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Author

Jameelah Lang is a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Houston and a Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast. She has a story forthcoming in The Kenyon Review.
What’s Love (Got to Do With it, Got to Do With it)?
Monday, February 13. 2012 | Posted by Jameelah Lang at 12:00 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Jameelah Lang is a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Houston and a Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast. She has a story forthcoming in The Kenyon Review.
Once a week, someone lets me into a room full of children. I am supposed to teach them creative writing. Here’s the thing: I am sometimes scared of children. It is because they know the truth, and they will tell you every time, like it or not. Once they said to me, “You wore that outfit last week.” Another time, “You are too hard on your husband, and you look really tired.” But this last week, we talked about love. We read Margaret Atwood’s “Variations on the Word Love” and talked about how love is nothing like Love. My kids were very serious and nodded like old-and-wise people. We talked about how love is more about fear than love, more like almost falling off a cliff.

Last year, I wrote to you about how Valentine’s Day sucks. I’m not backing down (I never do; it’s a problem my therapist and I work on). But this year, I bring you a slightly—note, slightly—more optimistic message. I don’t believe in love. What I mean is, I don’t believe in Love. I believe that my husband is the only person in the world who encourages my terrible whistling. I believe that he lets me buy the expensive crackers and sleep on the good side of the bed, always.

This time around, let’s get real. This is the part where people stop being polite, because isn’t that what marriage is all about anyway? Let’s talk about what love really looks like. It isn’t gushy. It doesn’t always or often have a happy-ending. And sometimes it really sucks. Last year, I dedicated to you a list of non-lovers, love-haters, heart-breakers. This year, I give you a list of people who know that love ain’t pretty, but will still saddle that bucking bronco. Yes, I live in Texas now.

“Two Wars” from This American Life
Real couples fight over all sorts of things: money, sex, work. In this episode of the This American Life’s TV series, a young couple argues over another important marital issue: grass. The green kind on your lawn. This episode features an epic stand-off between two people about who will mow the yard: he refuses because of capitalism. She is allergic to grass. The show asks the most important relationship question: who will give in first? When it seems like no one will, we get to an infinitely more important question: can we love those things in one another that we don’t even like, the things that we can hardly stand? Or maybe, what do you have to give up or lose in order to love?

“Jolene” by Dolly Parton (or by The White Stripes)
Love is all about competition. Between you and your lover, between you and the universe, between you and the other people who want to take your man (or woman). My husband and I once fought for days over a game of Scrabble. Dolly Parton once fought a woman named Jolene for her man. Now that’s true love: going to bat for your lover, admitting that the other woman has better hair, and still waxing poetic about how bad you want him. What I like best about this song is the desperation. I don’t know enough about music to say how D.P. does it, but trust me, she does: every element of this song communicates the poignant feeling of wanting something badly and knowing that it probably isn’t good for you. I’m not sure if Jolene won out or not, but I doubt it, seeing as Dolly Parton always wins in the end.

“Do You Know Where I Am” by Sherman Alexie
In this unflinching story by Alexie, a couple meets, falls in love, gets married, lives together, and later dies. Pretty standard fare. Except that the real story lies in the small (and large) ways that they fail each other first, break each other apart, attempt to put the pieces back together. Like all the best fiction (and life-moments) this story is funny and sad at once, using humor as a device to ask us, “What is really at stake here?” and “How much can you bear?” Alexie uses laughter to guide the audience toward a conversation—about love, failure, marriage—while leaving the possibilities for full, complete realization(s) to the readers’ (or lovers) themselves.

The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Speaking of lovers, The Lover is a short novel based on the Duras’s affair with an older man when she was fifteen. The novel positions the question “What is Love supposed to be?” against “What does a love really look like?” or “What kinds of loves are right?” Duras is a master craftswoman, and she uses distance, language, and structural patterns to join external and internal perspectives on love in general and her affair in particular. Duras uses love as an inlet to talk about the ways that the past and present operate cyclically, the ways that people pick up and leave behind pieces according to who they are trying to become. She trades sentimentalism for honesty, vulnerability for brutal confession.

And this Valentine’s Day, I will leave you with someone who definitely knows what love is: Whitney Houston, singing about how she loves you, even though it hurts her real, real bad.


Author

Steve Sanders is a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing. He hails from Norman, Oklahoma and received his MFA from Boston University. In each location, he learned to live and mostly die by the Sooners and Red Sox.
A Place for Readers Like Us
Saturday, February 11. 2012 | Posted by Steve Sanders at 13:46 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Steve Sanders is a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing. He hails from Norman, Oklahoma and received his MFA from Boston University. In each location, he learned to live and mostly die by the Sooners and Red Sox.
There is a scene during Alison Maclean’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son in which our hero Fuckhead (Billy Crudup) and his partner Wayne are celebrating a scrap-metal windfall with cheap whiskey shots at The Vine. In the book, the scene occurs at the end of the story “Work” and Fuckhead says they listened “to songs of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce” The description said country and western to me, something era appropriate like Merle Haggard’s “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down.” In the film, we watch Crudup gamely falsetto along to Joe Tex’s lovesick soul classic “The Love You Save.” The dissonance between the song I imagined and the one I get to hear exemplifies why I love film and why I’ll always be drawn towards cinematic attempts to adapt classic works of fiction.

Around here there has lately been much discussion about films as they compare to novels. Films have not fared well. My colleague Will Donnelly argued on the blog a couple of weeks ago that the canard that “the book is always better” is fundamentally true as books allow a reader limitless possibilities to adapt the work for themselves. My professor Robert Boswell made a similar argument in class last week saying that books were an “implicit” medium while film was “explicit.” Film demands less of the imagination and has had a resulting toxic influence on many an aspiring young writer. As both a writer and reader, film has instilled any number of bad habits—from treating scene breaks in a story like commercial breaks on a television show to casting a novel while I’m reading it (actually this is one is not always a bad thing: I don’t’ care how vivid your imagination might be, you’ll never come with a better Eddie Coyle than Robert Mitchum). I concede these points about the problems inherent in adaptation, but still I’ll always eagerly consume and almost always appreciate a cinematic attempt to translate a superior work of fiction. (I do stress the almost. I’ll never forgive Revolutionary Road.)

The adaptation of Jesus’ Son is certainly not the ideal example to defend this appreciation. The film was largely ignored during its 1999 theatrical release has been all-but-forgotten since (it still hasn’t been given a Blu-Ray release and the DVD lacks any special features). Johnson’s book is letter perfect—a series of extended prose poems about misspent youth and spiritual redemption. The film is certainly less than perfect. It’s impossible to translate much of that poetry in a visual manner (and one of the film’s flaws is in its attempt to copy/paste the book’s narration into an awkward voice over). The book is perfect and there’s no need to for the film to exist. That’s why I love it. There’s no way for Maclean (or any director) to do justice to the reader’s vision of the fictional world, but it’s fascinating to see someone try.

The cinematography evokes the perpetually frozen mid-western landscape with a visual palate of blues that transform to grays and back again, capturing the permanent winter landscape of Nixon-era Iowa. Billy Crudup’s cheap charisma allows him to ease into the role of Johnson’s aimless but blessed addict. The casting overall is something of an insane dream team—Samantha Morton, Dennis Hopper, Holly Hunter, a young Michael Shannon, Johnson himself as the stabbing victim from “Emergency”—all of them looking appropriately unwashed and rode hard. I could go on, but my purpose here isn’t to write a Lost Classic column (it's on Netflix Instant if I’ve piqued your curiosity). And I hope I don’t need to tell anyone to read the book.

That’s part of the point of this sort of adaptation. It’s hard to imagine an audience for the film that would extend far beyond fans of the work. The film exists, to awkwardly paraphrase the closing line, for readers like us, to savor those things that stay consistent with our imaginations and appreciate nice deviations like “The Love You Save.”


Author

J.S.A. Lowe is a first-year PhD student in poetry at the University of Houston, having relocated from Phoenix, AZ. Her poems have been published in magazines including AGNI, American Scholar, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, and Salamander. Her limited-edition chapbook DOE appeared from Particle Series Press in 2008.
Boredom with Poetry? Poetry on Boredom
Tuesday, February 7. 2012 | Posted by JSA Lowe at 19:30 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

J.S.A. Lowe is a first-year PhD student in poetry at the University of Houston, having relocated from Phoenix, AZ. Her poems have been published in magazines including AGNI, American Scholar, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, and Salamander. Her limited-edition chapbook DOE appeared from Particle Series Press in 2008.
Recently a friend entrusted me with an honest confession: "I want to like poetry? but honestly I find it kind of boring." NB by the way that my friend is no intellectual lightweight—on the contrary, this person is educated; sensible of philosophers from Leibniz to Nietzsche; interested in travel, languages, programming, culture and media; and highly trained in mathematics and the physical sciences.

The admission did somewhat surprise me, as I've for so long considered poetry to be the humanities equivalent of theoretical physics: a condensed compression, like an equation, expressing the intersecting and impossibly complex relation of parts such as time, space, matter, and motion. I have believed that a poem could function in many ways like a function, accepting a reader's input as part of its argument and expressing a value in return. Is this pretend-mathematical, and too sloppy? Very likely. But I've considered one of Hopkins's "terrible sonnets" to be roughly equal to one of Maxwell's equations: an encapsulation that, when dropped into a human mind, will unfurl like one of those miniature sponge-animals in a glass of water.

After he admitted this, I was silent for a moment, contemplating what seemed to me the complete and total failure of education to make poetry vivid and meaningful to people. Of course I encounter the same kind of confession, albeit less sensitively phrased, among my first-year college students: "In high school we had to read Romeo and Juliet! It was a waste of time! It was boring!" Personally I can't imagine how you can possibly make Shakespeare boring; but apparently it has been done, and repeatedly, to Texas high schoolers. And to people like my friend, who expressed particular disinterest in anything by the swan of Avon: "I understand that the characters are archetypal, but they don't interest me." I could only say that it's the language I find endlessly compelling, the fact that those 38 works are long poems poorly disgused as plays.

Of all the grave wrongs which formal education perpetrates (including the criminal failure to teach critical thinking), this seems to me among the worst—that people should be shut off from so much pleasure, from one of the highest orders of intellectual enjoyment—and from a pursuit which is also completely basic and natural to being a person. Rhythm, music, image, language-play: small children know this, do this: make poems, recite them, teach them to each other. Then something terrible happens.

Immediately I began to try to think of "starter poems"—lagniappes, amuse-bouches, something to convince a new or casual reader that there is a reason people like me get so exercised about the whole attempt. Song lyrics came to mind as obvious firsts, as did rhymed-and-metered poems I memorized as a teenager without trying—though most of them seemed pretty silly from the perspective of a serious-minded adult. Frost, "Fire and Ice"; Browning, "My Star"; Larkin, "This Be the Verse"—were these really the best I had to offer someone who didn't understand why poems were not only resonant but important? And other equally memorable poems that mean more to me—say, Auden's "September 1, 1939" or any of Thomas Hardy's Poems of 1912-13…wouldn't those be too advanced to serve as an entrée into poetry's difficult music?

Then my brain took a strange leap…from poems which are allegedly boring, to poems about boredom. Could a poem about the sensation of boredom itself perhaps be stimulating? Isn't one of the most exciting things about Beckett's stage work, for example, the fact that all those words about stultifying existential ennui aren't in themselves boring in the least? That you can feel completely enthralled watching two people sit around talking about something that never happens?

So in that spirit—here are three poems about boredom. And if, as Shakespeare wrote in King John, "Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale / Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man," perhaps poems about life don't have to be as dull as life itself often seems.

To Boredom

I’m the child of your rainy Sundays.
I watched time crawl
Over the ceiling
Like a wounded fly.

A day would last forever,
Making pellets of bread,
Waiting for a branch
On a bare tree to move.

The silence would deepen,
The sky would darken,
As Grandmother knitted
With a ball of black yarn.

I know Heaven’s like that.
In eternity’s classrooms,
The angels sit like bored children
With their heads bowed.

—Charles Simic (2007)

*

Bored

All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn't even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details. Myopia. The worn gunwales,
the intricate twill of the seat
cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular
pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans
of dry moss, the blackish and then the graying
bristles on the back of his neck.
Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes
I would. The boring rhythm of doing
things over and over, carrying
the wood, drying
the dishes. Such minutiae. It's what
the animals spend most of their time at,
ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels,
shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed
such things out, and I would look
at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under
the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier
all the time then, although it more often
rained, and more birdsong?
I could hardly wait to get
the hell out of there to
anywhere else. Perhaps though
boredom is happier. It is for dogs or
groundhogs. Now I wouldn't be bored.
Now I would know too much.
Now I would know.

—Margaret Atwood (1994)

*



Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

—John Berryman (1969)


Author

Jason Daniels is a third year MFA candidate at the University of Houston and an assistant fiction editor for Gulf Coast.
A Celebration of Variety
Saturday, February 4. 2012 | Posted by Jason Daniels at 20:08 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Jason Daniels is a third year MFA candidate at the University of Houston and an assistant fiction editor for Gulf Coast.
I am unabashedly a reader of science fiction and fantasy. Whenever I have a break from schoolwork, I find myself, often, in a kind of a crisis. There are the books that I need to read, because my advisers and teachers told me to, there are the books I should have read years ago, there are the new books I’ve read reviews for and want to dive right in and then there are the pieces of genre fiction, books with pictures of exploding spaceships on them, that promise a fun, thrilling read.

Unfortunately, I’m not as unabashed as I just said. We only just met and already I’m lying to you. I’m sorry. The books with the exploding spaceships are at the bottom of the pile because, frankly, they’re generally pretty bad. I do, however, make time to reread Dhalgren, to pick up the new China Mieville or Neil Stevenson, to work through the Ursula K. Le Guin I somehow missed along the way. They do not comfort me with nostalgia for the books I used to read, though there are certainly moments of such nostalgia; rather they challenge me and make me wonder. This is the job of good science fiction and fantasy. It is the reason why I tend to dismiss those that scoff at genre for the bad writing—there is bad writing in literary fiction as well—and it is also the reason I mourn each bad book of sci-fi I read, because it could have done so much more with its conceit.

All of this is to say how happy I am about all of the great sci-fi and fantasy coming from literary writers. In the last year alone I picked up After the Apocolypse, Pym, Zone One, A Visit from the Goon Squad, 1Q84 and The Illumination, though I know that I missed a handful of other ones, due only to the limitations of my own time. Despite the arguments that continue, with their tedious quibbles over definition, or their preposterous claims as to what can and what cannot be great literature; right now, the boundaries between what is “genre” and what is “literary” are porous and often crossed. I have not touched here upon all of the genre writers whose works have gained press of late within literary circles, but it is not insignificant. Heck, even Jonathan Franzen, dismisser of Oprah book club readers and books on anything other than paper and ink wants more excellent sci-fi to be written.

All these things have happened before and will happen again. People who carry on these arguments will bring up things such as Mary Shelly, the ghost stories of Henry James, 1984 and so on. Large swaths of time have elapsed in which the realm of genre fiction is secured in its ghetto, safely away from what is literary, and all those that venture over are either banished forever or given special pass because it’s not really sci-fi/fantasy/etc., for some silly, nebulous reason.

For now, though, it is a triumphant time. I do not think that all books should be fantastical or set in some unimaginable future, as that would be as ridiculous as claiming that none should be. Nor do I think that this genre argument applies to only these genres that I personally care about. Instead, we are in a period where, with the exception of curmudgeons waving their polemics, writers can (and do) write the best stories they can in the best way possible. Sometimes this is realist fiction, sometimes it is genre fiction, sometimes it is that isit/isn’tit of things like magical realism, and on and on. I look forward to more books about zombies and disaffected professionals, aliens seeking contact and illegal immigrants seeking work, pastors dealing with jaded parishioners and geneticists adding gills to bored millionaires. The arbiters of genre and literary distinctions will be back, I know, and they will make Jonthan Letham pay, but until then I am glad for this small respite where the best story is the one written with the most care, skill and urgency, and not the one that meets the guidelines of acceptable topics.


Author

Christine Ha is a M.F.A. candidate for fiction at University of Houston's Creative Writing Program where she serves as Fiction Editor for the literary journal, Gulf Coast. She recently received the editor's poetry prize from The ScissorTale Review and was a finalist in the 2010 Creative Nonfiction MFA Program-Off contest. Christine's work can be found in Fire Point, The ScissorTale Review, and PANK Magazine. She is also a contributing writer at Eating Our Words, the Houston Press food and dining blog.
The Art of Food and Literature
Thursday, February 2. 2012 | Posted by Christine Ha at 22:54 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Christine Ha is a M.F.A. candidate for fiction at University of Houston's Creative Writing Program where she serves as Fiction Editor for the literary journal, Gulf Coast. She recently received the editor's poetry prize from The ScissorTale Review and was a finalist in the 2010 Creative Nonfiction MFA Program-Off contest. Christine's work can be found in Fire Point, The ScissorTale Review, and PANK Magazine. She is also a contributing writer at Eating Our Words, the Houston Press food and dining blog.
The two things I love most in this world are food and stories. Perhaps this explains my attempts in the kitchen and at writing fiction (and, apparently, my penchant for rhyming words). We can eat all the finest French foods, read the entire canon of classic literature, but there comes a point in our lives when we can no longer be satisfied with simple ingestion; the pursuit of what we love (if the love is true and fervent) becomes the impetus for our evolution from being eaters and readers (there I go again with the rhymes) to cooks and book writers (okay, I failed at that one). But what I mean by this is the consumer eventually becomes the creator.

Unlike others who are self-proclaimed culinary artists, I did not get my start in the kitchen watching my mother or grandmother prepare all the cherished dishes from my childhood. In fact, all I knew how to make when I went off to college were scrambled eggs, instant ramen, and frozen pizza. Much to the chagrin of Asian mothers everywhere, I did not even know how to steam rice in a rice cooker. It was only out of a need to survive that I finally picked up a chef’s knife and wooden spoon, and thus began my kitchen adventures. I made many disgusting foods my friends and roommates found inedible, but every once in a while, I’d make something not only digestible but—dare I say it?—quite delicious: ginger braised chicken, sirloin beef kebabs, a four-cheese baked ziti. Seeing food coma written all over their faces (you know the look: eyes half closed, greasy lips parted, jaw slackened), I realized it made me extremely happy to feed people. It became my way of sharing myself, of imparting love, to those around me.

It surprises me whenever I hear someone declare a food amazing or wretched after just one bite. Likewise, it’s rare that I can immediately love or hate a story before ever reaching the end. And even when I’ve finished it, it still takes me a while to process everything before I can definitively say, “Yes, I liked it” or “I think I would’ve rather been [insert loathsome household chore here].” I used to envy this visceral polarity others possess—they are much quicker to enter into discussion while I am left sounding like an ignoramus: “Uh…I don’t know…I guess so…oh yes, I concur”—but over the years I’ve spent in grad school, I’ve discovered that my slowness to process is not always a bad thing. When I taste something for the first time, I spend the initial bite acquainting myself with the food: what is my initial reaction? THen my second bite is spent dissecting the dish. Which ingredients are present? How do they complement each other? What is the texture like? The temperature? And this, too, is how I read. Perhaps I can’t answer you when you first ask me how I felt about a particular book—my answers will almost always come off as lukewarm—but let me think a minute, and I’ll get back to you.

I can tell you, however, that if I find a story I decide I love after some time spent thinking about it, I will try to pick it apart, figure out the elements of craft that went into it, and go home and try to recreate something like it. And I know I’m not the only one. Isn’t that, after all, what we’re doing day in and day out in our graduate writing programs?

There are artistic elements to both food and literature; the good ones speak to our emotions and energies while the great ones dance with them. Both help us commune with another character, another culture. They keep us open-minded and aware of the universality of life. Annia Ciezadlo, a journalist who left New York to live in Baghdad, said, “The path to hearts and minds [is] led through the stomach. You have to eat the meal [and familiarize yourself with their cuisine in order to connect with the people.]”

Cheers to good reads and good eats. And here I leave you with a recipe for Margaret Atwood’s baked lemon custard; she recently came to Houston for an Inprint Margaret Root Brown reading and will be this year’s keynote speaker at the AWP conference in Chicago. Bon appetit!

Margaret Atwood’s Baked Lemon Custard
Originally from an interview with Bon Appetit magazine

INGREDIENTS:

  • 3/4 c. Sugar

  • 3 tbsp. Butter at room temperature

  • 1 tbsp. Grated lemon peel

  • 3 lg. Eggs, separated

  • 3 tbsp. All-purpose flour

  • 1 c. Buttermilk

  • 1/4 c. Lemon juice


DIRECTIONS:

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter six 3/4-c. Ramekins. Beat sugar, butter, and lemon peel with an electric mixer in a lg. Bowl. Beat in egg yolks. Stir in flour in three parts alternating with buttermilk added in two parts. Stir in lemon juice.

  2. With clean dry beaters, beat egg whites in a med. Bowl until stiff but not dry. Fold egg whites into yolk mixture. Divide batter among prepared ramekins. Place ramekins in a roasting pan. Add enough hot water to pan so that it comes halfway up the outside of the ramekin.

  3. Bake until cakes are set in center and beginning to brown, approx. 35 min. Remove from water bath. Serve hot or cold. Can be made a day ahead: cool completely, cover, and refrigerate.


Author

Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is an MFA candidate at the University of Houston, where he teaches introduction to poetry. His poems are forthcoming or have appeared most recently in The Birmingham Review, Linebreak, Switchback, The Laurel Review, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for Gulf Coast.
Poetry and genre
Monday, January 23. 2012 | Posted by Joshua Gottlieb-Miller at 13:44 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is an MFA candidate at the University of Houston, where he teaches introduction to poetry. His poems are forthcoming or have appeared most recently in The Birmingham Review, Linebreak, Switchback, The Laurel Review, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for Gulf Coast.
When I began writing poetry, the only agenda I had was to write poems I wasn’t embarrassed to share with other people. I didn’t have any loyalty to metaphor or narrative, or any other element of craft as a monolithic organizing principle. I hadn’t learned to classify myself as an imaginative poet or a musical poet, or thought that I would always need some measure of story or structure. I’ve benefitted enormously from trying to better understand why those distinctions matter, and when to be considerate of them in my own work. Eventually, though, questions of genre or type seem inherently limiting. It’s easy to fail when you don’t know anything, but it’s even easier to fail when you think you have to know (and do) everything.

This isn’t where I thought my blog post would start. Initially I had planned to discuss the lack of magical realism in contemporary American poetry and a similar reticence towards surrealism in fiction. The word “inappropriate” comes to mind.

Fiction’s tendency towards plot and character often precludes too much traffic in the privately unreal. It’s important to note that the magic in magical realism frequently emerges from, or to be more specific, relies on a mundane context.

Poetry, in all of its brief glory, rarely has the space for an out-of-place event to appear to be out-of-place. The prevalence of metaphor may also explain why poetry is more hospitable to surreal work, with its less straightforward sense making.

But even these generalizations seem canned. There is surrealistic fiction and there are magical-realist poems. The poet James Tate’s narratives, despite his surrealist label, often allow for strange happenings within mundane circumstances. Even the immensely readable Lucille Clifton features a relatable human speaker in one poem among winged sorrows who also happen to be choruses of desire.

Fiction offers enough space for genre. Are poems long enough to truly be sci-fi, or to embody horror? Can we consider Confessional poetry to be genre-like (i.e. to have conventions that if met, qualify a work as Confessional), or Deep Image poetry?

Perhaps poets more allow for categorization when seen in their collections circling around the same themes and returning to the same images. A book might reveal interests that single poems don’t. The poet might find these interests useful, pursuing the sci-fi poem or the post-apocalyptic dramatic monologue.

And yet, how refreshing would it be to return again to the notion of the single poem that does not know what it is. Perhaps we write this poem more often than we realize. We try to define what we have written, forgetting that so much magic is already expected.


Author

Will Donnelly is the Online Editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. He is also a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Houston.
Adaptation
Saturday, January 21. 2012 | Posted by Gulf Coast Online Editor at 19:36 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Will Donnelly is the Online Editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. He is also a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Houston.
Each year, I teach classes about both fiction and film, and my students, on the first day of either type of class, always say the same thing: The book is always better than the movie. That’s a subjective call to be sure, but I think that the reason behind it provides some insight into the way that reading and viewing affect the human mind.

First, however, it’s important to note that it’s not always true that the book is better. I’ve got to be subjective myself here, but it seems unlikely that many audiences would prefer Cornell Woolrich’s short story “Rear Window” over Alfred Hitchcock’s masterful filmed version. (The proof may be that hardly anyone knows about the Woolrich story these days.) The same might be said about George Langelaan’s story “The Fly,” remade on film in 1958 and again in 1986 by Kurt Neumann and David Cronenberg, respectively, or about the story “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr., remade into John Carpenter’s The Thing. In fact, in cases where the film version outshines the book, the book often slides into obscurity, having been eclipsed by its cinematic counterpart.

Still, in many cases, it does seem true that the written version of a story outshines the film in the eyes of most fans, and I think I know the reason for this – it’s because reading is an act of creation, of imagination, as much as one of being guided by an artist.

I’m sure the above is true in any language, but in English, writers have only twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks with which to convey the entirety of the human experience. While reading, we often feel as though we’re losing any sense of the outside world, but really, we’re just looking at a series of limited codes, inked squiggles across a page. All of that scenery, that tension, those characters, all of that is made up by our brains. The author has us by the literary hand, of course, but there’s only so much detail that he or she can provide. We fill in the rest.

Thus, when a film is made of one of our favorite books, we come face to face with a vision borne of the directors’, producers’, and actors’ imaginations rather than a vision from our own. Theirs just looks different, and because we were the ones to conjure the experience while reading, their vision can be jarring (and often dissatisfying).

This might be bad news for those out there waiting for their favorite books to be turned into films, but it really says something profound about the process of reading, too. It means that reading is an art. Like writing and filmmaking, reading requires a creative endeavor from the audience. The product – the experience of the story – is then a combination of the imagined realities of both the author and the reader. It is, as Stephen King once wrote, “a meeting of the minds.”



Author

Ashley Wurzbacher is a first-year PhD student in fiction at the University of Houston and an assistant fiction editor for Gulf Coast. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southeast Review, The Iowa Review, Barnstorm, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Eastern Washington University and has taught writing at The University of Houston, The University of Montana, and Eastern Washington University.
A loud, absent thing: On writing and wishing
Friday, December 23. 2011 | Posted by Ashley Wurzbacher at 20:05 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Ashley Wurzbacher is a first-year PhD student in fiction at the University of Houston and an assistant fiction editor for Gulf Coast. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southeast Review, The Iowa Review, Barnstorm, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Eastern Washington University and has taught writing at The University of Houston, The University of Montana, and Eastern Washington University.
It’s the end of my first semester in Houston and I’ve been wishing it would snow. I came here by myself from the Northwest and I left a lot of things behind-- people, yes, but also things that are catching up to me now, asking unspoken questions that go something like this: Is writing really important enough for you to have left us behind?

Sometimes I’m not sure it is. I miss dramatic changes of season, pastries made with huckleberries, frozen lakes. I miss the deer that paraded by my window every day in Missoula and the drive my partner and I did not get paid enough to make, into the Bitterroot Valley in winter to teach students who too often didn’t make it to class. I miss the air on snowy days so clogged with white that we could not make out the mountains that we knew were hiding in the distance like gods. And I miss my old pine-shaded apartment in Spokane, sitting on the roof with good friends and cheap wine. I miss the moose my partner and I stopped to watch one day in a woman’s snowy yard, munching on a shrub outsider her window, and the woman in a stained housedress and fuzzy slippers who stepped onto her stoop shouting, Shoo! Shoo, you! I find myself wondering silly things: Whatever happened to that woman in slippers in the snow?

In those places, and in the places I inhabited before them, Pennsylvania, England, there were moments of discomfort, as there are anywhere, and there were extremes of cold, and I’m sure there were times when I wished for warmth the way I now wish for cold.

Houston’s warmth is harsh in its own unique way-- too close, like breath. I keep listening to Joni Mitchell’s “River” and feeling like she’s singing to me: But it don’t snow here/ It stays pretty green… My classmates and I arrived here in 109-degree weather, humidity so intense I felt always wrapped in plastic. Now summer is over, but the leaves don’t fall, and flowers still bloom-- everything is still lush, even after summer’s drought, in a way that I find confusing. And lately, when it rains, it rains furiously. There seem to be extremes of everything but cold. There other inhospitalities, too: stark metal gates in front of houses. Lizards. Roaches.

I guess what I’m saying is, it can be a challenge being here, figuring the place out. I’m unsettled and yet on some level I recognize that this unsettled state is okay, natural, even good-- and nurturing to the writing life. There is some need that won’t be quiet and leave me alone, and the only way to deal with it is through reading, writing, and thereby connecting myself to that loud, absent thing that won’t stop nagging me, that elsewhere that refuses to be left behind. To what extent is all writing just thinly-veiled wishing? And in many ways, reading, too? I wish I knew what it was like to ____. I wish I understood why someone would ____. I wish there were still mountains on the horizon. I wish the leaves would fall instead of hanging on, staying green, trying to trick me into thinking we’re stagnant, that the earth has stopped turning and I’m stuck. I wish it would snow. Like Joni Mitchell, I wish I had a river I could skate away on.

As people who write, I think, we have to be always ready to walk into things that are going to do all they can to throw us out. The act of writing itself is one such thing. What’s more, we have to make sacrifices in order to enter this hostile space, the space where creation happens, twisted as it may sometimes seem to do so. Virginia Woolf reminds us in A Room of One’s Own that to write, to create,

is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty…Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them.


I need them, though, and if you’re reading this chances are you do, too. The other day, wishing for some familiarity, wishing for cold, I reread Richard Hugo’s 31 Letters and 13 Dreams. And what I had been hoping would happen when I picked up the book, happened: I was transported. I thought, there is St. Ignatius in the snow. There is something that I know. It’s amazing how someone else’s letters to someone else can answer my questions, speak to my concerns, conjure images I need to see. How those letters can deceive me into believing they were meant for me all along. It’s snowing/ in Missoula, has been off and on for days but no fierce winds/ and no regrets, Hugo writes to Marvin Bell in “Letter to Bell from Missoula.” And I think, Okay. Yes, the world is still turning.

I write little when I feel that everything is in place, when I am content with just being still. Maybe in the end this is where all writing comes from: the presence of missing things, the unmet needs, the slow opening of spaces that need filling. Maybe, too, literature derives its power from its ability to help us navigate those spaces, to realize the ways in which we connect across them.

I’ll leave you, then, with Gabriel Conroy in one of literature’s greatest scenes of snow and absence, the final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead”:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.


Author

Eric Howerton is a third-year PhD in Fiction at the University of Houston. He currently serves as a fiction editor for Gulf Coast.
Revisitation Rites
Saturday, December 10. 2011 | Posted by Eric Howerton at 17:54 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Eric Howerton is a third-year PhD in Fiction at the University of Houston. He currently serves as a fiction editor for Gulf Coast.
As writers I think it’s fairly common for us to revisit our own work from time to time, reading what we’ve read in the past and feeling either elation (“Hey, this isn’t half bad!”) or despair (“I can’t believe I ever thought this was good.”) or some odd mix of the two. Revisiting stories, essays or poems we wrote years before can give us a sense of progress, nostalgia, relief, maturation, revulsion, what have you—it can run the gamut from good to bad, uplifting and dispiriting. Case in point, I recently read an aborted version of this very blog post, which I started last year around this time but abandoned out of a combination of end-of-the-semester frustration and general brain lassitude.

In the earlier draft of this post I discovered a line that was so ill-conceived I wondered what I could have been thinking when I wrote it. The line read: “Help! This book is like a casserole!” It was a line that today I would excise without a second thought. Or would I? Even though the line appeared in an earlier draft of this post, I have since found a way to keep it in a revised version of the same post! Regardless, I still have no idea what the line was supposed to mean when I wrote it or if it means anything at all in the present. Maybe it means I have/had a phobia of potluck dishes that heavily feature canned soup or French’s onions. Maybe it means the book I was writing about at the time (C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) was uninspired and bland, which is how I generally tend to think of the casseroles. Whatever it means, I’m relieved that “Help! This book is like a casserole!” was a confusing package of words my 30-year-old mind knew to leave by the wayside.

Revisiting yourself as a writer naturally happens whenever you tackle the practice of revision. In my experience, revision generally follows on the heels of finishing a draft of a story or poem, so the distance we have from the work we’re revising might not necessarily be as wide as the growing distance we have from work already published (“It’s done!” we might think. “No need to revise this puppy ever again.”) or work that we’ve abandoned (“Not even revision can save this ill-conceived story I started 10 years ago.”). In a certain respect revision is in itself a practice of revisiting yourself: I tramp over the lines/paragraphs/passages/stories that an earlier version of me wrote until I feel that I, as the author, am a presence—a houseguest, if you will—who’s worn out his welcome. When I’m finishing up a story I’m often struck with the sensation that if I stick around any longer I’m liable to break something valuable or generally muck things up. In this way, revising is like borrowing a friend’s apartment for the weekend. When it’s time to go, you have to remove the noticeable traces of yourself before locking up. To continue the metaphor: When you can’t leave a story well enough alone, when you revise it endlessly, it’s like you’ve left something in the apartment that you have to go back and retrieve, or you remember a spill you’re not sure you mopped up properly so you want to go back and clean it up.

Revisiting earlier work can help remind you who you were when you were writing it, but there are other types of revisiting our past relationships with writing that I’m interested in here that have little to do with reading your own published work or taking on the labor of crafting. Finishing a story can feel like a bittersweet affair—there’s the sense of accomplishment that comes with completing the work, but at the same time finishing can feel like a deep and meaningful relationship is about to undergo a seismic shift. The story that you developed from little more than a fleck of an idea—the story you nourished, enlivened, and fleshed out—becomes the aloof cat sitting on the back of the sofa with half-cocked lids, sporting a look that says, “Don’t fool yourself into thinking I still need you, buddy.”

In the past year I’ve noticed an expanding circle of ways in which I revisit my relationship with writing, though I’ll just talk about one of them here. This circle has involved more than just going back and reading stories from my high school and undergraduate days—a period in which much of what I wrote rehashed elements from A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and whatever was playing on Adult Swim at the time. Needless to say when I read my old stories about hyper-violent quantum physicists and families of anthropomorphized onions, I have mixed reactions to both form and content. Some of these emotions leave me feeling satisfied because I can trace the lineage of consistent themes or ideas that have always troubled me and that I’ve continued to write about. Others leave me astonished that I managed to spend so much time on projects that now seem so irreconcilably juvenile, though to not laugh at the premises would be to admit that I’ve become stodgy and dull in my “old age” or that I’ve shunned the childish pleasure I get from absurdly juxtaposing ideas that normally don’t go together. Others leave me somewhat uneasy, especially when encountering something I wrote that now strikes me as insensitive, offensive, or ignorant.

But this post is about gratification, and one of the most satisfying ways in which the circle of understanding has widened came from revisiting myself not as a writer, but as a reader. Last winter I picked up a box of books that I’d been storing in my parents’ garage for close to a decade. In the box I found books that I’d read in elementary school, middle school, and high school. As I unpacked the box and arranged the titles on my book shelf, I naturally began to leaf through some of them and I soon became more engrossed than I could have predicted. Not having seen the books in over ten years, I didn’t think they’d still have such an effect over me. I was wrong about the books. The more I read the more I remembered how much I’d enjoyed reading them as a child. But what was more, reading them as an adult bowled me over and revealed more about my own writing than I could have ever predicted.

There were two authors in particular whose works shouted out to me even after all these years: Roald Dahl and Bill Watterson. Roald Dahl is the well-known Norwegian author of books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, and Watterson wrote and drew the Calvin and Hobbes comic for over a decade. Both were hugely popular in the 1980s, feature wildly imaginative story lines, and often dealing with philosophical themes by treating them lightly and absurdly. As soon as I saw Dahl’s novels and Watterson’s comics I spent hours poring over them, and I was surprised to find that not only did I find nearly as much satisfaction from them as an adult as I did when I was a child, but the satisfaction wasn’t all that different.

The clichéd way to end this post would be to reminisce about a childhood spent reading books and to advocate that you try to write literature that makes you feel the way you felt when you were a child. But that’s not really what this post is about. Rather, I think this post is about understanding why you are the writer you are, and part of that is knowing which works—not strictly those from your childhood, but from all times of your life—are the ones that have the potential to affect you again and again. Whether you’re actively reading these works or not, in a way you are always surrounded by them. In revisiting Road Dahl and Calvin and Hobbes I found so much of myself in them as a writer that it was, to be honest, curious at times to see how my work paralleled theirs. (I say “curious,” but who among us is really above the anxiety of influence?) Certain stories of mine can now be seen as reactions or continuations of Calvin’s fantasies as Spaceman Spiff, and I see Dahl’s anti-adult tendencies as being analogous to my own concerns with authority and government. Of course, there exists a whole list of novelists whose works weren’t meant for children who I feel that I’m reacting to in the same way I react Dahl and Watterson, but I don’t need to go into that now. The point I want to emphasize, or maybe the question I want to ask, is how much we really change more as readers and writers as the years pass, whether the events that happen to us really shape our interests all that much? Or if an interest, once shaped, retains its shape over time? Revisiting what we’ve written and what we’ve read can have profound effects on the writer we see ourselves having become, while at the same time the revisitations can instill in us the opposite feeling: that becoming itself—the change from one state of being into another—is just an illusion. In this way, we are always the same writer and the same reader, or at the very least we are a continuation of the writer and reader we were.

Maybe as writers we’re only ever trying to satisfy the readers we were. Or maybe as readers we’re always trying to please the writer we want to be. Either way, the reader I was at 30 knew that “Help! This book is casserole!” wasn’t a great big mess of aline, and so he left it alone; yet the writer I am at 31 managed to use that line three separate times. I’m at a point as a reader/writer where I think I’ve done the line justice (even at the disservice of my own reputation!) and with that I can excuse myself from the imaginary apartment I’ve been mucking about, confident that everything is in its right place. On my way out I’ll double-check for spills before locking the bolt from the outside and confidently sliding the key under the door.


Author

Edward Porter's short fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices 2010, Colorado Review, Booth Journal, and Inch Magazine. A Ph.D. candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, he received his MFA from Warren Wilson College, and is a former Fellow in Fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Too Many Books
Monday, December 5. 2011 | Posted by Edward Porter at 22:02 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Edward Porter's short fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices 2010, Colorado Review, Booth Journal, and Inch Magazine. A Ph.D. candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, he received his MFA from Warren Wilson College, and is a former Fellow in Fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
I have too many books.

In an age when many people don't own any books at all, as far as I can tell, I have more books than anyone I know—more than any of my friends and fellow students, more than any of the professors whose homes I have visited. I'm not suggesting this is any kind of victory: clearly it's a problem. I'm not going to make an argument here about the tactile nature of books versus the convenience of electrons. I'm not interested in even discussing it.

I briefly hoped that my book problem might have a clinical significance I could write about, but a little research reveals that no, I am neither a book hoarder nor a bibliomane. My books are all either directly useful to me, or of obvious sentimental value. I do not have multiple copies of any one book. On the rare occasion that I end up with a duplicate, I give it away with ease. Most importantly, my books are not stacked on their sides on the floor , or at least only a few of them are. They are either displayed in bookcases or stored in boxes stacked in the spare room. I briefly knew the famous film historian and undoubted cinemane William K. Everson: his apartment was entirely filled with cans of film, stacked floor to ceiling, and you had to edge through them sideways to get to the bathroom. My home, on the other hand, is reasonably livable. Ergo, I do not have a psychological disorder. I am not the Smaug of books.

This is slightly disappointing: certainly this blog post would be more dramatic if it limned my struggle with mental illness. Once, I took a long solo backpacking trip, and found that in the course of my day I had to periodically put my pack down and take inventory, to check that I had not left some vital item at my last campsite, even though I'd checked it already a couple of hours ago. When I got home, I asked my shrink if this meant I had some genuine condition, perhaps obsessive compulsive disorder, for which she could prescribe drugs. "No," she said. "You're just uptight. I'm not going to give you drugs for that." Sadly, my book condition is likewise not a pathology. I just have a lot of books.

I'm not sure exactly how many books I have, but it's well north of two thousand. That's not an epic number—nothing remarkable by any serious standard. Not many compared to Hemingway (seven thousand) or Umberto Eco (thirty thousand). Of course those guys had more means and more space than I do. It's a lot of books for a regular guy though—a lot of books for someone who has sawn as many boards and pounded as many nails as I have.

In a sense, I have always had too many books, at least compared to my fellows. I grew up with an attic full of them. My parents were not bibliomanes either. They just had a lot of books. I still have their hardback copies of A Century of Charades, James Gould Cozzens' Castaway, the collected plays of Ferenc Molnar, The Flying Yorkshireman, Eleanor of Aquitane, and similar titles that I will certainly need to reread before long.

My books only really became my books, when I went away to college. Unlike many other students, I did not immediately sell my schedule's worth of books back to the college bookstore at the end of the semester. That seemed insane to me, which explains why I still have all those books on Renaissance diplomacy and Egyptology (it was still an -ology then, instead of a Studies). By my junior year, I had three five foot shelves on brackets and standards filled with books. Girls seemed impressed. What started as a substitute for adult life became a means for pursuing it.

Since then, all I have had to do is to keep living, and the books have found me of their own accord. A few years ago I got rid of a bevy of ragtag bookcases picked up from the street and made three floor to ceiling cherry bookcases. Then, in a painful loss of dignity, I had to buy some hulking black Ikea thing to supplement them. Then another two of those, and still, I have six or seven boxes of unshelved books.

They hunt me down and catch me at my weakest. For example, I had to kill some time in Montrose a couple of weeks ago, so I went into Half Price Books, just to browse, and found a complete set of that silver-covered Moncrieff translation of Remembrance of Things Past for around thirty bucks. How was I supposed to pass that up? I'm just a Proust dilettante who has only read Swann's Way, but I will certainly read the rest of it someday. Won't I? Not this year, or next year, maybe not even the year after, but very soon. Possibly even before I get back to finishing Gibbon's The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, which again, I got about ten years ago for such a reasonable price that it would have been idiocy not to buy it. The first two hundred pages at least were quite good, so I'm sure I'll get to the other thirteen hundred in the almost immediate future. I only have so many books because of so many moments in the past in which I would have to been barking mad not to have taken advantage of such favorable circumstances.

Of course, this would not be a problem were I living in the spacious manor of my ancestors. Instead, I am an academic transient who will have to leave his home within a year or two and go somewhere else, probably far away. At which point, my books will become a serious encumbrance. I personally carried every one of my books up four flights of stairs a few years ago. I have moved them three times in the last six years. When I think about the prospect of moving them again, I have deep concerns about my knees and my wallet.

So, I should slowly get rid of all of those except the ones the really matter, yes? But of course, this is the essence problem: so many of them really matter. I have known most of my books longer than I have known my wife. Having taken the trouble to acquire a copy of Sara Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, do you really think I'm going to just get rid of it once I've read it? I'm not going to jettison my Bill James Baseball Abstracts from the eighties even though I have them more or less memorized: that's my youth you're talking about.

I have a very good friend, who reads quite a bit. We share a taste for science fiction. A few years ago I found a massive copy of all eleven or so of Roger Zelazny's Amber novels in one volume. After I'd finished it, I mailed it to Jeff, who also read it, enjoyed it, and then literally threw it away. He was shocked when I objected. He pointed out that we had both gotten as much good as could be had from it. The fact that it could still be read again didn't matter to him. His thinking was based on the mercenary needs of humans—he just wasn't seeing the universe from the book's point of view. He didn't care about its enduring capacity to keep fulfilling its nature. That book could have done so much. Even in that cheap, yellowing, pulpy edition with the bad glue, it had plenty to look forward to. But no, it was just an exploitable resource to him. Jeff and I are still friends, but I will never lend him a book again.


Author

Peter Kimani is a first year PhD student in Fiction. He has published two novels and poetry, and runs a satirical column in The Standard, Kenya’s leading national newspaper, where he served as senior editor.
Things fall apart: Three words worth more than fifty cents
Friday, December 2. 2011 | Posted by Peter Kimani at 12:21 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Peter Kimani is a first year PhD student in Fiction. He has published two novels and poetry, and runs a satirical column in The Standard, Kenya’s leading national newspaper, where he served as senior editor.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot bear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...


William Butler Yeats’ post-war poem, The Second Coming, has attracted a great deal of attention since it was penned nearly a century ago. It was at the centre of an unseemly row late this year, pitting very unlikely characters: an octogenarian man of letters from Africa, and an African American rapper.

There couldn’t have been worse contrasts: Chinua Achebe, a grandfather figure with his shaft of white hair and wrinkled face and 50 Cent, a bling-bedecked reformed gangster turned rapper. The subject of contestation: the latter’s right to use Achebe’s book title, Things Fall Apart, in a new film.

To provide a context, Things Fall Apart is the book that Achebe, widely hailed as the grandfather of African fiction, published in 1958. This was the pioneering title in a series that British publishers, Heinemann, would keep running for the next 50 years – and produce what’s regarded today as canon in African fiction.

Achebe’s seminal novel, which has since sold ten million copies, and translated into more than 50 world languages, chronicles the life of an ordinary villager, Okonkwo, who is caught in the social disruptions that colonialism heralds for the Nigerian society, and ultimately tear it asunder.

In 2007, the Man Booker International Prize committee that honoured Achebe for his lifetime contribution to writing recognised his "redrawing the contours of African history.” By the same token, the committee went on, Achebe had "redrawn the contours of the novel [James] Joyce recreated for the 20th century, and illuminated the path for other writers seeking new words and forms for new realities and societies.”

The great statesman and freedom icon, Nelson Mandela who spent 27 years as a political prisoner, before emerging to lead South Africa in 1994, said Achebe was “the writer in whose company the prison walls came down."

The American author Toni Morrison thanked Achebe for “doors which (he) figuratively opened for her,” according to another tribute to the distinguished scholar.

Such is the book’s revered history that Achebe lawyers claimed risked contamination through its association with a film starring 50 Cent.

The film, which is scheduled for release, recounts the struggles an American football player diagnosed with cancer.

“It's a project that I wrote, produced and financed myself," 50 Cent said in a recent media interview. The film directed by Mario Van Peebles, premiered at the Miami film festival last March and is due public release.

“After being contacted by Achebe's legal team, 50 Cent allegedly offered $1m to hold on to the title. Achebe took this as an insult,” wrote The Guardian of London.

"The novel with the said title was initially produced in 1958 (that is 17 years before he [50 Cent] was born)," Achebe’s lawyers are said to have responded, according to Nigerian website, Naijan, adding that the book title would not be sold, “even for £1bn.”

The film has since expanded its title to All Things Fall Apart, to avoid a blown-out legal tussle.

While the feud illuminates on intellectual property rights, there are many grey areas. To start with, Achebe does not have copyright protection in his book title, according to multiple online sources.

Quoting the US copyright law, fashionentlaw.com says: “Titles, names, and slogans . . . are not subject to copyright protection. Even if a name, title, or short phrase is novel or distinctive or if it lends itself to a play on words, it cannot be protected by copyright.”

The rationale, it says, is “the result would be absurd if it did. To say citizens cannot name their songs, books, movies and what have you Things Fall Apart because someone else already did, would yield a very difficult society to live and function in.

But the website clarifies Achebe could use Trademark Law and Unfair Competition laws to protect his book title, perhaps by explaining that 50 Cent could potentially damage his business prospects by diverting his would-be readers to his film if titled Things Fall Apart. That is highly unlikely, given the form and content in the two artistic servings. In any case, the author had no issue with the jazzy hip-hop band from Philadelphia, the Roots, when they used Things Fall Apart as their album title some ten years ago.

In the absence of evidence that Achebe stood to suffer commercial losses by allowing 50 Cent use of his book title for his film, perhaps the attention should turn to what Achebe stood to gain had he consented.

The David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University may have little use for $1 million windfall; at age 80, his four children are all grown, his house and cars long been paid for. But 50 Cent’s film would certainly have aroused fresh interest among young readers who listen to his music. Or perhaps such people do not read books, the sort that Achebe writes.

But symbolically, it could have been a fitting renewal of a relationship between the author and the African-American community that 50 Cent addresses.

As Ernest Emenyonu and Iniobong Uko note in their essay from the literary volume, Perspectives on Achebe, James Baldwin had such great respect for Achebe that, upon his death in 1987, his family gave his briefcase to Achebe “believing that ‘he would have wanted you to have it.’”

The Guardian’s article succinctly sums up the row: “It seems hawkish, at best, to hound someone else for using a phrase you yourself borrowed... as one smart cookie on Facebook pointed out, one could equally ask, "did Yeats have to pay Jesus for use of the phrase "The Second Coming"?


Author

Zachary Martin is an Assistant Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast.
Yates, Kundera, and Craft
Thursday, December 1. 2011 | Posted by Zachary Martin at 09:15 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Zachary Martin is an Assistant Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast.
One day in the spring of 2007, while I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I called in sick to work and drove across the Charles River to the library at Boston University. It felt a bit wicked, lying to avoid my job as a textbook salesman so I could spend the day in the special collections department with other volumes, and I remember worrying someone I knew would spot me, would know that I was playing hooky from the world of commerce to immerse myself in research.

I had crossed the bridge that day to view the library’s files on Richard Yates. Yates had moved to Boston in 1976 at the urging of his editor, Sam Lawrence, and his manuscripts, including an early draft of Revolutionary Road and notes for an uncompleted novel, Uncertain Times, had found their way back to the city after his death in 1992. It was while living in Boston that Yates had published The Easter Parade and Liars in Love, two of his best books, and it was the Boston Review that had published Stewart O’Nan’s 1999 essay on Yates that resulted in a resurgence of critical acclaim for his work. It seemed proper that the city where I lived had taken in one of my favorite writers, and it seemed necessary that I should make a pilgrimage to study the drafts that ultimately became the novels and stories that had so greatly influenced me, ever since Yates’ “Best of Everything” had led me to the rest of his writing so many years before.

As I sat in the special collections reading room that day, turning the brittle pages of Yates’ typescript for an early draft of Revolutionary Road, here is what I remember thinking: for most of its life as a work-in-progress, the novel I perhaps most admired in the world had been awful. Much of the final novel was there, but the story was lifeless. Frank and April’s arguments were entirely without subtext, and the prose was lackluster. Here, for instance, is the opening paragraph of the manuscript, then titled The Getaway:

Nine weeks of rehearsing had failed to put the Laurel Players in shape. They were an amateur company, but a costly and dead serious one, recruited from three suburban Connecticut towns. This was to be their maiden production, and their anxiety only deepened as the deadline drew near. But then at dress rehearsal their paid director climbed halfway up a stepladder to tell them, with real conviction, that they were a damn talented group of people and a wonderful group of people to work with.


Compare this with the final product:

The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium. They hardly dared to breathe as the short, solemn figure of their director emerged from the naked seats to join them on stage, as he pulled a stepladder raspingly from the wings and climbed halfway up its rungs to turn and tell them, with several clearings of his throat, that they were a damned talented group of people and a wonderful group of people to work with.


It had taken Yates seven years to move from a first draft of the novel to the finished product, and it was at that moment in the library that I understood what those seven years had been for. I already possessed a graduate degree in creative writing by that point, but I doubt I really understood until I saw that manuscript what craft meant.

*

In an essay published in the New Yorker in 2006, Milan Kundera decried what he calls “the ethic of the archive,” wherein “armies of researchers…accumulate everything they can find” of an author’s life and work, including “mountains of drafts, deleted paragraphs [and] chapters rejected by the author,” all toward the goal, according to Kundera, of creating “an enormous common grave.” There is undoubtedly a kernel of truth in what Kundera has to say about archival material. I have a memory, from when I myself worked in a special collections department, of standing over a photocopier and Xeroxing a picture of a prominent Freudian analyst with his dog. A professor upstairs had evidently found the picture indispensable to his research.

But make no mistake: there is also something deeply flawed in Kundera’s reasoning, at least as it relates to literature. There are two elements that make up a work of literature—art and craft—and to try to deny the scaffolding of the thing, the craft, is to try to elevate it above the realm of human achievement. Despite Kundera, I have little doubt that that morning and afternoon spent in special collections at Boston University was the most formative of my life as a writer. It’s not a revelation that we all start off with shit, but it can be revelatory to trace the precise path from straw to gold. Perhaps, for Milan Kundera, the art and craft of storytelling come easily enough, but for the rest of us the archive can serve as a record of craft, as object lessons in how to tell a story.

*

I sometimes see this process from the outside through the eyes of my partner, who is a trained photographer. When we go to, for instance, the Houston Center for Photography together to view exhibitions, she doesn’t seem to experience the same visceral joy that I do upon seeing a well-made photograph. But then again she is able to puzzle over a piece in ways I can only imagine, to appreciate superior craftsmanship where I see nothing. That is a talent made possible by years of examining the remnants of the artistic process, out of seeing all of the various ways a photograph can make its way from negative to print.

It is no different in other fields. There is pleasure to be found in seeing a building constructed where once there was an empty lot. As the archive can teach us, a novel or story is constructed just as surely, and learning how stories are built, like learning how houses are built, should only increase our desire to live in them, to make them an integral part of our lives and our identities, and to care for them.




Author

Sophie Klahr was born in Pittsburgh, PA. She is the author of the chapbook (Blank) Versus Recovery (Pilot Books, 2007). Her recent poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Chautauqua, Lo-Ball, Pank Magazine, Ploughshares, The Normal School, The Offending Adam, and TYPO. She is the poetry editor for Gigantic Sequins and teaches poetry at the High School for Visual and Performing Arts.
The Passing Word
Monday, November 28. 2011 | Posted by Sophie Klahr at 09:43 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Sophie Klahr was born in Pittsburgh, PA. She is the author of the chapbook (Blank) Versus Recovery (Pilot Books, 2007). Her recent poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Chautauqua, Lo-Ball, Pank Magazine, Ploughshares, The Normal School, The Offending Adam, and TYPO. She is the poetry editor for Gigantic Sequins and teaches poetry at the High School for Visual and Performing Arts.
Where does grief begin? What is the first word of grief?

(This (and all of the below) is what I write in my journal while flying back to Houston after 24 hours in Ft. Lauderdale, oddly disembodied after barely sleeping on the floor of an apartment where my grandmother is dying. I write it as if towards someone, a mode weirdly formal for my journal, but it seems to be the closest I can get to what’s happening. I send the writing to a friend when I get home, then to my mother, who sends it to my aunts– the thing wants to be shared. I trash my other Gulf Coast blog essay, try to revise the below work a little, but I can’t fully, and I don’t have time, so I choose to let it be raw. And, so, here we are):

I think of this fragment of Pablo Neruda’s, from “Ode to the Book”:

I learned about life
from life itself
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men
when fighting with them
when saying all their say in my song.

When I arrived last night, my mother told me that she’d bought a book at Goodwill, a collection from “The Favorite Poems Project,” started by Robert Pinsky. "I thought it would be good for me to have some poetry now," she said. I’d brought her a collection of short stories, grabbed from my shelf. "I almost brought you poems," I said, "I should have." She said it was okay, that stories would be good too. " I can disappear into them. Poetry takes some work." What she meant, I think, was that poetry puts us into the moment, into the Here and Now. And right now, slowly losing her mother, the moment is painful. But poetry was the literature she was drawn to. Perhaps this was the closest thing to prayer that made sense.

This is what the living do, I kept thinking, a line of Marie Howe’s, and the title of one of her wonderful books. But she wrote the book in the aftermath of her brother’s death. Here I was thinking, This is what the living do, standing with my mother and my aunts around a bed, each woman touching a piece of my grandmother’s still breathing, speaking body.

It is easy to forget sometimes, how fundamentally we measure human life in words.

My grandmother has been in decline for weeks, in pain. Now, she's in home hospice, where saintly Caribbean nurses preside over this trio of neurotic Jewish sisters from New Jersey, their dying mother, and her deaf 92 year old boyfriend. She’s been on Haldol (for panic) and Morphine (for pain) for days. Before I visited, my mother warned me: "She didn't say anything today. All she said yesterday was 'Your hair looks nice.'" I prepared myself to speak to someone wordless, a woman half-knit to another place where there is no language the living know of.

But when I arrived, accounts of my grandmother's words unfolded. She had called herself "the main event." She had offered to "tell the family secrets." She recited nursery rhymes, Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater. One, Two, Buckle my shoe. Sometimes she spoke of her pain.

My grandmother spoke to me. She shook her head smiling: "I say No to everything," she said. "You're SMILING!" said my mother. "Why shouldn't I smile?" All of us laughed then, except she, who couldn't laugh, smiled.

My father likes to tell this joke, if it is a joke:
Q: What might you say now, when you call someone on the phone, that you never would have said 50 years ago?
A: “Where are you?”


"You can read so much into everything that she says," said my Aunt Jill, laying curled around her mother in the hospice bed.

In the den, away from my grandmother’s room, my mother started to pull things out of her bag and pile them on my lap. An article about a movie; an article about political cartoons; a New Yorker she’d folded opened to a page of comics she thought I’d like. Beside her bag was a stack of books, a few more New Yorkers, a copy of the New York Times.

This is how we stay here, I thought, this is how I learned to ground myself. My mother taught me to find words that made sense, that moved me and kept me, that made a world.

We sat in the kitchen while I ate dinner and my mother flipped through the book of poems she’d bought. We read Yehuda Amachai aloud, William Carlos Williams. My mother’s not a poet, not a writer. “What do you think of this one?” she said, opening another poem towards me.

Another moment: my grandmother was gazing loosely towards my mother and I, sitting beside the bed. On the bureau were little trays of rings, earrings. A few vases, a jewelry box. A purse with Penelope Cruz airbrushed on the side. A framed picture of gauzy girls in a boat in sunhats tipping slowly over a pond. My grandmother had been quiet for awhile, though my dear noisy aunts had been rattling about one thing or another, about ducks, about spicy food, about work, about the history of their sisterhood. "Employee of the month!” my grandmother exclaimed, “Out...out of the blue!" Her face delighted. This sweet fragment, untouchable, a piece of a husk of a narrative. All of us laughing, again.

There was a moment in the morning when she cried. My mother and two aunts around her, I next to my mother. Perhaps it was seeing all of us there. We hadn't all been together in years. None of us had spoken. Her face seemed to pull itself inward as she looked suddenly quickly at each of us. She began to sob, as much as a woman who has hardly been eating or drinking or speaking could sob, which was very little, except it was such clear, clear sobbing, hardly a sound, but in our bodies everyone, we felt it, the sob. "Make believe," she said "you're in the desert." "No, mom," said my mother, crying too, "the beach. Why the desert?" There was no response. "Why?" my mother said again, and it was the only moment in all of thi s that I wanted to push in, disrupt the narrative, re-write the scene. I wanted to say, "Ask her what is there."


Author

J.S.A. Lowe is a first-year PhD student in poetry at the University of Houston, having relocated from Phoenix, AZ. Her poems have been published in magazines including AGNI, American Scholar, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, and Salamander. Her limited-edition chapbook DOE appeared from Particle Series Press in 2008.
Veterans' Day
Monday, November 21. 2011 | Posted by JSA Lowe at 20:37 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

J.S.A. Lowe is a first-year PhD student in poetry at the University of Houston, having relocated from Phoenix, AZ. Her poems have been published in magazines including AGNI, American Scholar, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, and Salamander. Her limited-edition chapbook DOE appeared from Particle Series Press in 2008.
"In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row…."

I memorized this poem as a schoolgirl; many of us did and still do. To me at the time it seemed evocative and tragic:

"We are the Dead. Short days ago / We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow…."

Yet now it seems so tame and mannered, so precisely metrical and true-rhyming, divorced in its formal elements from the ugly destructive senselessness of battle. I think of the red plastic-and-fabric remembrance poppy you can buy in Britain for Armistice Day, available at every till and corner by putting a pound coin in a tin. On that day red poppies flare on coat lapels everywhere, in a country still marked and marred by the world wars, where people can tell you stories about grandparents who served.

A few days ago, Glyn Maxwell's tersely moving piece on the Ivoy Gurney poem "To His Love" reminded me of the tradition of war poetry in English. If you spent any time on social media this year, on Veterans Day you might have noticed people paying more attention to the date (11/11/11—numbers which would have pleased James Joyce) rather than the fact of its being a holiday. Let's redress that by paying attention to a few war poems—some equally as famous as John McCrae's, some less well-known, but each more or less about the gritty, unprettified experience of being a soldier.

"Break of Day in the Trenches" by Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)

Poppies appear in this poem, too; but they are plastered white with the dust of combat, not bloodily red. Paul Fussell called Rosenberg's lyric "the greatest poem of the war"—where "the war" means The Great War, as it once seemed inconceivable there should ever be another as horrific. Rosenberg's voice here is cynical and sardonic, straight from the trench; it doesn't flinch from the violence deferred from the bodies of the soldiers into the earth and sky themselves. The poem's intelligent speaker manages to find a bitter amusement in the rat's survival and its "cosmopolitan sympathies," even in the darkness of "the bowels of the earth."

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew?
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe—
Just a little white with the dust.


"Dulce Et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen (1893—1918)

I've been teaching this poem for years, reciting it for many more, and the ending never fails to give me chills—it's such a perfect, hair-raising melding of formal strategies and pure unadulterated acid. Owen has composed a sort of run-on sonnet, with that single couplet in the middle of the poem right where the speaker himself falls apart, shaken out of form by the recurrent figure of the gas-poisoned soldier, so that we get "drowning" twice. The last octet's being written in the conditional, as a long "if…then" sentence, adds propulsion and momentum to the conclusion, as do the jagged, jangled metrics. I defy you to read it aloud and not get a picture of "my friend" that's entirely sinister and unflattering (and which may remind you of certain of our own elected officials).

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


"We Never Know" by Yusef Komunyakaa

Komunyakaa's poem is lyrical in its simplicity and even more disturbing for this, as the reader one by one unravels each metaphor into its real image. By the time we get to the place where the poet says as much, we too have fallen in love. What does the title mean? What kinds of things do we never know—about each other, about the work we do?

He danced with tall grass
for a moment, like he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed white-hot.
When I got to him,
a blue halo
of flies had already claimed him.
I pulled the crumbled photograph
from his fingers.
There's no other way
to say this: I fell in love.
The morning cleared again,
except for a distant mortar
& somewhere choppers taking off.
I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldn't be
kissing the ground.


"The Performance" by James Dickey

I still remember where I was and what I was doing the morning I read this poem, so astonished by the last two lines in their terrible loveliness. Does the poem capitalize inappropriately off of Donald Armstrong's bleak death, or does it memorialize the shining grace of a young man literally cut down in his prime? Dickey has an Audenesque gift for enjambing nouns and adjectives together in unexpected, illuminating ways: "untrustworthy air," "glittering grave." I never want this poem to be as beautiful as it is.

The last time I saw Donald Armstrong
He was staggering oddly off into the sun,
Going down, off the Philippine Islands.
I let my shovel fall, and put that hand
Above my eyes, and moved some way to one side
That his body might pass through the sun,

And I saw how well he was not
Standing there on his hands,
On his spindle-shanked forearms balanced,
Unbalanced, with his big feet looming and waving
In the great, untrustworthy air
He flew in each night, when it darkened.

Dust fanned in scraped puffs from the earth
Between his arms, and blood turned his face inside out,
To demonstrate its suppleness
Of veins, as he perfected his role.
Next day, he toppled his head off
On an island beach to the south,

And the enemy’s two-handed sword
Did not fall from anyone’s hands
At that miraculous sight,
As the head rolled over upon
Its wide-eyed face, and fell
Into the inadequate grave

He had dug for himself, under pressure.
Yet I put my flat hand to my eyebrows
Months later, to see him again
In the sun, when I learned how he died,
And imagined him, there,
Come, judged, before his small captors,

Doing all his lean tricks to amaze them—
The back somersault, the kip-up—
And at last, the stand on his hands,
Perfect, with his feet together,
His head down, evenly breathing,
As the sun poured from the sea

And the headsman broke down
In a blaze of tears, in that light
Of the thin, long human frame
Upside down in its own strange joy,
And, if some other one had not told him,
Would have cut off the feet

Instead of the head,
And if Armstrong had not presently risen
In kingly, round-shouldered attendance,
And then knelt down in himself
Beside his hacked, glittering grave, having done
All things in this life that he could.


"Friday Night, FOB Cobra" by Hugh Martin

A former classmate of mine, Iraq veteran Martin seems to write straight from his experiences, without filter, using a laconic military tone that you could easily mistake for artlessness. They're deceptive, such poems; you read them and think, I could have written that—unless you're foolish enough to try. In this poem Martin's men cook, lift weights, decorate their gear, take care of camp, and above all talk smack, in exactly the way homesick soldiers almost certainly do. Another friend who served in the Persian Gulf has spoken to me eloquently of the crashing boredom, long uneventful nights with only that simmering undercurrent of threat. Per Milton, they also serve who only stand and wait.

1.
Smith, shirtless, curls forty-pound dumbbells,
veins burst, worms over biceps.
The curls are part of his plan for home:
a sex life.

2.
On burn detail, Ritchey stirs shit with a metal rod,
asks Carter—standing back with a smoke—Doesn’t it make you
hungry?

3.
Jones’ brother sent him a twelve-pack
of Ultra Sensitive LifeStyle condoms. The box reads:
almost like wearing nothing at all. He cuts it out,
tapes it to the front of his flak vest.

4.
Sergeant Thompson has been in so many fights,
there is no cartilage left in his nose.
In line for the phone, he shows us:
bending it like an ear with one finger,
flat against his cheek.

5.
Kellerman’s wife divorced him over e-mail.

6.
When asked why his hands are so hairy,
Kenson says, with a cup of coffee and a ball of wet Copenhagen
bulging beneath his lip, I ain’t a fuckin’ girl.
He sips four pots a day, changes the grinds
once a week. The coffee tastes of steam and heat.

7.
In Tower Ten, Stevens discusses mutual funds,
interest rates. He says a young guy like me
might spend all his money on a bike, truck, a house.
He’s taking his wife
for a cruise, investing the rest,
and that’s what you do with money.

8.
On marriage, Perry says, It ain’t like that.
You think you just walk in the door,
and she hands you a beer,
gives you a blowjob.
It ain’t like that, he says.
Just wait,
it ain’t like that.

9.
Ski boils water in a canteen cup,
adds ramen, slices of expired Slim Jims.
He discusses the meaty juices, how the heat
sucks them out.
This meal is sacred.

10.
Sprinkling hot sauce over cold, boiled potatoes,
Dempson talks about reading the paper, the names
of the dead.
All of us know he’s slept with ninety-seven
women. After we finish our food, he tells us
about one.


Author

Layla Benitez-James is a first-year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Houston. She came to Houston by way of Austin with a four year stop-off in San Antonio at Trinity University where she majored in English and minored in Creative Writing and Spanish. Her work has been published in the San Antonio Express-News and the San Antonio Current. She has never blogged before.
11:11:11
Wednesday, November 16. 2011 | Posted by Layla Benitez-James at 19:05 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Author

Layla Benitez-James is a first-year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Houston. She came to Houston by way of Austin with a four year stop-off in San Antonio at Trinity University where she majored in English and minored in Creative Writing and Spanish. Her work has been published in the San Antonio Express-News and the San Antonio Current. She has never blogged before.
I consider myself to be a rational person (although this is self proclaimed i.e. I could be wrong vis-à-vis my rationality). However, I do keep some superstitions close to my heart: I knock on wood and throw salt over my left shoulder to guard against bad luck and negative jinxes; I also make wishes on fallen eyelashes and, of course, at the time 11:11.

I’m not quite sure why I ascribe so steadfastly to the rule of wish making at 11:11 but it’s a favorite luck giving superstition. I don’t know when this started but a halfhearted attempt at discovering the origins of the 11:11 wish online was disappointing, (save that now I know Ellen DeGeneres started her own record label called eleveneleven). I like to think it has to do with a person’s love of symmetry or the comforting repetition of parallel lines. I also like to think the kind of person making wishes at 11:11 is an optimist: someone who, even if they don’t initially see the glass as half full, has enough good will to wish it to be full.

I hope everyone had a wonderful 11:11:11; it is the only one we will get (12:12:12 just doesn’t have the same ring to it and thank goodness there can’t be a 13:13:13). In the tradition of ascribing arbitrary significance to certain days over others, I had high hopes for my Friday. I even picked up a penny, heads up, as I was walking to the car in the morning to drive my boyfriend downtown to work. Instead of making it home in the normal five minutes, my trip was derailed by an HCC student who ran a red light because she was running late for class. We collided right in the center of Jefferson and Austin. I admit I felt betrayed, not only by 11:11:11 but by the “lucky” penny resting in my back pocket. However, as I waited for the police and the inevitable, dull process of exchanging information I realized that it was lucky no one was hurt, that my car was still drivable, and that I had only lost about an hour of my day.

I was reminded that I can’t always know what luck looks like when it happens: it could be more than something good happening, like something bad that doesn’t become worse. Sometimes it’s hard, when watching the news or listening to world events on the radio to view things positively. It’s definitely difficult right after you’ve had a wreck. For me, part of my attempt to view things positively is the knowledge that I need to work without indulging in time wasting pessimism. One of my favorite poets, Heberto Padilla of Cuba, relays this understanding of good and bad luck in his poem “La alegría abre también los ojos en la negrura/ In blackness, joy also opens its eyes.”


La alegría abre también los ojos en la negrura

La alegría abre también los ojos en la negrura
y despliega su mapa deslumbrante
Donde está tu camino
Y se planta a tu lado
Y te arranca los ojos de suicida
Es como un ramalazo que cae sobre tus hombros
Y al volver la cabeza para mirar
descubres que aun es posible el día
La gran transformadora de los labios gruñones
Y del hollín desesperado de los enclenques
Que siempre tiene los mismos ojos
Y la misma cara
Y te busca en el fondo del espejo
Y sólo espera que le tiendas la mano.

In blackness joy also opens its eyes

In blackness, joy also opens its eyes
and spreads out its dazzling map
indicating the road to be taken.
It stands at your side
and tears out your suicide's eyes.
It is like a lash
falling over your shoulders,
and as you turn your head,
you discover that the day is still possible.
The great transformer of whining mouths
and of the desperate, grimy weaklings
(always with the same eyes
and the same face)
seeks you out at the bottom of the mirror
and waits only for you to offer your hand.


For me, my silly superstitions are my way of offering my hand, of being aware of what good things come and what bad things are not only survivable, but allow me to see the world in new ways. My wreck could not ruin the magic I was determined to find on 11:11:11. I wish to always discover that the day is still possible and then, to write.



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