Monthly Update: September 2024
Life, Writing, Reading
Life
August was a full month for me: running the MFA residency (July 30–August 11), celebrating several birthdays, including my own, my 14th wedding anniversary, a camping trip to Lopez Island (see photo above!) and the restart of the school year for my wife (elementary PE teacher) and middle-born son (first week of kindergarten now complete).
At the residency, the staff and interns (5 of us total) performed a skit which we had put together in 24 hours. All week, we had been wondering what to do at the end-of-residency talent show, which we call “Live from Ithaka” (formerly called “The Poetry Contest”). Suddenly, the day before, my coworker and I thought—what if we rewrote a scene from Shakespeare’s King Lear and performed it? King Lear was one of the common readings for the residency, so everyone would be familiar with it. We hastily typed out the scene (the eye-gouging scene; Act 3, Scene 7), then replaced many words with blanks—we were creating a Mad Lib version. We asked students and faculty for about 80 words, then we filled in the script. On Friday, we did a read-through, changing stage directions and lines as needed. We lacked appropriate props, so we wrote words on pieces of paper, and paused the action to show them to the audience. To our delight, the front rows read the words aloud so all could hear. Instead of eye-gouging, our Cornwall plucked the toes of Gloucester (me). When one of the servants was killed, we held up a piece of paper that read “Dead.” But we needed another servant. So the flip side of the paper read “Alive,” and that way she could be revived to speak again at the end of the scene. The performance went very well; laughter was constant, rising and falling like waves on a beach. Yet many confessed afterward (or upon watching the video of it later): “I really had no idea what was going on, but it was fun to watch.” It was even funner to create and perform.
Writing
Amid all the busyness of this last month, I have somehow had the headspace to return to writing poems, writing on average a poem per day. I received a new journal for my birthday, and its blank pages are like invitations to creative discovery. I have written poems about biblical characters (what if Goliath had killed David? What was the apostle Paul thinking about before his death? How else could Jonah’s story have gone?). I have written poems in response to other poems. I have written poems about observations and experiences, like falling asleep while writing a poem.
As I write, I am paying more attention to meter. Iambic tetrameter and pentameter seems to be my default line rhythm, and it is satisfying to write lines that way. When I get stuck on a line—what should I write next?—I hum the meter and, in time, words come to mind that fit the pattern (and provide a delightful direction for the poem). I’ve been reading a lot of Shakespeare plays this year, and that has probably tuned my ear to the 5-beat line.
Reading
Here are brief reviews of some of my favorite books I read in August.
Fiction
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars
I read Adjei-Brenyah’s short story collection, Friday Black, after receiving it in an MFA alumni book exchange a few years ago. I was excited to hear about his latest novel, and finally got around to reading it (well, audiobooking it). The premise: death-row inmates are given the choice to participate in gladiatorial combat, for which they receive fame, perks, and, if they survive several years of mortal combat, their freedom. These “hard action sports” are heavily televised, not unlike other professional sports today, particularly American football. While the setting of the story lends itself to action, the true story is one of love, of relationships, of dignity and humanity in the face of cruelty. In some respects, it reads like the Hunger Games, a critique of the American obsession with sports, competition, and violence. But unlike The Hunger Games, this is set in our era, only a few years in the future. The novel follows several characters as they reckon with the American justice system, capitalism, incarceration, and how one finds hope, love, and dignity. Here’s a quote that reminded me of what I wrote in an earlier post about eternity and recognition. Loretta Thurwar, one of the combatants (and just a battle or two away from freedom) is talking with Doc Patty, one of the doctors on the circuit.
Doc: “And if you can, you should look back to those people you have been, those people got you crying over yaself each night, and remember they some ones that need love too. Ya understand me?”
Thurwar did not understand then. She felt so alone, so completely removed from any kind of good. … “She’s a killer,” Thurwar said. “That me, she killed my favorite person. I don’t love her, and I shouldn’t.”
“And I’m telling you, you have to, my friend. Loretta. And that li’l baby girl that came before the person you crying over so much. Love her too. Love all the way through it. I learned that’s the only way.”
…
Doc: “I learned a long time ago. On this one thing you don’t negotiate. You love through all the people you’ve been and hope you have a chance at being better. … What I’m telling you is you can curse yourself to the moon and back and what will it have you feeling like? But try to look at yourself and say ‘I love you’ and see what happens” (345–346).
James McBride, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
I’ve seen so many people recommending this book since it came out last year. As with Adjei-Brenyah’s book, I finally got to it. This book is set in the twentieth-century in a town in Pennsylvania. The narrative takes up the threads of several different characters, showing how the whole community of Jews, Blacks, and immigrants (and one white doctor) are interrelated, how they care (or don’t) for each other, and the consequences for their actions. The story is infused with minor details and tangents that seem unimportant at first, but which play a huge role at other points in the novel. There is death, there is life. There is kindness and cruelty. There are plot twists. The story can seem slow at first (every story beat, every detail has a backstory which needs to be told), but it crescendoes toward the ending, drawing many threads together. I, too, recommend this novel.
Non-Fiction
Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us
Last year, I read Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, my favorite book ever about dinosaurs. This month, I read Brusatte’s follow-up book on mammals. From pre-dinosaur times to today, Brusatte covers it all. I audiobooked this, but in the print edition, there are beautiful illustrations of mammals and bone structures and fossils, etc. Fun fact: do you know the physical feature that distinguishes mammals from non-mammals? It’s not lactation, it’s not live birth, it’s not warm-blooded. It has to do with our jaws. Mammals have jaws that can freely move around, which aids in our chewing, biting, grinding, and gnawing. Learn more fun facts by reading this book!
Jericho Brown, editor. How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill
Jericho Brown was a guest poet at one of the MFA residencies when I was a student. He has a fun stage presence, a dynamic reading (and singing) voice, and is an amazing poet. (At the residency, I sheepishly asked him if it was okay that I had two books for him to sign—I didn’t want to hold up the line. He responded, with a huge smile on his face, “You can buy as many copies of my books as you want to, and I will gladly sign them!”) This book of essays by various authors is not just for Black writers, but for anyone who wants to improve their writing craft and consider how their race/ethnicity/culture relates to their work. I audiobooked this collection, but am eager to get a print copy to reread the essays that stood out to me most.
Drama
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
I saw this play performed by a high school program many years ago, but never read the play until now. It’s whimsical, weird, and wonderful. With Hippolyta one might say:
This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.
Poetry
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
This 2024 translation by Mark S. Burrows is wonderful. The book is a bilingual edition, so the original German is on one side, English on the other. Rilke wrote all these sonnets in a few weeks while he was working on another large poetry project, The Duino Elegies (two of the elegies, also translated by Burrows, are included in the book). This is from part 1, sonnet 12:
Even if the farmer worries and works,
he never reaches the place where seed transforms
itself into summer. The Earth gifts.
Scott Cairns, Anaphora
It feels a little weird to praise this book, since Scott is my boss. (I don’t think he subscribes, so we don’t need to think of this as sucking up.) Cairns’ poetry was some of the first I read when I was considering the MFA program in 2018, when I was still discerning between poetry and fiction. Many of his poems are about spiritual humility, about letting go of our presumptions and preferences, descending into the heart to a place of uncertainty and of faith. He is ever conversant with saints of the past, particularly Isaac the Syrian (see, in particular, Cairns’ collection Idiot Psalms). In Anaphora, Cairns continues this practice. In poetry, “anaphora” is used to describe repetition at the beginning of successive lines. But in Christian liturgy, “anaphora” refers to the moment in the Eucharist when the bread and wine are consecrated. In Cairns’ collection, both senses are in play. Here are some stanzas from the poem “Late Sayings”:
Blessed as well are the wounded but nonetheless kind,
for they shall observe their own mending.Blessed are those who do not presume,
for they shall be surprised at every turn.Blessed moreover are those who refuse to judge,
for they shall forget their own most grave transgressions.
Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems
This is the Penguin edition, translated by James Greene. Mandelstam’s poetry is, in the best sense of the word, startling. It is full of surprises, sometimes delightful, sometimes sorrowful. These lines are from “Whoever finds a horseshoe”:
Where shall we begin?
Everything pitches and splits,
The air quivers with comparisons,
No one word is better than another,
The earth hums with metaphors.
Currently Reading
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
I audiobooked this several years ago and immediately bought myself a physical copy. I used it for part of my writing class last year (the theme was “wisdom”). This year, I am using this book as the primary text. The class is a Gen-Ed writing course (“welcome to college, here’s how to critically read and write in an academic context”), so the main focus of the class is on writing, critical thinking, process, etc. But students need something to write about—so that something this year will be Indigenous ecology, using Kimmerer’s book as the primary text, with some supplementary readings as well. In this book, Kimmerer uses story and Indigenous ways of knowing to demonstrate what plants (and animals) can teach us humans about how to live in kinship with the natural world. As a trained botanist, she doesn’t reject Western science, but argues that it should be wedded to Indigenous knowledge so that both can be strengthened as we learn more about and care for our world. Here is one of her many metaphors, from the chapter “Asters and Goldenrod”:
Why are they [asters and goldenrod] beautiful together? It is a phenomenon simultaneously material and spiritual, for which we need all wavelengths, for which we need depth perception. When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge. Might science and traditional knowledge be purple and yellow to one another, might they be goldenrod and asters? We see the world more fully when we use both (46).
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