Archive by Mario Alberto Zambrano
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The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier

 

What if you broke your arm and a shaft of light came shooting out of your elbow? Or if your boyfriend left you and your chest glowed with brilliant radiance–the pain could be an illumination.

So is the basis of Kevin Brockmeier’s new novel The Illumination. He takes the most tragic of human condition, both emotional and physical, and gives it beauty that never ceases to reveal new interpretations of pain. A woman cuts her thumb and a sword of light shoots out of the wound; a young boy’s bum has a lit up square-edged mark from a paddle spanking; a girl’s skeleton swells white as disease rushes through her bones. Though written with lyrical and beautiful phrases, there is no uplift in this theme that one would normally ascribe with radiance, not in the figurative sense anyway. It has more to do with tenderness. In one scene, after a young Chuck Carter is beaten by fellow classmates, Mr. Brockmeier describes the episode: “For a few seconds, the light poured out like water. It hurt just a little too much to be beautiful.”

The six characters that are protagonists to each of their stories (a data analyst; a photojournalist; a schoolchild; a missionary; a writer; a street vendor) are all at a loss–not only from what is obvious, but from what is underneath them, emotionally and psychologically–and where there is injury, there is light. It’s a global phenomenon. One wonders if Mr. Brockmeier’s intention is to illicit a kind of empathy for those in pain, especially from members of the ‘fend-for-yourself’ culture. Would the immediacy of being able to witness pain invite more compassion?  Perhaps, if you were to cross the street and see someone’s arthritic knees spark like a disco ball, you might be inclined to help him.

It isn’t just The Illumination that threads these six narratives; there is also a journal, a love diary: I love sitting outside on a blanket with you, my bare foot brushing against yours. I love how embarrassing you find your middle name. I love how irritated you get at smiley face icons, or, as I know you love to call them, “emoticons.” I love seeing your body turn into mosaic through the frosted glass of a hotel shower. The diary is comprised of reasons why a husband loves his wife. But they get into a car accident. Carol Anne, one of the protagonists, shares a hospital room with the wife for whom the journal is written. The wife, before she dies, gives the diary to Carol Anne, and from one story to the next, the journal ventures on its own journey, coming across characters that find themselves touched by the emotional radiance it reveals.

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Archive by Liz Axelrod
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Mark Nowak Interview

Rebecca Melnyk, 12th Street Journal’s Poetry Editor read Mark Nowak’s work in Modern American Poetry class and was impressed with his experimentation. When she brought him to us as a potential interview, we agreed. Mark Nowak perfectly highlights our vision of Writing and Democracy and the writer’s place in the world.  His latest book Coal Mountain Elementary gives recognition and voice to downtrodden workers.  His work fuses poetry, prose, photography, film and music into a fascinating hybrid that provides a window into the struggles of the common worker. His unique views demand attention and raise consciousness and conversation up from the level of human experience – bypassing the gloss of mass communication. We hope you’ll enjoy and be enlightened by our latest 12th Street Online interview feature.  – Liz Axelrod, Editor-In-Chief

12th Street Online: You’ve said that when you began writing poetry, you were fueled by music. Does music still play a large part in what you write?

Mark Nowak: I first came to art-making as an electronic musician in Buffalo, NY in the early- to mid-1980s. The first band, Aufbau Principle (or Aufbau—German for construction or building-up) was a two-person group that I formed with a fellow undergrad student—we dreamed of being a U.S. version of Kraftwerk. We were living in a city that was absolutely, and sometimes literally, collapsing around our us. And that music was our soundtrack during that time. The second, a three-person group called People Have Names, tried to fuse that German krautrock tradition with early 1980s electronic and industrial music—Cabaret Voltaire, the Factory Records releases from Manchester, the Wax Trax records from Chicago, etc. Even my MFA thesis at Bowling Green in the late 1980s was (very bad!) a four-track cassette recording of a completely sampled, chance-generated text called Factors Other Than Frequency. Today, I still tend to think and create less like a poet and more like a musician at a multi-track recording system. Most of my work is composed of multiple voices mixed on separate tracks, all fused or articulated into one final artwork that might include testimony on one track, newspaper reports on another, photographs on a third, and rules of capitalization or pro-coal curriculum on another.

12th: Do you spend a lot of time editing what you write?

MN: The way I work is probably more time consuming at the research and construction stages than at the editing stage. I’ll spend literally hundreds and hundreds of hours researching—sometimes for projects that never see the light of day, like the year where I spent almost every day at the microfilm machines at the Minnesota Historical Society researching the I.W.W. led strike against U.S. Steel by iron miners in Minnesota’s iron range. Likewise with Coal Mountain Elementary, where I had to read and re-read more than 6,300 pages of testimony with miners and mine rescue team members at Sago, West Virginia, in order to locate just one of the voices in that book. I also spend a good deal of time, once that research is completed, working and reworking the construction or framework of the piece—usually on either an Excel spreadsheet or Microsoft Word table. Those spreadsheets or tables allow me to create an almost musical score or orchestration for the piece as whole; they allow me to see the overarching patterns and timings in the voices or tracks. Then, there are adjustments, changes… maybe that’s where “editing” comes in.

12th: In Shut-Up Shut Down many of your poems are based in recorded observations. In some of the poems, the prose unravels into disjunctive rhythm—is there something specific you are communicating? Is that the way these people sound to you?

MN: The form I was experimenting with most in Shut Up was the haibun, a form in which a prose block is followed by the haiku. Basho, of course, was the master of the form. And Fred Wah, a writer from Canada whose work I admire, brought the form back in ways I found to be quite innovative in his fabulous book Waiting For Saskatchewan. So, no, it wasn’t representative of how people sound but rather of the effects of neoliberalism and globalization on the manufacturing sector in the States in the 1980s (and in the new millennium in the final piece, “Hoyt Lakes Shut Down”). I was trying to capture that fracturing, that collapse, that disintegration of industry and community and self that I had been a witness to in Buffalo and Toledo and Detroit and the Iron Range, i.e., the “rust belt.”

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Archive by Liz Axelrod
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Light and Language in True Grit

True Grit –  by Mario A. Zambrano

There might be a better reason why I was impressed after seeing True Grit, the latest Coen film, other than that it was a film masterfully put together; from soundtrack to dialog to cinematography. I didn’t watch Westerns growing up, even with the insistent coaxing from my father. It wasn’t in my interest to watch cowboys ride horses and spit tobacco while abusing Indians making them out as if they were lesser than the horses they rode. John Wayne was mentioned more than a dozen times, and there was a particular tune my father would sing when he’d feel he’d performed some heroic deed. If I tried to sing it now it’d sound like the opening track to an Indiana Jones flick, but if I heard the melody I’d recognize it and be half-certain that a man was nearby with his chest filled with pride because of some stunt he’d performed to make him feel like John Wayne.

I’m not sure why I agreed to see True Grit, if it was because I was on vacation at home in Houston during the holidays⎯meaning that days are spent mostly making meals and waiting to see what my parents would like to do⎯or if it was because I’d heard hype about Jeff Bridges’ lead performance. I didn’t know at the time that this new adaptation, inspired by the novel by Charles Portis, had already been made into a film in 1969 with John Wayne himself, whom won an Academy Award for his role as Rooster Cogburn. I have my father to thank for letting me know. As the movie began, he leaned over to me and said, “Let’s see if this is as good as the original.”

Before an image is revealed, a track played, the movie begins with a young girl’s voice, prim and strong-willed, and a faint golden light slowly illuminating at the center of the screen. Mattie, the young girl, tells the story of how her father was killed, who killed him, and her plans for finding the man so that justice prevails. She finds the U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn, a drunk, one-eyed official known for his easy hand in shooting criminals, and offers him fifty dollars to find the man that killed her father. He hesitates at first, shocked and amused at the fourteen-year old’s insistent proposition, but finally accepts.

As I reflect on the film I realize that there are different kinds of films for different kinds of interest. If one wants to be wowed with the latest technological feats and cinematic effects then one could choose a film like Transformers or Harry Potter to sit back and be bedazzled. But if one prefers character and dialog then there are recent films like The Social Network and The Kids Are All Right to satisfy the itch. True Grit is one of those films.

There is a scene where Mattie haggles with a vendor trying to sell back a few ponies that her father had bought before he died. She’s only fourteen, and yet her wit and brilliance pierces the scene like a shaft of light in a dark tunnel, the way she handles the language is sharp and acerbic. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of loss for vocabulary and conversation, something that has gotten loose and easy over the years, especially amongst our teenagers. I was sitting atop a moment of irony: the most impressive highlight of the scene was the speed of mind and eloquence of rhetoric, yet there were no interchangeable vehicles or sweeping visual effects that could turn a human into a mongoose, and make it seem ‘real’. And there I was in a theater with a TMX sound system next to a young woman who a few minutes earlier had chanted with her husband such sophisticated phrases like, “OMG,” “For real?,” “She is so not right.”

What’s happened to our language? Was a Western film really impressing me on the grounds of verbal skills in a way that I thought could only be done in an English novel? Yes, it was. The Coen brothers, who wrote and directed the film, were doing a fantastic job in transcending me to a literary experience not commonly felt in blockbuster hits.

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Archive by Jeff Vasishta
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Thrill Ride

Twenty-three years had passed since I spent a summer in my hometown of Gorleston-On-Sea, a quaint, soporific seaside town on the bucolic Norfolk coast in southeast England. My last summer there was on the eve of my nineteenth birthday. I was about to move to London to attend university and finally snip the apron strings that tied me to my comfortable, rural middle class upbringing. Now, as a parent with two young daughters of my own, I felt they should experience what I had taken for granted in my youth. I wanted them to trade the muggy, congested, dusty streets of New York for the tranquil, salty air and rolling green cliffs of England. Any other parent who had the chance would do the same.

So under a cloudless blue sky and gentle breeze, a few days into my trip, I went on one of my customary morning runs on the expansive golden beach, which was about a thousand yards from my mom’s house. About halfway through, as the endorphins kicked in, soaked in sun and sweat, I felt a beautiful, spacey high. The blur of thirty years vanished, and I couldn’t distinguish the timeline between being eleven and forty-one. It didn’t really matter. The surrounding smells and feelings were so familiar. I completed the run quickly, hardly noticing my feet moving on the sand.

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Archive by Liz Axelrod

Stephen Elliott Interview

 

Stephen Elliott, the author of seven books including The Adderall Diaries, and the Editor of the online literary site, The Rumpus http://therumpus.net, sat down with 12th Street’s Jennifer Sky to discuss the politics of writing and the lure of the website for the literary world.  This is the premier interview of 12th Street Online’s monthly author series.  Enjoy – Liz Axelrod, Editor in Chief

12th Street Online: What was the catalyst to starting your online literary magazine, The Rumpus?

Stephen Elliott: I was done with The Adderall Diaries—that was my seventh book—and I didn’t really have the urge to write another book. I wanted to do something else. I thought, “Well, I should get into editing,” because that’s kind of what I know how to do. If you write long enough, eventually you learn how to edit because editing is such a huge part of writing. So I thought I would start editing somewhere.

I was actually talking to Arianna Huffington about joining The Huffington Post. I had all these ideas—pages and pages of ideas—about how I wanted to build a book section for The Huffington Post and all these cools things I wanted to do with it. Then at some point I thought, “Well, it’s just a website. If I have all these ideas why am I giving them to Arianna Huffington?” You know, I’ll just do it myself. So I started The Rumpus. I didn’t know if I was going to make any money or if anyone would read it. That’s the same way I write. You start it and see what happens. It’s like I do everything.

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Archive by Mario Alberto Zambrano

Great House

‘I wanted to be judged on what I did with my life, but now I will be judged by how I described it.’ – Great House, Nicole Krauss

Sensibility veils the language in Nicole Krauss’ new novel Great House, not in the way that obscures the images of life on the other side of the narrative, but in a way that perceives a character’s past—reflecting on loss, the inheritance of one’s history —in a sort of nostalgic embrace that finds poetry in meditation: ‘When at last I came across the right book the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn’t control what came through it’/ ‘…my mind went to it like a tongue probing the tender spot of a missing tooth.’

All the narrators that compose this orchestrated collection share a poet’s sensitivity and point of view. Two of these characters are writers: Nadia, a middle-aged novelist in New York City who has a brief affair with a Chilean poet named Daniel Varsky, who gives her a wooden, nineteen-drawer desk, once owned by Lorca, to look after when he goes back to Chili, and Lotte Berg, a former Kindasport chaperone (her story his narrated by her husband Arthur Bender) who writes elliptical stories in the privacy of her attic studio, on the same desk Nadia looks after years later⎯the desk being the object that threads together all four narratives. Other participants in the trajectory of ‘the desk’ are Leah and Yoav Weisz, children of an Israeli furniture dealer who specializes in retrieving heirlooms lost to the Nazi’s during the war. And finally, there is Aaron, a man writing to his estranged son Dov after his wife’s death, trying to piece together the puzzle of their relationship that has been obscured by misunderstanding. Dov, who left Israel and went to London to become a judge, is alluded to as the connecting line to Nadia, who narrates her story to a judge, ‘Your Honor’, whom she has fatally injured in a car accident in Israel.

*Editor’s note – there’s so much more to this review – click more and keep reading.

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Archive by Luke Sirinides

The Abracadabra

The Abracadabra: A New Poetry Game

I invented this game during Paul Violi’s poetry workshop “Romantic Rebellion.” Two examples of the Abracadabra—“Four Reviews” and “Four School Subjects”—are presented below. Read the rules, check it out, and play along!

Rules:

The player chooses a general topic and four subjects within the topic (e.g. Critical Reviews: Theatre, Book, Food, Film and School Subjects: Math, History, English, Science.)

The player writes four poems—one for each subject (these together make the Abracadabra.)

The poems are written in Dactylic meter—each foot has three beats: Stressed, unstressed, unstressed. ONE, two, three, ONE, two, three. It’s like waltzing. (NOTE: This rule can be broken. If you find a meter better suited to your purposes, you must use that one.)

The rhyme scheme is ABCB. You may write as many quatrains as necessary—but less is more!

The player must use each letter of the alphabet in order throughout each of the four poems. You do not have to use one letter per line, only in order.

In the A-Z words, you may not use the same word twice in the Abracadabra. (This rule can be bent. For example, using “X” to mean “crossing out” is not the same as using “X-” as the prefix for “X-axis.” But try and stay diverse.

* Editor’s note: Click MORE to view Luke’s poems and play along – leave your magic poems in the comments box.  Have fun!

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Archive by Rebecca Melnyk

Peter Orlovsky Memorial at The Poetry Project

The East Village was alive this past Wednesday night with both those who haunt and those who need to be haunted

In St. Marks Church on 10th Street, hundreds of people filed into the Poetry Project’s Memorial for the poet Peter Orlovsky who died this past May. His name becomes more recognizable when it precedes the fact the he was Allen Ginsberg‘s lover and life-long companion, immediately positioning Orlovsky as a shadow amongst the great Beat poet. He never howled as loudly as Ginsberg, but he was bursting with creative energy and feelings so dynamic that when Ginsberg encouraged him to write, it was only natural that he did so.

Throughout the evening, music, poetry, storytelling, and memories compounded in unraveling Orlovsky as a true poet. Some friends, like Patti Smith, recalled “always being in the same room with Peter, but never speaking a word to one another.” They bonded through the unspoken – from being surrounded by an intellectual circle of those who were accustomed to speaking.

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Archive by Luke Sirinides

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go is that rare book that eludes categorization. Is it literary fiction, or sci-fi? A thriller or a quiet rumination on the human condition? Is it a dystopian tragedy, or a coming-of-age love story? Astoundingly, the answer to all of these questions is simply “yes.”

It’s difficult to review the novel without giving away some of its more surprising plot points—discovering the world of Never Let Me Go is both its joy and its sorrow. (The film adaptation is premiering this Oscar season, so read the book before the movie hype spoils it for you.) I’ll reveal only as much as the first ten pages do: The novel is narrated by Kathy H., who works as a “carer,” in England, in the 1990s. She and her two best friends, Ruth and Tommy, grew up and were students together at Hailsham. Kathy H. has had a chance to reconnect with her friends after many years apart, since they were both “donors” she “cared” for. Hailsham, which seems very much like a boarding school, was much better than any of the other places. We see the “guardians” there are interested in art and creativity—the students take classes in drawing, poetry, music appreciation …and little else. One “donor” shudders when Kathy asks where he went, however, “he wanted… not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it was his own childhood.” Indeed, Kathy’s observant yet naïve reminiscences allow it to become our memories as well (though we learn in Chapter One that she’s not exactly sure where Hailsham is.)

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