The Prairie Schooner Blog

"An Ecstatic, Cerebral Jab": Q&A with Chigozie Obioma

Prairie Schooner — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 21:33:18 +0000

by Paul Hanson Clark

One of the new members of UNL's Creative Writing Faculty is having quite the month. In addition to getting settled into teaching classes in Lincoln, Chigozie Obioma was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his book The Fishermen. I emailed Obioma a few questions about his book, literary journals, and how he's adjusting to life in Nebraska. Enjoy!

Can you tell us about your book?

The Fisherman is a family drama that tells the story of four auspicious boys of a Middle class Nigerian family who, upon their strict father’s transfer to another city for work, go fishing at a forbidden river where they encounter a vagrant famed to possess prescient powers. Their lives and that of their family is changed and marked forever by this singular encounter in both tragic and redemptive ways. Told by the melding dual voice of Benjamin, youngest of the boys, who looks back from two decades later to when he was nine years old, it is also in part a bildungsroman.

Were parts of the novel published in literary journals as you were working on it?

I wrote the story of the novel one night, a few days after the germ of the idea was first planted in my mind. I had about twelve pages of foolscap paper filled in one sitting. I knew it was a novel from the start, but just wasn't sure how to tell it. But I wanted to do something unique; to contribute to the possibilities of what we can do with fiction as an art form. I was about sixty-thousand words deep into the novel when I began to worry about how about how it would be received. So I decided to test the waters. I stripped the novel down to the essentials of the plot and sent it out to small journals as a short story. I abandoned the novel while waiting for journals to accept the story, and in the interim, within which I got a few acceptances, I wrote another novel from beginning to end. After receiving a few acceptances, I sent it out to big journals: Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, etc. It was not until 2011, when Ted Genoways of VQR sent an acceptance that I picked up The Fisherman again, and completed it around August of that year.

So, then, what do you think of literary journals?

I think they are a great resource for starting writers and also seasoned ones to keep up with snapshots of what is being produced today. Perhaps, without the validation that VQR gave, I would not have published The Fishermen.

What's it like being shortlisted for such a major prize?

The news about the shortlist came to me as an ecstatic, cerebral jab on the mind. It is imponderably satisfying, and just delightful, but wholly encouraging. I had merely hoped, at the onset of the work, to get published. To be nominated for awards is, to say the least, completely unexpected. But humbling, nonetheless.

How do you like UNL so far?

It is fun, totally exciting to have the opportunity to impact a few minds interested in fiction writing and Literature. I’m taking every moment of it with delight. But also, of course, there is the difficulty that grading and working through hours of students’ papers present to the teacher. But isn’t that the thrill of it all?

For more information on Obioma, click here to visit his website. To buy The Fishermen, click here.

So You Wanna Win a Book Prize?

Prairie Schooner — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 18:24:57 +0000

In honor of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets (open now!) We've revived our interview series about publishing the first book. This week, Book Prize Coordinator Katie Schmid Henson talks with 2015 Sillerman prize winner Mahtem Shiferraw about shaping her first collection of poems, winning the Sillerman, and what's next.

1. Describe the process of making the manuscript. How did you conceive of the poems together?

The poems were conceived in different times, each in its own way. I cannot say each poem was written with a collection in mind because my poems tend to demand their own individual space. However, once the poems were revised and edited and near completion, the collection came together as a whole.

2. How long did the process of making the manuscript take, from beginning to put it together to the moment you submitted and won the Sillerman?

The whole process of the manuscript took at least five years, most of which was spent trying to understand what each poem’s message truly was and revising it to accomplish its truest form.

3. How did you hear you’d won the Sillerman prize? What did you do immediately after you’d heard?

I received a phone call and I thought it was some sort of prank. It was not just winning a poetry prize that stunned me, but winning one for African poets. This was unbelievable to me because it gave me permission to finally think and place myself as an African writer, which is an honor to be, and an identity I am still grappling with.

4. What was it like to work with editors and bring the book to press?

It is wonderful! I didn’t know how others could care so deeply about my poems, and in such refreshingly new ways. The whole process has enlightened my writing in general.

5. What do you wish you’d known about constructing the manuscript before you won?

I wish I had the courage to understand each poem as it is. My writing process, both prose and poetic, comes from a deep consciousness not completely awakened, and as a consequence, my work almost always needs deciphering. I suspect I inherited this innate sense of secrecy from my culture, especially from the languages itself, and in particularly from Amharic. Amharic is a very soft-sounding language, and it’s so richly provocative too; one sentence, or phrase, or even one word can carry with itself multiple interpretations, all completely different in their nature, their scope and tone. Therefore, with Fuchsia, deconstructing each poem for what it is, what it could be and what it accomplishes in its current form, are some of the things I learned after the Sillerman.

6. What’s changed since you’ve won the Sillerman? Do you think of or approach your work differently?

Absolutely! Bringing Fuchsia to publication through the Sillerman has been very enlightening. I pay closer attention to why certain poems belong to one collection and the arc that ties together individual pieces to each other and into a full-length manuscript.

7. What are you working on now?

Book #2 is a full-length poetry manuscript (that will be partially published in chapbook format) and the major unifying arc is the recurring theme of war; whether literal or imaginary, war makes distinct appearances, sometimes in the shape of a stranger, or a foreign land, or an unsought touch, or black skin.

Book #3 is a novel that follows the story of a character that goes through the woes of trauma and mental illness and finds redemption through faith and perseverance. It has been finished for the past two years, most of which I spent trying to understand its purpose (because it changes every time I read it). The few people that have read it also seem to agree with this notion of it being a transformative work, meaning not that it changes you (which I also hope it does, somehow), but that it changes on you. The multi-faceted element of each story I write hunts me and prevents me from being a pragmatic writer.

Book #4 is a novel in stories. Through the spirit of the Nile and the magical realism that inhabits Ethiopian folktales, the stories are connected to each other, from a small village in Gojiam, to a peninsula in Bahr Dar, to various neighborhoods in Addis Ababa. One of the stories, The Monk of Zege, was published last year, so I’m in the process of submitting the rest.

Although I always work on multiple projects at the same time, winning the Sillerman and in general going through the process of Fuchsia, have transformed the way I approach my own work, which is usually with fear (perhaps that’s why I still can’t read some of the poems included in Fuchsia without breaking into pieces, “Questions for Your Mother”, “Kalashnikovs”, etc). Though I still do not plan my poems or outline my novels and short stories, I am alert to what happens beyond the page and the only way I can do this is by distancing myself from the work.

Mahtem Shiferraw is a poet and visual artist who grew up in Eritrea & Ethiopia. Her work has been published in The 2River View, Cactus Heart Press, Blood Lotus Literary Journal, Luna Luna Magazine, Mandala Literary Journal, Blackberry: A Magazine, Diverse Voices Quarterly, The Bitter Oleander Press, Callaloo Literary Journal and elsewhere. She won the Sillerman Prize for African Poets and her full length poetry collection, Fuchsia, is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press. Her poetry chapbook, Behind Walls & Glass, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She holds and MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. You can find Mahtem online here: http://mahtem-shiferraw.com/

Alberta Clipper 9/29/15: “Well, Millstone, Cistern, Cliff (1892)” by Steve Lautermilch

Prairie Schooner — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 16:22:30 +0000

by Kara Cosentino

September 29, 2009, is a date that rocked the world. In Samoa, an 8.1 magnitude earthquake sparked a tsunami that produced waves as high as forty-six feet. In Lincoln, Nebraska, meanwhile, it was a calm and sunny seventy degrees. One year later, a poem called Well, Millstone, Cistern, Cliff by Steve Lautermilch appeared in Prairie Schooner, depicting a storm after a drought, another time of disaster. –Kara Cosentino

for Paul Cezanne

The cistern has run dry. Now the stone well,
shaped rock and unshaped, collects sound, and what
is beyond sound, the crackle of wrinkled stems
curling to flame. Watercolor scratched,
scraped to bare stock—trees, saplings, twigs.
Roots and brush, windfall limbs and fallen trunks.

Broken, unbroken ground. A tent of shavings, tinder,
leaves, wick and wicker bleached to windless scraps,
rag and bone for the match. Canvas of oil and graphite,
artist's paper of charcoal and flint. A table, a candle,
a workshop of candles, a bench of burning sight.

Winding back to the village, threading sycamore
and elm, a ribbon of unribboning steps that vanish,
packed clay turned dirt cobbled stone, the first drops
of rain pattering on pickets, spattering a gate.

Roof tile and slate, forked branch and fern
beginning to blossom and burn, palette knife wind
working, edging open door and window frame, threshold
of the weather to come, already arriving, the pour
and slather and following mist that breathe
and fan household and land ablaze.

What were you feeling, old young man,
haunting that grove, leaf-hold
where a millstone was cut and hauled,
makings for the mill that never was built.

Gathering colors, one after another, brother of
half patches, stepfather of quarter tones brought
to a sketch, an easel, like offerings for a poor box.
Open air tent, tabernacle and altar cloth where
the silence swells, running and sweeping a shore
that has no need of other tides. Hard to get down,

hard to let go. No, not the colors or pigments, not
the blunted stabs of pencils grains of minerals
and daubs of washed clays, and
not the pounding storm or slashing gale that pares
sharpens and drives grass blade and pine straw
into the side of barn fence post and pine.

Only the timed give and take, right hand and left,
the rhythms of the water clock ribs,
this free flight of wind, lift of limb, bird wing of breath
that chalice and paten the bones, the workaday canvas
of harvest and prayer. Slashing, stroking, patching,
repairing. Coming about. And always

under sea the eddy and ebb, below and within
and between each pulse, the bead and bell
of the unknown, unwatered life.

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Fall 2010)

The Alberta Clipper is a biweekly gust of history—brushing the dust off of a poem from our archives and situating it in the current events and local Nebraskan weather reports of days gone by. Explore the Alberta Clipper archives here.

So You Wanna Win a Book Prize?

Prairie Schooner — Wed, 23 Sep 2015 16:15:19 +0000

In honor of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets (open now!) We've revived our interview series about publishing the first book and expanded it to include writers who are working toward publishing their first books. In this interview, Book Prize Coordinator Katie Schmid Henson talks with Prairie Schooner Contributor Naoko Fujimoto about shaping her first collection of poems.

1. How many books have you published, and where?

None!

2. Describe the process of constructing your first manuscript.

I recently finished constructing my first manuscript called, “Radio Tower.” Its original foundation was to contain forty five poems as my thesis to finish my English education at Indiana University South Bend in 2009. I named the thesis project, “Sinking Garden.” Since then, I have edited its existing poems, written several new poems, and restructured the poems’ order at least four times. Numerous titles had been created and discarded in the process. To be honest, with my young, optimistic attitude, I thought that it would be easier to publish a book after I had published a decent amount of individual poems in print and online magazines.

I had three big turning points for my manuscript and now fully understand the importance of meeting mentors at the right time. They guided me at my point in development and drastically shortened the maturation time for my writing skills, as well as taught me to manage my artistic explosions appropriately. Since I came to America about ten years ago, I have had three major mentors and many, many supporters to keep me on track.

My first poetic mentor was David Dodd Lee. With his earthworm-like-handwriting, he showed me what phrases and line-breaks worked and did not work. From him I learned fundamental poetry editing skills. My second mentor was Russell Thorburn, who helped me come up with my manuscript’s title. We had several emails and phone calls discussing only titles, and finally we fell in love with “Radio Tower.” The last mentor was Jeffrey Levine, who pushed me to strive to the next level of editing techniques and language art. He opened my eyes to see poems in ways that I had never imagined.

I strongly believe that polishing a manuscript is a group effort with someone I can trust to be honest and patient with me. With my personal cheerleading team (and my husband), I can finally say, “My first manuscript is ready.”

3. How did you conceive of ordering the collection? How did you decide which poems to include in the collection?

I believe that a poetry book must have a strong spine. With it, the work as a whole has to be a cohesive collection. Page after page, the book must have moments of inner conversation with a reader. It took me a long time to find my spine for “Radio Tower.” My poems reflect how a native Japanese person views life. These poems and images must flow well from one to another, so I listened to each poem carefully. I questioned myself as to why a particular poem needed to tie up with the ones before and after it. I wanted “Radio Tower” to be a classic first collection; therefore, I did not retain some of my experimental works and included only the best ones for the theme.

4. Did you notice poetic tics once you’d put the poems together? (For instance, I spent the year 2007 trying to break myself of the verbs “bloom” and “ache,” once I realized everything I wrote was blooming or aching.) How did you decide which tics were fruitful (interesting in that they accrued throughout the collection in a meaningful way) and which were not?

Yes. My one of poetic tics— or obsessions— was “Blue.” There is a lot of “Blue” in “Radio Tower.” I think that obsession did not bring problems. I told myself, “Picasso expressed himself in blue constantly, so why not my poetry?” I chose my “Blue” poems on whether they supported the spine of my book or not. Therefore, I did not include all my “Blue” poems in “Radio Tower,” but it would be wonderful if I could construct a “Blue” collection in the near future. And about tics: When I was young I saw a pantomime running a tick’s circus (there were no real ticks. A mime was acting like a tick trainer). It was full of imagination and laughter. If I treated poetic tics as bad things, some fantastic chemistry may not be born. I would like to say that the tics I keep are to purposely have fun with my obsessions.

5. Has publication (of individual pieces in the collection) changed your writing or manuscript construction processes?

No. But publications make me smile, they are like a gambling addiction. My old rule was to publish only in print magazines; however, my thinking has evolved over the years and I recently started submitting to online journals. Online media has the power to publish a poem, a picture/art, and audio readings together. For my first manuscript, it would be cool to have my own reading projected in my Japanese-English accent (My pronunciation may switch “L” and “R,” and I may confuse some listeners, sometimes intentionally. So I could say, “Also available in a printed version”).

6. How did you decide where to submit the collection? How many places did you submit?

I submitted my manuscript to publishers I respected. If I could aspire to have my work alongside their existing books, I submitted. If people suggested particular publishers, I sent to them as well. So far, I have submitted to twenty eight competitions (that was why I kept working in a full time office job.) One was a finalist for the 2015 Kundiman Poetry Prize.

7. What does current-you wish you could have tell past-you about the whole process?

Create more chapbooks. In my early poetry career, I really wanted to start with a major book, so I had never entertained the thought of creating chapbooks. Though, like my media-type feelings, this has evolved. I am currently working on four chapbooks, and I adore them. Their experience brings with it a new enjoyment and creative opportunities. Given the chance, I would like to design and paint my own covers and illustrations for them. Chapbooks have millions of creative possibilities. And I would also like to say, “Keep smiling,” even when receiving rejections and going though rough poetic times.

8. What is your favorite part of your first book?

All. “Radio Tower” is my blue virgin gleam.

Naoko Fujimoto is a native of Japan. Her recent publications are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, the Cape Rock, Tangential Bird Piles, and Nano Fiction. She is currently juggling writing fiction and working at the office.

Prairie Schooner and Pseudonyms

Prairie Schooner — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 17:29:15 +0000

by Kwame Dawes

Prairie Schooner will not publish work by Yi-Fen Chou, or any other known pseudonym used by the poet Michael Derrick Hudson. The editors at Prairie Schooner were not aware that "Yi-Fen Chou" was a pseudonym for Michael Derrick Hudson when we published his work under the name Yi-Fen Chou, but once Prairie Schooner became aware of the actual identity of the poet a few months ago, Prairie Schooner confirmed the facts with Michael Derrick Hudson and has taken the position that the circumstances and rationale guiding Hudson's use of a pseudonym would not warrant our publication of his future work under such a pseudonym. In principle, Prairie Schooner has no objections to the use of pseudonyms, but we require disclosure of their use to the editor before publication. For the record, Prairie Schooner first published work by "Yi-Fen Chou” in 2009.

Alberta Clipper 9/1/15: “Art and Craft” by Diana O’Hehir

Prairie Schooner — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 16:40:02 +0000

by Summer Bethune

Eighteen years ago on September 1^st, the whole world appalled at the news that Diana, Princess of Wales, a well-loved British icon celebrated for her charity work, had been killed in a car accident. Investigations revealed that the driver, Henri Paul, was drunk and speeding at close to 120 mph when the accident occurred in the Place d’Alma underpass in Paris, France.

That day in Lincoln, the temperatures remained comfortably between 66 and 84 degrees. Until that evening when scant thunderstorms began around 10 p.m. and the sky cried down upon the city, perhaps in mourning with the rest of the world.

Four years later, the 2001 summer issue of Prairie Schooner included a poem by another Diana—Diana O’Hehir from California, a well-known poet and the author of I Wish this War Were Over, a novel published in early 2001. Her poem, “Art and Craft” offers a magical perspective on a royal family in a light-hearted yet heart-breaking way.

“Art and Craft”
Diana O’Hehir

It’s a gift from the king
and the queen has dropped
and cracked it.

She’s panicky.
She calls in the magic tailor
who can mend anything: he
sews up the eggshell tight,
clean.
Secrecy, she says, and pays him.
Now, disappear.

Three months later out pops a baby princess,
perfect,
except a scarlet seam down her back.
That’s the mark of her royal heritage,
the queen tells the king

who loves his baby daughter.

Years pass. Everyone gets much older.
The grey-haired queen hardly thinks about her
joyous, shimmering light-shot
egg-crack days.
When, knock, knock,
here’s the tailor, the brilliant
who can mend anything, be it hard as
steel or soft as a woman’s breath.
The queen panicks.
Go away.
You promised.
Gold? Silver? Rubies?

But the tailor says no, and no.
He’s felt mortality’s bite; he wants
artistic recognition.
I am the best, he says.
The world must know,
because life is short but art is long.

The queen sags.
Once she thought that love was long,
and now she knows,
hardly an eye-blink, hardly a cough,
Do, she tells him, what you need to do.

And that’s the end of
that kingdom.

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Summer 2001)

Briefly Noted - August 26, 2015

Prairie Schooner — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 21:42:37 +0000

Quick-to-Read Reviews

Vol. 4 Issue 4. August 26, 2015. Ed. Paul Clark.

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst | Reviewed by Dirk van Nouhuys

Hemingway on a Bike by Eric Freeze | Reviewed by Ryan Borchers

Bird from Africa by Viola Allo | Reviewed by Ryler Dustin

Alan Hollinghurst. The Stranger's Child. Vintage International, 2012.

The theme of The Stranger’s Child is the social position and self-image of gay men, particularly literary gay men, in England from 1913 to 2008. Sections spaced 10 or 20 years apart make up the novel. A charismatic, titled, middling poet who is mainly a closeted gay man is the principal character of the first section. The tension in this section comes from his effect on the people around him. He dies in WWI in the interval before the second section. Each succeeding section illustrates a changed standing of gay men.

Hollinghurst is a fine wordsmith; his prose is shapely and illuminating. As usual, he is exquisitely witty, reminding me of Oscar Wilde, alive to people's sensitivity to one another's moves in large social situations. While he writes about parties as well as anyone, he isn’t as good at describing just two people are interacting, unless they are body to body.

In my mind I compared this book to three novels that self-consciously cover a long stretch of time. First is Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, where the characters are defined by a ruling passion and remain consistent, as their society remains static. Their consistency in the face of time and events is a moving human image. Second is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, where the characters are similar to Murasaki's, but the action of time forces the protagonist and the reader to peel the layers of deceit that ornament and hide the characters, and in the process the reader witnesses changes to society. Third is Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, which questions whether people living in different times, in an essentially static society, really remain the same people.

In Hollinghurst society changes in a way that allows the gay characters to be more themselves. At the same time the past recedes into a fog of misunderstanding, making the comfort of the present an uneasy one at best. –Dirk van Nouhuys

Eric Freeze. Hemingway on a Bike. University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

Eric Freeze’s Hemingway on a Bike is a book of odds and ends, a hodgepodge collection of essays with an author who is unafraid to explore his interests. And Freeze certainly has a wide variety of interests, including Star Trek, competitive sprinting, and the Brigham Young University honor code’s policy in regards to men’s facial hair.

Freeze has a knack for drawing connections between strangely disparate elements. In “Bolt,” for example, Freeze writes about how competitive sprinting, nuts and bolts at the hardware store, and a sudden flight from life’s hardships all have the word “bolt” in common. These connections might leave some readers asking “So what?” while leaving others delighted with their irreverence. Another essay strikes a similar chord: in “Foosball Champion of the World” Freeze hunts down a table made by one of the world’s premier foosball table manufacturers. The struggle as presented lacks urgency and just doesn’t seem to matter, which might beg another question: "Why should it?"

However, Freeze is not a one trick pony. In certain moments he escapes the trap of irreverence and provides the reader with true intimacy. In the aforementioned “Bolt,” an older woman tearfully confesses her desire to have a sexual relationship with Freeze while he is serving a Mormon mission. The final essay, entitled “On Intimacy,” is a series of vignettes in which Freeze’s acquaintances tell him some pretty deep, dark secrets. These moments, however, are few and far between. When you read Freeze you can't help but get the feeling the author would rather tell you about his hobbies than show you his soul. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? The answer probably depends on how irreverent your sensibilities are. –Ryan Borchers

Viola Allo. Bird from Africa. Akashic Books, 2015.

Viola Allo’s Bird from Africa is a subtly musical book grounded in a refreshing conviction in the human voice. In “Sit With Me,” Allo channels her grandmother to express this conviction: “If you are wise, what you must do is speak well. / Talk to people as we are talking now…” Allo deftly crafts her music from accessible speech that bridges the gap between speaker and reader. Even as musical momentum builds in poems like “Muddy Shoes,” it never threatens to hedge out human warmth:

I arrive in Maryland, and
the mud is still on my shoes.
I notice this, one afternoon,
on a walk through Germantown.
I know I will not wash my shoes,
filthy from my summer in Camaroon.
The mud stays where it is.

Allo is deeply aware of the fractures that run through her hometown of Bamenda and all of post-colonial Camaroon, and offers her words as a salve, testifying to a deeper level of interconnectedness and co-mingling. In fact, these poems over brim with Allo’s luscious and humane vision of inter-penetrability, a fluid interplay between individual and community, body and earth. In “Young Bride in Bamenda,” a bride’s sweat falls into a pot of plantain stew so that when the family eats, “the whole world / feels full.” Even in moments of intense conflict—like when the speaker exchanges blows with her father—there is a profound sensitivity to our mutual vulnerability and an underlying, courageous sense that this might offer redemption. These are powerful songs, “soothing / the earth, carved up, engraved with bodies,” in which “we hum together beside a bed of flowers” (“Bodies, Flowerbeds”). –Ryler Dustin

Dirk van Nouhuys is a native of Berkeley with a BA from Stanford in Creative Writing and an MA from Columbia in Contemporary LIterature. Ryan Borchers is a 28-year-old writer studying to earn his MFA at Creighton University. His work has been published in tommagazine, The Cynic Online Magazine, Wordhaus and Maple Street Press's "Here Come the Irish." Ryler Dustin earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston and is a current PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He has represented his native Seattle on the final stage of the Individual World Poetry Slam and his poetry appears in New South, The Porland Review, and elsewhere..

Jürgen Becker: An Introduction

Prairie Schooner — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 16:52:11 +0000

by Okla Elliott

Jürgen Becker was born in Köln, Germany, in 1932. He is the author of over thirty books—including drama, fiction, and poetry—all published by Suhrkamp, Germany’s premier publisher. He has won numerous prizes, including the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, the Hermann Lenz Prize, and the Georg Büchner Prize, the highest honor a German-language author can receive.

I first discovered Becker’s work during a year-long study abroad in Germany. I was immediately struck by his ability to track the oddities of consciousness and by the unexpected ways ideas and images ricochet off one another in his poems. I was also taken with his subject matter and the way he renders historically or politically charged content in aesthetically sophisticated and nuanced language. Becker’s work often deals with his childhood experience of the Second World War and the political consequences of the postwar division of Germany. It is perhaps his melding of the personal and the political that makes him a truly great poet.

When I returned to the United States, I continued to read his work, and with ever-increasing interest. Comparative literature scholar and critical theorist Gayatri Spivak has claimed that the most profound way to read a writer’s work is to translate it. In many ways, I agree with this notion, especially in the case of poetry. Once I began translating Becker’s poems, I had to find my way into the shape and feel of his lyric idiom more thoroughly than I previously had in order to recreate it as accurately as possible in English. That comingling of my language and his makes my relationship to Becker’s work unlike any other I have.

The following six translations will appear in Blackbirds in September: Selected Shorter Poems of Jürgen Becker, out from Black Lawrence Press in late 2015. “In the Wind,” “Correspondent,” “A Provisional Topography,” and “Oderbruch” were originally published in A Public Space, Natural Bridge, Plume, and Indiana Review, respectively. “Autumn Story” and “Poem about Snow in April” appear here for the first time. I hope these translations, along with this brief commentary, spark interest in Becker’s work among poets and scholars, as well as general readers.

***

In the Wind

Blackbirds, then other voices. It doesn’t stop

when it snows, when with the snow

a newness comes that is

entirely essential this morning. Or how

do you see it? I see the pear tree and how it

(the pear tree) reacts to the wind (to the

wind). This morning, yet again,

the decision fell. War

between magpies and crows, only this war,

no trappings, only this clear understanding.

Yet another voice, the next commentator; it’s all about

(yet again) the whole. Are you standing

in the garden? The you know, tsk tsk, the blackbird

warned above all else, you know, I’ll say it yet

again, in war, in the new snow, in the wind.

***

Oderbruch

The camera’s broken? It’s cold out,

and there are crows bigger than crows

usually are, scattering smoothly over there across the fields.

Nothing over there. Twilight. Gold gray twilight

spreads out. A tree in Poland

is over there the lost barren tree.

Lighted and empty, the bus drives over the levee.

On the riverbank, two men with their backs

to the dam, which neither begins nor ends.

You don’t hear anything. You hear the slippage

of the floe, the circling floe. You hear

for a long time yet, later, in the dark, the drifting ice.

The camera’s broken, else why are the pictures

blurry now? Two men stood on the riverbank.

They came back. They could tell the story.

***

Correspondent

He hardly looks into the camera; it almost seems

as if he were having a discussion with himself, a correspondence

with Something on the unseen table, perhaps

with his pen or cigarette.

A light tremble of his hands . . . no one knows; in any case

very nice, nothing specific, just mumbling—

what can you say . . . coldness and glances

toward the street, which is somewhat lighted

with snow; a leftover flag

blown by the wind machine. Something gigantic that slowly

disappears . . . it has already disappeared, yet before

any decree. He reiterates, he can only leave

once nothing else is happening. We’ll miss him.

***

Autumn Story

A sign, or just some scribbling . . . I’ve tried

to give the old, sunken pear tree fortification.

But the support of pencil-marks failed. Now,

for a few days already, a fog reigns, one that finally

has finished the job. There’s nothing more to see here.

That’s how everything has gone this year:

structures, frosts, the flight of owls, wars in September.

***

A Provisional Topography

On the Weichsel River, before the war. You see

exactly where we

could have gone farther on the path

above the dam separating the Nothing of river-silver

from those things that formed only shadows

in the changing light.

The unmoved architecture of clouds: it is

this moment that over decades has dragged itself

and has adopted the color of newsprint.

In the distance, in the dark, two houses.

Although it’s bright as day.

Whether souls wander here . . . in any case, distant,

on the dam, two people walking

stand out against the horizon, in the middle

of this past.

The rows of trees continue until

they disappear in a line that returns

on the other side of the river.

The question, whether such or similar conflicts begin.

At night, and not just nights, in the subjunctive.

. . . as though the embankment were to come against us.

Then it’s clear that you can’t steer anything in history.

A progression, an altogether private movement stays

undecided between the return home and a further absence.

These years, it’s said, have left traces of bitterness.

But the landscape is rather quiet.

Invisible the destruction, if in fact

there is destruction.

And the time is passed

which the subsequent, the subsequent time produced.

But you never speak of Now.

Probably in the summer. At that time of year

we remember. Fence posts follow the paths,

or turned around, all of it belonging

to the landscape . . . who owns it? The landscape

leads into landscapes, from the visible ones

to the unseen ones which await us.

A provisional topography.

You can cover it up. You can change

it, but a series emerges, until we achieve

the shore of repetition.

***

Poem about Snow in April

April-snow; quickly; once again

fifteen minutes

of winter and full disappearance

of crocus-regions

and

fifteen minutes, in the future,

says Warhol, is fame. Quickly,

a poem about snow in April,

for mood and snow

are quickly gone

and suddenly,

metaphorically speaking,

snow-mastery disappeared

in the region of the crocus,

and the regime of spring rules.

So, a spring-poem.

And quickly. Tomorrow it’s winter, again,

and new mastery,

no,

not tomorrow: in fifteen minutes

with snow, like quick life,

says Warhol, metaphorically speaking,

like snow, disappearing, April.

Alberta Clipper 8/18/15: “The Telephone of the Dead” by Goldie Goldbloom

Prairie Schooner — Tue, 18 Aug 2015 16:17:06 +0000

By: Kara Cosentino

August 18, 1955, Hurricane Diane (not to be confused with Diana) ravaged Wilmington, North Carolina, killing 184 people, destroying 813 homes and damaging over 4,000 others, and leaving $754 million worth of damage in its wake. The effects of this terrible weather battering the east coast didn’t reach as far as Lincoln, Nebraska, where August 18^th was a scorching hot day, at 97 degrees. Fifty-five years later, The Telephone of the Dead by Goldie Goldbloom appeared in Prairie Schooner. The story follows a woman who loses her husband in a horrible lightening storm and the husband who refuses to let his memory be forgotten. –Kara Cosentino

Marnie Gottfried's husband, Steve, had been dead for two weeks when he called her for the first time. She had just returned from Israel, hadn't even unpacked, was as unhinged and raw as she would ever be, and the telephone call sent her windmilling to a therapist. When she mentioned the telephone call to the polite little man, he prescribed something, but even after she was regularly swallowing antihallucinogenic chemicals, the calls continued. In fact, she got a three-thousand-dollar telephone bill, collect charges from an 800 service distressingly called The Telephone of the Dead. She didn't share this with the therapist, surmising— quite correctly—that he would think she was hooked up with some necrophiliac outfit.

Her husband had come home in a summer storm, the clouds boiling like a pot of scummy soup, his little Citroën pulling between the pines as she bent to wring out the mop in the kitchen. The lightning was directly overhead, had—in fact—hit the chimney again and fried the computer. She was growing tired of changing the surge protector, bored with the childlike scream the computer made when struck by lightning. It simply wasn't true that lightning didn't strike the same place twice. It had favorite places, places like their chimney and their pines, where it loved to run riot, cavort wantonly, drive deeply into the earth again and again like a serial rapist.

It was sensible of Steve not to try to make it to the house through an electrical storm. She peered out the kitchen window at the car, waved, but couldn't see a thing. The rain vomited down, uncon-trollable, the thunderous belly noises deafening, truly. She finished mopping the floor, dumped the water down the drooling toilet and was heating up the meatloaf when Steven opened the back door.

"I think I've been hit by lightning," he said, in an odd high voice strung through with glass. Freshets of water ran from his clothes onto her brilliantly waxed floor, and he held his arm out to her. On the soft, white part, just below the elbow, was a red circle, covered with a bunch of soggy tissues. She reached out to brush them off but he screamed, "Don't! It's my skin, Marnie!" The fur on his arm was gone except for a few shriveled hairs that turned to ash as she watched.

"I told you not to go out in a storm," she said. "I warned you."

He looked at her strangely, not at all with his usual obsequious good humor.

"I think I died," he said, cradling his arm and rocking slowly forward and back. He still stood, dripping on her floor. His hair noodled down his face and into his eyes.

"You're just being melodramatic," she said, "Put those clothes in the bathroom. You're ruining the floor. How did you really burn your arm? Starbucks?"

"No," he said, "Something hit me. I fell flat on my back. I was looking up at the trees, the rain all but drowning me. I felt some part of me lift up out of my body, out of my eyes, but I could still see the house and Polly in her crib and you. You were waxing the floor."

It gave her a jolt when he said that. He never noticed anything in the house. It wasn't even a good guess because he had no clue that she ever cleaned the floors. He thought they stayed sanitary through sheer force of will. He thought shirts arrived from the Garden of Eden, freshly starched and lined up in his closet, clinking and jostling to be first in line. He hadn't graduated from magical thinking.

"There was a bright light. I know this sounds like everyone else's story, people who almost die, but it really happened. I was pulled along toward the light, and I could taste things in the air. Colors. I don't know. The further I went, the better I felt—light and free and warm, so warm. By God! It was fantastic! I didn't want to return, but I felt myself being dragged backward. I bumped into my body, and a squirrel was scrabbling onto me, trying to climb onto my face. Out of the wet."

"Well!" she said. "How's that for selfish? You'd have left me and Polly and Ronnie just to be warm and free? Nice! Where's your sense of responsibility?"

He looked at her with deep loathing. Something squirmed across his face and ran down into his collar.

"You're the selfish one," he said, "Wanting me to give that up."

He pushed past her, imprinting his wet clothes on her cotton sundress, went upstairs, and slammed the door to their bedroom.

He didn't unlock the door or come down again until he went out for tests the next morning. The doctors claimed he would be fine, except for possible blindness. That he would live to one hundred and tell his grandchildren the story of how he had been hit by lightning in his own backyard, but he still hadn't spoken to her when he died of a heart attack three days later. Silly man.

"Darling," he said, on a Friday afternoon, the first time he called, and she knew it was him from the way his tongue skipped the r. It was a lucid dream, deliciously, comfortably real. Not worrisome at all. "Have you paid the pool guy?"

"Why did you die?" she asked, floating pleasantly, bobbing in the late afternoon light, jetlagged and shell-shocked and tranquilized within an inch of her life.

"Heart attack," he said, "I thought you knew."

"No, no. What I meant was . . ." What had she meant? Why did you leave me? I've been so angry that you wimped out of life, went AWOL. I needed you.

"Are you all right? Is it nice there?"

"Oh, you're wondering about the three-square-meals, roof-over-your-head kind of thing. It's not like that," he said, "But I'm feeling wonderful, better all the time."

She didn't know what to say to that. She was feeling worse all the time. Every day dawning with a newer version of pain laid out for her to try on. Even though he hadn't been a fully satisfactory husband, she had been used to him and relied on his company and help with the children. And he'd had a regular paycheck, was punctual with the bills.

"Where are you calling from? I didn't think . . . I thought . . . what kind of phone is it?"

"British," he said immediately. "Red phone booth. Smells like cigars and wood with a bad case of dry rot. Heavy old-fashioned black receiver."

And since she was dreaming, she hadto be dreaming, she pictured Dr. Who, beset by Daleks, purling through infinite space in a red telephone box. She was still laughing her new psychopathic laugh when he hung up on her.

The calls came often after that, always late on Friday afternoon, and there were many times when she was not in a drugged torpor, or dozing on the couch, or in a suggestible mood brought on by the death of a thirty-seven-year-old husband, and the telephone bill made it quite impossible to suppress the belief that this wasn't some delusional coping method cooked up by her more officious neurons. It might be, it was, real.

He usually called her late in the afternoon, when she was on the couch, reading, Polly napping in her crib, Ronnie not yet home from school.

"So, how was your week?" he asked, as flat and disinterested as the asinine robot voice that had guided her through the flight arrival times in Israel. She wanted to say it had been hideous, horrible, the Grand Canyon of desperate weeks, but can you say that to a corpse?

"All right, I guess," she said. "Polly's cutting a tooth."

She'd been dreaming away her days, but once night fell, her bedroom filled with cats in heat, chanting "Now! Now! Nauwooo!" Their shrieking filled her ears; she was deaf to all but the lusting of invisible cats, and she certainly couldn't sleep. Polly had been hysterical when she finally went in to her, a glaze of snot over her entire face, shuddering and juddering and rigid with misery. "What's the matter, Polly Wolly?" she'd asked, lifting the baby out of her crib. But her daughter had stared at her as if she had turned into a fluorescent midnight Medusa, and screamed piercingly, striking at Marnie's face and clawing at her eyes. In the morning, there was a sliver of ivory glowing in Polly's swollen gum, and a two-inch scratch on her own eyelid.

"Mmm," he said, and he may as well have said "Who's that?" His memory was cotton candy, fairy floss, things melting at the edges, and poor Polly must have been at the edge, a newborn memory with too few sticky strands spun around her.

"Your youngest child. A girl," she said, prompting him. Steve had brought Polly to nurse at night. He'd massaged the infant with almond oil, tracing circles on her heels with his thumbs. He'd carried her everywhere, draped over one forearm, like a butler's towel. The room slid by sideways, the sun darting happy summertime spears into her eyes. Polly was the baby who had slept between them for three months and kept them apart. Close. Apart.

"So, how was your week?" he asked again, and then, before she had a chance to answer, she heard him talking to someone else, a woman. "Just a moment, madam." Was he talking to her? When had she become "madam"? Her husband, Steve, was softly pleading with another woman, a kind of moan in his voice, and, dear God, it made her heart race. Had the Arabs got it right and fifty virgins waited for a good man in paradise? Was he, even as he spoke to her, being massaged, fondled by some unearthly nymphet?

"Steve?" she called, clutching the phone and willing her auditory centers to amplify those bleached sounds of climactic urgency.

"Excuse me . . . I'm talking to my wife. Let go!"

She heard scuffling, rustling, a crescendo of sound and was picturing imminent ecstasy at the hands or mouth of someone remarkably like Shula, her husband's sexy assistant, the one she'd made him get rid of, when a smoker's voice, a voice plugged with gravel and clay, totally unfamiliar, came boiling down the line.

"Mommy!" it drawled, "I ran away and was killed. You don't have to keep on putting my pictures on the milk cartons. You don't . . ."

"I'm sorry," she said, "I'm not your mother. I have my own little children. I'm . . ." and for a moment she couldn't remember her name, and only the sound of her dead husband's voice, begging in the background—"Marnie! Marnie! Let go, you harpy! Let me speak to my wife!"—was capable of reminding her. "I'm Marnie Gottfried," she said, "From New Haven."

"I want my mommy!" the thing wailed. "How does this stupid phone work?" which was Marnie's own question. It might be like black holes, or the Bermuda triangle, or conception. Subject to theories but difficult to prove.

"What's your name?" she asked the murdered thing, whose voice pelted her ears with gobbets of red clay and tiny bullets of granite. "Can you remember your name?"

But the girl, the murdered one, bayed, and there was a noise of beating leathery wings, and that awful wolflike howl, drawn out endlessly and magnified over the line, and once, in the middle of it, she heard Steve croak "Marnie?" and then a new voice said, "Who is this? Are you God?" This was a streetwalker's voice, still chewing air gum, still with traces of mascara in it. Behind this voice, she could hear her husband remonstrating with the murdered girl, and then there was screaming, a catfight in paradise, and things were said that made her hair rise; her tail, if she'd had one, would have been a liatris. When she could no longer hear her husband's voice, she lay the telephone back in its plastic bed and sat in her floral Queen Anne chair, as still as a corpse, until the room was utterly shrouded in darkness.

A week later, he was calling again.

"So," he said, "How was your week?"

"What the hell was that?" she asked, still bruised from the howling.

"What?" he said like Ronnie caught stealing a freeze pop. Incredulous that you suspected him of wrongdoing.

"The harpy, the whore, I mean, who's in charge of room assignments?"

"The boss, of course."

"Oh," she said, nonplussed. "That makes sense." She could have kicked herself. Nothing made sense. Nothing. "Why do you always call me on Friday afternoon?"

"That's when they let us out."

And this truly silenced her. Out of where? She didn't like to think of the possibilities when she thought of the others who stood in line with him to use the telephone.

Ronnie plowed through the summer, not looking right or left, no longer loving Mrs. Brown, the camp director, no longer talking to his friends, ex-friends, because they couldn't understand the for-eign language that came out of his mouth. His father had died. They knew that, secretly imagined what it would be like if their own fathers disappeared from the dinner table, and some of them — the divorced kids—thought they knew what it felt like, thought they felt the same wound running from the top of their heads to the seat of their spines, splitting them in half; the operation performed with a dull bread knife, the sawing, the hacking unceasing until they were divided. Yeah. They thought they knew. And as they passed him, some of them blurted the things their parents had told them to say: "Sorry" and "Too bad" and "He was a nice man" and "Where did the lightning hit him?" But mostly he was ignored and that was just fine. He wanted to finish circle time and pinch potting and banana boating, turn in his projects and get graded on what kind of kid lets his father get killed. He wanted— more than anything—to lie in the earth and stare up at the sky until he drifted up there too. Until his insides leaked out and evaporated, became clouds and rain and lake and ocean and clouds again.

This was all written on his face, and his friends avoided him because of it, but when he came home, Marnie held his hands, hugged him, washed him with the rough washcloth, sat too close, touching, touching, not letting go.

"How was your day?" she asked. "Anything special happen?"

Her words ran over him like water, meaningless. He slung his backpack in the closet and went to sit in the Citroën. She wanted him to see a kiddie psychiatrist, a Virginia Axline, a therapist with a sandtray, where he could bury little coffins and drive little Citroëns round and round plastic pine trees and torpedo his mother with Playmobil bombs right where she stood mopping the floor.
The gym teacher from camp called—a morning call, a call she picked up callously, knowing it wasn't Steve—and asked if there was a history of seizures in the family.

"I'm talking petit mal here," he said, "Eyelids fluttering, spacing out momentarily. Sound familiar?"

"Why?" she said, scanning the outrageous bill from the telephone company, a bill she'd have to argue: Israeli hotel, Middle Eastern long distance calls, the Telephone of the Dead.

". . . Ronnie on the floor."

She'd missed what he was saying. "That's fine," she said, not caring, "He's fine. We're all fine. Thanks for your concern."

And she'd hung up thinking they were fine. They were alive. It was Steve who had the problem.

In her garden, the next morning, with pads like monstrous mushroom caps strapped to her knees, she sunk her hands as deeply as she could into the rotting soil. A thin root ran past her fingers, like an underground power cable, and when she blindly touched it, she received the smallest shock. It was a dandelion spearing down, obsessive in its desire to take over the earth. She encircled it, tightened her grip and yanked hard on it, downward. The weed listed beneath the earth and she crowed. That was what it was like to be a mole or a gopher or a vole. Powerful. Subversive.

The phone began ringing, a ringing that struck her like an atomic blast, the windows of her home blowing out in fountains of glittering, somersaulting glass, but when it stopped, when she stood up to remove the fungal extrusions from her knees, the house was standing, the windows staring placidly at the sky.

Her husband's Citroën was still parked underneath the pines, and she wondered where she'd left the key. It would be like her to have buried him with the key in his pocket, but she couldn't really remember. Shrouds don't have pockets, and the Chevra Kadisha had been adamant about protocol. No suits, no glasses, no notes from Ronnie, no teddy bear from Polly, no kisses, no flowers, no music, no mirrors.

She had found a letter in the top drawer of his desk marked: "To Be Opened in the Event of My Death" and, at first, it seemed like it had been written by another man. No mention was made of her or the children, or their rented house under the trees, or his job with the Whiffle Poofs, or any of it, and she thought the letter might have been written many years ago, before they'd had children, and he had forgotten to tell her about it. But the paper was the heavyweight Crane stuff she had bought him for their most recent anniversary, and the letter was dated the day before he'd died.

He had asked to be buried in the traditional way, the religious way, with the assistance of the Sacred Society, and he wanted to be buried in Israel. He had bought a plot for himself, and an officious little yid showed up with the paperwork. She thought the man probably lived in the freezer down at the morgue, but it turned out he'd recently spoken to Steve on the phone and taken his credit card number and was only doing his job, delivering the deed. "Such a young man. How sad," he said, as he handed her the manila envelope. Karka in Israel, which sounded like shit in Israel but meant land in Israel. A tiny plot indeed, in the stony heart of the world. There was a slip with telephone numbers, names, the El Al flight schedule for God's sake. Steve had it all organized.

They'd never been religious people. Or, at least, she hadn't. She was no longer sure about Steve. Certainly they'd gone to a cocktail party on Yom Kippur the previous year, eaten treif in dozens of places. And now he wanted to be buried in Israel?

But she'd done it all. Followed his plans to the letter. Schlepped the casket to Israel on the plane, sneaked in at night to polish the simple wooden box with lemon oil—only to see the anachronistic shtetl Jews in their black polyester shtetl suits pry off the lid, lift out Steve, and lower his linen-swathed body into the crater. She had really cried then, seeing the Jerusalem rock pitched down onto his unprotected head, the ants already on the march, men from Invasion of the Body Snatchers rattling on in Hebrew. A heavily bearded woman had approached her and then muscularly ripped the collar off her best suit.

So the keys probably weren't in Steve's pocket.

In one of his first calls, she'd asked him why he wanted the religious funeral, but he hadn't answered. It mattered to her, though. She wanted to know.

"Steve," she said, "I had to go to Israel. My God! It's a third-world country. Always blowing themselves up. Polly and Ronnie stayed with Mom. What were you thinking?"

"Thank you," he said, "It's a relief."

"What is?" she said, almost screaming, almost scratching her eyes out.

"Being in the earth," he said, and she heard the dull clunk of the rock hitting his skull. "It's freeing."

"Oh, freedom," she said, "That's all you care about. You don't care two hoots for your family. It's all about you. That lightning blew your fuses."

"No. That's not it. The less there is of me there . . ." he said, slowly, thinking it out as he said it, her throat closing as she realized he was using "there" for the world, her world, her life, ". . . the more there is of me here."

And where was here, exactly, besides a British telephone booth that was definitely somebody's idea of a funny joke?

"The worms and the beetles and the ants, they're important; they nibble through what connects the soul to the body. Like being tickled. Like picking off a scab. It feels good."

She walked into Polly's room and stared at her daughter, wetly sucking her thumb in a real heaven. She held onto the edge of the crib and waved the telephone at the unhappy crawling things that swarmed from the walls. A different time, on a day when she felt stronger, she asked Steve about cremation, the designer label of being less in this world, and he choked. Gagged on her words.

"Don't!" he said. "It's murder," and he abruptly hung up.

He was a weak man, the kind to kowtow to anyone, bow down and lick the boots of the oppressor just for personal advancement, just to get ahead, and it revolted her. When they'd first come to New Haven, before they had children, he'd taken her downtown to see the Yale campus. It was a summer evening, and as they walked along, peering into the frivolous shops and admiring the very Englishness of it all, she'd felt she might be able to love him. She could force it out of herself, like a bowel movement.

Her mother's succession of flaccid husbands appalled her, convinced her that Steve wasn't so bad. That he must be lovable, if only for the way his hair became transparent when it was wet, a quirk that had entirely charmed her when they were dating.

But then they'd turned down an arcade, and a man—a security guard, she thought—ran up behind them and pushed them along, his hands on the small of their backs. "Sorry folks," he said, "I'm real sorry about this." He made them sit on steps at the blind end of the arcade, and she saw he was holding a long serrated knife, and his eyes glowed and spun like marbles, and he shook from head to toe with something she couldn't identify. This man, this criminal, was wearing a bright Hawaiian shirt and red high tops. "I'd hate to cut you," he said, as if he meant it, and she stood up then, behind Steve, ready to run or kick or bite or whatever was necessary to survive. Her husband's knees, she saw, were bludgeoning each other, his skin was the color of canvas.

"I need a fix, man, they're killing me here. They shut down all the hospitals. No one gives me a chance."

Steve had seven hundred dollars in cash to pay the movers, and it was a fortune to them then, but what the hell. Give the guy the money, she almost shouted. Almost kicked Steve in the back to get him moving. She wanted to get home in one piece, all her limbs attached. Steve took out his wallet and glanced inside at the thick bundle of twenties.

"I've got a twenty," he mewled, "but I need a ten for the baby-sitter. Will you take a ten?"

The man sighed and lowered his knife. "Damn it," he said, "I always get the Jews."

He took the ten and walked quickly away, and her husband, the man who had been playing with their lives, turned and vomited on her shoes.

"You know," he said, the next time he called, a humid afternoon full of greenflies and the shouts of children out of camp, "if you'd do something for me, I wouldn't be stuck here with little Lolita and a bunch of anal anesthesiologists. Flotsam."

She was probably flotsam. Or maybe it was jetsam. She could never tell which was which. Or maybe she was ballast. The heavy bottom of things.

"Pardon?" she said, "I thought you were beyond help at this point."

She laughed, the mirth of the anchor chain as it is borne down into the depths of the sea.

"Not at all. The scuttlebutt around here is that you can get pretty decent accommodations if you suck up to the boss. Shmear him a little. What say you light the Shabbos candles. For me."

Her mind boggled at the thought of shmearing God. Slipping Him a little bribe on the side. This really had to be a prank devised by some evil bastard down at the Whiffle Poofs. Or maybe it was those Skull and Bones boys.

"Marnie," he said, "Are you still there?"

"What?" she said. Religious coercion direct from heaven or hell or wherever it is that dead people hang out. It was unbelievable. Despite his sadly depleted state, he was still forging ahead with his pathetic plans for advancement.

On hot summer days, driving home from work, Steve used to wind up the windows and turn on the ancient heating system in the Citroën. He wore three sweaters and two scarves, a woolen balaclava, and a pair of rubber gardening gloves, and by the time he got home, his skin would be a bright, slippery purple, like the underside of a tongue. They had a claw-foot tub in the cellar, with a hose from outside hanging through the jalousie, cold water only. After parking the car under the pines, he'd come tearing through the house and launch himself into the tub. There'd be screams from downstairs as the water hit his skin, and eventually yodeling. "Great sauna," was what he always said to her when he came upstairs wrapped in a towel. "It's incredibly healthy for you. You should try it someday."

At the yoga class he'd given her for her birthday, when she was supposed to be emptying her mind of distracting thoughts, she secretly pictured what would happen to him if he was stopped by the police dressed in his woollies and his gardening gloves, the heater blazing. She'd willed it to happen, pictured it so solidly that it seemed inevitable that he'd be pulled over and wind up in jail for at least a night. Get the Breathalyzer test. A cavity search. And the police officers would look at her with pity when she came to bail him out in the morning and hand her the rubber gloves.

"How did you call me?" she asked Steve for what felt like the hundredth time. "What is it that you say to the operator?"

She rubbed her thighs, warmed her hands in her armpits. Lately, she could never get warm. Some vital internal engine had turned off. She pinned the phone to her ear with her shoulder and blew on her hands.

"I already told you," he said. "I ask the operator to put me through to my wife. That's all. Listen. Are you going to light the candles? It has to be before sunset. None of that after dark malarkey."

"Who is Ronnie?" she asked. "Who is Polly?" She paused, blew a single smoky breath into the ice-cold air. "Who is Marnie?"

There was a silence at the other end, and the wind strummed the invisible telephone lines, plucking a deep B-flat that sung through the phone and sussurated in the marrow of her collarbone.

"My wife?" he guessed, his brain gone porous, licked down to the stick, freeing itself a little more each day.

"Oh, Steve," she said, "Yes. Your wife. And your children." It was like being married to a victim of Alzheimer's who was locked up in some prestigious Long Island facility, making furtive phone calls when the staff wasn't looking.

"You'll do it?" he asked, still puffing around his version of the fast track.

"I don't know. Maybe," she said. "Listen, Steve. I'm just not into all that claptrap."

He began to give her the telephone number of the local Chabad House, where she could pick up a brochure of candle lighting times, and she felt her fingers tightening into talons around the receiver.

"No!" she shouted, louder than she'd intended. "Forget it. I'm not doing it."

There was a hiccup and then, loud and clear down the line, the sound of Steve crying.

"You don't really love me. You never loved me. If you did, you'd light the damned candles and get me out of this armpit."

It reminded her of when he begged for oral sex. "If you really loved me," he'd whined, "you'd swallow." But he'd cried then too. It was the usual way he gave her a guilt trip, to get her to do what he wanted.

"Oh, stop it," she said. "I'll think about it."

It was ghastly: a shade, a spirit, a dybbuk telling her what to do but offering nothing in return. So utterly selfish. It shocked her (although after the telephone booth nothing would ever truly shock her in all her long life) that the World-to-Come could be so base, so craven. And what was the deal with the telephone? A backdoor business line? They call out for pizza when the staff goes on strike? They call the riot police when the harpy goes canine?

She'd received calls now from Steve at Ronnie's camp and once at the gym and once when she was visiting her mother in Boston, so she knew that the simple request "Put me through to my wife" would connect them, wherever she was. Or he was. It was maddening. She'd never wanted a cell phone, that degree of connectedness feeling like an invasion. And yet, here was her husband, ex-husband, whatever, trailing her through the woods of her life like a bloodhound.

One particularly hot Friday afternoon, as she lay on the couch, idling, there was a miserable thunk, the lights went out, and the air conditioner stopped working. She went down to the basement to reset the circuit breaker and it was there, in the darkness, that she knew what was amiss. The power had been cut off. An image of the last five checks she'd written swam in front of her eyes, checks she didn't have the money to cover. Sweat crept down her back like an insect. Unless she got a job, she and Polly and Ronnie would soon be on a cat food diet. "Ronnie?" she called, climbing the stairs. "Polly? Who wants to go to Grandma's?" She found Polly asleep in her crib, splayed out like a starfish, but Ron didn't answer. "Ron? Ronnie?" she called, as she walked through the house, horribly aware that she had no idea where Ronnie had been for the past six hours. Since breakfast, in fact. Some mother.

She searched through the garden and the mildewed apple trees along the back fence. This is what desperation feels like, she thought. Mounting desperation. She glanced at the Citroën, still parked under the pine trees after its last unlucky trip. The windows were fogged up, a lopsided heart and "Daddy" scrawled across the windshield. Ronnie was in the car, slumped on the driver's seat, wearing his father's sauna clothes; the thick woolen sweaters, the scarves, the balaclava, even the gardening gloves. He looked like a potato she'd once exploded in the microwave, his mouth open and foam on his lips. "Ronnie," she said, gently shaking his arm. "Wake up."

The car was incredibly hot and moist. She pulled his arm harder, and when he still didn't move, slapped him on the backside. "Get going, Ronnie. I've wasted enough time looking for you already. I'm not going to stand here all day."

A humid breath stirred the pines and raised the hair on the back of her neck. "Ronnie?" she said again. The little boy had the keys to the Citroën in his hand, and she pulled them away from him, taking in the slow slide of his rubbery arm to the floor of the Citroën before moaning "Oh God, no." She shoved him over to the passenger seat and got in, started the car and revved the engine. "Not Ronnie. God damn you, Steve." At every red light, she leaned over and squeezed the little foot that had somehow gotten hooked up on the ashtray. He was breathing. "I'll get you there, honey. You're going to make it."

It was only when the policewoman was asking her yet again how Ronnie had come to be parboiled in a car, how he hadn't been noticed for so many hours, and why it was, exactly, that he was wearing all those heavy clothes, that she remembered another important thing she had forgotten: Polly, at home in her crib. "Excuse me," she said to the policewoman, who eyed her as if she was something that fell out of a vacuum cleaner bag. "I'm just going to dash home and pick up some pajamas." When the woman made a move as if to stop her, she added, "For Ronnie." The woman nodded but said, "If you're not back in twenty minutes, I'll have to issue a warrant for your arrest."

"Do you think it was deliberate?" Marnie wailed. "That I'm an abusive mother?" The policewoman stared at her and said nothing. Dear God, what would happen if she found out about Polly?

The phone was ringing as she pulled up under the pines, and she ran to answer it, afraid it was bad news about Ronnie, but it was only Steve.

"So," he said. "How was your week?"

"You bastard!" she screamed. "You couldn't call and tell me about Ronnie?"

"Ronnie?" he said, and she let the last good memory of her husband go, felt it slide out of her like his semen.

"Your son. Look. I'm too busy to talk right now. I've got to get back to the hospital."

There wasn't a sound from Polly's room. She had a premonition that the baby had died in her crib. She pictured the little girl strangled in the Mickey Mouse bumpers; smothered, face down, in her own vomit; her head caught between the bars of the crib. The silence chattered demonically at her nerves. But Polly was still sleeping, thumb in her mouth, a ring of mustard yellow baby poo on the leg of her onesie. It was oddly annoying to find her alive.

"I'm just checking," Steve said. "You have the candles, right?"

"I don't want you to call me anymore. I want you to stop this. It's abusive, it's . . . just leave me alone. Okay, Steve? Please. You have no idea what I'm going through."

"Did you speak to the rabbi yet?"

"Steve. Stop. Your son, Ronnie, is in the hospital right now. He's badly dehydrated, unconscious. I really have to go."

The house smelled like rotting flowers, like pseudomonas. The flowers that people had sent after she returned from Israel were still on every surface in their cheap florists' vases. Dead. That was the stink. The flowers were all dead.

"You're not going to drive to the hospital on the Sabbath are you?"

She came close then to using a word she had avoided her entire life. She could taste it on her tongue like a piece of wasabi, bringing the water to her eyes.

The next morning, she woke, blinking against the staleness of Ronnie's hospital room and the fug of Polly's breath on her face, hearing Steve's voice whispering over and over, like a dog snuffling at her heels, "Put me through to my wife. Put me through to my wife." Her brain stalled but then started with a roar. He was able to connect with her only by asking for his wife. She watched several cute young doctors and a gentle-faced middle-aged man walk by. Suddenly, they all looked like possibilities. Ways to get away from Steve. She inquired of a passing nurse if there was Internet access available for the patients, left Polly in the reclining chair they'd slept in, and trotted down the hall in her fluffy slippers. In the patients' lounge, she turned on one of the computers. The screen flickered, green letters sprinting across the abyss. She swiveled her chair to face the screen, typed in online dating services, and pressed Search.

Marnie guiltily read every one of the Happy Endings, peering at the faces of the men to see if they looked as if they might have a job with the Whiffle Poofs. If they might have been barbecued under some pine trees on a hot summer day. None of them did. They looked cool and scrubbed, like new cars in a dealership, still smelling faintly of plastic.

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Fall 2010)

Women and the Global Imagination: The Center of the Universe

Prairie Schooner — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 21:33:47 +0000

by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

In our Winter 2014 issue Alicia Ostriker curated a poetry portfolio on Women and the Global Imagination, and we were so struck by its contents that we wanted to keep the dialog surronding this theme going on our blog. In her essay, Nancy Jooyoun Kim explores the experience of being a writer who is often derided by peers for not being universal enough. We hope you enjoy reading. To read more on this theme, visit our blog and buy or Winter 2014 issue (print or ebook). To take part in the dialog, follow and interact with us on Twitter.

Language has a kind of violence, and this includes both what is and what is not said. That violence lives in prepositions, definite and indefinite articles, periods and question marks. That violence may be ugly or beautiful, calm or enraged.

As a female writer of color who’s been through the literary and institutional gauntlet (MFA program, a steady nine to five job, crawling-in-the-mud experiences as both a writer and editor), I often think about how I would be or would not be “talked to” if I were a man, if I were white, or even if I had grown up middle class.

Notice the words “talked to” and not “talked with.”

That is exactly what happens when the white male classmate claims to know more about me, my story and my cultural and economic experience than I, the person who lives with it, who wakes up to it every single day. “Actually, I don’t think most Koreans think like that,” he says. He claims to be both more Asian and more American (he means more knowledgeable) than me. So, what does his “more” leave me with? A constant feeling of less.

How can I be more less than what I actually am? And who defines what I know or don’t know about myself, what’s particular to me and what’s universal to the world? Why is the story of the middle-class, educated couple falling apart considered to be more universal than mine—the story of the daughter of immigrants who speaks a different language from her mother, the story of people who work all their lives, tirelessly and intelligently, yet continue to be poor?

Not once have I heard anyone question the universality of a story about the middle-class, educated, white couple falling apart, trying to put themselves together by choosing what kind of tiles they want for the floor. People might ding that story for not enough character development, or plot, or just plain sloppy language, but I have never once heard a story of that ilk criticized for not being relatable enough.

My story has never been enough, and I have always had to work to imagine the more “universal” story instead of my own. (I’ve never chosen tiles before and, no, I’ve never fallen for a bullfighter in Spain, Ernest Hemingway.)

All those great writers have been successful in teaching me to think how they think, but I’ve never had the privilege of living how they live, without the daily consciousness of racism or sexism or homophobia, without the constant accusation of being “too political.” But everything is political, and our deepest problems stem from all the politics that live underground, unseen. If expatriation, the New Woman, anti-Semitism, and masculinity in Hemingway manages to be “universal,” why does the woman who writes about her experiences as a lesbian in a heterosexist world happen to be “too political,” “too pointed,” “too specific,” belonging only on a certain bookshelf in the dark corner of the store, “not universal enough?”

When everyone, and every classroom, reads the story of an Asian American woman in a denim factory, of a transgender couple falling out of love, of a black artist who has a complicated relationship with studying at the Sorbonne, of an undocumented immigrant who wants to be a podiatrist, as not just anthropological or just ethnographic or “too political,” the idea of a center might just collapse. Floating through it, we might find a way for all of us to actually exist. And that is human.

Born and raised in LA, Nancy Jooyoun Kim is a graduate of UCLA and the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington, Seattle. She’s a former managing editor of The Seattle Review, blogger for The Kenyon Review and nonfiction editor of The James Franco Review. She now lives in the SF Bay Area, where she's working on a novel and personal essays.

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