August 24, 2018 At Work There Are No White People in Heaven: An Interview with José Olivarez By Andy Powell The first poem I encountered from José Olivarez’s forthcoming book, Citizen Illegal, was “A Mexican Dreams of Heaven” at The Adroit Journal. When I read it, I started cracking up in the living room. I read it out loud to my partner, who was in the bedroom, and she also cracked up. The poem elicits the painful laughter that comes with so much truth: there are white people in heaven, too. they build condos across the street & ask the Mexicans to speak English. i’m just kidding. there are no white people in heaven. Olivarez’s poems span gentrification, gentefication (which Olivarez defines in this interview as the returning of a neighborhood to the communities who are being displaced), migration, anger, love, cheese fries, family, loss, therapy, white America’s engagement with immigrants and people of color, futures (including defecating donkeys), pasts (including a very sweet imagined recollection of his mother out dancing), more love, tough love, generous love, and, of course, as a Chicago poet, The Bulls. I met Olivarez for a coffee in Chicago to speak about the book. He was coming from a Teaching Artistry workshop at the Poetry Incubator, a conference for poets who integrate activism and community engagement into their creative practice. I already knew of José—he used to work for the same organization, DreamYard, that I work for in The Bronx. He has since worked for Urban Word, and now is at Young Chicago Authors, all organizations centered on building with youth through poetry. His workshop at the Incubator focused on the transformative possibilities of poetry and the imagination. These possibilities are at play in his own work. In “A Mexican Dreams of Heaven” he shifts the power balance and makeup of what heaven is, who gets to go to heaven, what it’s like. I suspect these visionary reversals derive partly from his work with kids, with the desire to imagine a future for them, to start imagining one with them. INTERVIEWER What scares you the most about this book? OLIVAREZ I wanted to make a book of poems that the people I love will be proud of. A lot of the poems are about my family, my experience as a first generation Mexican-American Chicano, and I wanted to write poems that were not shameful, not ashamed. I wanted them to be poems that my brother wouldn’t be embarrassed to show his co-workers, that my mom could share with the family, with her co-workers, that my students would want to give to their friends. I didn’t want them to look at the poems and think wow, José is so ashamed of us, or, José is so sad to be a part of us. I am very proud of my people, where I come from, and my community. Read More
August 24, 2018 Comics Ms. Lucy’s Steamboat By Jason Novak My seven-year-old recently reminded me, after thirty years of forgetting, that there’s a sinister underground current of folk songs being traded on the schoolyards of America, behind garden sheds and under slides, away from the watchful eyes of what in my time were called “yard duties”. What’s amazing about these songs is that there are dozens of them that seem to be pretty much universal, both geographically and across generations. The one below should certainly be familiar. “Ms. Lucy” has roots that go back at east as far as early 20th Century vaudeville, at which point it was just a single quatrain about a steamboat. Over the decades, children all over the country added more quatrains and variations, until it became the song that so many people now know almost by instinct. But as familiar as the song may be, it wasn’t until I applied my time-hardened analytical ear to the lyrics that I realized just how strange and wonderful they are. So of course I had to draw them. Songs like these have a funny, complex life of their own, slowly getting modified and updated, while retaining a few anachronisms. My daughter knows what a “TV set” is, for example, even though she’s never encountered one “in real life.” In the same way, I knew what a steamboat was at age seven because it was already stamped on the culture as a cliché in cartoons. There are other schoolyard songs I could’ve illustrated that are way funnier, but they’re in such horribly poor taste that they’ll have to wait until I’m too worn and crotchety to worry about offending the public. In any case, I love the teasing word play in this one, and can’t get over that it’s been with me, dormant, all these years. It’s probably a good place to hang the blame on all the hack work I’ve subsequently churned out as a freelancer Read More
August 23, 2018 Arts & Culture Vodka for Breakfast: On the Melancholy of Cheever’s Journals By Dustin Illingworth Detail from the cover of the Vintage Classics edition of Cheever’s Journals There is something feckless about a writer’s journals. They are a specialist’s document, and those who parse their pages are like grooming baboons, searching for fleas. Expecting bohemian excess or stoic grace, we discover instead a life reduced to the fungible poetry of soiled clothes and closely mown grass. A writer’s journal is “neither life exactly, nor fiction,” Elizabeth Hardwick suggested, “but like one of those dreams in which dead friends, with their old crumpled smiles and grunts, their themes, meet you turning a corner.” The themes of John Cheever’s journals—God, sex, guilt, and nature—manage to instill genteel ennui with the anguished moral passion of a Russian novel. Published in 1990, eight years after his death from lung cancer, and decades after he had been enshrined as America’s premiere bourgeois fabulist, the journals shocked in their revelation of the self-lacerating, booze-addled voluptuary hiding in the fine suit of a country squire. “Rarely has a gifted and creative life seemed sadder,” a chastened John Updike wrote upon their publication. But though the gap between Cheever the cultural effigy and Cheever the man was received with surprise and consternation, the ambiguity of his work had always betrayed such a fissure. Cheever’s greatest fiction enacts a kind of doubleness, a yearning for grace darkly marbled with lust and duplicity. The rapturous moments—one thinks of the beautiful early story “Goodbye, My Brother,” with its darkness and iridescence, the naked women walking out of the sea—barely conceal the saturnine streaks. Beneath his character’s charm and taste is a stratum of secret pain, a longing that is somehow shameful. They expect more from life, and this expectation leads them into bafflement and transgression. This is authentic sin, half created, half siphoned from the brackish estuary of Cheever’s soul. The pulse of his magnificent storytelling can be found, vast and inchoate, in the pages of his journals. Cheever couches his spiritual odyssey in the mundane torment of his domestic life, a kind of Strindbergian drama set in the deep lawns and blue afternoons of Ossining. “In church the Epistle is majestic but my mind wanders,” he writes in a 1959 entry. “Now a clearing wind has sprung out of the Northwest. I will think about Hell and the family.” His difficult marriage possessed an elliptical structure: His desire for physical intimacy, her rejection of that desire, his consolation in alcohol and hers in bitter recriminations. Particular anecdotes pierce with the pain of specificity: “Vodka for breakfast. Mary mentions her mother for the third time in thirty-five years. ‘I wanted a teddy bear for Christmas, and she said I was too old. She pronounced ‘doll’ with the same terribly Massachusetts accent you have.’ So we are people we have never met.” Read More
August 23, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Like Bread in a Stay-Fresh Wrapper By Kaveh Akbar In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I was in an abusive relationship for several years, and two years ago today the man I’d been involved with died by suicide. We had not been in touch for a long while before his death, but I’m still not through dealing with all the damage from our relationship and completely unequipped to know how to grieve him. Is there a poem that might help me make more sense of an overwhelming amount of conflicting emotions? Sincerely, Still Not Over It Dear Still Not Over It, I thought a long time about which poem to prescribe you, and kept coming up against the reality that no poem would precisely correspond to your exact experience (unless you wrote it!), nor would any poem help you “make more sense” of a situation that is aggressively hostile to sense—a man claimed to love you but he hurt you, you freed yourself but he died and now you need to learn how to grieve him despite his abuse. It’s profoundly irrational, which is to say, it’s profoundly human and true. I give you Kevin Prufer’s “Black Woods.” The poem ends: Listen to yourself. Did he step inside you? Listen to yourself. Is he trapped inside you? Let go of me. Is it black woods in there? It seems to me a poem deeply invested in exploring our inherently illogical response to grief. The chilling, unforgettable closing repetition of “Listen to yourself” is, of course, what the griever can never do, not really, so overpowering is the noise of grief itself. The open, bracketed spaces remind me of Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho—here are moments too thundering for history to keep them, the silences not silences at all, but rather typographical concessions to the failure of a medium. This sounds like an excruciating situation, and I hope so much you have people in your life with whom you can speak about it. Prufer’s poem offers a glimpse of the irrational heart of grief warring with the omnipresent pressure to conceal it, to move beyond it and once more conform to convention. I hope you find the freedom to argue, grapple, and grow with the grief you’re experiencing. —KA If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Read More
August 22, 2018 Arts & Culture V. S. Naipaul, the Man Versus the Work By Cynthia Payne V. S. Naipaul. Photo: Chris Ison. During the long hot summer of 1978, I found myself living in a small town in New Hampshire. My parents had moved there from suburban Boston six months before, and I felt marooned. Before or since, I have never known such an overpowering depression. I worked nights as a waitress at a Ramada Inn off the highway, where I wore a Swiss milkmaid uniform and plaited my long hair into a crooked bun. The long days I spent wallowing in my discontent. The only thing keeping me above water was that in the fall, I would return as a junior to the academic wonderland of Wesleyan University. Of utmost interest to me was a course in fiction writing that was to be taught by V. S. Naipaul. I ordered several books of his from a small bookstore near the Ramada Inn, which in my despair seemed to be possibly the only such store in the state. The owner hadn’t heard of Naipaul, but he dug up a copy of India: A Wounded Civilization and The Mystic Masseur. It was the first time I had ordered a book—except for schoolbooks and used paperbacks, I rarely bought new ones. Despite the fact that my parents intended my waitress earnings to go to school tuition, not incidentals, I felt I had a right to these books. I hadn’t studied with an actual writer before, never mind one of Naipaul’s breadth, accomplishment, and evident fame. Of course, I hadn’t heard of Naipaul at all until my writing professor that past spring had told me of his pending arrival. Naipaul was a literary lion—that was made clear. The English department—most specifically my professor—had captured him, perhaps having little idea what it would mean to keep him fed for a year. What I remember now is being told he had written an important piece on Conrad. Of his novels and journalism, my professor gave only the most general gloss, and I wonder now how much she knew of the writer beyond his fame. I was interested in Conrad—I had read the major novels—and I shyly confided this. What I didn’t say was that I struggled with Conrad’s contortive prose, feeling I never entirely grasped his intent. Read More
August 22, 2018 At Work Apocalyptic Office Novel: An Interview with Ling Ma By Madeline Day Ling Ma’s debut novel, Severance, transcends any typical classification. It is part satirical office drama, part immigrant narrative, part millennial bildungsroman—with a dash of zombie apocalypse. Severance chronicles the life of Candace Chen, an obedient worker bee who is one of the last people alive in New York City after the Shen Fever strikes. The “fevered” who populate the city aren’t your classic teeth-gnashing, skin-peeling zombies. Instead, victims of the Fever are reduced to creatures of habit—they adhere mindlessly to their everyday grinds until they quite literally work themselves to death. Before the Fever, Candace works for a Bible production company in New York that outsources its labor to Southeast Asia. When the city starts to crumble and all of her coworkers flee, Candace chooses to stay behind and work—in part because her only family is far away in China and in part because she finds comfort in the familiarity of her day-to-day routine. Alone in New York, Candace spends her days wandering through the city and taking photos to post on her blog under the pseudonym NY Ghost. She catalogues abandoned avenues and ransacked luxury stores in hopes that people elsewhere will respond with their own nostalgic or romanticized versions of the city. (“If New York is breaking down and no one documents it, is it actually happening?”) Eventually, when the MTA shuts down and the bodegas close one by one, Candace and a small group of survivors are forced to make their way to a safe “Facility” located near Chicago. All the while, through a series of flashbacks, Candace draws parallels between her own journey and that of her parents, who left their home in China for a new life in the States. In the end, Severance isn’t so much a story about zombies as it is an imaginative critique of capitalism. Underneath Ma’s deadpan comedy lie shrewd observations of the West and the decadence of our everyday existence. We indulge in Frappuccinos and overpriced packaged vegetables at Whole Foods. We live off of products made by labor outsourced to China and Indonesia and Pakistan. In Ma’s eyes, the Fever is an inevitable symptom of Americans’ rapacious consumption. “What you do every day matters,” Candace insists at one point. If we don’t listen, we might just get what we deserve. Although Severance is Ma’s first novel, she has published short stories in Granta, Playboy, Chicago Reader, and elsewhere. She received her M.F.A. at Cornell University and is currently an assistant professor in the creative writing department at the University of Chicago. I had the chance to correspond with Ma the week leading up to the release of Severance, and we discussed her influences, the experiences that fueled her novel, and her opinions on social media. Read More