystery at the core of his poems. Jane Hirshfield’s After, Come, Thief, and Given Sugar, Given Salt earn a place on my list because of their contemplative nature, and how her spare yet multi-layered poems suggest as much by what she does not say as what she does. I’d include Naomi Shihab Nye’s Words Under the Words: Selected Poems for her direct, simple language, and her sense of urgency and compassion in writing about moral concerns and injustices. Lastly, Marie Howe’s The Good Thief and What the Living Do would hold a place on my list of touchstone books for the powerful, nuanced ways she handles complex emotional issues involving relationships and loss.

***JOEL W. NELSON: “Touchstone” isn't exactly the first word to roll off my tongue in the morning. What does it mean anyway? At one point, a touchstone was a literal stone used to measure the quality of gold and silver. Applied to our topic of discussion, a “touchstone” book of poetry can be understood as a book that one uses to judge the quality of other works, possibly even ones own. Kobayashi Issa's The Spring of My Life, translated by Sam Hamill, is such a book for me.

 Language is an essential compromise. Words can give life to a poem, but they can also kill a poem. The secret is in finding the right balance, and Issa is a master. His poems explore the whole range of emotion from light humor to deep suffering. When confronting suffering, the temptation is always to say too much instead of handling it with restraint, something Issa does beautifully. Even when his daughter dies of small pox, Issa manages to hold back:

 This world of dew
 is only a world of dew--
 and yet...oh and yet... 

This poem kicks off a series of poems by various haiku poets who also lost children. The haiku are brilliant mini-explosions of raw emotion. If there is one trait I admire most in a poet is his or her ability to transcend the page, to bring the reader into a world bigger than what they expected. If the poet can use the poem to manipulate not just the words on the page but the space outside the poem, is there anything more awesome than that?

 The old masters are old masters for good reason. I constantly fail to write the poems I want to write, whether it's because of a craft related failure or a lack of taste. For some reason, the poets of China and Japan reinvigorate me when I feel defeated and humble me when I become too proud. The Spring of My Life is a book that I constantly revisit. The feeling I get when reading these poems is a feeling I seek in other books of poetry and a feeling I aspire to share to my readers. Maybe one day, I will succeed, but until then, always the struggle.

***BARBARA SABOL: Joy, Sorrow and Every Moment In Between: Jane Hirshfield's The Lives of the Heart 

There is a good handful of poetry books I return to―for comfort (Kunitz, Merwin), for inspiration (Millay, Yeats), for wisdom (Hopkins, Rumi), for sonic brilliance in the nearly-edible vocabulary, the sheer rhythmic flow of a line (Dickinson, Heaney), for a well-wrought narrative (Bishop, Haas), for the exalted pleasure of discovering one's own perceptions exquisitely expressed (Glϋck, Doty). Any one of these poets could serve as exemplar "touchstone" poets. The one poet I keep closest, however, read again and again, the poet whose work embodies all of the above qualities, whose poems resonate into my day, is Jane Hirshfield. I own most of her books, including her collections of fine, illuminating essays. Of her books of poetry, The Lives of the Heart, published in 1997, has long represented a standard of poetry making to me, and stands out in high-relief on my bookshelf. Its pages are yellowed and the sumptuous cover holds a permanent curl at the bottom right-hand edge. What defines this collection, in particular, as my touchstone book of poems, is only secondarily its clear cohesion around the conceit of heart-as-symbol, its accessible diction, its beautifully rendered images, its philosophical and spiritual depth. Each time I re-read certain of the poems, I am struck anew by the quiet yet authoritative voice that layers meaning and image, image and meaning, such that I discover yet another strata of connotation, of connection to the poems' sensibility and sense enacted by its original and beautiful language. The poems ring true, the clapper chimes in fresh tones, even if I've read that same line five or fifty times.

 The collection is organized in four sections, each a full complement of one heart-theme: I) Heart Starting and Stopping in the Late Dark; II)Not-Yet; III) The Sweetness of Apples, of Figs; IV) Each Happiness Ringed by Lions. The four sections together present the full scope of emotional and spiritual responses to the world, to loneliness, loss, longing, joy, via a heart metaphor.

 A parallel theme of mortality and the inevitable tension that death/loss imposes on our waking lives, our joys, runs through the book. In the poem, "Not-Yet," the speaker turns her "blessings like photographs into the light," while "over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on:/Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken." The speaker accepts the temporary nature of her blessings: "I move my ear a little closer to that humming figure,/I ask him only to stay." The undertone of mortality completes the full circle of life, as enacted in these poems; eventually both "salt heart" and "abundant heart," in their ardent beating, says the god of Not-Yet, will someday cease.

 The book opens with the title poem as prelude to the collection; it presages the themes of each of the four sections in startlingly beautiful, textured images:

The Lives of the Heart 

Are ligneous, muscular, chemical.
Wear birch-colored feathers,
green tunnels of horse-tail reed.
Wear calcified spirals, Fibonaccian spheres.
Are edible; are glassy; are clay; blue schist.
Can be burned as tallow, as coal,
can be skinned for garnets, for shoes.
Cast shadows or light;
shuffle; snort; cry out in passion.
Are salt, are bitter,
tear sweet grass with their teeth.
Step silently into blue needle-fall at dawn.
Thrash in the net until hit.
Rise up as cities, as serpentined magma, as maples,
hiss lava-red into the sea.
Leave the strange kiss of their bodies
in Burgess Shale. Can be found, can be lost,
can be carried, broken, sung.
Lie dormant until they are opened by ice,
by drought. Go blind in the service of lace.
Are starving, are sated, indifferent, curious, mad.
Are stamped out in plastic, in tin.
Are stubborn, are careful, are slipshod,
are strung on the blue backs of flies
on the black backs of cows.
Wander the vacant whale-roads, the white thickets
heavy with slaughter.
Wander the fragrant carpets of alpine flowers.
Not one is not held in the arms of the rest, to blossom.
Not one is not given to ecstasy's lions.
Not one does not grieve.
Each of them opens and closes, closes and opens
the heavy gate―violent, serene, consenting, suffering it all.

One poem that catches my breath with each reading, and that I'd like to share here, is "Not Moving Even One Step," in which longing and emotional fulfillment are enacted by the figure of a solitary horse in light rain:

Not Moving Even One Step

The rain falling too lightly to shape
an audible house, an audible tree,
blind, soaking, the old horse waits in his pasture.

          He knows the field for exactly what it is:
          his limitless mare, his beloved.
          Even the mallards sleep in her red body maned
          in thistles, hooved in the new green shallows of spring.

Slow rain streams from fetlocks, hips, the lowered head,
while she stands in the place beside him that no one sees. 

The muzzles almost touch.
How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

How strange and yet natural that the "she" horse appears in the second stanza. It is the old horse's open-heartedness to love's possibilities and mysteries that allows the female horse to inhabit the empty space that only he, in his blindness, can see. And how quietly and surely that last stanza completes the poem, with the impossible observation (unless it is the heart that perceives the muzzles almost touching) in the simple sentence in the penultimate line, followed by the philosophical musing of the closing line. Jane's poems seem to turn on insights such as "How silently the heart pivots on its hinge," which carry a contemplative quality through the collection, adding a multi-hued resonance.

A new book of poems by Jane Hirshfield, titled The Beauty, will be published this March by Knopf. If it's possible for another book to rival the full emotional and spiritual range found in The Lives of the Heart, it may be this newest. I relish the idea of another book of Jane's; another collection that promises to express the unarticulated and private self―poems that, as in "Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight: ". . .look back from the trees,/and know me for who I am."

In Brilliant Explosions Alone by Steve Brightman

 

In Brilliant Explosions Alone: poems of baseball

publication 2013

Steve Brightman

NightBallet Press
nightballetpress.blogspot.com
ISBN 978-0-9893106-2-8

Review and Interview by Barbara Sabol

                     

In Brilliant Explosions Alone:
A Brilliant Blending of Pitcher and Poet

     The writer who follows the adage “write what you know” is sure to produce a credible read; pushed further along the spectrum of engagement, however, he who writes not only from knowledge but from love creates work truly passion-infused. Such is the most recent poetry chapbook by Steve Brightman, whose knowledge and love of the game of baseball ignited the collection In Brilliant Explosions Alone, published by Night Ballet Press. More than baseball, it is about Cleveland Indians baseball during a particular 2008 season, and about a particular young pitcher with promise to spare who failed to live up to his own and the fans’ great expectations.  Jeremy Sowers, the subject of Brightman’s lyric sequence, embodies much more than a could-have-been-ace pitcher:  in these poems he is a metaphor for a dream and a dream dashed, a modern-day David whose Goliath might be a Yankee slugger or Life coming at you.  In the poem, “All Our Smaller Battles,” Brightman aptly plays on that comparison―the small man with the sling shot and the one with hard ball―in the poem’s final stanza:

           . . .        

         

         This is where our stoic southpaw

         became us, because not all of us

         get to slay Goliath. Not all of us

         get cast as David.

         Most of us rest our heads

         as the vanquished.

     In Brilliant Explosions Alone works almost as a lyric documentary, one that the reader views in her imagination, game-by-game, poem-by-poem.  The book is neatly unified around the 2008 Indians season and proceeds chronologically from Sowers’ opening game in March to his last in September.  Cleverly, play dates replace page numbers, a feature that draws the reader further into the atmosphere of the field, the fans, the solitary pitcher on the mound.

     The 22 poems that form the narrative of Jeremy Sowers’ turbulent season are bookended by a poignant prologue and epilogue.  The prophetic prologue poem, “Left and Nothing,” sets the tone of the collection:

         

          . . .

          He was

          small enough

          for shadows,

          small enough

          for getting lost

          in the crowd of

          everyone who

          paid to see him

          pitch that day.

The epilogue poem, “Or Best Offer,” closes the narrative with a suggestion of regret, of failure.  Each of the four stanzas begins with the line “Not one damn kid/”:

          . . .

          Not one damn kid

          signs on the dotted line

          thinking that he is going

          to find his cards buried

          in a box of commons or

          sold on eBay in lots of 50    

          for a dollar or best offer.

          . . .

          Not one damn kid

          signs on the dotted line

          thinking that he will be

          epilogue before he’s thirty.

In this closing poem, Sowers, our anti-hero, broadly represents promise unfulfilled and the sad regret of failure under the field’s night lights.  The poet’s richly sympathetic rendering of his subject is the heart beat of this book.  Brightman’s real skill lies in his ability to establish an authorial distance and at the same time empathize so fully with the struggling pitcher, such that, for the reader, his struggle becomes our own.    

     The poems are shaped by taut, condensed lines, often running unbroken down the page, much like the outline of a fast ball over home plate. This, combined with the poet’s employment of the game’s charged argot and repetitive phrasing, results in a compelling cover-to-cover read; for this reader, in one captivated sitting. Take the poem, “Counting Tigers”:

          Seven Tigers

          tonight grounded

          out.

          Six Tigers

          tonight made it past

          first base.

          Five Tigers

          tonight managed

          hits.

          Four Tigers

          tonight were left

          stranded;  . . .

The recurring phrasing and form creates an urgent tempo that draws us through to the final stanza where the reference shifts to “One Indian/tonight has finished/counting Tigers.”

     An effective use of the speech line underscores the clipped vernacular in poems like “Perfect Through Five” where Sowers exultant voice animates descriptions of the game’s action:

          “Hell yeah,” I thought,

          “this was why

          they drafted me.”

          Home plate

          looked as big as

          the horizon and I was

          perfect through five.

     Brightman also effectively employs the rhetorical devices of anaphora and epistrophe−repetition of  phrasing at the start and ending of a line, respectively−blended with the first-person quote to reinforce the subject’s defeated and self-berating tone in “Like This”:

          . . .

          I could be 6-6. I could be 1-11

          I could be anywhere between.

          I could be a star.

          I could be in Columbus

          taking a bus.

          I’ve never struggled

          like this.

          I’ve never been hit

          like this.

          I’ve never doubted

          like this.

          I’ve never stood

          on the mound

          and questioned

          like this. . .

     Indeed, nearly three-quarters of the poems are persona, written from the pitcher’s alternately hopeful and hapless perspective. Another tight handful of poems blend poet’s and pitcher’s voices so seamlessly that narrator and subject become one. This is the greatest strength of In Brilliant Explosions: the poet aptly inhabits his subject, creates a credible voice that reveals the pitcher’s inner life, while making the game a palpable, dynamic and sensory-loaded experience. Brightman paints an intimate portrait of a player in the context of the great game of baseball.  These poems move the reader−baseball fan or no−because they manifest the ambition and struggle of an everyman with a dream and a chance to live it.  

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Barbara Sabol lives in the Great Lakes area and has an M. A. in Communication Disorders, an MFA, and a BA in French. She is the author of two chapbooks: Original Ruse (Accents Publishing, 2011) and The Distance Between Blues (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, including The Examined Life, San Pedro River Review, The Louisville Review, on the Tupelo Press Poetry Project web site, and in the collection, Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems (Accents Publishing). 

---

Conversation with poet, Steve Brightman

What a great read In Brilliant Explosions Alone is. You really hit your stride with the language and rhythm of the poems, which enacted the struggle and loneliness of a person under great internal and external pressure to perform in the spotlight. A wonderfully intimate portrayal of Sowers, and also a great depiction of the game of baseball, which I happen to love, as well.  What perfect timing that Night Ballet Press released the book mid-October, right in the thick of the World Series.  As a reader, I could appreciate even more the baseball colloquialisms and calls and the rhythm of  the announcer’s patter as I read through the book – straight through.

This is such a satisfying  book of poetry for the quality of each poem individually and for how you stitched them into a such a well organized series, to create a narrative of this one player and a field-level depiction of the game.  Why don’t we begin by talking about how the book is put together.

B: The collection is wonderfully unified and composed with a singular focus, which perfectly suits the theme of one pitcher, one season.  I really loved that the poems are organized by game date versus page number, which lent to the sensation of travelling through an entire seven month season in the short space of 24 pages. Did the organization of the book precede the writing of the poems?

S: Yes and no. I wrote the epilogue shortly after I’d seen him with backpack at PNC. Once I decided to move forward with this as a collection, the organization dictated the production. I’d spent a lot of time on baseballreference.com poring over the box scores, trying to get a feel for each individual game.

 B:  I know that you’re a great baseball fan and undoubtedly have some real ball player heroes. I’m curious about your choice of Jeremy Sowers as a sort of protagonist/anti-hero in that particular 2008 Indians season. 

S: I kind of stumbled across it in stages. It wasn’t a conscious decision to sit down and put him on a pedestal. I should start by saying that I’ve always been drawn to the anti-hero, so you can count that as the first stage: two of my favorite baseball players (Curt Flood and Roger Maris) were both maligned during their careers by the mainstream media and the public for one reason or another. The second stage was my general befuddlement at the relationship between Cleveland sports teams and their fans. Some guys become idols while others become afterthoughts and there seems to be no rhyme nor reason as to why. The final stage, the metaphoric straw, was seeing his game used jersey in the team shop for considerably less than other players’ jerseys. Heck, it was marked down cheaper than the manager’s and coaches’ jerseys. So I bought it. And kind of adopted him. Then I just had to figure out what to do with him now. Writing seemed like the most logical choice.

B: In these poems, Sowers is portrayed as both baseball pitcher and struggling human being; someone with a broad spectrum of feelings on and off the mound.  Reading the book, I was continually impressed with how you captured that alternately lonely and lofty experience of the pitcher.  How did you manage to step inside the imagined skin of your subject?

S: This was pretty easy. I’m a pretty big baseball fan, so the little boy inside of me still relishes the opportunity to see big league ballplayers in person (I hope I never outgrow that, FYI). One of the best places I’ve found to do this is at PNC Park in Pittsburgh. Fans gather before the game outside the visitor’s entrance for similar type run-ins and photo/autograph opportunities. Ballplayers get dropped off by taxi or bus or whatever service their hotel provides outside the ballpark and a scrum of varying degrees ensues, usually depending on popularity (sought out by autograph seekers) or how good-looking a ballplayer is (sought out by girls of all ages). I was there before a game in which the indians visited the pirates a few years back and was part of the scrum. Everybody went ballistic over Grady Sizemore and Victor Martinez when they left their cabs. Jeremy Sowers, meanwhile, walked up to the park with his backpack on, completely unmolested. It was like he was just some random guy walking up to the park to catch the game. That had stuck with me ever since.

B: There’s a wonderful balance of pathos and restraint in these poems.  On one hand, there are the numbers, baseball’s so amazingly abundant numerical data. And, on the other, the heart of the player. Did you consciously hold back or check your sympathetic response to Sowers by talking about speed of fast ball, field measurements, batting averages and so on?

S: Actually, I had to take a bit of the opposite approach if I wanted it to work on a personal level. I wanted to make it accessible to die hard baseball fans, but also casual fans (as well as those with little to no interest in baseball). I had to scale back my reliance upon the stats, rather than the man.

B: Most of the poems are persona, with Sowers relaying what’s going on in his head in the raw moment, as in “Empty Weird” or recollecting specific moments in the game, as in “This Is the One” (one of my favorites). I wonder why the intimacy of the persona poem, versus the straight narrative.

S: This kind of dovetails into my previous response. It was easier for me to access the man – Jeremy Sowers as Everyman, even – and avoid the clinical aspect of statistics through a persona. Statistics really only tell you about what happened, after the fact. They are their own narrative, so to speak.

B: The diction― the natural speech line, jargon―throughout is fantastic, reminiscent of the rhythm of the announcer’s patter. Did you deliberately fashion the lineation and cadence on how the game is called?

S: I did not. Over the last six or seven summers, though, I have spent a large part of my summers at games or watching and listening to games. March through October, baseball is pretty much the soundtrack of my life. I would have been more surprised if, upon completion, some of that cadence hadn’t seeped into my work.

B: Do you plan to write more books covering the life and times of one character?  I hope so, because you have a real talent for lyrically hunker into a character’s psyche.

S: Funnily enough, I’d been mapping out the idea of a Lou Reed chapbook, which was inspired by “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens, excepting Lou Reed will be my blackbird. The title, then, will be “13 Ways of Looking at Lou Reed”. I’d started it about a month before he’d passed. Now that he is no longer among the living, I feel a bit conflicted about continuing. I don’t want it to seem like I am being a parasite or an opportunist, so the release will have to be handled delicately.

B: On that same note, I wonder what inspires you to take up the proverbial pen―what form(s) does your muse take?

S: I don’t really have a muse. I don’t really search for inspiration. I just keep my eyes and ears open and write. That said, I do have a consistent and particular audience in mind when I write.

B: This is your fourth chapbook in less than two years time, which signals that there’s quite a lot in your creative hopper to write about! Please talk about your writing regimen and how you manage to be so prolific.

S: My writing regimen is pretty simple. I write every day. Literally, every day. Halloween was 1400 days in a row. It boggles my mind a bit when I think about that (and the accumulation of forgotten poems). Sometimes, I’ll participate in poem a day challenges in order to find prompts that I wouldn’t normally use to write, but most days I just sit down and write. Granted, my writing style (short poems, mostly) lends itself to that routine, but in a lot of ways that routine has also lent itself to my writing style. As I was telling another writer the other day, I tend to write near the end of the day. My body winds down and becomes tired and my mind is quite near the muddiness of sleep. It is also quite clean as, by this point in my day, I’ve managed to move past the events of the day. My writing happens in that area in between clean and muddy. Obviously, some evenings I’m not near my computer or able to write due to other commitments. On those days, I try to write first thing in the morning (before my day has a chance to fill with events that need to be shaken free) or whenever my schedule permits.

B: You have yet another book coming out in the near future, correct? Can you tell us about it?

S: I have been wrestling with the idea of a full length manuscript, but have not really applied myself to that too seriously. If and when I do that, I will probably self-publish unless someone out there with a specific idea (and the means to wade through/cull my body of work) wants to take the reins on that.

B: What projects are you currently working on?

S: Well, as stated earlier, I have my running poem a day project. Not sure when that will end, although I realize it will eventually. I also have a chapbook slated for 2014 with NightBallet Press. Dianne Borsenik has really been a guardian angel with her oversight and presentation of my work.  

Steve Brightman, Biography

Steve Brightman lives in Kent, OH. He has published three chapbooks this year: In Brilliant Explosions Alone (Nightballet Press, 2013), Absent The (Writing Knights Press, 2013), and Like Michelangelo Sorta Said (Poet's Haven, 2013); and has just put the finishing touches on a fourth, 13 Ways Of Looking At Lou Reed. His work has also been included in a number of journals, such as Two Hawks Quarterly, The Cleveland Review, Junkmail Oracle, Bear Creek Haiku, and in  anthologies, such as Buzzkill: Apocalypse – An End of the World Anthology (Night Ballet Press, 2012), Lipsmack! A Sampler Platter of Poets from Night Ballet Press (2012) and I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems about Ohio (U of Akron Press, 2003).