Grocery store brands, dollar store finds,  more local fruits and veggies, less red meat, and home-cooked meals over take out—these are some of the cost-cutting measures I’ve adopted during this long recession. 

I like the challenge of saving the most money while getting the best food for my small family.

However, there are two things I won’t stint on: good dark chocolate and fine spices. The right spices and marinades can dress up economical meals, enriching flavor and enhancing texture.  I consider it a double win if I can find reasonably priced fine spices and herbs. 

Awaken Savor’s fine spice and herb blends offer exotic and enticing tastes from around the world at prices that don’t break your budget. 

One of my favorite Awaken Savor blends is Ras el Hanout , a rosy-hued rub which includes saffron stigma, mild paprika, cumin, ginger, coriander seed, cassia, turmeric, fennel seed, allspice, green cardamom seed, whole dill seed, galangal, nutmeg, rosebud powder, bay leaves, caraway seed, cayenne pepper, clove, mace, cubeb pepper, brown cardamom, lavender flowers, and orris root.

Its subtle yet intense aroma, which reminded me of the Chicken Tikka Masala I had enjoyed for years at my favorite restaurant in Seattle, Cedars on Brooklyn, compelled me to prepare a home-cooked version. 

I also prepared chicken breasts, marinated in olive oil and pomegranate-infused wine vinegar with a pinch of salt (a habit I haven’t totally dropped), and then grilled  for a quick lunch with steamed jasmine rice and greens.

Za’atar is a peppery, smoky traditional Middle Eastern blend of thyme, oregano, basil, savory, whole dry marjoram, ground sumac berries, sesame seeds, orange peel, and hyssop.  

Za’atar is something of an aquired taste.  However, I enjoyed Awaken Savor’s version much more than  Penzey’s Fine Spices blend, which I used a few years ago and found to be a little bitter. 

I whipped up a simple olive oil and lemon juice based marinade with a pinch of salt and chopped chives.  There was enough to divide for use on grilled tilapia filets one day and baked chicken breasts the next.  The blend has a multi-layered flavor which enhanced both the poultry and fish.

I approached Texas Tear Dropper meat rub with some trepidation. A fiery blend of chipotle, cayenne, aleppo, chiles, black peppercorns, wasabi, and mustard, I had been warned it was HOT. However, after marinading a London Broil in the rub with red wine vinegar and a little olive oil and grilling it to medium rare, I found the spice-infused meat extremely flavorful with just the right amount of heat.  It also has a strong and delicious aroma.

All Awaken Savor blends are salt free; I added a small amount of salt to two of the marinades I prepared, but you can easily do without.  They are all natural and each product comes with a recipe card that includes the origin of the blend.

Awaken Savor products are available at www.awakensavor.com, and at many fine food stores.  (This article originally appeared 06/13/2009 on Eat.Drink.Memory: satisfying the craving for good food, drink, culture & travel, where I’m a Contributing Writer.)

Some thoughts on Election Night 2008

I’m taking a break from making calls (over 100 made tonight & counting!) to reflect on some of the memories I’ve collected while working for Barack’s Campaign for Change. I’m thinking about the many people I’ve met and the voices I’ve heard.

The first time I, went canvassing for Barack the somewhat disheartening day ended on a high note. After knocking on 10 pages worth of doors in an economically depressed area of Virginia Beach, and being met with hostility, suspicion, indifference, and many empty homes, my partner and I were greeted by an entire extended family who came outside to thank us for the work we were doing to change the world.

The man on our list was a young Black soldier who was visiting his parents’ home with his wife and two daughters. He came to the door in a Barack T-shirt and stepped outside to speak to us; his mother, father, uncle, wife and two daughters followed. As he updated his address (he had recently been transferred to Northern Virginia) and signed up to volunteer, his father and wife spoke about the campaign and the hope they felt.

His pre-teen daughter said she wanted to vote too. As three generations of this family stood around us, I noticed that we were all smiling ear to ear, just beaming at each other. “It’s a new day!”, his father said as we took turns shaking hands round the circle and said goodbye.

The first night I made calls to voters in my state, after 25 calls that yielded little but wrong numbers and one screaming McCain supporter, I happened on a 93 year old Black woman who had voted early, she said, “because of my age”. She wanted to talk and her quavering voice conveyed the emotion she felt. “I have waited so long for this, for this day! I have waited so long to see this happen, wouldn’t nothing keep me away.”

Tonight, as I made calls to voters in Virginia and Nevada, a 73 year old White woman stopped me mid-sentence to say “Don’t you worry, I voted this morning and I voted for Obama!”.

As I canvassed near my neighborhood on Sunday, a young White man with sandy-colored hair in cornrows, a naked torso covered in what looked like home-made tattoos, and a big smile asked for an Obama lawn sign and poster. As he meticulously taped the poster to his mailbox he explained that he couldn’t vote, but he wanted to help get the word out. “Barack’s gonna change everything up! He’s gonna change this world. ” (Apparently, as an ex-convict, he had lost his right to vote.)

Down the street from that enthusiastic young man, my canvassing partner and I met an 85 year old Black woman and her 35 year old son, both of whom were voting for the first time. “I’ve lived a long time…” the woman said as she opened her hands for a lawn sign. “Never thought I’d see this day…” Her son asked for some stickers.

As I canvassed or made calls, I was struck by the simmering excitement and cautiously hopeful enthusiasm of Barack Obama’s supporters. I understood, because I felt those emotions myself. This is the first time I have felt truly connected to the political process and the first time I have become actively involved beyond voting and giving a small donation.

I’m a single mother of a young son and a teacher; my time and my budget are tight. Yet, somehow I managed to scrape up extra time and extra money for Barack Obama’s campaign. I have waited so long for this and together we all will change everything up. For the first time I unabashedly believe–we can change this world.

Yes we can,

Maura Alia Badji

Virginia Beach, Virginia

November 4, 2008

Obama Nation is a hodge-podge of bogus and deceptive “research”, the same old reconstituted lies people have used to attack Barack Obama for years. The book is chockful of factual errors on a wide range of subjects from the year of the Obama’s wedding to African citizenship laws.

I have watched and listened with growing incredulity while the media has treated Jerome Corsi, a known promoter of crackpot manifestoes and easily disproven deceptions, as a serious scholar. The media has willingly swallowed the claims of Corsi and his publisher that his latest “hit” is the culmination of real research. Instead of being given free publicity, Corsi needs to be confronted with his manipulations of reality and his use of questionable sources.

This is the same man who wrote books alleging that George Bush is trying to dissolve our borders with Mexico and Canada, that oil is inexhaustible, and that the government caused the Twin Towers to fall on 9/11. This latest regurgitated hatchet job is no more credible than any of Corsi’s other kooky theories.

As if his published record didn’t say enough about his lack of credibility, it is well-known that Corsi is so bigoted that even other right-wing hatchet men can’t stomach him. The slime commandos pushing Swift Boat smears in 2004 kicked Corsi off their publicity tour due to his history of public religious intolerance and bigotry.

Truly, Obama Nation deserves to be remaindered to the slush pile of history’s regrettable footnotes.

How are you feeling today?  About your looks? About yourself?  Is your skin tone looking a little uneven?Lips chapped?  Eyes red?  Is your breath a little unfresh? Is your butt too big, or maybe not big enough?  Breasts saggin? Knees baggin?  OK, maybe you do look pretty good today, but couldn’t you stand to look just a wee bit better?

Yes, you there, sitting at your desk ducking the pop-up ads for wrinkle cream, driving down the highway past billboard after billboard, sitting in the subway, watching TV, waiting at the doctor’s office as advertising blip after advertising blip enters your brain.

A steady stream of media messages tell all of us, but especially women, that we are not good enough, lovely enough, smart enough, desirable enough, cool enough, and that the only answer is to buy, buy, buy.  Unfortunately, if the relentless messages of the marketing masters are to be believed, we can never buy enough product to ever get it just right.

It is just those kinds of messages that the creators of the You Are Beautiful sticker project hope to counteract, armed with nothing more than a simple phrase in black text on a silver sticker.  Actually hundreds of thousands of stickers. The goal of their project is to “spread the message to as many individuals, in as many places as possible, simply reminding them of their beauty.”

Since the project begin, they have printed over 500,000 stickers and given them away free.  You can contact them here to get your own stickers and help spread the word.  Alternatively, a pdf download is available for those who want to print their own batch.  They also encourage one and all to create their own You Are Beautiful art and art installations, then send photos to be posted on the project website where examples from around the world are archived.

Just imagine, one day as you are sitting in traffic you glance up at a street sign to see the unexpected rectangular addition that tells you: You Are Beautiful.  And you are.

~MoxieBee,  www.moxiebee.wordpress.com

While I am a very clean person, one who has been known to bathe twice in one day just because I like soaking inert in the tub, I am a woman afflicted with…..clutter. Mounded magazines (not newspapers because I don’t want to be found under a moldering pile of them when I’m 80), mail, mail, and more mail, books, books, books, oh yes and more books. Topped with new mail. And a couple more books to hold it all down. Now I know I am not alone.

My great friend Kristen emphatically recommended Karen Kingston’s book, CLEAR YOUR CLUTTER WITH FENG SHUI (Broadway, 1999) after she could stand her own clutter no longer. Kristen and I are both teachers and writers with young children, so we have similar forms of clutter: the flotsam & jetsam teaching/writing types collect plus brightly colored childhood related dreck. She claims this book has started to get her home, and by extension, her life, in order. As she explained the author’s assertion that clutter clearing is one of the most powerful, transformative aspects of Feng Shui, I surveyed the increasingly baroque piles of clutter in my home.Oh, how have I sunk to this low estate?, I wondered.I’ve not yet purchased said book, but just the thought of embarking on a clutter-clearing program that could energize my life got me instantly juiced.

Kristin read me a few choice excerpts from the book over the phone one morning as I procrastinated about sorting my mail. Apparently, Ms. Kingston uses the principles of Feng Shui to banish clutter, clear space and bring about a new sense of balance. She gets your Bagua in order. Yes, my friend, your Bagua , from the Chinese pa kua, literally “eight symbols”.

A bagua map is a tool used in some forms of Feng Shui to map a house, a room or even a desk to see how the different sections correspond to different aspects in life, such as fame/reputation, family/ancestors/health, love/marriage, children/creativity, helpful people/travel, career, knowledge/cultivation, and wealth/prosperity.

The bagua map is intended to find areas lacking good chi, (the circulating ethereal substance or life energy that in Chinese philosophy is thought to be inherent in all things) and to show where there are negative or missing spaces that need rectifying.It seems that if you solve your chi issues in your environment it can carry over into the corresponding areas of your life. Get your Bagua in order; get your life in order. Don’t mess with the Bagua—that’s all I’m sayin’, till I actually read the book myself.

According to Ms. Kingston, dealing with clutter is one of the most important aspects of using feng shui. Clutter, which derives from the Middle English word clotter—to coagulate—tends to accumulate when energy stagnates, and vice versa. Kingston’s approach to feng shui is that you can sort out your life by sorting out your stuff.

Jazzed and enthused with the possibility of clearing an energy path in my life, I recently actually collected and purposefully disposed of three garbage bags full of mail and other assorted junk. I have a long way to go before I achieve spatial nirvana, but it’s a start. Wish me luck.

“I’m not stupid. I went to Wendy Ward Charm

School… I know how to walk, how to get in and

out of a car without showing the world everything.”

Terry Ventura, on her readiness for her new

role as Minnesota’s first lady (Time.com, 01/18/99)

Mrs. Jesse Ventura and I share a special bond. We’re both proud graduates of The Wendy Ward Charm School. In windowless offices above the local Montgomery Ward’s, I learned about the magic Ps—Poise and Posture.

MaryAnn Palodino, doppelganger of 1970s siren Marisa Berenson, presided over ten girls in various stages of gawk every Saturday for 8 weeks. Her title, Personal Charm Director, fit like a tiara; in sweet but forceful tones she turned the everyday into Proper Pronouns. False eyelashes improbably becoming, lip-gloss blindingly shiny, her silver bangles never jangled on her willowy arms. I was grudgingly mesmerized. Like me, MaryAnn was tall and dark; unlike me she was thin, a walking definition of perfection.

It wasn’t my idea to enroll in The Wendy Way to Charm; my mother thought it would bring me out of myself. Self was something I hid and ignored. At twelve, with my height and breasts in full bloom, I looked eighteen. I didn’t want to parade in a roomful of little girls.

Radiating disdain, I slouched through the door in a baggy T-shirt. My cool was practiced. Head down, I stumbled into a chair. I guess you have your work cut out for you, my mother sang out. She quickly exited, leaving me to my best impersonation of a paralytic. Nonsense, MaryAnn purred. She’s a tall and lovely girl. I was hers; it was that easy.

Cherub-voiced, with the personal force of a drill instructor, MaryAnn schooled us in Classic Charm. Before we could touch the jeweled pots of gloss nestled temptingly in our Beauty Kits, we imbibed the mantra: Cleanse! Tone! Moisturize! I inhaled the almond moisturizer we were issued—my first real girl gear.

Several girls began wearing their hair in disheveled homage to MaryAnn’s sleek chignons. I managed to achieve a “hiding small woodland creature” effect, and then switched to a Veronica Lake do. MaryAnn pronounced it chic but impractical; I kept tripping while practicing the Model’s Walk.

MaryAnn imparted the mechanics of modeling with the gravity of a tutorial with Balanchine. Model’s T, which, indeed, resembled a ballet position, was the starting point for Model’s Walk— a pantherish glide. The Pantsuit Lunge, my favorite, came next—lurching forward with hand on knee, elbow slightly bent. I tolerated The Skirt Tilt: one hand on hip with a slight dip to the side. It echoed the unflattering I’m A Little Teapot I’d been corralled into performing in kindergarten. Only the Hokey-Pokey earned more of my childhood scorn.

The group favorite was Little Twirl, a supposedly controlled spin for showing off skirts. Spin Girls Spin! Maryann sang as we dizzied ourselves. Beatrix Chassee, a sallow milk fed veal of a girl, became briefly notorious for twirling herself into a nosebleed. Heedless of her distress, the rest of the Charm commandos spun in disoriented orbits while MaryAnn ran Beatrix to the restroom. A visitor to class at that moment might have witnessed something akin to Interpretive Dance for the Autistic.

Model T, Model Walk, Pivot, and Pantsuit Lunge. Model T, Model Walk, Pivot. We practiced our panther glides tirelessly, for the ultimate reward—A Fashion Show, the golden carrot MaryAnn held out as we toiled on imaginary runways. Wendy’s Way handbook featured such weirdly deathless prose as “Beauty is learned…and earned—you’ll never find it sitting on a mushroom” and the slightly frightening “…remember rudeness is the devil’s gift to a self-conscious girl, and you don’t want people to think you’re self-conscious.” If that was true, the entire class was enrolled in Satan’s Gift Registry.

I worked hard for MaryAnn, she of the flawless skin and noiseless bracelets. Her huge eyes seemed to reflect what I could become. Soon, I was voluntarily showering two times a day. A miracle! , my mother declared. I sneered an elegant sneer; my Model’s Smile was for MaryAnn alone.

When MaryAnn looked at all of us, gangly, pimply, plump, or stringy, she really seemed to see Natural Beauties capable of pulling off a Graduation Fashion Show. Natural Poise and Beauty are the Best Cosmetics Girls—Makeup and Stylish Clothing are Only Icing! I forgave her mixed metaphors.

As we descended to Ward’s retail floor to select outfits for the Show, my stomach tightened with familiar dread. I was 5 ft 8 and over 120 pounds–huge, enormous, gargantuan. My sad baggy T-shirt camouflaged my flaws.

Nothing ever fit—why bother looking? Freak!—too tall, too big, and too fat–my inner rant continued. As the other girls fanned out in pursuit of Fashion, I lurked near the footwear department feigning sudden interest in Earth Shoes. MaryAnn caught me with her gimlet eye as I slinked behind a pillar. Why wasn’t I looking for an outfit? I stared at the pillar, the floor and MaryAnn’s charm bracelet—all hearts. I unleashed my litany of woe—too big, too tall—too much! She was unconvinced. Show me where you usually look, she commanded. I led her to the area where my father usually selected my clothes. Always in the largest size possible.

A frown broke her usually placid surface. Then she smiled and said, Why sweetie, this is the children’s department! You are a lovely young woman—not a little girl. In memory I see her as a sort of Disco Glinda the Good Witch, lip-gloss reflecting light from an ever-present rotating mirrored ball. I wanted her to curse my parents as fools, but without another word she led me to the Fun & Lovin’ Juniors department. With MaryAnn’s help, I chose my first grown-up outfit: a fitted brown and cream windowpane-plaid jacket and a peach mock turtle neck shell with chocolate brown pants. Brown platforms completed the ensemble.

MaryAnn waited for me while I changed in the mirror-less dressing room. Remember, shoulders back, chest out, she murmured as I reluctantly emerged. Slowly, I turned to face the mirror. I froze. I had a real woman’s figure—breasts, waist, hips, and long legs. I nearly swooned. No wonder my parents tried to hide it. No wonder I was speechless; I’d never really looked at It–the body I had long disdained. I only knew what I felt like all the time—too much. Yet, now I felt just right. I wasn’t fat—I was curvy. For once I didn’t cringe at my own reflection. Good fit is always important; you can’t put clothing on willy-nilly; MaryAnn smiled but I hardly paid attention. Nearly drunk with self-love I did the Pantsuit Lunge and bonked my head on the mirror.

Some thirty years later, I find myself summoning up all the Charm I can muster to ask: what the hell does plus-sized mean? If the count starts in the size 0 range of Kate Moss and the Sex in The City gals, all the rest of us are plus-sized. I buy what fits and flatters, no matter the number on the little tag. I live fully in my tall, curvy body and can often be persuaded to demonstrate the Pantsuit Lunge at parties. Wendy Ward,embodied by Mary Ann Paladino,equipped me not only with the ability to get out of a car without flashing my knickers, but with enough Charm to take on just about anything.

]]> http://moxiebee.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/charmed-life/feed/ 2 moxiebee http://moxiebee.wordpress.com/2008/07/17/blogsi-have-blogs/ http://moxiebee.wordpress.com/2008/07/17/blogsi-have-blogs/#comments Thu, 17 Jul 2008 06:31:39 +0000 moxiebee http://moxiebee.wordpress.com/?p=14 ]]>

My other blog is at skirt! magazine’s site:

http://skirt.com/blog/5529

I’m a featured blogger there— AKA a skirt-setter; you heard it here first.

Slanting the Truth: Memory & Illumination in Personal Narrative Poetry

By Maura Alia Badji

Written on the walls of a women’s bathroom at the McDowell writers’ colony are words close to these–”Our obligation is to outlive an insane family long enough to write about them.” Fueling my desire to survive my colorful and erratic family was a strong drive to be able to one day tell the Truth About What Really Happened. The Truth, not only about my experiences, but about all the people inhabiting those wonderful smoke-screened family secrets that led to more secrets. In my family, narrative was a snake that swallowed its tail before the story could be ended.

Surrounded, as I was, by inventive and duplicitous story-spinners, it seems natural that I would be drawn to experiential narrative, as a poet and as a reader. As a young poet I was interested in the Truth, my own and that of others, those who were brave enough to live to tell. I begged my grandparents for whatever shreds of memory and hazy recollection they were willing to dredge up. I wanted to know what happened in 1920-or-so, when Nana tangoed with Valentino on a ballroom floor as smooth and shiny as glass. What dress did she wear? What was the exact shade of her rouge? And was he really wearing some too? What happened, not many years later, when her Old World Italian parents forced her into an arranged marriage that resulted in the birth of ten children, of whom eight lived, including my mother? I wanted to know not just what happened, but most importantly how did she feel?

And what about great-aunt Connie’s daughter Rosalie, with the impossibly long black hair, who was kidnapped by the son of a Mafia don? Chloroformed, raped, and forced into marriage across state lines, she improbably fell in love with her captor, raised two children with him in a palatial home protected by blacked-out windows. When he tried to “go straight” his murder was pinned on Rosie, who spent two years in prison before the truth came to light and she was set free. Years later, she typed up her story on brittle leaves of rice paper and

put it into a shoe-box she gave to my grandmother for safe-keeping. Her story stayed buried in a closet until my mother briefly inherited it and let me read the crumbling pages; I’ve never fully forgiven her for impulsively giving this treasure to a distant relation without first making a copy for me. I tried to memorize that fragile manuscript– Rosalie had written her true story and I was interested in Truth.

I nagged my mother for her side of every family story and grew impatient when she “retold” history to suit her moody version of Truth. The stories my mother told often did not match those my grandmother gave me and vice versa. I noted the discrepancies only to shrug them off. They just hadn’t gotten the story right. I learned their stories so well it seemed that their memories became mine–but only after I had added my own touches. Raised in a chaotic, often violent household headed by a father who bent reality to suit his whims, I relied on the notion of Truth to finally set things right. As a young writer I planned for the day when I could tell the Truth about my experiences, my family, my far-off ancestors. I would write the Truth, turn my back on lies and be free.

Of course, I grew up and out of such simple notions; I found that more often than not ambiguity is the rule an adult and a writer must learn to live with. As I’ve learned during my apprenticeship as a poet and sentient being, the truth is rarely, if ever, one Truth. The truth is rarely only one story; the truth is rarely only my story. Perhaps most importantly, I’ve come to realize that the truth in life and the truth in art are not always the same thing.

In her Proofs and Theories, Louise Gluck differentiates between the two by separating out actuality, “the world of the event”, from truth, which she refers to as “embodied vision, illumination or enduring discovery which is the ideal of art”. She goes on to say:

The artist’s task, then, involves the transformation of the actual to the true. And the ability to achieve such transformations, especially in art which presumes to be subjective, depends on conscious willingness to distinguish truth from honesty or sincerity.(33)

So, in creating art from experience the poet must ask herself if “telling the truth”–being merely honest, or sincere is enough, or does it, in fact, keep her from reaching that which is true? The doggedly faithful recreation of what actually happened is of little use to Gluck, while the “embodied vision” is of great value. A voice that follows the path “discovery” is open to what may happen; no conclusions have been drawn, no lessons summed up and neatly parceled out for the reader. It is this quality of mobility that will keep the narrative alive; the immutability of fact leads to stasis.

I agree with Gluck’s contentions, but that agreement did not come easily. Like many poets whose impulse to write comes from deeply felt experience I thought that my first responsibility was to “get it right”, to be honest. I became frustrated when dramatic events recounted in a poem felt strangely lifeless and flat. Hadn’t I been faithful, at times painfully faithful to the truth? Yes, in fact so faithful that I gave up on a poem if I failed to photographically transcribe the events as they had happened. At times I felt imprisoned by what I took to be the “truth”; when I dared to stray from my quest for capturing reality, when I dared to invent I felt guilty!

By the time I read Gluck’s Proofs and Theories, I had begun to ask– How many versions of the truth are available to both writer and reader? Poet and writer Judith Ortiz Cofer, in an interview with Stephanie Gordon, relates how she learned about important facets of truth from both her mother, a story-teller who claimed she was telling ” the absolute truth, the la verdad“, but changed it each time “to suit the occasion and the audience” and from Virginia Woolf:

Cofer: She was teaching us that reality is relative, that we change it through our own interpretation… And I learned that was art. Art is taking the ordinary and trying to give it enough levels so that it becomes universal.

Gordon: …you say in writing the ensayos (essays of a life) in the book (Silent Dancing) you faced the possibility that the past is mainly a creation of the imagination….you tell of Woolf’s influence…how she realized the way one had to rely on a combination of memory, imagination and emotion that may or may not be the exact truth, but more poetic truth.

Cofer: …I decided to write these ensayos, which is Spanish for rehearsal or practice. I was rehearsing, using language as a trigger to lead me back to what Virginia Woolf calls moments of being, which are a combination of memory and imagination…So the actual event is not as important as the memory of it to me…(Gordon, 2)

As Louise Gluck notes, the truth “on the page, need not have been lived. It is instead, all that can be envisioned.” (Gluck, 45) It is not enough to simply recount or report events as in a personal journal entry or a journalist’s report. The weaving of actual events, memory, imagination, and personal opinion are at the heart of the art of writing experiential narrative.

William Zinsser describes the process of moving from personal experience to the art of memoir as “inventing the truth”:

…the writer of a memoir must become the editor of his or her own life, imposing a narrative pattern or an organizing idea on an unwieldy mass of half-remembered events. (Zinsser, 13)

In experiential narrative poetry, as in memoir, the events must be transformed through art–this is the goal of the poet using dramatic, or personal event as material from which to fashion a narrative. To be successful, the poet must filter events through not only perception but craft. In other words, technique plays a hand in the transformation of event into narrative poetry as much as emotional response to the material at hand. The poet must shape her material, point out patterns, reshuffle and select images, actions, details in a way that will serve the narrative

as presented to a reader. In some ways, created narrative must “make more sense” than reality.

Alberta Turner describes this editorial process, and the problems it may engender, in A FIELD Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics.

The poet selects and points to its (experience’s) patterns so that they will be noticed.

If he is not skillful, his selection and pointing may garble the patterns by conflicting, oversimplifying, twisting or merely not making the necessary connections, thus distorting one self’s perception even of its own perceptions so that other selves cannot recognize mutual perceptions in it. It is this problem of presenting the data of one unique self so that other unique selves will recognize it as their own that poses the chief artistic challenge to contemporary poets who probe their own selves for the sake of transcending the individual in order to reveal the universal self. (162)

In becoming the editor of one’s own life in order to make art, the poet must not only transcend personal experience, but transform one’s memory of it, to the point where often what one has written becomes more vivid than what one first experienced. Poet Annie Dillard warns “if you prize your memories, don’t write a memoir”. (Zinsser, 14)

Experiential narrative, whether based on personal history or the re-telling of another’s

story, is wedded to memory. Memory, with its myriad twists, fragmented turns and switch-

backs is linked to the pursuit of truth. And truth, as Carolyn Forche has noted is “ambiguous

in that it requires very thick descriptions”, (Kuusisto,39) descriptions which we retrieve from memory. One’s own memories, and the memories of stories one has been told, inevitably become a part of one’s identity, part of the lens through which we view and decipher the world. Gloria Naylor has said of the writer’s use of memory and identity:

…[when] you think about the process itself, within the artist, what you are doing is trying to somehow give cohesion to the chaos that is all of you. You are taking the memory of your personal self, your historical self, your familial self [because] your writing filters through all those things. [A writer uses what] has been your living reality, consciously or unconsciously, and you articulate through that reality. (quoted in Pearlman & Henderson,23-24)

Because of the filtering process of memory and identity, a hundred writers will have a hundred different views of reality and none will have cornered the market on Truth; what they all offer is a version of truth.

It seems that for writers, truth and memory are always circling each other, waiting to see who will flinch first. More jealous cousins than adversaries, poetic truth and memory share many of the same impulses. Muriel Rukeyser speaks of an “imaginative truth” in her classic work, The Life of Poetry:

…there must be imaginative truth– truth which is health and strength and richness of imagination before poet or reader can approach the poem. If that truth exists, it finds its form, for the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same. If that truth exists, and we are not locked away in defenses and denials, we move toward it and it finds us. (55)

This imaginative/poetic truth seeks to hold, to keep, to gather, just as memory strives to retrieve the past and connect to the present. So, it would seem that imagination, poetic truth

and memory are bound together.

In her book Memory Quest: Trauma and The Search for Personal History, Elizabeth A. Waites discusses the retrieval of memory as a way of reinstating the past and planning for the future–

Information-processing models of memory typically conceptualize retrieval as an associational linkage between memory traces and cues (Tulving,1983)… the word retrieval brings to mind the image of a dog fetching a bone…this prosaic image may in fact be as relevant to what commonly takes place as the notion of a computer conducting matching processes. Intuitively…most people associate retrieval not with implicit or automatic connections but with intention and effort. We search until we find…we seek out cues that jog memory….What Jacoby calls the “stage-setting” function of memory enables us to use the past to plan for the future. (53-54)

While poetry drawn from experience may include an element of “retrieving” moments of time, it more importantly involves examining what was only to transform it. In so doing the poet is able to use memory to move from the actual experience to the “embodied vision” of the poem.

Charles Simic has said:

The secret wish of poetry is to stop time. The poet wants to retrieve a face, a mood, a cloud in the sky, a tree in the wind, and take a kind of mental photograph of that moment in which you as a reader recognize yourself. Poems are other people’s snapshots in which we see ourselves.

(The Unemployed Fortune Teller, 2)

While I concur with Simic, I believe that in retrieving these lost moments the poet goes one step further than simply freezing time. As the poet looks at these moments through the prisms of imagination, vision, and craft, the raw material of memory is transformed into poetry. Of all the arts, I believe poetry and photography have the closest relation in how they use memory. Each form seeks to both isolate, illuminate, and transform specific details and moments, but in such a way that these details and moments continue to live in the readers’ or viewers’ imaginations. If the artist succeeds she will have a living, breathing specimen to share and not the dried husk of a butterfly pinned to a board. As Felix Pollak puts it ” A poem is/ to keep a now/ for then.” (Kuusisto, Tall, Weiss, 217)

In discussing memory, I mean not only the dictionary definition of “the store of things learned or retained from…activity or experience as evidenced by modification of structure or behavior or by recall or recognition” (Mish, 725), but also the idea of memory as a living organism which shape-shifts with every occurrence, rather than developing in a straight line. An image that is quite useful in summoning the shape of memory is the spiral, an energized vortex connecting the present with all that has been and all that may yet be.

In her Introduction to The Spiral of Memory, a book of interviews with Native American poet and musician Joy Harjo, editor Laura Coltelli describes the power of transformation which informs Harjo’s work:

This same energy provides nourishment for memory, which strives to retrace the past not as an inducement to curl inwards on oneself, as if it were a point in time without an escape route, but rather as a dynamic process to reaffirm ancient heritages and proceed forward on a path of constant renewal:

The way I see remembering, just the nature of the word, had to do with going back. But I see it another way too. I see it as occurring, not just going back, but occurring right now, and also future occurrence… (15, Harjo)

…the proceeding of memory is the spinning movement of the vortex, which spirals down the tip while simultaneously expanding toward the future like the spiral in “Heartshed”: “in the beginning/ It doesn’t mean going backward./ Our bones are built of spirals.” (9)

Seen in this way, the spiralling vortex of memory becomes a dynamic conduit between our present lives, our ancestors and our futures. In fact, many cultures, including Native American, Chinese and some African, view the shape and function of memory and time in this way. Engaging the spiral of memory rather than struggling to draw straight lines between fragments of remembrance, in an attempt to get it “right”, can free the poet to “reinvent” the truth with all the tools she has at her disposal.

Craft and technique, in experiential narrative poetry, also encompass the poet’s voice. If the poet can recognize and develop her own voice she can gain more control over the poem. She can open her poems to the universal while also leaving her verbal “thumb-print” on it. The poet’s voice becomes her way of making the poem her own no matter the subject matter or point of view she employs.

In discussing the verbal image, which is a component of voice, Marlene Nourbese Philip states in her essay, “The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy”, that

Fundamental to any art form is the image… The word ‘image’ is being used here to convey… the irreducible essence– the i-mage– of creative writing; it can be likened to the DNA molecules at the heart of all life. The process of giving tangible form to this i-mage may be called i-maging, or the imagination…In her attempt to translate the i-mage into meaning and non-meaning, the writer has access to a variety of verbal techniques and methods…all of which aid her in this process. Whatever the name given to the technique or form, the function remains the same– that of enabling the artist to translate the i-mage into meaningful language for her audience. (Philip, 12)

I concur with Nourbese Philip, but would add that this is not the only function of “i-maging”– a secondary function is that of locating the writer within the work. This location is revealed through the interconnection of the poet’s voice, attitude, and tone within the poem. Lawrence Raab believes that “attitude is how the subject is presented, how in a poem the voice postures, therefore tone”. He goes on to state that attitude “emerges out of the poet’s attempts to write

his way toward that subject, to locate himself in relation to his materials”. (Raab, 19) How and where the poet locates herself is essential to whether the poem reaches the reader, whether it succeeds. I believe that, ideally, the poet must strive to position herself as a prism through which the narrative flows, rather than a mirror that merely reflects the poet’s experience.

The relationship between writer and reader sometimes parallels that of friends or lovers; a certain balance of expectation, desire and inspiration is involved. If the writer does her job fully, she will first set up expectations– by allowing room for the reader’s experience– which she will then fulfill within the narrative. If this is accomplished she will inspire a desire in the reader to think about her subject even more, to reach a deeper understanding. Alberta Turner, in A FIELD Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, states that most poets writing experiential narratives

…are working on the same assumption that has always underlain both the making of fictional characters and the telling of autobiography– that the universally common experiences created by human psychology, physiology, and history insure that any cluster of specific, concrete details in any single human being’s experience can be made to evoke similar responses from all human beings. (161)

The stress she gives to the words “can be made” point to the significance of technique and craft in shaping personal/experiential material in such a way as to transcend the merely personal and move into the universal. Turner sees this as “the chief artistic challenge of contemporary poets” who work in this mode. If one succeeds at this difficult task Turner believes the reader will say ” ‘Look how interesting I am’. And the poem which makes a reader say that is a poem he’ll keep.” (170) What is not compelling, is not kept; what is not kept certainly won’t endure.

In describing the lure that compelling literature, and the memoir in particular holds for readers, fiction writer Joan Frank finds that these works:

…seem at once to be happening within us and to us; another’s life slipped momentarily over our own, an imposed yet familiar dream. How? By attaching reader identification to recognizable thoughts, emotions, actions, or events–segueing from known to unknown, concatenating belief through successive experiences like stitches through knitting….As the writers perceptions seep into ours, so do their revelations and sorrows. (Frank, 17)

Frank’s assessment that the “artful” memoirist is a skilled weaver who allows their perceptions of experience to gradually “seep” into the readers’ can also be applied to the poet who successfully spins experiential narrative.

The poet who stands between the reader and the poem, blocks the reader’s view by asserting the primacy of her experience, her vision; this poet runs the risk of becoming the literary equivalent of the companion who talks of nothing but herself. The poet who invites the reader along for the ride, makes space for the reader’s associations, emotions, reactions.

The extreme versions of these two positioning choices fall on opposite ends of the spectrum. On one end, we find the poet who strives for objectivity to the point of disappearing. For example, much of Carolyn Forche’s earlier work is characterized by a dislocation of the poet’s voice. She reports on what she witnesses in other cultures and often locates herself as a “spokesperson” for the truth as experienced by others. Where is her experience? In the least successful of her poems Forche positions herself as a mouth-piece for some politically correct notion of truth, divorced from the heat and immediacy of her own human experience. The following passage from “Return”, included in her The Country Between Us, is illustrative of this dislocated stance; a great deal of the poem is given over to the voice of Josephine, to whom the poem is dedicated:

So you know

now, you said, what kind of money

is involved and that campesinos knife

one another and you know you should

not trust anyone and so find a few

people you will trust. You know the mix

of machetes with whiskey, the slip of the tongue

that costs hundreds of deaths…

…Such things as water pumps

and co-op farms are of little importance

and take years.

It is not Che Guevera, this struggle.

Camillo Torres is dead. Victor Jara

was rounded up with the others, and Jose’

Marti’ is a landing strip for planes

from Miami to Cuba. Go try on

Americans your long, dull story

The authoritative voice comes from Josephine, who reports what the author witnessed, and then proceeds to give the author and the reader a sort of moralistic Latin American history lesson. The authenticity of the experience, as delivered by Josephine, is “suspect”; she is re-reporting what the author has shared with her, so the experience is twice removed. How can her readers trust her when she does not entrust them with her own perception? While I will not go so far as to say the technique of first-person restatement of second-person experience equals a failure of “embodied vision”, I do believe that this makes for a weaker poem. In the best of her work we find her midway between subject, experience, and witness as in “The Colonel”, also from The Country Between Us:

The Colonel

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried

a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went

out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the

cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over

the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.

Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to

scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On

the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had

dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for

calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of

bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief

commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was

some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot

said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed

himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say

nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries

home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like

dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one

of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it in a water

glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As

for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves.

He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine

in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears

on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor

were pressed to the ground.

May 1978

In this poem, Forche’ starkly relates the tension and horror of her particular experience in such a way that it is transformed into something familiar to the reader. The passage way between subject and reader is left free. In removing herself as the focus of the event while still staying present, she makes certain assumptions that the reader will recognize flashes of specific details and will follow her into the poem.

At the other, far end of the location spectrum we find the poet who not only blocks the reader’s experience, but places himself front, center, and omnipresent. The world is not so much strained through his experience as drowned by it. Sharon Olds’s poem “The Takers” from her second book The Dead and The Living is an example of such a poem:

Hitler entered Paris the way my

sister entered my room at night,

sat astride me, squeezed me with her knees,

held her thumbnails to the skin of my wrists and

peed on me, knowing Mother would

never believe my story. It was very

silent, her dim face above me

gleaming in the shadows, the dark gold

smell of her urine spreading through the room, its

heat boiling on my legs, my small

pelvis wet. When the hissing stopped, when the

hole had been scorched in my body, I lay

crisp and charred with shame and felt her

skin glitter in the air, her dark

gold pleasure unfold as he stood over

Napoleon’s tomb and murmured This is the

finest moment of my life.

This is not so much a poem, as an accounting, or as Carol Muske puts it– “testimony…(which) lacks any noticeable rhythmic pattern beyond the flat conversational tone of the speaker.” (Muske, 17) The poet seems to be recounting facts with very little art involved beyond the regrettable and “uneasy appropriation of the Nazi/victim paradigm”.(18) The metaphoric leap from the older sister’s actions to those of Hitler is just too far a leap to ask of the reader. Such an appropriation is symptomatic of the kind of hubris which can occur when the poet is located in such a way as to block all other sensibilities. The poet does not allow the material to move from actuality to “embodied vision”; the alchemy of experience passed through the poet’s vision is missing.

In another poem from the same collection, “The Couple”, Olds is able to move from a simple inventory of the actual sight of her two children sleeping in the back of a car:

rulers of separate countries, sister and

brother. Her big hard head

lolls near his narrow oval skull

until they are crown to crown, brown

hair mingling like velvet. Mouths

open, the rosebud and her cupid’s bow,

they dream against each other, her calm

almond eyes and his round blue eyes

closed, quivering like trout.

to a larger imaginative “embodied vision”:

they look like a small

royal bride and groom, the bride still a

head taller, married as children

in the Middle Ages, for purposes of state,

fighting all day, and finding their only

union in sleep, in the dark solitary

power of the dream–the dream of ruling the world.

(Olds, 80)

While I agree with Muske that Olds is a talented poet, I also believe “The Takers” is illustrative of a good deal of her work which is based on personal experience and that this sort of poetry can truly be called confessional. In the past, confessional poetry has most often been associated with such 20th century poets as Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton; all four were branded with this label, Sexton and Plath especially so. Ironically, although Sexton and Plath wrote about intensely personal and often painful subjects, literary history has revealed the extent of the technique and craft that went into their work. Anne Sexton remarked of her work to Paris Review:

I don’t adhere to literal facts all the time; I make them up whenever needed. Concrete examples give a verisimilitude. I want the reader to feel,”Yes, yes, that’s the way it is” I want them to feel as if they were touching me. I would alter any word, attitude, image, or persona for the sake of the poem.

(quoted in Maio, 182)

Both Sexton and Plath wrote about subjects that made people uncomfortable–menstruation, suicide, incest, sex– at a time when women were still expected to be “nice”; perhaps this led to their being dismissed as merely “confessional”.

When I use the term “confessional”, what I am referring to is the sort of contemporary poem that is reminiscent of the achingly personal journal entry, nearly devoid of craft, technique, or unifying theme. In a recent AWP Chronicle article, Edward Lense describes contemporary confessional poetry as

…poetry that is simply an unmediated expression of emotions, not recollected in tranquility but spoken directly to an audience. In the case of a coffeehouse reading or a poetry slam, the audience is physically present, while in the case of an Internet posting or publication in a micro-magazine, the poet knows that the text will soon be available to a more dispersed audience of people who, very likely, are writing the same kind of poetry and posting it in the same places. This kind of poetry is “confessional” in that it is almost invariably drawn from personal experience, and like the frank talk in daytime media, exposes to public view things that would have been deeply hidden in (Mark) Van Doren’s time. In a time when television routinely broadcasts intimate details of people’s lives, and group therapy, and twelve-step organizations are part of daily life, there is nothing remarkable about using poetry as a form of self-expression. (18)

Sadly, there is nothing remarkable about such poetry created as an “unmediated” vehicle of self-expression. Self-expression, while valuable in and of itself, is not art. Art requires the mediation of craft, vision, technique, along with some modicum of self-restraint with regards to one’s self and generosity towards one’s readers. A certain degree of humility or humbleness is required when writing first person experiential narrative, especially those that involve dramatic material. Not a self-conscious humility that points to itself, but a muted integral sense of standing in the background to let the reader in. Otherwise, the unmediated personal poem may as well remain locked away in a diary; it serves no one but the writer, the only one with the key to their own emotional Esperanto.

A poet who undertakes the art of writing experiential narrative poetry must constantly contend with the art of balance. She must continually ask herself how much to hide, how much to show, when to step aside, and how? How much personal material tempered by how much craft? How much masking of the self is beneficial? How much reserve is too much?

Rita Dove and Lynda Hull, two poets whose work I am repeatedly drawn to, have wrestled with the questions of balancing truth, memory, and craft in their narrative poetry. Each in her own way demonstrates strengths and weaknesses from which I have drawn lessons.

The late Lynda Hull, a poet of sometimes hypnotic immersion in the play of words, created a masque– a sort of verbal maquillage that allowed her to sing the devastation, beauty, and pain of her own harrowing past, as well as of those she loved and survived. In his Afterword of her post-humously published collection The Only World, poet Mark Doty has written of her penchant for maquillage in her personal and public life:

My friend Lynda Hull spent her life impersonating an extraordinary woman. Perhaps personate might be a better verb; it’s not that anything about the performance was false but that Lynda was devoted to the creation of a self, on the page and off. Her artifice, her maquillage–literal and verbal–were not disguises but part of a quest for the authentic. Like the drag performers she loved, Lynda understood that the authentic self is not necessarily the naked one; we forge ourselves as we forge our poems, out of the materials at hand: our histories, the stuff of character and circumstance, all the occasions of style. Style, at its highest, is not decoration but a gesture of revelation; surface can be, when most deliberate, most consciously wrought, what John Ashbery called someplace ” a visible core”.(75)

Hull took the raw material of her history, her addictions, her character, her sense of style, and spun it all into the revelations of her poems. Her poetry is characterized by cascading imagery, the shifting and tilting of time, narrated by a stylized “I” in language that seems in love with itself. Hull’s poems revel in the play of the sounds and shapes of language even as they describe dramatic events. Here is a portion of Hull’s long poem “Red Velvet Jacket”:

It’s almost Biblical driving this midnight burning highway

past South Bronx exits

with the names of streets once known, where torched cars

spiral columns

acetylene blue & white. We’re in the universe of lost things

where the lights are out,

the lamp pawned & soon the record player, that enameled

table

clothes, the rooms & faces,

air hissing soft through the rolled-down window like

silk velvet slipping hot

into my hand-bag, velvet fine as a fingerprint whorl,

maroon as the long dusty cars

that sharked these avenues, mildewed upholstery like

it was always raining night,

the insides ripped out of everything. But I was talking

about the red velvet jacket

With its layers of imagery– “velvet fine as a fingerprint whorl/ maroon as the long dusty cars/”, with its imaginative verbs– cars that “shark” and “spiral columns”, with the music of assonance, consonance–”air hissing soft through the rolled-down window”, with its rhythmic pacing, this is clearly a poem that has been crafted, not transcribed. Yet, somehow we believe that the speaker, this stylized “I”, has traveled “this midnight burning highway/ past South Bronx exits”.

So sure is this voice, that alternates between stylish narration and the conversational tone of “But I was talking/ about the red velvet jacket”, that we trust her to take us on this ride with her. In an interview with David Dillon, Richard Hugo said of poetic voice:

Voice is usually something that grows out of stance. It has to do with how strong a person’s urge is to reject the self and to create another self in its place. (Quoted in Maio,1)

With her meticulous attention to detail, the observant and imaginative “I” (eye) that Hull creates invites us along as she takes in the vistas of memory unfolding around her as the poem continues:

that hangs even now in the mind flaring its slow veronicas

in recollection’s wind that breathes

the mineral glamour of cornices & pilasters, districts

that burned years ago.

These days at the fringes even trains turn express,

the bombed-out blocks & clustered faces

blurred featureless. Out of sight, out of mind. Midnight’s

burning highway, another charred strip-job.

The specific details of “slow veronicas/ in recollection’s wind”, and “the mineral glamour of cornices & pilasters, districts” act as moments of stop-action in the anarchic flow of “midnight’s/ burning highway” where “even trains turn express,/the bombed-out blocks & clustered faces/blurred featureless”.

The path of the narrative mimics memory’s stops and starts, blurrings and sudden clearings as the poet tries to “gather back the gleaming fragments & Warsaw/ flashes”. Recalling her ride past burnt out ghetto buildings and “the trams’ blackened windows”, the speaker is now reminded of “a museum model of the Ghetto–/ the Jews immured, a system of catwalks and barricades,”. Perhaps, because the speaker is not likening herself to the victims of the Holocaust, her comparison of ghetto/Ghetto is not distasteful in the way of Sharon Olds’s sister/Nazi, self/victim analogy.

The speaker does not refer directly to herself within the action until stanzas five, six and seven, at first obliquely, then directly:

the strangeness, the story endlessly told any life unfurls,

causal chains of small decisions,

almost random, those accidents of grace or luck. That red velvet

’30’s jacket. How it sleeked

over the hips, elaborate glass buttons, how it made me feel

a little dangerous, a sense

of stolen fortune or history, as if I’d been chosen

for extraordinary moments, as if

I’d walked untouched, fire parting smoothly before me, liquid

& blue, that refused to singe,

to mar the bearer with a scar to signify the event.

Red velvet the color

of that long car we’d cruise under the river through

Alphabetown,

then the Bronx, Hunts Point

& its flooded streets awash with crates of rotting fruit,

streets that figure still

relentless in the endless anarchy of dreams–

the Puerto Rican dealer, Juan his wife, the kid.(Shift the car

to 5th, don’t stop,

don’t slow down.) But the door splinters all over again.

The jump-the-dealer routine.

Red velvet sleeve rolled up, snake of blue vein, snake

of salsa rising from the streets,

the warmth sexual, turning me capable, the grain of wood (7-8)

As the night wears on, the party turns ugly– a boy dangles a baby out a window, threatens to drop it– and the voice, the “sole white face” in the crowd, stops him by screaming “Give me the baby” in Spanish.

The “I” that slowly emerges from the speeding, smoky, color-washed background of the poem can be said to fulfill the function of the “personal poet’s persona” as put forth by Samuel Maio in his book-length thesis Creating Another Self:

…the poet creates a persona–one called “I” or by a proper noun– to act as the personal poet’s speaker, and it is this speaker’s self which is defined by the poem’s “images of the self,” and only to the extent they are depicted in the poem. Therefore the personal poet, consciously or not, substitutes for his or her literal, historical self a literary self as voice of the poem, one that is sincere but not altogether authentic. (2)

Maio defines the terms sincere and authentic by paraphrasing Lionel Trilling’s thesis of Sincerity and Authenticity, which claims that a poet who reveals their private (literal) self in a poem is authentic, while the poet who presents a self that is “differs, however slightly, from the private self…is sincere” but only partly “veracious”. (2) Having defined these terms, Maio goes on to clarify his concept of the personal poet as one who rejects his literal(authentic) self and creates “another, sincere self in its place…a self expressed as the persona-speaker of their personal poems”. (4)

The persona that Hull creates to narrate the strange, drug-fueled memory-ride of “Red Velvet Jacket” survives that night and steps forward to the present, the uncertain future.

called back from the ruins in that jacket, dark stain blooming

through the sleeve, the child squalling

in my useless arms. I don’t know what happened to the jacket

& all those people are lost to a diaspora,

the borough incinerated around them, nowhere in this night

I drive through. Silk velvet and its rich hiss

the shade of flame offering its drapery, its charm

against this world burning ruthless, crucial & exacting. (8-9)

Although the red velvet jacket is physically gone, its image remains a touch stone of her passage through a “world burning ruthless”, a symbol of what she once was, and what she survived. That the persona’s voice has gone on to narrate the poem is yet more proof of her endurance.

Dorothy Baressi, in her review of The Only World for The Gettysburg Review, wrote:

…Hull closely aligned her poetic persona with the junkies and castoffs she wrote about. This is her signature: survivor, witness, recorder of the lost and the damned…Hull keeps us riveted as she lovingly describes each wrecked face and city facade in a kind of scat jazz singing that sounds very fresh, incantatory, to use Denise Levertov’s word. (70)

I believe Hull is able to keep us attentive because she doesn’t focus too much on her role in whatever song she’s singing; she is not Survivor or Witness decked out in sparkling capitals. As Baressi notes, Hull is able to combine her two loves–language and subject–skillfully. She blends lyricism with narrative with a lushness of mood and sound that only rarely borders on excess. Hull’s occasional weakness can be said to be the result of too much of a good thing. In evoking descriptive mood, the focus of her poems sometimes becomes fuzzy, the gorgeous details too diffuse, as in the first two stanzas of “Bar Xanadu”:

A perfect veronica, invisible, scallops air

before the bull, the bartender’s fluttering hands.

Tipped with silken fruit tinselled gold,

a dusty banderilla hangs above racked bottles,

burnt-orange. Your lacquered fingers streak

the cocktail napkin and the globe of cognac’s

fragrant on the zinc bar. Fields of chamomile.

Close your eyes and then the night turns to coal

seamed with diamonds. Outside, a girl murmurs

her tired price, in pesetas, to passing men.

Irita, the barman calls when she wanders in

to wash at the single cold water tap. (63)

The rich details are perhaps too fast and furious; the “scalloped” air and the ” silken fruit tinselled gold” seem to collide with the “burnt orange” “dusty banderilla” too close to the “lacquered fingers” holding the “globe of cognac”. In the second stanza, the leap from the bar to “fields of chamomile” to the night which “turns to coal seamed with diamonds” borders on excessive. As she then turns her gaze to the girl who “murmurs her tired price, in pesetas, to passing men”, I’m tempted to agree with Baressi, who notes at times Hull “veer(s) dangerously that close to sentimentality”. Yet, I’m willing to take her excesses in stride and learn from them.

A strength of Hull’s poems is that they are never solely concerned with the autobiographical; her subject matter is often fused with the inescapable social issues of our times– such as the AIDS epidemic and the violence found in our cities. Indeed, in “The Window”, Hull writes, “Oh, the many lives that have fountained through/ my own…” (73)

Although Hull’s work springs from the experiences–real and imagined–of herself and others, it is never mired in it. Through her imaginative word-play, her stylistic turns of voice and vision, experience is alchemized into poetry. In this way she achieves the leap from actuality to Gluck’s definition of experience/memory illuminated into “embodied vision”; her poems remain truly “alive” even after her untimely 1994 death.

If Lynda Hull’s poems can be characterized by lushness, effusive language and occasional excess, Rita Dove’s poems are marked by elegance, control, and a persona kept at a remove that sometimes borders on absence. Her lines are clean, structured, her language distilled to a pristine essence. Like Hull, much of Dove’s work is experiential narrative in which the personal is woven into the historical.

Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, is a book-length series of poems, which when read in sequence as intended, form a narrative of the lives of a married African-American couple, loosely based on Dove’s own grandparents. Spanning from 1900-1969, a period that included the Great Migration of blacks from rural south to the urban north, the book is divided into two sections, Mandolin, is Thomas’ section, Canary in Bloom, is Beulah’s. On the whole, these poems are stanzaic, consisting mainly of tercets and quatrains. Two longer poems in Thomas’ portion are broken into numbered sections. All of the poems are narrated by an unnamed omniscient speaker; the character’s voices, set off by italics appear from time to time.

While I enjoy and admire Dove’s imaginative economy of language and precise diction, I’m puzzled at her choice to remove the poet’s persona entirely from these narratives of her grandparents’ lives. The all-knowing narrator in these poems seems cold and distant, the images like glancings of photographs; the poems themselves too easily parcelled up in their endings. Here is an example of such an ending in the third poem of Beulah’s section, “Courtship, Diligence”:

A yellow scarf runs through his fingers

as if it were melting.

Thomas dabbing his brow.

And now his mandolin in a hurry

though the night, as they say,

is young,

though she is getting on.

Hush, the strings tinkle. Pretty gal.

Cigar-box music!

She’d much prefer a pianola

and scent in a sky-colored flask.

Not that scarf, bright as butter.

Not his hands, cool as dimes. (50)

On the face of it, this is a lovely, well-made poem which cleanly avoids sentimentality. Yet, I can’t help feeling that it is too well-made, like a tightly hinged box that snaps shut at the end. Perhaps, in my assessment of this poem, I’m betraying my own stylistic tendencies, which, if given free reign, veer more towards the excesses of Hull than the tidiness of Dove.

Still, I’m drawn to Rita Dove’s work and to poem’s like “The Event”, the first poem in Thomas’ section:

Ever since they’d left the Tennessee ridge

with nothing to boast of

but good looks and a mandolin,

the two Negroes leaning

on the rail of a riverboat

were inseparable: Lem plucked

to Thomas’ silver falsetto.

But the night was hot and they were drunk.

They spat where the wheel

churned mud and moonlight,

they called to the tarantulas

down among the bananas

to come out and dance.

You’re so fine and mighty; let’s see

what you can do, said Thomas, pointing

to a tree-capped island.

Lem stripped, spoke easy: Them’s chestnuts

I believe. Dove

quick as a gasp. Thomas, dry

on deck, saw the green crown shake

as the island slipped

under, dissolved

in the thickening stream.

At his feet

a stinking circle of rags,

the half-shell mandolin.

Where the wheel turned the water

gently shirred. (12)

So much is evoked and unfolded in these ten short stanzas. A poem such as “The Event” showcases Dove’s finely honed economy of style. The emotion in this poem stays at the level of undercurrent, like the water “gently shirred”. The next poem builds on the unfolding of Thomas’ reaction to Lem’s death; because they were written to be read in sequence, each poem is linked to and builds on the next. The poems in Thomas’ section are sometimes linked to and sometimes parallel those in Beulah’s section. For example, “Courtship, Diligence”, discussed previously, contains an echoes of the yellow scarf and mandolin (which are Thomas’ emblems) in “Courtship” from Thomas’ section:

King of the Crawfish,

in his yellow scarf,

mandolin belly pressed tight

to his hounds-tooth vest–(16)

After his courtship and marriage to Beulah, the mandolin– Thomas’ main emblem– fades into the background. It only returns, briefly, in two poems. In “Compendium” it becomes a symbol of what he has given up for his new life with Beulah: “In the parlor, with streamers/ a bug on a nail./ The canary courting its effigy”.(28) In the very next poem, “Definition in the Face of Fury”, the yellow scarf and mandolin becomes a deeper symbol of lost time: “That dragonfly, bloated, pinned/ to the wall, its gossamer wings in tatters/(yellow silk actually faded in rivulets)–/what is it? A pendulum/ with time on its hands, a frozen/ teardrop”. When

Thomas finally reaches for the mandolin again, he finds that he’s too late. “How long has it been…?/ Too long. Each note slips/ into querulous rebuke, fingerpads/ scored with pain, shallow ditches/ to rut in like a runaway slave/ with a barking heart.” (29)

Likewise, Beulah’s canary emblem shows up in “Lightnin’ Blues” in Thomas’ section :

On the radio a canary bewailed her luck

while the country outside was kicking with rain. (27)

before she is mentioned in the title of Beulah’s portion of the book, Canary in Bloom, and we meet her in “Dusting”, in which she tries to recall the name of an old beau:

Not Michael–

something finer, Each dust

stroke a deep breath and

the canary in bloom. (52)

The canary appears in several poems, the beautiful songbird kept in a cage symbolic of Beulah’s unexplored yearnings, the dreams she left untouched–her yearning for Paris for example– throughout her life with Thomas. Still the canary “blooms” and sings, signally some satisfaction.

There is much muted emotion in the finely crafted poems that form Thomas and Beulah; even rage, regret and sorrow are kept at a subdued level by Dove’s characterizations and techniques. From the raw material of her knowledge, memory and research of her grandparents’ lives, Dove has created a new reality–an “embodied vision” which encompasses craft and vision.

In looking at the challenge of achieving a poetry that moves from the truth of actual experience to the truth of “embodied vision” as defined by Gluck, I have looked at four poets who reside on opposite ends of the spectrum. On one end, Forche and Olds begin with actual experiences, both personal and reported, but do not move far from merely recounting. While both talented poets who have written some memorable pieces, their work is largely devoid of the transformative power of craft, vision and technique which the art of poetry requires. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Hull and Dove, who in strikingly different styles, discovered how to move from the springboard of experience/memory through the alchemical process of re-visioning the truth of the actual to the truth of the “embodied vision” of the poem.

The poet’s task of reaching the “embodied vision” may seem a daunting, even contradictory challenge. Louise Gluck states–

The truth, on the page, need not have been lived. It is instead, all that can be envisioned…the materials are subjective, but the methods are not. (45)

Perhaps it helps to restate the challenge in the words of Emily Dickinson who exhorts us to “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant–/Success in Circuit lies” (Johnson,ed., 248 ) I believe that the transforming “slant” is the prism through which the poet re-invents experience into poetry.

It has become clear to me as I’ve worked on this essay that without the process of illumination, “actuality”–unadulterated experience– can become a trap for the writer who hopes to create art by faithfully telling the truth. I’ve found that a way out of that particular trap is found in opening experience to “all that can be envisioned”. (45) Telling the truth, as Louise Gluck warns “is not necessarily the path to illumination.” (33)

As I mentioned earlier, I came to agree with Gluck’s assertions about truth in poetry after no small amount of struggle. Releasing myself from the bonds of “truth-telling” has allowed me to re-envision the personal and family stories I am compelled to return to time and again in my writing. With this release comes another task and a gift– the task is to infuse my raw material with the question “What if…?”. The gift is permission to re-vision that which I know, that which I’ve forgotten, and all that could be imagined. Neither gift nor task are easy, but in struggling to use both I’ve freed myself from the drudgery of truth-transcription and opened up my work to the possibility of true illumination.

Nancy Willard, in her essay “The Well-Tempered Falsehood: The Art of Storytelling”, has this to say about the writer’s path to illumination and thus to art:

The teller tells the story he has made out of bits he has seen and pieces he has heard. His telling brings these fragments together, and in that healing synthesis, he gives the wasted hours of our lives an order they don’t have and a radiance only God and the artist can perceive. We get up, we go to work, we come home dead tired, and sometimes we wonder what we are doing on this planet. And we know in the great schemelessness of things, our own importance is a lie. Is the object of the game to tell that lie? Yes, to tell the lie. But in the telling to make it true. (Willard, 239 )

I would go one step further than Willard, to say that when the writer does her work using all the tools at her disposal–memory, experience, witness, craft and vision– that “radiance” or “illumination” will also be perceived by her readers.

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