Tag: Issue 19

A Million Tigers Who Aren’t Mad at You

.Reading time 52 minutes.

By Sandy Nietling

Featured Art: Abstract–Flowers in the Left by Carl Newman

My Mexican boyfriend cannot tell me if he’s ever killed a person. This is not because of a language barrier on either side. I asked my question clearly enough, and he is a good conversationalist with a decent English vocabulary. Still, Raf furrows his dark brows for a long moment, apparently needing time to puzzle through the facts as he knows them. Finally he frowns. “I’m not sure.”

When I ask my American boyfriends if they’ve killed someone, they laugh the way that they’re meant to laugh. Then, while they’re busy being surprised or trying to work up a clever response, I can worry about the papers I have to grade or how much longer the sliced pineapple in the refrigerator will last before I have to give it to the orioles in my backyard. That’s why you ask about death in the first place. It’s supposed to buy conversational elbow room, but Rafael has done the unexpected and provoked my attention instead of letting it drift away. It is not until later, in the dark of my bedroom, that he is relaxed enough to explain his crime.

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Jenny Perowski is Ahead of Me in the Grocery Store Line

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Julie Danho

Featured Art:  (Untitled–Flower Study) by Mary Vaux Walcott

If an Amish family can forgive the man who burned
their land, surely I can say hello to Jenny Perowski,
who used to call me “fattie fat” in seventh grade math
and had boys call my house, pretending to ask me out.
That was twenty years ago. Now Jenny, if not fat exactly,
is puffy as a slightly overstuffed chair. I’m thinner than her,
and my pleasure feels more whiskey than cream, makes me
want to pour out her Kors bag to rifle for candy, then slowly
eat it in front of her like she once did to me. I know
her cruelty was, at best, a misdemeanor. But anger
is like a peppermint in a pocketbook—everything inside
takes on its smell and taste. I could break it in my teeth,
make it disappear. Instead, I savor the mint, let the sugar
line my mouth like fur, linger far past what can be called
pleasure. How good it would be to be better than this.

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Grammar School

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mark Belair

Featured Art: Project for an Overdoor by Carlo Marchionni or Filippo Marchionni

Through the municipal green, overpainted wire mesh
obscuring the grammar school basement windows

comes the spank of a basketball not engaged in any game,
just pounded in place in an empty, echoing cafeteria, then

an outside metal door gets gut-punched open to release
gruff-voiced janitor, belt keys jangling, cursing at the world

while from a first-floor office a stretch of plastic packing tape
screaks off a roll as a phone rings and a copy machine whumps

as if providing a bass line to a class that, upstairs,
bursts into a trebly, mocking laugh, after which,

yet farther up, in a distantly reverberant bathroom, a toilet
flushes and keeps running even after a door slams shut and

all the old, hard memories flood
back enough for me to know

that if a documentary film was made
about daily life in grammar school—

with shot after shot of small, solemn faces
taring out at us—

its scoreless soundtrack
would be this.

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When Mr. Bridges Died

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

Featured Art: (Children Swimming) by Unidentified 

When Mr. Bridges died I knew
the whole eighth grade would have to gather
in the gym and sit there on those cheerless,
folding metal chairs set up by string-bean
Donny Graf the constant burper.
Mr. Bridges was a substitute,
we hardly knew him, but
I knew that there we’d be, all of us,
and there would be our stiff-grinning
twitchy principal, Mr. Albert Fraze, to slowly,
slowly stand and tell us what a deep
and lasting loss this was for all of us.
And later, sitting there three rows from the exit
by fatso Robert Randall who’d socked me
in the stomach on the 8 bus once,
I knew that Mr. Fraze would drill us
with the first long look that said, Every one of you
should be ashamed, ashamed for even thinking about,
for even thinking about thinking about
turning your gaze away one ten
thousandth of an inch:
a man is dead today.
And then would come this clumsy, freighted
metaphor and though I doubt I knew the word
(metaphor) I knew our Mr. Fraze: Mr. Bridges
was a kind of bridge, he’d say,
or found a bridge, or formed a bridge, or built
a bridge, or was a bridge from ignorance to wisdom,
from confusion to compassion, blah, blah, blah,
which is exactly what he said so that
sitting there I thought of that four-cabled
quarter-mile Roebling tower bridge
and I thought of its glittering
river city Cincinnati since we’d studied it all week.
I pictured its reaching, curving waterway, the great
Ohio and I thought of the circling terns and swirling slicks
and chemical froths and then I thought of a row of houseboats
and a paddlewheel steamer with a single, smiling
tourist, anyone and no one, waving once.

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Siccità

.Reading time 31 minutes.

By Stephan Jarret

Featured Art: The Hills by Preston Dickinson

To my grandmother, Francesca, the cliffs of Wilmerding, Pennsylvania resembled Italy’s Amalfi coast. Only, when she looked over the edge, the valley was waterless. Not even a polluted stream that dried out in the summer months. “Siccità”—drought—she used to say, when she led me into our backyard and squinted with high-angle menace toward the neighboring town of Pitcairn. At night, the phosphorescent sign of Randy’s Brew House shrouded the valley in faux-oceanic cobalt blue, offering “HOT GIRLS” and “FREE PRETZELS.” Still, the lower hillside was anything but arid—peppered with trees, I thought— so I tried to mention that something was sustaining them. “What?” she’d say, either incredulous or deaf.
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If I Could Have Your Attention

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jonathan Louis Duckworth

Featured Art: Sunrise or Sunset (study for book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom) by Abbott Handerson Thayer

-To S. S.

              and if I could make of my hands a hammock
for the sinuous long-S slope of your spine
              if I could flocculate moonlight into a salve
to rub away our fears as fingers smooth a bedsheet’s creases         
              if I could scan the abjad calligraphy of your curls
and wake with long strands coiled lamia-like under my tongue
              if we could lie enmeshed under night’s aspect
our spooned bodies a crescent luna under the folds
                if I could rise first to cook you breakfast
and convince you basil pesto is morning fare
                if I could recite to you all sixty-three octaves
of Keats’s Isabella with pungent pesto breath
                if we could exhume for each other our buried poems
to pry vital marrow from those discarded bones
                and if we could distill the essential incanti
like sweet incense extracted from fetid agarwood
                if I could breathe my favorite words to you:
“gloaming,” “Ewigkeit,” “azimuth,” “garrigues,” “laverock”
                if I could settle into entire stillness
while you whisper your own treasured motes into my ear
                and if I could only compose the words
that could incite in you half what yours have in me
                I could be with you, or else write no more

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Directions

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Matthew J. Spireng

Featured Art: Village Street by Alice Pike Barney

This time, giving directions to a place
I have never been, an address
I have only passed so I could tell another where

it is, I have explained: across the street from,
a few blocks down from, between this
cross street and that, a little yellow awning

across the front, the name in big letters above it,
and if it is dark, will there be
light on the awning, or will its color be gone,

indeterminate? Tell me, will you, if I arrive
first and find a better way to describe, how
can I reach you, or must the first suffice?

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Fantaisie

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Donald Platt

Featured Art: Garden Flowers by Edna Boies Hopkins

                               Each person is
a solar system, the bits of birth’s Big Bang orbiting
                               some sun that both attracts

and repels. Elliptically, my mother orbits her own death,
                               that great shining
ball of fire I cannot look directly at. She draws closer to it,

                              then pulls away. She rotates
as she revolves. Together we write her obituary. Born.
                              Schooled. Worked as.

Married to. Gave birth. Resided. Retired. Is survived by.
                               The old story
we all get to write if we’re lucky, or one that will willy-nilly

                              get written for us.
I leave the day she’ll die blank. She gives me the notes
                              she wrote last night:

“Funeral in Christ Church and Bill Eakins to preach.
                              Ask Women’s Guild
to serve a simple refreshment. Give $100 to organist.

                              Give $5,000
to church. Give $500 to Bill Eakins. Give $1,000 to women.
                              Give $250

to soloist. No calling hours. Only the church service.
                              Nobody
getting up and saying nice things about me. Everyone

                              has their own
memories—good, bad, and indifferent. Chief purpose
                              of a funeral

is to pray for the departed. Also to give comfort
                              to those who grieve.
Call Hickey Funeral Home.” As an afterthought, she added

                              “Ask Charlene
to play Saint-Saëns’ Fantaisie for violin and harp.
                              You’ll need to find

a harpist.” Everyone needs a harpist to accompany her living
                              and her dying.
No one to turn to but the seated, marble harp player

                              at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, early Cycladic, eleven and a half inches high
                              He embraces

the D-shaped instrument, whose top is ornamented
                              with the head
of a waterfowl. Against his right thigh and stone shoulder, he rests

                              the weight
of the instrument. It has no strings. His raised right thumb plucks
                              five thousand years of silence.

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NOR 19 Feature: Manipulating the Reader

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Featured Art: Sketch of Church Tower and Roof Top by Arnold William Brunner

We often say that a story, a movie, a song, or even a commercial about sad dogs is “emotionally manipulative.” We use this phrase not only to discount a particular piece, but to condemn it. What, though, constitutes literary emotional manipulation? Is there such a thing as a benign manipulation, a justifiable heart- tugging? And what specific moves can we identify that make the difference between effective and ineffective narrative manipulation, between a moving poem and a mawkish one?

We asked five writers—Rebecca McClanahan, Debra Marquart, A-J Aronstein, C.L. Dallat, and Matthew VanWinkle—to respond to those questions.

I Second That Emotion

.Reading time 18 minutes.

A few years ago, I attended a literary gathering and heard four poets and memoirists read from their work. They were all accomplished writers, varied enough in their approaches to evoke laughter, sighs, nods of acknowledgment, a collective gasp at one point, and, toward the end of the evening, some tears as well. Tears are not uncommon at readings, of course—I have cried at several—but in this case the tears came not from audience members but rather from one of the readers, who had warned us that she might “choke up” because of the emotional content of the autobiographical piece she was about to read. Her introduction, followed by a tearful presentation, suggested either that the work was too new to share publicly or that she had planned her reaction and was intentionally manipulating us. As she spoke, I sensed listeners growing more and more uncomfortable, as I was. Some leaned back into their chairs, some crossed their arms. The more emotional the reader’s performance became, the less effect bit seemed to have, an unfortunate outcome, especially given that the work was potentially moving in and of itself. But it was as if the writer did not trust the work, or perhaps did not trust us to do our job as listeners: to bring our own emotional response to the work.

As I listened, I kept thinking of Chekhov’s advice to a writer who had sent him a story: If you “want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder . . . As it is, your heroes weep and you sigh.” John Gardner has a similar take on this issue in The Art of Fiction. “In great fiction,” Gardner writes, “we are moved by what happens, not by the whimpering or bawling of the writer’s presentation of what happens. That is, in great fiction, we are moved by characters and events, not by the emotion of the person who happens to be telling the story.” Certainly Chekhov and Gardner are not suggesting that the writer herself be unmoved by events and characters, but rather that she allow the reader the space to complete the transaction her words set into motion. For isn’t that what readers of literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction want the chance to do? To, in the words of that Smokey Robinson hit, “second that emotion”?

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Tell it Cool: On Writing with Restraint

.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Debra Marquart

Featured Art: Hill with Trees by Eleanor Harris

For years, I’ve encouraged students to “tell it cool” when narrating a tale that is harrowing or emotional. A cool narrator can be a buoy in rough waters. I’ve always thought this advice came from Hemingway, but at this moment as I search my bookshelves for the place where Hemingway said it, I can’t put my finger on the quote. I know it’s in there somewhere, likely in one of the letters (bossy letters full of unsolicited advice and signed “Papa” when friends were just writing to ask for money).

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway famously wrote about knowing what to leave out. In his discussion of the short story, “Out of Season,” for example, he remarks that he left out a key event connected to the real story: “I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself.” According to a letter that Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925, the story was “an almost literal transcription” of an experience he’d had while traveling in Europe with his first wife, Hadley.

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Staying with Argos: Odysseus and His Dog

.Reading time 17 minutes.

By A-J Aronstein

Featured Art: Clearing after September Gale–Maine Coast by Howard Russell Butler

Argos, the loyal dog of long-suffering, well-tanned, always-oiled Odysseus, appears only once in The Odyssey. At the sight of Odysseus, who returns to the island kingdom Ithaca after 20 years, Argos dies. Bam! Kaput. Struck down by a Zeusian thunderbolt. At this point in Book 17, no one other than the reader knows the true identity of the disguised and smelly Odysseus, who dresses like a beggar. Escorted by his loyal swineherd Eumaeus, Odysseus pauses to observe Argos from the distance of a few steps. But he can’t even pet the pup before steering back toward his wife’s suitors, whom he’ll slaughter in due course. Argos dies almost immediately after Odysseus turns away. Though the encounter takes fewer than one hundred lines, its brevity should not trick us into thinking about Argos’s death as a merely sad aside. A closer reading reveals how Homer manipulates his audience before the final act, using Argos to orient our empathy toward Odysseus. Moreover, if we stay with Argos a little longer, he reveals something essential about fiction’s capacity to wrap epic emotions into even the tiniest moments.

To see a doggie’s demise in any medium will always make us blubber. So too will reunions between pets and soldiers. Witness the strange phenomenon of YouTube compilations documenting first meetings between dogs and American troops returning home from Middle Eastern war zones. These clips depict pure cathartic joy. Fido or Georgie or Lady jump and drool all over their patriotic owners, howling with disbelief, filmed by someone holding an iPhone that trembles with the cinematographer’s barely-constrained sobs. Music swells, the major cries, and before we have time to think about the trauma lurking in the background, we cut to another dog jumping into the arms of another deep-eyed master in fatigues. These are fragmented blips of pure joy. They don’t ask us to think: They constitute a conveyor belt of emotive force.

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Yeats and Heaney: The Poetry Without the Pity

.Reading time 22 minutes.

By C. L. Dallat

Featured Art: Genip Tree in the Mountains, Jamaica by Frederic Edwin Church

When W.B. Yeats dismissed Wilfred Owen’s World War I poetry as “all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick” (and omitted Owen, Sassoon, and Rosenberg from his 1936 anthology), he was making a powerful statement, not just about dis- taste for sentimental language and the role of pity in poetry, but about the poet’s duties and limits. He had already excluded writing war poetry from his own list of obligations in 1915’s “On Being Asked for a War Poem,” but only later became more coherent on the abjuration of pity as an unfit subject.

This is, of course, the Yeats whose career started in the mists and myths of a Celtic twilight amidst a flurry of pre-Raphaelite sentimentalism and romance, who wrote of tragic heroes, of “The Pity of Love” and “The Sorrow of Love.” So before reaching for his famous poem, “Easter 1916,” where Yeats does appear to address war and politics, we should take a momentary look at that early work.

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Designs Less Palpable: Emotional Manipulation and Even-Handedness in Keats

.Reading time 18 minutes.

By Matthew VanWinkle

Featured Art: Flowery Meadow by William Henry Holmes

In a February 3, 1818 letter to his friend Reynolds, Keats rejects a reading experience that he associates primarily with Wordsworth: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket.” The reproach is so scathing because it acutely observes how rapidly the poetry’s interest in its audience cools, from the importunate heat of the design to the indifferent withdrawal to the pocket. Keats is fuming primarily at Wordsworth’s dogmatism and propensity for self-congratulation, as we hear earlier in the letter, where Keats complains of being “bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist.”

At first glance, this might seem like a rarefied chafing, a protest against an intellectual irritation or an effusion of rivalry peculiar to talented writers. Yet the kind of readerly hatred that Keats memorably articulates becomes more comprehensible when we think of art that has palpable designs not on our ideas but on our feelings: the swelling soundtrack that jerks at our tears, the so-cute cartoon kitty kitty that beguiles us into wuv. Every reader has caved in to this sort of appeal at one time or another, and many readers look back on such acquiescence abashedly, or worse. How to admit, even in hindsight, to having been manipulated, to having feelings that can be summoned and practiced upon with such infuriating confidence?

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