It doesn’t change much but sometimes gets greener or grayer
in turns. Here it’s cloudy and there the hills
are purple in waterless air and the garlic sleeps under topsoil.
There’s spilled paint on my fingers and I won’t forget but am always
afraid I’ll forget what your nailbeds look like.
You’re my yellow roof but still air drafts up to the top of me

–

Writing by Emma Aylor, Photo by Nolan Boomer

On Romantic poets: “I think they used study as a contrast to poetry. The mind cannot always live in a ‘divine ether.’ The lark cannot always sing at heaven’s gate. There must exist a place to spring from—a refuge from the heights, an anchorage of thought. Study gives that anchorage: study ties you down; and it is the occasional wilful release from this voluntary bond that gives the soul its occasional overpowering sense of lyric freedom and effort. Study is the resting place—poetry, the adventure.” –Wallace Stevens, June 20, 1899

I used to think extensively about the question of scholarship against personal creativity (usually prompted by older relatives who, when hearing I am an English major, inevitably invoked now what are you going to do with that). It seemed there were two distinct answers, perpendicular at best, perhaps not even on the same plane — that is, I could either interpret art or make it. I vacillated between the two sides of a text: I want to write it; no, I should read it, I can tease it apart like corn silks; but why would I pull it apart?

I have these two selves. One is happy researching, reading, combing over someone else’s work all day; the other, beautiful as the person’s work is, becomes distracted at every paragraph break by newer and self-made ideas. Some of me needs to study and some to be studied. Is that an ego battle? Somehow poetry seems the opposite of that, but I can see where the perception comes from. It’s not me; it’s my insides. I am everything but most often I can’t see how.

As I work on a critical thesis alongside my own creative work, I see naves scraping themselves places in corners I had never seen. My notebook is half others and half me, and what I want to make is something in between. I pore and pour alternately, each informing the other, the sides flipping and curling like fortunes on my opening hands.

This is adhesion without regard. The sun
warms wool sleeves but don’t forget it’s still
cold; you are gapping and what I have
is less. I was born for something, but it might not
be this. Today I passed stunted boxwoods
pruned round, smelled the small leaves’ tang jammed
on overlapping panes of sky like fat citrine enamel
but I had to keep walking, scraping it from my fingernails.

In summer of 2008, before my senior year of high school, I worked at the Bahama Sno Shack, a trailer the size of a king bed with chipped concrete tables and sticky yellow umbrellas outside. We had a shaved ice machine, a hundred bottles of syrup, gallons of sugar water, a cash register, a Styrofoam cup for tips, and a radio that was always on, tuned to Top 40.

Between then and now I’ve heard these songs often — “I Kissed a Girl,” “American Boy,” “Just Dance.” At senior prom, in Nova Scotia, at Hardee’s, for nostalgic value at a house party: wherever I am I will hear the choruses and immediately taste sno cone — in particular, the blackberry one, super-saturated, fake as chrome fingers, with a marshmallow fluff and sugar water mix pumped on top.

During my first shift I ate five snow cones. It was something you learned, working there: no one was watching you. The manager came only at close to count up the money and take the trash, and so we melted little bits of ice and fructose in our cheeks. I told myself I was learning the product.

We made the sugar water in huge jugs, filling them at the spigot behind the Shell station and then heaving them back down the hill, adding heaps of sugar before shaking them with our thin high school arms. To make the syrups themselves we would mix flavor concentrates with the sugar water.

My first shot wasn’t vodka or spiced rum; it was sour apple concentrate in a little plastic medicine cup.

Sometimes A would visit, once on his way to his hosting job at a Chinese restaurant in the white polo and black pants he had to wear. That day he got a large Tiger’s Blood — cherry and coconut — and stained his lips redder. This was before we started dating but after I wanted to and I’d never needed anything so jagged and lightlike as him.

Most often I worked with M, who had just graduated. I had King Lear for my summer reading, by that time specked with food dye, and she had a red phone and long thighs and dated a few older guys at once. We were paid monthly, always on Sundays, and in August we were working with everyone’s July paychecks on top of the fridge. We were making minimum wage, and M turned up “Lollipop” and jimmied open the guys’ checks to find that every guy there made more money than us. Girlhood became curse; I was its shy knees and she its blazing shoots.

A bald man, ruddy-faced and always dressed in the same Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts, came to talk sometimes, starting with his bad friends and loneliness and segueing to sex. He came twice when I was working alone and I don’t know how long he was there each time because my ears were thin lines and I couldn’t catch the radio. I was in a vinyl box in sundresses or shorts. My hands were cold from the broken shaved ice machine, seventeen-year-old hands. I wanted a hammer or a gun or a dick. Even now he sets my teeth to drums.

When I did the night shifts my parents stipulated that I be sure to work with one of the guys. I lied, usually, too quiet to ask the manager and rationalizing that that man had only come during the day. I would work with M some nights, M who was half my size with tined elbows. She filled me in on the fights that had happened the summer before, between “rednecks and blacks,” she said, when they had to call the cops several times. Even now the rednecks kept nooses tied in smooth red nylon rope or thick twine in the back windows of their trucks when they came on Saturday night. It was better this year, she said, so far. As she talked she tied a length of string she had into that little knot, whirled coils around its base, hanged her index finger until its tip was smashed eggplants and sleet crumbed on the tile.

Where I live you varnish our outsides
the broken blue of old pencils. Our address
is half down tender, a quarter up
Main. We sing for your skin, our throats
skimming around your knuckles and into
your nail beds, popping the moons. Our parings
don’t take. You haven’t played guitar
in a year but when you do I will be laundry
lint on your wheels. And how you
sleep there isn’t room for us full
as new white tusks, just mothballs on the phone
at night and slow belled threads in each hand.

I wrote this in a meeting of the Untitled Society, a prompt-based writing club, to twenty minutes of shuffled, disparate music. It’s about you; it always is.

The days I read a new poem I am young, younger, suddenly—young as a verb almost, as a growing-down somehow simultaneous with upwardness. My favorite poems are prescient and precocious, as if a child had written them with perfect understanding despite the cruelties of anachronism and time, as if she had written them with some fore-urgency. Some of the best poets lead me to believe that they are decades younger than they are—Olena Kalytiak Davis’ “Please don’t misunderstand: / We still suffer, but we are / happy,” her “five chambered heart / Filling with the panic of birds, asking: What? / What if not this?” Dorothea Grossman’s little missives: “I have to tell you, / there are times when / the sun strikes me / like a gong, / and I remember everything, / even your ears.” Eileen Myles has seemed my age and appropriately rebellious for it as far back and forward as I’ve read in her work—“Listen to all your voices now.”

This applies to being taken out of time, too, I think. Rumi could probably be thought contemporary. When I found Yuan Chen’s poem “Letter Smuggled in a Fish” online I assumed it to have been written within the decade:

Your letter unfolds and unfolds forever.
I flatten it with my hands to read:

tearstains, tearstains and a touch of rouge
where it must have touched your cheek

—And then I looked him up online a few days ago only to discover that he lived from 779 to 831 CE, despite how close he feels, here with no bodily hereness any longer.

Children themselves speak some of the best poetry unintentionally, as if pulled out airily on a stick, cotton candy words; as the plum pit suddenly appearing in what was soft. Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge, in her book Poemcrazy, details a few similar incidents with her children and students, and quotes Kenneth Patchen’s ideal that a poet should “wear comfortable shoes and see a lot of children.” My favorite story is her son’s:

I saw my son, Daniel, shaking our new lilac bush the spring he was three . . . I asked him what he was doing. “I’m stirring the sky, Mama,” he told me. I asked only that he stir it gently. How can you tell a child to stop stirring the sky?

Poetry is my way of never growing up, of residing in that childspace forever, heady, unconscious, smelling of tall grass or pond water. To be a poet is to never stop digging the hole, planting the marigold, stirring the sky.

Lidia Yuknavitch is one of the first on my list of “lady heroes,” a list which also includes writers and representatives of kickass womanhood Beryl Markham, Virginia Woolf, Roxane Gay, Isak Dinesen, Cheryl Strayed, Marina Tsvetaeva, Emily Dickinson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. A list that reminds me of my body, my words, my place, and their importance. Of “girl myths,” as Yuknavitch calls them in one interview, and how we must make new ones including our bodies and our power.

We knew, from her memoir The Chronology of Water and from essays like “Blood Red Desk” and “About a Boob, or the Hermeneutics of a Woman’s Body,” that Yuknavitch believes in the body, in story, sex, power, enjoyment: that the body can teach us more about writing, feeling, and art than much else. In an interview with The Rumpus about Dora, she says, “You could say I think the body is the first novel. I take my cues about form and content from her.”

From this, through this, Dora becomes a rolling curvy bodily whole that refuses to feel shame for what is human, for integral girlselves and teenselves and selfselves. The writing is styled into boles, into trunks of kennings and words informed primarily by a precision of fleshed feeling—vodkaskin, throatsong, girlstory, bomblets. It is as full as the character Marlene’s laugh—Marlene, who is Dora’s surrogate-sort mother, part of the family she creates herself: “Marlene is making bacon. She laughs and laughs . . . She says, ‘It is my dark continent. It lives in my belly! . . . It is a statement made by history. I had to eat it, and now it is in my belly.’ . . . With her back to me, she says, ‘Someday, you will learn to laugh with your whole life.’”

To promote the release date of Dora, Yuknavitch led an online campaign on August 1, in which women and men everywhere posted pictures of themselves, their torsos, headless, with signs and skins reading “My body is not your battleground,” often signed “Love, Dora and the daughters of Eve.” Dora is a reclaiming of the body, of every body, and of the stories it and its accompanying personhoods holds. And it is about youth and jealousy, about fullness through living that. In part, Yuknavitch’s dedication to the book reads: “This book is for every teen who ever got treated like something was wrong with them, when really they were opening the portal for all of us. I made this for you.”

I could talk about plot here, or characters. I could mention that, and probably ought to. (I should at least mention that Dora is a modern retelling—as well as a tearing-apart—of Freud’s famous case study of the same name.) But, in tandem with Dora’s statement—“Art is a verb”—reading Dora is a verb. My review can’t change you like it can, can’t tell you exactly how much of the space above your heart up to your throat into your ears will recognize yourself in this, and cry on trains or in hotel rooms like I did knowing that you are both different and exactly the same as you were at seventeen, or as you are now at seventeen, between months or years. I want you to see the tribe Dora makes herself, the space she carves out with her elbows and the sharp corners of her youngfeeling self. I want to ask you yourself “which city [your] body is. Or ocean.” I want to hold your hand while you read this and draw strings from the nodes of its story to your own, draw how it saves you.

—

Dora: A Headcase, published by Hawthorne Books, is available through Powell’s and elsewhere. Lidia Yuknavitch can be found here.

“The instinct for heaven had its counterpart:
The instinct for earth, for New Haven, for his room,
The gay tournamonde as of a single world

In which he is and as and is are one.” —Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”

I spent a day this July in New Haven, researching Stevens at Yale’s Beinecke Library. The Beinecke holds one of the twenty-one surviving complete copies of the Gutenberg Bible. Its walls are made of transparent marble, to let in some light but not enough to damage the rare and old books it holds in its glass spine, and I touched the illumined veins, surprised at their sponged solidity and warmth.

—

What I really love is people. Everyone I interacted with, that day, was so kind—someone walking his dog in the park. A man who complimented me. A woman who saw me feeding a squirrel a bit of cookie and asked if I knew it, said I was sweet, was surprised that I didn’t visit that squirrel often, that I had never been there before. Three ladies from Newport News on the hotel shuttle; one said, “Bye baby! See you around Yale!” Not one person rude or forward. I have so much faith in these people, in most all of them. It makes me almost believe in some kind of god—or maybe just some supreme kindness, soft and catching.

—

I never knew that this was traveling alone. Those close to me reminded me that I am, unfortunately for safety’s sake, female, that I should be aware and travel light and limit excursions after dark. I worried about packing and overthought which books to take, which ones would last me, thought I’d be lonely or wish for someone to talk to, believed that I would bore myself, would walk so much that I’d blister my soles, refuse, and go home, would lose my wallet or my pills or my voice.

But I wander more, notice more, unconstrainedly. I go to multiple coffee shops in a day because I feel like it. I read on benches and move every time my legs want or jolt. I smile at passersby. Talk to myself. Talk to others. I am at the same time shy and exuberant, and I’m allowed to be with no one watching or imaginarily demanding consistency. I hog all the pillows, sleep mid-queen, shower long. I smile every time I wake up and savor missing you, this once, where I have the space to feel it.

—

In the research room, I typed pages of notes from four boxes of original material. I held the billfold Stevens threw away at 735 Farmington Avenue—where his landlady fished it, as well as some of his handwritten drafts, from the trash—thin leather, sat-on, the small golden corner—WS. I felt his typewriter keys’ impressions, his light pencil, his imperfect erasings and illegible signatures. I mistook muse for arms in his handwriting, humped like mountains or zippers or combs, things with soft teeth.

Joshua Poteat has published two books of poems, Ornithologies (Anhinga Poetry Prize, 2006), and Illustrating the Machine that Makes the World (University of Georgia Press, 2009), as well as a chapbook, Meditations (Poetry Society of America, 2004). From 2011-2012, he was the Donaldson Writer in Residence at the College of William & Mary. Currently, Joshua is a copy editor/copywriter at The Martin Agency. In collaboration with the designer Roberto Ventura, he creates light- and text-based installations which have appeared in shows at Randolph Macon College, 1708 Gallery, and for Richmond’s InLight, which won Best in Show, 2009. Originally from Hampstead, North Carolina, Joshua lives in Richmond, Virginia with the writer Allison Titus and their four pugs.

What was the first thing you wanted to be when you grew up? When did you decide you wanted to write?

Probably something involving guns…like a police officer. I had a thing for guns and protecting/spying on people. So much for “the pen is mightier”…. I’ve still never shot one, though. (A gun, that is. Or a person.) When I figured out that people actually die when shot with said guns, I got over them quickly. As for writing, I’m not sure I ever decided. It’s just something that happened. Looking back on my childhood, there are “influences” that could have pushed me in the direction of writing/poems… a combination of living in the middle of the woods/marshes of eastern North Carolina (isolation), having a father who knew many things about the natural world (lust for knowledge), writing lyrics for punk bands (angsty/screamy), and a love for reading (mechanics of language). I constantly question my life choices, especially the poems. It feels frivolous at times… useless/pointless/nothingness… but so does everything else. While waiting for the abyss to swallow me, swallow us, I might as well do something that brings joy to me.

Do you remember the first thing you wrote?

In 5^th grade I won first place in a Topsail Middle School writing contest. The title of my piece was “Sadness is a Baby Sister,” based of course on Charles Shultz “Happiness is a Warm Puppy.” I’m sure I wrote other things before this, but it was the first time that someone noticed me. Note: I officially love my little sister now. She is amazing.

Not that you asked, but the first word I read out loud was “Sears.” And the first image I remember drawing was a huge family portrait on my bedroom wall in orange pencil in the middle of the night. My parents told me years later that they pretended to be angry with me so I wouldn’t think I was getting away with a misdemeanor/graffiti. I like to imagine them smiling quietly in bed, all those years ago, young, imperfect, in pain, alive.

What was the very first piece you published?

I just found this the other day after my wife made me clean out a desk drawer. It was in Atlantis, UNC-Wilmington’s undergraduate lit/art journal at the time…kind of like an uncool, early 90s version of W&M’s Bullet. It’s still horrible, that poem. It was entitled “Fifteenth Minute” and involved a time-based murder of sorts. I don’t mind that it’s horrible, though. I see previously published work as tattoos… if you get them when you’re young, more than likely your aesthetics haven’t developed enough for time to treat them gently. And then you’re left with a cartoon Tasmanian Devil on the small of your back for life. You can either be embarrassed/haunted by the Tasmanian Devil, or you can embrace it, because it represents a life lived, a mile-marker, a map to the lost self. The ink is the only way back.

You have some wonderful titles: “Illustrating the Theory of Twilight,” “Illustrating How to Catch and Manufacture Ghosts,” “The Angels Continue Turning the Wheels of the Universe Despite Their Ugly Souls (Malvern Hill Battleground),” “Meditation for Everything We Have Loved.” You said once that your titles are often found—like “Drug Department,” which is from a series that takes its titles from a 1900 Sears-Roebuck catalog. How do you choose and write your titles, or know when they’re the right ones?

Why thank you. Four out of the five titles mentioned above are not mine at all. Godard said, “It’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to.” Not that I’m taking anything anywhere, really. I just enjoy the process of riffing off of found titles. For some reason it works for me. I realize it’s gimmicky and possibly “unwriterly” and I probably wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. In a way, it’s similar to collage/mixed media. By taking other older texts and imposing them onto a “modern” sensibility/poem, it pushes conceptually against time, history and meaning. At least that’s what I’m hoping. And it works with my regular process of writing a poem, which is also collagist in practice. I take notes, lines, phrasings, quotes from films/texts and attempt to compile them into something cohesive. Since my impulse is more narrative, this seems like a bad idea. Yet I keep doing it.

Your second book, Illustrating the Machine That Makes the World, was inspired by J. G. Heck’s 1851 “pictorial archive.” What is it like working so closely with somewhat ekphrastic poetry in a book-length series?

Emphasis on “somewhat ekphrastic.” Only a couple/few of the poems in the book were directly influenced by the actual images. It’s the titles of those etchings that pushed me into making poems for them. Apparatus to show the amount of dew on trees and shrubs, Illustrating the theory of twilight, Illustrating the theory of interference, Illustrating the resistance of the ether, Illustrating that objects on earth can throw shadows into space, Apparatus for determining the specific heat of bodies, Illustrating the manner of communicating vibrations to the air… etc., etc. All of these images are strange little 19^th century diagrams of no obvious/particular meaning. It’s the titles that got me. So the book is more of a textual ekphrastic, or textphrastic (patent pending)! Regardless, it was extremely fun to work with the images/titles in a book-length series. “Fun” is not a word I would normally use for poem… or for most things… but by god, I had a good time with them. Included in the appendices of the book are the images the titles come from… and a section of erasures/ruins of poems that appear earlier in book. My editor didn’t think the appendices were necessary and could possibly take away/distract from the book. I appreciated his viewpoint, due to the fact that he was probably right, but it’s a book of poems. Just poems. Based on the readership of poetry in the 21^st century, I could have put photographs of my pet squirrel Nutty and 5-year-old Josh in the back of the book and I would have sold the same amount of copies. So the appendices live!

I know you collect old photographs. Do you have any other collections? How do they seep into your writing and art?

Pugs! I collect pugs! Well, not really, but my wife and I do have four pugs. They are hilarious and beautiful. Besides pugs, I collect old things in general. Not really antiques per se, just strange old objects. Like typewriters, wooden boxes, tools, globes. My coolest recent find is a weathered/worn framed needlepoint sampler from 1906 that says “Absent but not forgotten” in Gothic needlepoint with a photograph of two little boys pasted crookedly in the middle. It is the epitome of melancholy. I’d rather find such things in abandoned places, but antique stores are much safer. As for seeping into my work, it has to, right? Maybe it’s just the feeling these objects give me that makes it into the poems. Not quite a “reliance” but an attention to history, to the dead. I live in an old, formerly dangerous neighborhood in Richmond in a house built in 1890, which probably shapes my internal world more than I know.

How do your writing and your light boxes intersect? Does one tend to inform the other?

I’m not quite sure they intersect. Occasionally I may use a line from a poem on a light box (or more recently ink transfers on wood panels), but I’ve never felt like much of an artist. I’m not trained in any way, though I guess I know my art history. It’s just something I like to do. The word “hobby” brings up some odd connotations, but that may describe my “art” perfectly. Not to be overly humble. I know a lot of artists who work quite hard on their respective forms, so compared to them, I’m just a tourist. What it comes down to, really, is if it (“it” could refer to anything here) makes me happy. And it does. When I get around to doing it.

Where do you like most to write?

I admit I have a poor work ethic when it comes to writing. I wish I could write anywhere, and I probably should be able to…I just don’t. I go through phases where I think it poems don’t matter at all, so I watch the entire Friday Night Lights TV series over a couple of months, for example, instead of working on poems. Thus, residencies are quite helpful to me. I can separate myself from my 40+ hour a week job and get down to business, whether it matters or not.

What writer has influenced you the most?

I could go on forever about this…there are so many influences… from The Hill Café’s black bean burger to Dario Robleto… but to keep it short, I will say Larry Levis. His work taught me (still teaches me) to push narrative to the edge of story into meditative landscapes/rooms.

Do you have a favorite poem or poems?

If I was making a mix tape of poems right now, Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Song” would be the opener.

For more information, go to www.joshuapoteat.com.

From the Wikipedia page for essence: “In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident: a property that the object or substance has contingently, without which the substance can still retain its identity. The concept originates with Aristotle, who used the Greek expression to ti ên einai, literally ‘the what it was to be,’ or sometimes the shorter phrase to ti esti, literally ‘the what it is,’ for the same idea. This phrase presented such difficulties for his Latin translators that they coined the word essentia (English ‘essence’) to represent the whole expression.”

I’ve started thinking of the concept of an essential self recently—of why philosophy contrasts it with accident, of why incidentals are placed at odds with something assumed to stay still within. Why is it, then, that I can’t recognize even a few-months-old self in examining knickknacks and earrings she collected and in reading what she wrote?

In a file of writing ideas I keep, I had typed an extract from May 19, 2012 as a germ for some essay or piece, and when I read it I had no idea I had written it until reading that it was from my own journal. I wrote, “And I’m back to projecting the life I want, that I’ve been working so hard for, so long, that I have no sense of a stopping point—and that’s all right, because I never want to stop.” The who of that bit is not who I recognize, though her hopes are the same. Before I realized I was her I envied how she phrased that.

There must be truth, then, in the “set of attributes.” This difference in modes of expression may change nothing but the bearing of the same ship, may just push the compass one degree west of the same general place.

Maybe there’s something to distancing self from self. A lag in love. As if I can only love a self I no longer fully inhabit because such love includes nothing of ego, because she is far enough from me to be no mirror but some transmutation: a painting of the same subject with different shades and strokes, another apple in the bowl.

I wrote of wintered dreams and leaf shoots I no longer remember, so that later, now, I can love them.