VOLUME 1 ISSUE 2

FALL 2008

Edited by
David Krump
Andy Nicholson
Meghan Punschke
Didi Menendez

ORANGES&SARDINES
 RANGES
&
S RDINES
 CONTENTS
ON THE COVER:

Natalia Fabia by

Didi Menendez,

oil on canvas

24” x 20”
 Publisher / E.I.C.

&
DIDI MENENDEZ

Creative Director
I. M. BESS

interviews Executive D.L.B.

138 Grace Notes JACK ANDERS
Grace Cavalieri: Editors
Interview with Ron Silliman MEGHAN PUNSCHKE
122 Grace Notes DAVID KRUMP
ANDY NICHOLSON
Grace Cavalieri:
Interview with Dana Levin Reviewers
JIM KNOWLES
reviews CHERYL A. TOWNSEND
JEREMY HUGHES
133 Cheryl Townsend: Island Time - Block
Island Poems by Natalie Lobe Short Story Contributor
KIRK CURNUTT
148 Jim Knowles: Resurrection of the
Dust by John McKernan Columnist
TALIA REED
132 Cheryl Townsend: Anon by Chris
Pusateri Interviewers
GRACE CAVALIERI
110 Jeremy Hughes: Anna Nicole:
Poems by Grace Cavalieri
short story
155 Kirk Curnutt: Manning the House Copyright reverts back to
contributors upon
publication. O&S requests
column first publisher rights of
poems published in future
136 Babbling And Strewing Flowers reprints of books,
anthologies, web site
Talia Reed: On Squinching Naked publications, podcasts,
radio, etc. This issue is also
Before the Masses available for a limited time
as a free download from
the O&S website
essay [Link].
Print copies available at
178 Hummingbirds and Fish [Link]. Please
support our press by
Jack Anders: Notes on Bob Hicok purchasing a copy. For
submission guidelines and
further information on
Oranges & Sardines,
please stop by
[Link]
Poets

Emily
Bob Kendal
Hicok Frey
12 68

William Cathryn
Stobb Cofell
26 104

Jane Patrick
Draycott Duggan
44 133

Brooklyn
Copeland
63
Artists
Natalia Peter
Fabia Ciccariello
7 74

Zhaoming Jorge-
Wu Alberto
22 100

Robert C. Justin
Jackson Wiest
34 106

Victoria Dana
McKenzie Clancy
50 114

Glenn David
Harrington MacDowell
64 118

Paul Nahem
Béliveau Shoa
70 128
[Link]
 7 ORANGES & SARDINES

Natalia Fabia
[Link]

Natalia Fabia was born in

Burbank, California. She is of
Q&A
Which artists do you admire or have had the biggest influence on your work?
Well, my all time favorite artist is Toulouse Lautrec (I even named my kitty
Polish decent, even though her cat after him) I love his technique, subject matter, composition and color
name is Italian. She attended choices.  He was an immensely skilled  scholarly  painter. He painted real
Pasadena’s Art Center College life and  from  his own life experiences.  I strongly believe artists, oil painters
of Design. Natalia loves to paint in particular, should all first be formally trained before having an active
people and is influenced by artistic career.
colors, punk rock music, hot
chicks and anything that How do you choose your subject matter?
sparkles. Her fascination with Well,  I like to paint  my girlfriends or people I meet  that look interesting.  I
hookers is what fuels the many am fascinated with  skin, eye balls..  interesting situations  light, colors,
paintings she does of sultry environments... Visually pleasing and sleazy subjects, interiors and
women in surroundings and decoration. I like to paint pretty things... what I consider beautiful, like
alone. chandeliers, animals, shiny things, vodka bottles, and I especially think
Natalia is currently represented woman are beautiful and enchanting so that is definitely the
by Corey Helford Gallery in encompassing theme of whatever series or painting I am painting. 
Culver City and will be having a
solo show there in February 2009. What was the first piece of art you were paid for?
That was a portrait I did of one of my girlfriends.  She is standing in her
There is also a video/interview on bedroom  lighting up a cigarette and has hello kitty  and cross  bone
youtube: [Link]/ tattoos on her collar bone and a back piece that was reflected in a mirror.
watch?v=Tbb2Z apbjA It is still one of my favorite paintings. I showed it to a regular customer I
would wait on at Mel’s Drive In, when I worked there as a waitress from the
SOLO SHOWS: age of 16 to 21, the customer loved it and bought it right away.
Thinkspace Gallery
“Hook Manor” 2006 Do you have a ritual or specific process you follow when creating art?
I first have the initial idea for the painting.  I plan a photo shoot, get the
Corey Helford Gallery models, location, props etc. Then I look through the photos, pick one or
“Hooker Safari” 2007 some and sometimes even compose the photos and mix them with other
images on the computer.  The way I actually start the painting varies. I
sometimes collage things on the panel and paint over  it. Sometimes
planning what I want to show from the collage, and at times I will just paint
and not know what I will cover up and what will show through. If I do not
collage in the beginning I just give the panel a wash and start painting
right away. In some of my paintings the technique and exact finish is 
planned and in some I know they will evolve over time on their own,
during the painting process.

What is your secret weapon?

Glitter!  Just kidding, there is no secret weapon, just to hard work. 
Constantly painting to finish paintings and to get better, and sometimes
things unexpectedly come together and it is wonderful.
 8 ORANGES & SARDINES

Prey oil on panel (with some glitter) 24” x 18”

Natalia Fabia
 9 ORANGES & SARDINES

Leopard Sky oil on panel (with some glitter) 24” x 20”

Natalia Fabia
 10 ORANGES & SARDINES

Wonderful Wild Beast oil, collage and gillter on canvas 72” x 72”

Natalia Fabia
 11 ORANGES & SARDINES

Safari Girl Pile oil on panel 40” x 30”

Natalia Fabia
 12 ORANGES & SARDINES

Bob Hicok

The healing properties of

Bob Hicok is a a public education
Guggenheim Fellow
this year. His most God he beat her awful. The beatings
recent collection, were actually very good, improvisational
even, he used whatever belt
“This Clumsy
or coffee cup was at hand. She wore
Living,” won the
2008 Bobbitt Prize this one bruise everyone tried to copy
from the Library of in art class, it was not black
Congress. He has or blue or green
poems due out in but all of them, not shaped
Best American like a leaf or African tribal mask
but not not shaped
Poetry 2008 and
like a leaf or African tribal mask.
Pushcart XXXIII. It was beautiful in a way

our attempts to give it a life

outside of its life were not, though I feel,
looking back, as all of this
is a looking back, as memory
occupies the center of any view,
that she loved us
for these attempts, briefly,
sitting on the tiny chair
in the middle of our tiny circle,
everything about the third grade
was small except knowing
 13 ORANGES & SARDINES

we couldn’t hold her in the circle

of our crayons forever. That was big,
as was the dog that chased me home,
though when shown a picture
of that dog not long ago, I see
I was wrong, it wasn’t big
but gargantuan, it was all mouth
and could have swallowed me
in one bite, and when she didn’t
come back to school, I drew something else:
the sun, trees that resembled people
with extra arms, people
who resembled coat racks, clouds
that were a churning of my hand
above the empty houses.

Bob Hicok The healing properties of a public eduction

 14 ORANGES & SARDINES

A half hour that is a day that is a life

In a park the size of a large living room
off York, a man dervishes
through his thoughts while the East River
spins out its cowlicks. One side
of his head is shaved, a plastic bag
blooms from his open zipper
like a black peony, and even he asks
of the cops who shot a man
fifty one times and were found innocent
this morning of everything, including
bad judgement, why one of them
reloaded. When I speak to him, he waves a hand
in surrender and leaves, muttering
like a lit fuse, I have the park
to myself, tulips and the dopplering of tires
across the Queensboro, people
headed home. The man
never shot back, didn’t have a gun, red buds
are in bloom. I see someone’s
attached solar panels
to one of Roosevelt Island’s
abandoned buildings, as if our emptiness

Bob Hicok
 15 ORANGES & SARDINES

is powered by the sun. Our emptiness

is self-powering. In the Guggenheim
this afternoon, I looked at paintings
done with gunpowder spread on canvas
and lit, it burns
shadow-images, in one case
of mushroom clouds, rows of them, each small
as a fist, wraithlike, delicate enough
I wanted to protect them
from the wind of people walking by. I feel why
we pray, I have no idea why
we pray, I leave the park
to itself, walk north, past another park
where three basketball games are going on,
men weaving, shouting, a loom
of aspiration, one guy
working it toward the hoop,
bashing at the man who would tell him
no, you can’t have what you want,
when a third man swings around,
strips him of the ball, and arcs
the most beautiful miss, a shot
so perfectly bad it’s from
another universe, I feel why we pray, I just
can’t.

Bob Hicok A half hour that is a day that is a life

 16 ORANGES & SARDINES

Critique with possible fracture

When I fell naked across the floor joists
I hurt my wrist. Having planned
to suddenly become a famous pianist,

I wrapped it in a scarf my mother wore

in 1967 as she sprinkled water
from a Pepsi bottle with a nozzle in it

over pants she ironed for my father

nearly every day. Women then
went around in flowered scarves, peonies

or tulips. When they gathered, it was as if

small gardens had missed each other,
small gardens with access

to wood-paneled station wagons.

Achilles would have admired
these pretty shields were he a touch

fay, how they protected

the Rube Goldberg machines of their hair
while washing windows or putting the crease

Bob Hicok
 17 ORANGES & SARDINES

of meaning business into pants.

Why was I naked? I don’t recall.
I’d never play Carnegie Hall, that much

was clear, but the Iditarod

was still on the list. I just needed
someone to convince me the dogs

liked pulling a sled, and only the dogs

could convince me of this, as I would only
believe a tree about how the axe feels,

no matter how loudly you yell timber.

The station wagons are harder to understand.
Why make a car look like a den, why

make a den no bear would enjoy, why the suburbs

at all when cities were available, you know,
to be lived in?

Bob Hicok Critique with possible fracture

 18 ORANGES & SARDINES

Between rapture and repair

The feeling everything is different
for the peony this time around. The hell
with ants. It’s not even true they open
the blooms, small mandibles. The feeling

corners are tired of waiting

for what comes around them. This row
of clapping people walks
toward its opposite, while on the left
of the first row, another row
of clapping people walks
toward its opposite, and this box
of clapping people will not have a lid.
This is what the corner hopes will happen

when it takes a more active role in society.

The feeling reincarnation alone
makes sense, that I have all these jobs
to learn to do, broken shale
and leaf shard. I will come back as gravity

so I can pull Tocqueville apart in the library

of unreading, and make you fall, and hold you
when you fall. Suddenly

Bob Hicok
 19 ORANGES & SARDINES

I am not so tired. The feeling

mountains are a wave of starlight
moving through, growing trees and grass
and me for a slow while. Who said

rodeo? bareback? Who said

you have to eat your supper
before you can go out to play? The feeling

that was a conspiracy, that we could have played

well into the night
without our carrots and especially
our green beans, nothing personal, green beans.
But it’s all personal. The feeling

my cursive is a hairdo beyond restraint.

That I am buttercup beyond restraint.
That the coming rain
is a reassurance beyond restraint.
That it will make my roof feel useful. The one
that leaked. That doesn’t leak now.
That will leak again.

Bob Hicok Between rapture and repair

 20 ORANGES & SARDINES

Arriving light in their fury to eat

It is not an indigo bunting but beautiful
still, a blue I can think of nothing like
at the feeder beside the cardinal
except the blue in “Champs de Mars,” blue
of Chagall’s Paris with a red sun
or moon, I can’t tell, behind the Eiffel Tower
on a postcard I’ll send to a woman
I have decided needs a purple bird
to arrive in the corner under roses.
Last night she said that her sadness,
the ongoing one, the one that never actually
leaves, that hides as a child at tag
or recedes as the tide, was there, with us,
among the cedars. I will send her
Monday this purple bird in the corner
of a postcard under roses, and the message,
I was with you in the cedars
as I am with you in the house.
She will find me, wherever I am
in the house, we will go to the window,
look at birds emptying the plastic tubes
with vigor, a churning of crow and chickadee,
eastern oriole, her sadness there,
with us, as mine, always, feels like this:

Bob Hicok
 21 ORANGES & SARDINES

I’ve asked my mother a question, she has turned

and said, I tried in the womb not to give you
a mouth, she was a fine mother, feels like
an unhung door, I want to be free
of the figurative, to return to the future:

her sadness there, with us, as mine, always,

but not named or fed, I hope
by then hummingbirds, ruby throated,
off to the side, probing the Rose of Sharon
that opened yesterday, the fluted blooms,
here is gentleness, over and over,
practicing enticement, being — there is
no other word for it — licked, there is
another word for it, kissed.

Bob Hicok Arriving light in their fury to eat

 22 ORANGES & SARDINES

Zhaoming Wu
[Link]

Zhaoming Wu was born in

Guangzhou, China. He influence on your work?
Q&A
Which artists do you admire or have had the biggest

received his BFA from the European Artists in 18 & 19 century, such as Auguste Rodin,
Guangzhou Academy of Rembrandt.
Fine Art, China and his MFA
from the Academy of Art How do you choose your subject matter?
University, San Francisco. I get ideas for my paintings in one of two ways. Sometimes
I get an idea, so I will tell the model roughly what it is and
His work have featured in: let her interpret it. Other times, I will ask the model to just
International Artist start moving around. When I see something I really like, I’ ll
Art Talk ask her to stop and hold the pose. Either way, I know I ‘m
America Art Collector found a subject when all of variables combine to elicit an
emotional response in me.
Art of West

He is represented by What is your opinion of digital art v. traditional art?

several galleries: Traditional art is foundation to the digital art, and the
digital art is the new energy to the traditional art.
Addison Gallery,
Boca Raton, FL
What was the first piece of art you were paid for?
Abend Gallery, I have sold my first piece art with $100.00 in 1981.
Denver, CO
Do you have a ritual or specific process you follow when
Astoria Fine Art, creating art?
Jackson, WY Before I start a new painting, I take a few minutes to look
Bryant Galleries, at the model or photograph and study the subject. As if I
New Orleans, LA were meditating, I am
Sanders Galleries, thinking, trying to fully
Tucson, AZ connect or
Howard/mandville re-connect with the
Gallery, Kirkland, WA inspiration behind the
Morris & Whiteside painting so that I am not j
Galleries, Hilton Head ust painting objects.
Island, SC
Gasov & Gurule What is your secret
International Fine Art, weapon?
Scottsdale, AZ Very solid painting skill &
Mclarry Fine Art,   unique perspective to the
Santa Fe, NM subject.
 23 ORANGES & SARDINES

6, Dusk In Solo oil on canvas 20” x 16”

Zhaoming Wu
 24 ORANGES & SARDINES

News oil on canvas 20” x 16”

Zhaoming Wu
 25 ORANGES & SARDINES

Dynamic Movement oil on canvas 24” x 30”

Zhaoming Wu
 26 ORANGES & SARDINES

William Stobb

William Stobb is the author The Light Year

of Nervous Systems (Penguin
2007) and For Better Night
Vision (Black Rock Press
2000).  His new poems are After many deaths, a late fall,
from a manuscript in an ice storm and a long dreaming.
progress entitled “Flood I saw my friend in new time
Light.”  Some of these
poems are forthcoming in Already dead yet still sick and distressed
American Poetry Review, he grimaced in company
Conduit, and Colorado I must’ve known
Review.  Others have
appeared in recent issues of others there but it didn’t register.
MiPOesias, nthposition, Recklessly positive I said it’s good
Jacket, and Pistola.  For to see you and try not to worry
miPOradio, Stobb hosts the
“Hard to Say” podcast on meaning I continue to love you,
poetry and poetics.  He lives you already died,
in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and you’re the kind of person
where he works as
Associate Professor of who deserves transcendent happiness so
English at Viterbo University.  please I’m trying to believe.
His Viterbo homepage is
easily searchable and
includes links to recent
works and .mp3 recordings
of poems.
 
 
 
 

I shouldn’t think ironically this

layer of ice seems moralistic
 27 ORANGES & SARDINES

The girl wasn’t expecting to feel

perfectly fit to the boy or to think
during that surprisingly literal
connection about different things like
red paintings in the employee
break room at the restaurant
where she worked empty
at that hour but one light left on.
It was fine. Safe. Love, she thought.
She just wasn’t expecting
in an afterwards flush that he would open
the window “I’m naked you know”
“Feel good?” “Yeah but come back I’m cold”
“You should see the world froze”

seeking purpose—found maybe

lacking but half willing

William Stobb The Light Year

 28 ORANGES & SARDINES

Morning at the end of one long winter

walking sidewalks in the dynamic of
thaw freeze thaw freeze Have to be
careful in thinking of my dead friend
noticing on such a day vole tracks ending
at the surface brush of owl wings
Careful not to be reckless with this
grieving like ice once begun
consumes the season So he would notice
now in the past tense He noticed
moments as if a shimmer rode what I found
significant more for its ending / beginning
Thinking arriving to mind a girl elapsing
to the window in ice light reflecting

in the dynamic of being still

after having been still having to

William Stobb The Light Year

 29 ORANGES & SARDINES

Blue in Nature (with Some Overflow)

A year later I ride through the marsh.

A goose hisses at me.
A heron flees the racket my bike trailer makes.

I hadn’t even thought of you yet.

I had to run juice boxes over
to my daughter’s school

and grocery shop for Anna’s graduation.

I had to try once or twice
to stay positive. When Claire called to tell me

we forgot the luau I didn’t get angry.

Maybe one second.
A dog came bounding

over hillocks of marsh grass growing

around rootballs and trunks decomposing.
It wasn’t scary. It looked like

some kind of hound

probably practicing birding only these birds
weren’t shot. I thought of you

only after the trail submerged—luckily

my trailer has good clearance
but my shoes got soaked.

(I should’ve taken my shoes off

and put them in the trailer!)
After that bracing adventure

William Stobb
 30 ORANGES & SARDINES

I crossed the bridge, looked down

at the overflown oxbow and remembered you
securing your canoe

to get up on a gnarly deadfall and help

Andy and I clear a narrow gap that wasn’t
nearly as tricky as we were making it.

You came back to me clearly—

you were feeling really good you said
meds were remarkably effective—

when one of those little birds you see

a million of but also only individual ones rarely—
glimpses of bird world much more

than hi how do you do singular bird

now we’re fine acquaintances
friends for life—jigged away from whatever it was

snacking right off the pavement—

I was riding easy no rush and it jigged
up and away from my approach—

then in a pretty tight moment

snapped back to take one more bite I guess
it was really good and it recognized me

as friendly I was happy to see as I remembered

you the bird posed for the briefest interlude
vividly blue.

William Stobb Blue In Nature (With Some Overflow)

 31 ORANGES & SARDINES

Some Overflow
This thinking overflows the poem. About how musical it was—
the zig-zag the bird made in its deft fly-away-and-then-back
and its clear, momentary pose all made me think of how like
instruments we are played by perception and consciousness. I
turned the bike and trailer around, rode back and found the
bird again. It had an ample source of food in seeds fallen on
the trail—we’re right in the middle of a late spring bloom—so I
was sure I’d find it again and I did. And when I managed to
get close enough to see it clearly a second time, I thought and
felt that the bird was only itself now. In that first moment when
its performance blew through me it had been more. Not, “it
had signified more,” though I know it’s absurd to argue that I
didn’t interpret it. It was more than itself. It was bright
arpeggios separated by an eighth note rest. It was you, Earl.
But in the second instance, it was itself only. “Of course it has its
own life,” I thought. These thoughts about how the dead are
with us—the mechanism of it, in a way, though that sounds
awful. Maybe the instrumentation of it—the ways we’re blown
through the larger harmonic. Maybe the dead play the
symphony of the living, though after I wrote “At the Afterlife
Hotel” I started really hating metaphors about what the dead
are doing. I wanted to think of the dead very physically. And
then blue appears in nature. Physical blue. Even a blue flower
but in this case better, an animate creature, softly textured and
coming still as if to present itself as blue, seems so precious as to
have been dropped from some richer sphere. This thinking
overflows as maybe living overflows.

William Stobb Blue In Nature (With Some Overflow)

William Stobb
 33 ORANGES & SARDINES

& Island Time - Block Island Poems by Natalie Lobe

REVIEW BY CHERYL TOWNSEND

ISLAND TIME - Block Island Poems by Natalie Lobe

with photography by Nathan Bickell - Black Island
Press, 3413 Wilshire, Greensboro, NC / 21pps

“Think of your poem as a against the wind, walk on the beach,

beacon.” is the first line of the first bend to pick up mollusks, then chasten
poem in this second collection of children dodging waves, sandpiper style.
poetry by Natalie. A beacon . . .
showing us in, guiding the way. Enter  I wish the photographs were in
into vacation time and revel in its color . . . to match the vividness of
virtues. the poetry, but even in their B&W
Gentle poems of essence, of exhibition, they extoll the succulent
place, of visual relaxation - ebb and landscape, the happy faces, the
flow and  stable. Smell the roses. scenic escapades.
Listen to the breeze. “Shine one word Further poems of clam digging,
at a time.” wind surfing, licorice dolphins, ferry
Yet they also speak of rides, stargazing, the inevitable
appreciation, conservation, and a footprints in the sand and
duty to preserve. She asks that we “BLACKBERRY PICKING” where she
“Make your every image live/for muses “I could have stayed on the
coming generations” and herein she porch, with a love poem/or a
is. Natalie has struck me as an acute daydream.”
observer, a studier and a recorder. But mostly I took in her enjoyment
Her verbal  photography puts you of the elements. Her soaking in the
there with her, toes in the sand and sun, giving in to the wind, allowing
sharing. the massaging of the water and
listening to the rain. “A late August
From “Black Rock” shower taps/paradiddle on he porch
roof” .. Paradiddle, indeed.
Marsh grass, scrub pine, my hair, I do need to mention that the
even the rocks lean towards Algarve aforementioned photographs were
where Portuguese women, taken by her grandson, who
their red and green scarves blowing obviously enjoys nature as well.
 34 ORANGES & SARDINES

Robert C. Jackson
[Link]

Robert C. Jackson is a
Q&A
Which artists do you admire or have had the biggest
influence on your work?
contemporary realist still Historically, Rembrandt. But in all honesty, I’m affected
life artist. Since 1997 he has most by the people I know. That would include a
been working full time at boatload of peers but at the top of my list would be
his painting craft. painter Scott Fraser . He has been invaluable in the
exchange of ideas, discussion of painting, and someone
to simply challenge me to go farther.
Robert’s work is in private,
corporate, and museum How do you choose your subject matter?
collections and shows in A hoppy ale or imperial stout and a little time. I’ll take a
various galleries from coast break from my painting occasionally to sit in a local
to coast. hangout for an hour and just brainstorm. In those times I
just write ideas as my work is driven by the narrative. Not
His work can be seen at: that I always have a long story to go specifically with a
piece, but I certainly give the viewer a jumping off point. I
Arden Gallery, Boston MA have a few sketch books that during those hours I intently
write down as many ideas as possible.
Gallery 1261, Denver CO
Leslie Levy Gallery, What was the first piece of art you were paid for?
Scottsdale AZ I’ve never liked selling my work personally so I am thrilled to
work with galleries. Thus my first sold piece was a simple still
Zenith Gallery, life painting that sold through my first gallery.
Washington DC
Do you have a ritual or specific process you follow when
creating art?
I work. I’m a pretty disciplined person so I go to work and
paint. I’ve had some folks ask if an artist should wait until
they are “inspired.” I wake up very seldom feeling
“inspired” and if I waited for it to come, it would never
show up. But, If I start painting, before long, I am lost and
captivated by what I am doing.

What is your secret weapon?

Humor. The soul needs both humor and drama. Somehow
in the arts, drama is what is taken seriously. But don’t
forget, you can be seriously funny!
 35 ORANGES & SARDINES

Ballooning oil on linen 40” x 30”

Robert C. Jackson
 36 ORANGES & SARDINES

Object Project Food Fight oil on linen 48” x 48”

Robert C. Jackson
 37 ORANGES & SARDINES

Waiting For A Fanfare oil on linen 40” x 30”

Robert C. Jackson
 38 ORANGES & SARDINES

& Grace Notes:

GRACE CAVALIERI INTERVIEWS RON SILLIMAN

Ron Silliman is one of America’s most

exciting / intelligent poet/critics. He has written and
edited 31 books to date. For 25 years Silliman wrote a
single poem, entitled The Alphabet. (1979-2004.) His
present poem is entitled Universe. Silliman sees his poetry
as being part of a lifework, which he calls Ketjak. Ron
Silliman’s blog is a culturally significant English-language
blog of contemporary poetry and poetics. By 2008, the
site had logged 1,500,000 visitors. Silliman was born in
Pasco WA, and attended San Francisco State University
and the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at
San Francisco State University, the University of California
at San Diego, New College of California, Naropa University
and Brown University. Silliman is a literary activist who has
also been a political organizer, lobbyist, ethnographer
and newspaper editor. Ron has received several honors
including fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Arts, The Pennsylvania Arts Council and the the Pew
Charitable Trusts. He is a market analyst in the computer
industry. After living for 40 years in the Bay area, he now
lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and children. Ron Silliman Photo © Star Black 2008

GC: What is the urgency might exist. Growing up When, at the age of 16,
of poetry in your own in a home that held only the same age my boys
life? Readers Digest are today, I happened
condensed novels was across William Carlos
RS: When I was younger, not conducive to finding Williams’ The Desert
say the age of ten, I out. Fortunately, the Music in the local library,
knew that I wanted an suburb I grew up in was I knew I had found what
art of language, but I on the edge of Berkeley, I’d been looking for.
didn’t really have an so that what I couldn’t
idea what that might find at home I could
mean, what possibilities come across in the world. GC: What was the most
 39 ORANGES & SARDINES

critical crossroad in your how to sort the mail and crime, tho he was
professional life? told me to open up the removed from the
next day so that they work-release program. It
RS: There are so many could come in around gave my new employer
different ways to answer ten, a sense that I could
that. When I left UC but when I arrived I think and act in an
Berkeley during my senior discovered an emergency, and I was
year to perform my “escaped” convict from given much more
“military obligation” as a San Quentin literally responsibility right away
conscientious objector hiding in the shadows. than otherwise might
with a prison movement He’d been part of a have been the case.
group, the Committee for work-release program
Prisoner Humanity & but had failed to return
Justice, I GC: How do
discovered that poems without
nonprofit narrative and
groups needed “Narrative, in a strict story create
writers, even if experience?
they didn’t sense, is nothing other
know it RS: The same
themselves. way
Before I left that
than the unfolding of experience
job – I stayed does. Narrative,
five years – I meaning in time . . .” in a strict sense,
and a half- is nothing other
dozen other than the
people had unfolding of
crafted a rewrite of to the joint the night meaning in time, and my
California’s state penal before because a work is deeply narrative.
code, setting terms for female co-worker, not But it doesn’t confuse
over 3,000 different knowing he was a narrative with plot, which
felonies. Perhaps the San Quentin inmate, is something altogether
most critical crossroad on offered him dinner and different. I have a hard
that job occurred my some post-dinner time imagining what my
very second day there. companionship. I had to work must look like to
The two women who ran negotiate his surrender somebody not familiar
the organization had and managed to do so with it, if only because
given me the keys to the in a way that he was not I’ve been on the inside
door and instructions on charged with any new now for decades,

& Grace Notes Ron Silliman

 40 ORANGES & SARDINES

but I think if you don’t only place my work the information.

worry about your appears to be difficult at
preconceptions of what all is within certain §
a work “should be,” you second-tier creative
will discover that my writing programs. Ridge on the small of
writing is always rich with fishing.
meaning, but that its
focus moves, sometimes GC: How can
sentence by sentence, dismantling the line make §
at times word by word. a greater entirety?
Usually I try to set up We pulls at the small
rhythms in the write to RS: I’m not quite sure fishing pants just as the
guide the experience, what you mean by this leg worked its way over
and my principle interest question, so I’m going to the time.
in the Fibonacci series presume that you’re
(which I used in writing alluding to a work like §
Tjanting and several 2197, which is part of The
sections of Lit within The Age of Huts cycle. That We arrived at the
Alphabet) is first of all work, which consists of small fishing context just
musical. It always amazes 2,197 sentences over 13 as the term use its way
me that people who poems (some in prose), over the miscreants.
have no difficulty going each with 13 paragraphs
to a show by Robert or stanzas (and each §
Rauschenberg, David with 13 sentences)
Salle or Jess or any other combines the basic We arrived at the small
artist whose canvases grammatical structure of fishing swamp just as the
pile multiple layers of some sentences with the sun worked its way over
imagery one on top of vocabulary of others, so the gas.
the other would then that you can get
have any difficulty with a sentences in which
text that did the same. certain terms recur. Let’s §
I’ve given readings to just look at one word,
audiences that were fishing. It appears in the Which is fishing, which is
mostly Deadheads (there following forms there: sun.
to hear my co-reader
Robert Hunter, the lyricist We arrived at the §
for the Grateful Dead) small fishing sensitivity
and even in prisons and just as the language A small village, fishing,
had great responses. The worked its way over worked for the sun.

& Grace Notes Ron Silliman

 41 ORANGES & SARDINES

§ § over the loss.

Fishing on the ridge We arrived at the small

fishing village just as the §
of way.
sun worked its way over
the ridge. As small of fishing begins
§ to arrived, village of sun
begins to worked.
Fishing is the small ridge. §
Those are all 21
The village arrived with
§ occurrences of the term
fishing first.
fishing in the 13 poems of
We arrived at the small 2197. You will notice that
fishing body just as the § there are two kinds of
temperature worked its sentences here, at least
way over the back. We arrived at the more with regard to that one
fishing village just as the word. There are a group
§ sun eat its way over the that all follow the same
porridge. syntactic structure into
The village of small fishing which for all but one
sun. § some unusual terms have
been introduced. Then
Distance arrived there is a second group
§
between the small fishing in which the term fishing
meaning just as the has been introduced into
Fishing off the small.
verification worked its sentences with different
way over the this. structures, and that some
other terms that keep
§
appearing with fishing
§ may also have been
The ridge of my fishing
introduced into that
village. The small fishing of an sentence. And there is
old sun. one sentence that is a
§ perfectly ordinary
§ sentence – the 15th in this
We arrived at the small sequence. At one level
fishing attention just as We form at the small the introduced words,
the case deserves its fishing form, just as whether from the fishing
way over the past. the rain worked its way Ur-sentence or from

& Grace Notes Ron Silliman

 42 ORANGES & SARDINES

others, invariably twist conversations with GC: In your own writing

the language so that is readers who have had of a single work for 25
sort of intelligible, but that experience with years, how do you
only sort of. The other is one or another of my sustain the flagging spirit
that terms begin to take works and, as one of to keep going?
on some traits that them once told me, it
typically belong to “ruined them” for bad RS: Because one of the
characters in fiction, literature from that major issues of my work
they appear in different point forward. is to rethink the
circumstances and part:whole relationship
have different fates. in the long poem, I’m
Now if you pay heed to working with different
the language as you – GC: What is there forms and approaches
as you would if you about language that from section to section
read it aloud –this we own and what and, in some cases,
seems pretty easy to cannot be owned? within sections.
do, even if all the So I’m not really doing
disjointedness is a little RS: I don’t think we own the same thing for a
unusual or new to you. anything, ultimately. If quarter century. And,
But if you are used to you can’t take it to the as The Alphabet built,
skimming language and grave, it’s not yours. the variation, the way
only heeding the larger individual sections
elements of fiction & “commented upon”
exposition, like one another became
characters, then you GC: Would you a sort of its own
are probably going to approach teaching fascination for me.
think this is all Milton, Dryden and
gobbledygook. In some Donne the same way
ways, my ideal reader is you’d teach Mullen or GC: What do you see
somebody who starts Hejinian? at this moment as the
off doing the latter, heart of invention in
which is the sort of lazy, RS: Absolutely. In each poetry?
semi-literate reading case, I’d have people
most of us were trained begin to read the works RS: The world is
to do, and realizes in aloud, even when changing constantly, at
the process that she or they’re by themselves an even more rapid
he has to do the former. alone. I don’t think you pace now than ever
I’ve had several can read Milton any before. Poetry has to
wonderful other way, frankly. both reflect and refract

& Grace Notes Ron Silliman

 43 O R A N G E S & S A R D I N E S

those changes relative fiction for a different story, but with

in order to speak species that lives on a the same key variables.
meaningfully of our lives planet dependent We need a tale about
at this moment. To write upon a sun that surely overreaching, call him
of the 21st century in a will burn out if we don’t Icarus, call him Faust.
form that was tired in annihilate ourselves first.
the 17th century is just There are pros and cons
pathological. While I to both methods, but
have my issues with the the pros for electronic
term “postmodern,” I media mostly have to GC: How come people
don’t have any do with distribution, are so mean to
problem recognizing more than with Language poets?
that pre-modern or anti- retention. As librarians
modern approaches to are wont to say, “Hard RS: What does not
literature are failures copy is truth.” change / is the will to
both as writing and change. But people
ultimately as ways to resist change.
live. Language poetry was
GC: Is pattern on the confrontive and
page the way we analytical at a moment
GC: What thematic understand poetry not when many writers were
similarities do you see based in meter? still pretending that they
stated and restated in were “above” such
poetry? RS: Meter is just one of cognitive exercise. Even
many ways of building many poets whose work
RS: Charles Olson put it pattern, structure, form we admired felt that
best: What does not into a text, however you they had chosen sides
change / is the will to want to think of it, and in the 1950s debate
change. the least original and between the raw & the
interesting one at that. cooked and here we
Meter, if it is at all came with a different
GC: What of the safety regular, is simply menu altogether. It was
and stability of digitally narcoleptic. as if we brought
encoded text, as chopsticks. Basically,
compared to the we’ve been the torso of
permanence of ink in young Apollo in the
the old fashioned GC: What if Icarus had room for the past thirty
book? been a pragmatist? years. You must change
RS: Permanence is a RS: Then we’d tell a your life.

& Grace Notes Ron Silliman

 44 ORANGES & SARDINES

Jane Draycott
[Link]

Jane Draycott is a UK-based Concourse

poet with a particular interest in
sound art and collaborative and
digital work. Nominated three Selective walking in a field or maze.
times for the Forward Prize for Closed circuitry. Wave after wave
Poetry, her most recent
collections Prince Rupert’s Drop of closeness. Running together.
and The Night Tree (Carcanet/ A deployment of human figures.
Oxford) are both Poetry Society Seed bed. Our bed. We float,
Recommendations. Previous
collections include, from Two are carried, you against me.
Rivers Press, Christina the Now what? Get in close
Astonishing (with Peter Hay and
Lesley Saunders) and Tideway, a with personal data. Me against you.
long sequence of poems about What are you going to do about it?
London’s working river. Get in close. You made this world.
Winner of the Keats Shelley
Poetry Prize in 2002 and
nominated as one of the Poetry
Book Society’s ‘Next Generation’
poets in 2004, she teaches on
postgraduate writing
programmes at Oxford University
and the University of Lancaster.
‘Concourse’ and ‘We would like
you to listen’ are part of an audio-
text collaboration with Elizabeth
James based on Andrea Alciato’s
1531 Emblematum liber.
 45 ORANGES & SARDINES

We would like you to listen

We would like you to listen
with your whole body
that dog Jimmy circling
surprised by the moon the mirror

To do so we would ask you to reflect

that dog is just calling dog

We want to ask what we can

seeing himself as others see him
another dog we can ultimately listen to

Jimmy the point of living is just to call

is to merge with the Beloved
to call another dog

Longing or love the moon’s

just rocks another sea
circling there surprised

Jane Draycott
 46 ORANGES & SARDINES

Turquoise
Because it is so necessary.
In the shop they are looking
for bits of sky. It is in his eyes.
She is in his eyes, sacred object,
talisman against some kind
of falling. Her eyes are turquoise,
tending towards fire. Like heaven.
Inlaid like heaven on earth.

And here it is, at least

a little bit of it. Blue fire.

At sea they watch the sky free falling,

a line of fire tending towards green,
toward the underwater mines of green.

And now they swim. Cold, deep, downward.

Because it is impossible. Now she is scared.

Jane Draycott
Jane Draycott
 48 ORANGES & SARDINES

& Resurrection of the Dust by John Mckernan

REVIEW BY JIM KNOWLES

John McKernan, “Resurrection of the Dust”,

The Backwaters Press. 225 pages, 6x9

Despite the rather large (these days) size, this collection is dense with excellent
and varied work, an unusual intensity, and many surprises. The image, language,
and sound are usually very sharp and well-worked, and there is an attitude that
wavers from playful to a bit sinister. You really need check out some samples:

Page18:
...I want to stay here to see
who owns this car Almost a blue-quiet in red
neon But the wind polishes its ice pick
to push be to the far edge of my daily
walk past the crack motel and morphine Bright
Aid Drug Store...

There is almost an addled talking through teeth to the sound, and the objects
are all sharp and dangerous, and the sprinkling of the mundane among the
pretty and lethal.

Page 27:
...To get a green passport Be &
Be a soul Stand back please Give
The alphabet time to breathe the dirt
Beneath the deaf squirrel who jumped
& flew 100 yards when the oak
Fell Be soul & tell us why you
Hate God A sentence squirting ...

A chanting soul motif, stream of consciousness, surrealism, surprise soundings,

 49 ORANGES & SARDINES

alternate phrase plays, a disquiet....wow. This is the sort of thing that stops me in
my tracks at the book store, all the deciphering to do, all that play, hints at things
beyond the poem.

There are many macabre moments, some personal, but with the poetic edge
undulled:

Page 41:
He tried to leave
Through hidden wisdom teeth
Then through two front teeth
With their pain-filled silver helmets

At the end He kept trying

To float up the IV drip Past
The iced needles of insulin Into
The calm syllables of coma
Whispering his name in a new language

Wow again. Eerie beyond gothic, he is entangled with a consciousness so

closely by observation. Riveting. At each step, not what you expect. I actually
remembered a friend who was semi-conscious for a week describe his trip
through the IV tubes . . . this is mythology of the real, the now. Very difficult to
read quickly, so much to feel. The way a gasp or cry moves the thoughts past
the teeth. So sharp. This is painting scenes with a razor. Hard to forget.

All along, there are little patterns, about ten pages of recollections, tributes to
other poets, more witty or macabre observation, some youth scenes. Through it
all, there is a strange precision yet a paired detachment from reality that makes
this always surprising, and sharp. I will be revisiting this, for sure. It’s a pretty
amazing body of work.

& Jim Knowles Resurrection Of The Dust

 50 ORANGES & SARDINES

Victoria McKenzie
[Link]
[Link]

Victoria McKenzie is a
Q&A
Which artists do you admire or have had the biggest
influence on your work?
graduate of Brown Egon Schiele, Pierre Bonnard, Romare Bearden, Joan
University. She moved Mitchell, Alice Neal
to NYC in the late
How do you choose your subject matter?
1980s; attended
I’m drawn to melancholy faces or scenes – capturing an
Parsons School of expression that says much more than that which is instantly
Design and studied obvious. Depth of soul.
privately with artist
Beverly Brodsky for What is your opinion of digital art v. traditional art?
several years. She is As someone who pays the bills through the practice of
digital technology and design, I can find myself straddling
married and the both sides of this issue. Putting a computer into the hands
mother of two of someone who knows which buttons to push doesn’t
daughters. She can be mean they will create a work of art. I’d put it this way,
found online at someone with the knowledge and experience of working
[Link], with traditional materials can create amazing things on a
computer, once they learn the software but I think the
which has links to her
reverse journey is MUCH more difficult. Similarly, working
full archive of work and with traditional materials, without the benefit of hitting
also her daily art blog, “undo,” forces you to really master your skills and ultimately
The Night Shift. gives you much more confidence.

What was the first piece of art you were paid for?
I think it was a small watercolor of some colorful sarongs
blowing in the breeze, strung on a line between two palm
trees. Sweet and simple.

Do you have a ritual or specific process you follow when

creating art?
I think my most re-curring ritual is that of procrastination,
typically through cleaning and tidying up. Once I get on a
roll with something, the chaos just expands exponentially
and it doesn’t bother me one bit. But to start something
new, I have to clean my workspace and clear my mind.
 51 ORANGES & SARDINES

New Sheriff In Town ink and watercolor on paper 4” x 6”

Victoria Mckenzie
 52 ORANGES & SARDINES

Party Hat mixed media collage 6” x 8”

Victoria Mckenzie
 53 ORANGES & SARDINES

I Don’t Wanna Go To Rehab mixed media collage 10” x 14”

Victoria Mckenzie
 The woman on the far left standing with her hands in front of her waist is Kirk Curnutt’s great-grandmother.
She is 115 and currently the oldest person in the world. The boy in the right in the overalls is his grandfather.
 55 ORANGES & SARDINES

& Manning the House

SHORT STORY BY KIRK CURNUTT

T HIS WAS IN the time when

refrigerators were just becoming
mistaking me for the ice-cream
man,” the drivers had been schooled
commonplace, so each morning a to say. Most of the time they
fleet of Model As still set out from the delivered that information a lot less
DePrez Ice and Coal Plant on the politely than Mr. Daniel DePrez, their
corner of South and Noble streets boss, would have appreciated. Quite
delivering blocks to homes. The often they improvised a bit of bad
drivers with routes inside Shelbyville news meant to shoo the children
were the envy of those who worked back to their chores. “Ain’t no ice-
the outlying county farms. Once past cream man coming to the
the city limits only a handful of roads boondocks,” they would declare.
were paved, and even though Mr. “Best tell your folks to buy an extra
Ford was making a reliable product block from me and set you a cow on
up in Detroit, his pneumatic tires and it. ’Cause that’s the only way you’re
vanadium suspensions were still getting ice cream out here.”
susceptible enough to ruts that the Ortis C. Huber was one of the
men had to putter along at a speed few drivers who didn’t taunt the
that barely outpaced a pair of strong children. It was likely the reason Mr.
healthy horses. Only one thing DePrez assigned him the poorest of
irritated the drivers more than the the delivery routes, which ran all the
conditions, and that was the children. way out to Blue Ridge Road heading
Regardless of whether they were toward Gowdy. That and Ortis had
walking to school or working the the makings of a good company
fields, when they saw a DePrez truck man. He’d only worked for Mr. DePrez
they dropped what they were doing for nine months, having come to the
to race up to the running boards and ice plant after teaching nearly half of
beg for flavored shavings. “You’re his thirty-seven years. He probably
 56 ORANGES & SARDINES

would’ve still been teaching, too, if But that was to the future. For
not for the Snodgrass girl and all the now he was content to rattle along
talk she’d started about him. That Blue Ridge Road, passing the time
was why Ortis happily considered daydreaming about his customers.
himself a company man: Mr. DePrez He wondered what Hester Cherry
hadn’t paid a whit of attention to would be like had her boy, Howard,
those rumors. He just plain hired Ortis, not died in the Argonne (Ortis
talkers be damned. Maybe driving an regretted not getting over); whether
ice truck wasn’t a path to a quick the cripple bachelor Dar Fately
fortune, but it beat hiring out as a would’ve had better luck with
farmhand or working at the furniture women if his legs hadn’t been eaten
factories that were then Shelbyville’s off by a thresher; whether poor
major employers. If Ortis played his families like the Pruitts would replace
cards right, he figured he could get their horses with motor cars had they
off the road by graduating up to a dollop of prosperity.
mechanic, maybe even managing Only one family Ortis didn’t
the garage at some point. And, as it care to conjecture about. He’d
turned out, that’s exactly what heard tales aplenty about the widow
happened: within a decade, Mr. Brandywine, and they were too
DePrez would promote him to reminiscent of what the Snodgrass girl
supervisor of the fleet, and from there had said to cost him his teaching job.
Ortis would go on to become an So as he knocked on the mudroom
engineer and then plant manager. door Ortis made sure he had nothing
Even after the ice industry went extraordinary in his expression, lest the
under and necessity transformed the woman think he was gossiping to
company into a water distillery himself about her. Only it wasn’t the
(among other things), Ortis C. Huber widow who answered — it was the
stayed with the DePrez family. He man. The one, rumor had it, Mrs.
would still be receiving a paycheck Brandywine refused to marry.
from them when he died in 1982. By The one, rumor made sure to
that point, he would be ninety-one, add, whom marriage was the only
and the scurrilous things the thing she refused him.
Snodgrass girl said about him were “Jus’ checking to see if the
long forgotten, even by Ortis himself. icebox needs tending,” Ortis said in

& Kirk Curnutt Manning the House

 57 ORANGES & SARDINES

as blasé a voice as he could muster. “She doesn’t think I can do it

“You know if Mrs. Brandywine’s right, so she’s insisting on doing it
needin’ a delivery today?” herself. Her husband and her shingled
“It don’t take a ‘Mrs.’ to tell the house, the barn, and that shed
when the water pan’s full. We got a out there, she reminds me. There’s
ham in here trying to go bad, so not a lot around here she thinks I can
yeah, we need us a new block. Make do right jus’ because I didn’t grow up
sure you wrap her tight so you don’t farming. But I’m about to show her.
dribble on the rug.” There’s too much work that’s wasted
The widow Brandywine’s man effort around here. I’m a-redesigning
always talked this rude, so Ortis this operation to be more efficient.”
wasn’t too offended. He went back “Efficiency’s a big word these
to his truck and draped a towel over days,” Ortis admitted. “Mr. DePrez
a block before swinging it hip-high had a man from Indianapolis down
between his pincers. preaching on it not long ago. The
“You’re wondering where she’s man said ‘efficiency’ about as often
at,” the man remarked inside as Ortis as he said ‘me.’”
swung the block into the insulated The widow’s man squared his
oak cabinet. There was a ham in shoulders, but he wasn’t at all
there, all right. Ortis didn’t need to intimidating. Even though Ortis
peek into the food cupboard to see considered himself a teacher by
it; the smell had seeped into the profession, he’d done enough
upper chamber, salty and rich. manual labor in his day that he
“Can’t say I was wondering. If wasn’t about to be cowed by
it’s not Mr. DePrez’s business, it’s none somebody who slicked back his hair
o’mine.” with something other than sweat.
“‘Mrs. Brandywine’ as you call “Did Mr. DePrez’s efficiency
her is up on the barn roof, re- man tell you how inefficient it us for
shingling. She’s got her boy up there, folks to buy their ice from a plant
but otherwise she’s working by her when they make’m home machines
lonesome.” what grow their own?”
“A roof’s gonna need re- “From what I’ve heard those
shingling,” Ortis agreed blankly, not home machines run pretty expensive.
knowing what else to say. I heard of rich men spending twice as

& Kirk Curnutt Manning the House

 58 ORANGES & SARDINES

much for one as they spend on a competition for his plant.”

flivver. I heard of them needing a Ortis nodded, trying to swallow
spare room, too, just to house the a smile. “I’ll let Mr. DePrez know. I’m
motor and compressor. Now rich men sure he’ll want to hear whether Mrs.
might have spare rooms, but Brandywine shares your view of the
everyday folk like me and.…” future … friend.”
Ortis made a point not to It was about as rude as Ortis C.
say you. Instead, he said Mrs. Huber had ever spoken to someone
Brandywine. who wasn’t the Snodgrass girl or a
“You been hearing old news, member of her family. He felt the
friend,” the man smiled, impervious to widow’s man eye him all the way
the insult. “General Electric got’m a back through the mudroom and
model now with the compressor built outside. There Ortis noticed the barn
on top of the machine. It’s all of a shimmering red against a green-and-
piece and hums quiet as a dream. gold backdrop of corn some twenty
The best part is it only costs $300. yards off the dirt drive. A silhouette
They’ve got an installment plan to slowly inched across its top, stooped
boot for folks who can’t lay cash on at the waist as a hammer swung and
the table. You know how I know all fell over the decking. Ortis didn’t
this? Because I just bought us a need to know it was the widow to tell
monitor-top, friend. That’s what it was a woman: each time the
they’re called: monitor-tops. Like I silhouette took a step, she had to lift
said, I’m a-making this operation the hem of her dress to avoid
more efficient.” tripping.
The widow’s man stopped “It’s not work what makes a
long enough to take a self-satisfied man. It’s the quality of his ideas, and
breath. I’ve got plenty of them.”
“I’d appreciate you telling Mr. Ortis shrugged and tossed his
DePrez this farm won’t be needing pincers into his truck bed. He wasn’t
more deliveries after today. We’re going to answer the man, but as he
making our own ice from here on out. started for the driver’s side door he
You best tell him to get used to spotted an object in the pebbly dirt.
hearing that news, too. $300 and an Three paces to the right, and his foot
installment plan gonna be tough would’ve been impaled.

& Kirk Curnutt Manning the House

 59 ORANGES & SARDINES

“I wish Mr. Ford would make a turned his truck around and crawled
machine what grows its own tires.” slowly up to the widow’s drive, close
Ortis bounced the nail in his palm. enough to see the black script
“Now that would be some kind of painted above the rear tire of the
efficiency.” chrome-colored chariot. GENERAL
He set the nail on his dash as ELECTRIC, it said. REFRIGERATOR. And
he started the truck and rattled back above the word, in the open flatbed,
toward the road. As he passed the as if there to rebuke the doubters, sat
barn he spotted a second silhouette a fancy white box. It, too, had a
on the roof — the widow’s boy, Ortis crown: an odd, glassy contraption
figured. He gave the pair a farewell shaped like a pillbox hat.
honk of his horn. He knew the boy Ortis watched the driver
well enough: on hot days, Clinton unload the appliance, the widow’s
was one of the children who hopped man telling him how to do his job the
on Ortis’s running boards begging for entire time. When there was nothing
shavings. left to see Ortis again turned back
*** toward Shelbyville. He was passing
He’d finished the day’s the cornfield that marked the edge
deliveries and was already past the of the widow’s farm when a boy
widow’s farm returning to Shelbyville hopped the drainage ditch and ran
when a truck came barreling down toward him. Normally Ortis would
Blue Ridge Road at him. It was neither merely slow and tell Clinton how
as wide nor as tall as Ortis’s truck, but dangerous it was to jump on a
it was spiffier and acted like it owned moving running board, but today he
the ground it traveled — even the stopped his truck.
plume of dust it churned up looked “I thought you were roofing.”
regal. Ortis had to veer toward the “Ma saw the scarecrow was
drainage ditch to avoid getting down.”
clipped. Even then the woosh when it He pointed toward the ditch,
roared past sent a shiver through his where a cross of wood was wrapped
axle that vibrated all the way up with a plaid shirt and topped by a
through the steering wheel into his crocker sack, both stuffed with hay.
hands. Ortis cursed the other driver The face on the sack gave Ortis a
until a thought entered his mind. He giggle.

& Kirk Curnutt Manning the House

 60 ORANGES & SARDINES

“I bet you painted that smile “All you’ve got to do is slip this
yourself, huh? It’s the same red as under that G. E. fellow’s tire, without
what your ma’s barn is.” him or Horace seeing.”
“Ma said a smile scares the The boy seemed to study the
crows more than a scowl. She sent nail. Then his eyes flicked up toward
me to prop ’im back up. Horace Ortis, and just as suddenly back to
planted him but didn’t tamp the post the sharp tip.
in deep enough. Crows keep “I know what you’re thinking.
knocking him over.” You’re wondering what Horace is
“Knockin’ which over? — gonna care if a delivery man gets a
Horace or the scarecrow?” flat. The refrigerator’s already in the
Ortis didn’t wait for Clinton to house, idd’n it? Well, you’re just
laugh. He didn’t figure the boy gonna have to trust me. Something in
would. me thinks that G. E. fellow is every bit
“‘Horace,’ huh? I guess I never a smart-mouth as your —”
thought to ask his name. What do He almost said stepfather.
you think of that fellow?” “The son of a gun darn near
The boy didn’t answer. blew me off the road,” Ortis told the
Probably out of respect for his mother. boy instead. “That’s the funny thing
“Well, I hope I don’t offend about the future. It’s always in a hurry
you when I say I don’t much care for to run down the present.”
him,” Ortis went on. “Strikes me as a Clinton still hadn’t budged.
smart-mouth. Thing is, since he’s “All right then. I’ll make it really
buying you and your ma that fancy worth your while. I’ve got some extra
monitor-top, I won’t have to put up blocks back there. What say we crush
with it. You’re still gonna have to, one up and you can have a cup of
though. I don’t envy you that. I feel shavings? Gotta be hot on that roof.
so bad for you I’ve got an idea. It Shavings for the rest of the week
may not take the smart-mouth out of could keep a boy like you mighty
old Horace, but it could give us both cool. Tomorrow I’ll even bring a bottle
a leg up on him.” of flavoring for you. You can hide it
He swiped the nail off the out here in the field and Horace’ll
dashboard and held it toward never have to know.”
Clinton. Ortis had just about given up

& Kirk Curnutt Manning the House

 61 ORANGES & SARDINES

when Clinton finally plucked the nail the creek.

into his own grip. What he remembered
“Strawberry and spearmint,” concerned Clinton’s father. The
he said in a near whisper. “That’s how husband whose death left Mrs.
the hokey-pokey man at the fair Brandywine a widow. The one whose
serves his shavings.” death left somebody thinking she
The boy had disappeared needed a man.
back into the corn before Ortis had a Lest he was mistaken, the
chance to wonder where in husband and father whose place
Shelbyville he might find a bottle of Horace wasn’t quite fit to take had
spearmint syrup. died of lockjaw — after stepping on
He sat for a while before a nail.
deciding a G. E. driver would never So as Ortis returned to Blue
waste time waiting for a mere Ridge Road he felt the future
iceman to pass him by. He drove a trampling down the past again—only
mile or so to where Blue Ridge this time he was the future. He was so
intersected with Range Road. A mile irritated at himself for pushing
up it, a little creek cut diagonally mischief on the boy that he didn’t
across the farmland. Ortis parked by take a lick of pleasure when he
the marshy bank and unwrapped a passed the G. E. truck, which sat
ham sandwich he’d packed that listing away from the drainage ditch,
morning. The ham didn’t smell half as its back left tire so flat the steel rim
rich or salty as the one the widow’s had carved its own rut in the dirt. Ortis
man was probably relocating into his pulled his truck over and stuck his
new refrigerator at that exact head out the window. “You need a
moment. As he chewed Ortis thought hand?” he shouted over his shoulder.
about Clinton and how oddly he’d “God done give me two,”
looked at that nail. Like he was afraid the other driver huffed as he
of it or something. Like it might jump unbolted his spare from its storage
up and bite him. Then, after about spot atop his side fender. “They ought
twenty minutes, without warning, to serve me well enough. I do wish
something unsettled Ortis’s stomach, they’d pave these goddamn roads
and he rewrapped what was left before they ask me to drive ’em,
of the sandwich and pitched it into though. You never know what in hell

& Kirk Curnutt Manning the House

 62 ORANGES & SARDINES

you’re running over out here in the that Horace — who was snapping a
boondocks.” switch-stick into the corn with a
*** sloppy, unfocused violence that said
Ortis only wondered how he probably wouldn’t have been any
much efficiency that new refrigerator use laying shingle. What he was
brought the widow Brandywine’s whipping couldn’t be seen; it was
farm for about a week. He made sure obscured by the chest-high stalks.
the boy got his daily cup of shavings, Ortis had a pretty good idea, though,
but other than presenting Clinton his and it chilled him with fear and guilt.
promised bottles of strawberry and The nail was his idea, after all—he’d
peppermint, he never again pushed the mischief on the boy. Ortis
mentioned the nail. Mr. DePrez didn’t jerked his gearshift into neutral and
seem too worried about competing jumped the drainage ditch, yelling,
against monitor-tops, either. Ortis was “Let him alone! Let him alone,
there when his boss crossed the dammit!” as the dangling thicket of
Brandywines off the company ledger unshucked ears thumped his chest.
with a light stroke of his pencil. “The Only it wasn’t Clinton on the
thing about those installment plans,” receiving end of that disciplining. It
Mr. DePrez told his favorite driver. was the widow’s scarecrow. The
“You miss a single payment, and the switch-stick had popped the buttons
store comes calling for its machine. A off the tattered shirt that held its
big company like G. E. won’t float a stuffing, so hay spilled everywhere like
customer through hard times. My dry innards. “I’m in charge here!”
guess? The widow’s man will be back Horace screamed. He was so caught
with his tail between his legs. up in proving it that he didn’t even
Probably stuck there by the widow notice he wasn’t alone anymore. “I
herself.” run this farm! You hear me? I do!”
That day had yet to come The object of his beating
when Ortis next saw him. He was was so compliant in taking the
working his usual route on Blue Ridge punishment that its expression didn’t
Road when he spotted an odd sway change a lick. The smile Clinton had
in Mrs. Brandywine’s cornfield. He painted on the crocker sack just kept
slowed enough to see it wasn’t due on grinning, red hot as a taunt.
to a breeze or a loose cow. The sway Even the widow’s scarecrow
was caused by the widow’s man — couldn’t help but laugh at her man.

& Kirk Curnutt Manning the House

 63 ORANGES & SARDINES

Brooklyn Copeland
[Link].

Brooklyn Copeland was

born in Indianapolis in 1984.
She is the founding editor of
UNEVEN BUT NOT ODD
Taiga Press, and the co-
editor of the poetry journal
Winter wears on,
Taiga, which seeks to
publish original work,
translations from the as it does, and has, flash
Scandinavian, Baltic and frozen and vampiric.
Slavic languages, and brief For three
interviews with young
musicians. Her chapbooks weeks we delay our arrival.
include The Milk for Free We are one smirk, Siamese
(2008), which is available
electronically from Scantily shorn-skulled.
Clad Press, Borrowed
House (2008), which is Our sun,
forthcoming from Greying
its pilot light
Ghost Press, and Pearl
of Siberia (2009), which
is forthcoming from
unlit, flares white.
Wyrd Tree Press.
 64 ORANGES & SARDINES

Glenn Harrington
[Link]

The paintings of Glenn Harrington

are recognized and collected influence on your work?
Q&A
Which artists do you admire or have had the biggest

internationally and have been John Sargent; for his design, mastery of light and color,
featured in such publications as draftsmanship, and facile execution - making look simple
American Arts Quarterly, American what is very complex.
Art Collector, International Artists
Magazine, the covers of American How do you choose your subject matter?
Artist & US Art, New Art International,
Observation is crucial in selecting imagery. Usually, It’s
The New York Times, and
Philadelphia Inquirer. He has had derived from nature or  natural human emotion. Sometimes
numerous solo exhibitions in New the imagery selects itself and I have only to notice it. When
York, Japan, Charleston, South designing a painting, it tends to be a matter of experimenting
Carolina and Pennsylvania, and has with a subject, remaining flexible, editing possibilities until
exhibited at the Norman Rockwell something interesting appears.
Museum, The Museum of American
Illustration, the Medici Gallery in What is your opinion of digital art v. traditional art?
London, and the USGA Museum.
I’m open to anything lasting being produced in the digital
His portrait work is highly regarded, medium. There are painting principles that transfer to an
having received the Draper Grand electronic approach, but I feel they are inherently quite
Prize in 2007, the Honor Award in 2008 different. There’s something raw, unplanned and
and 2005, and Certificate Award in independent, about picking up a brush or pencil in an
2004 from the Portrait Society of attempt to say something about an experience. All the senses
America’s international juried show. are at work. I love the feel and smell of it; colors have distinct
Harrington’s portrait of Maria Callas scents, brushes wear down and become familiar, the feel of
was used to promote the Tony Award the canvas varies. Each stroke is a track, a thought, it’s 3d
winning play “Master Class.”
Glenn is represented in Manhattan by
and exposes the planning and skill in the artist’s intent. I’m
the Eleanor Ettinger Gallery. amazed at what’s being produced digitally, but feel at
present, a certain homogenization that is limiting. 

Do you have a ritual or specific process you follow when

creating art?
I’ve been fighting against one for years, I don’t want the
process to become mechanical, repetitive. Yet, without
packing all the habits we’ve learned on the way as we strike
out into new ground would be futile. So, I try and stay loose
within a planned framework, always allowing for a
spontaneous change of direction. Having infinite
possibilities at hand helps- solutions to new problems as they
arise- this has surfaced after many years of grappling with it.
photo: Glenn Race
 65 ORANGES & SARDINES

Irridescence oil on linen 40” x 30”

Glenn Harrington
 66 ORANGES & SARDINES

Hemlock Ledge oil on linen 24” x 36”

Glenn Harrington
 67 O R A N G E S & S A R D I N E S

Silken Scarf oil on linen 14” x 11”

Glenn Harrington
 68 ORANGES & SARDINES

Emily Kendal Frey

Emily Kendal Frey MATADOR

lives in Portland, You don’t have
Oregon.  Recent to live
work is forthcoming in the kitchen
with the bones.
in Spinning Jenny,
Warbler, Bird Dog,
Fou and (with
Zachary SEX
Schomburg) Anti-, She’s looking at me
Pilot, Sir! and like I have cake
Jubilat. in my hair.

THERE
A crow is eating
the matador’s
shadow.
 69 ORANGES & SARDINES

MATADOR
Beauty that is not shaped is heart-buckled
Beauty lives across the divide from the other-shaped beauty
I have lived on the other side of beauty
I have lived this side of beauty
Beauty the scale we measure loss against
Beauty the fence
Beauty the fence we climb
Beauty the hole we step through
Make a hole-shaped place for beauty
Each hour a sacrifice to beauty
Beauty sacrifices itself

Emily Kendal Frey

 70 ORANGES & SARDINES

Paul Béliveau
[Link]

Paul Béliveau obtained his Bachelor’s

degree in Visual Arts from Laval influence on your work?
Q&A
Which artists do you admire or have had the biggest

University in 1977. Recognized for his I could say Rubens for his genius as an artist, unifier,
expertise in drawing, engraving and cultured man, diplomat, businessman who has been able
painting he has since then had more to gather assistants and collaborators who have
than sixty solo exhibitions across “nourished” his genius. Throughout my career (30 years
Canada and the United States. His now) I have been influenced with some very talented
works can be found in many public artists who have had completely different career paths,
and private collections throughout such as the inevitable Picasso who went though the 20th
the country and has to his name Century like a comet, burning almost everything on his
some fifteen works of art integrated way. Pop Art has a large influence on my work as well, with
into architectural sites. The recipient Warhol who understood American people with their
of numerous prizes in visual arts and qualities and failings. I am an ardent admire of Bahaus
of multiple grants from the Canada style with Gropius and Rohe, those who have literally
Council, Béliveau has taken part in transformed teaching and design during the 20th Century.
several committees and juries as
specialist in the visual arts. Paul How do you choose your subject matter?
Béliveau lives and works in Quebec The series “Les humanites” originates in my search for
City, Canada. giving the book a different look than the one we are used
to, that is put down a table (close or open) with very
Currently represented by the traditional scenes. Opting for a “close-up” of the book
following fine galleries : spines, vertically or horizontally arranged, has allowed me
Galerie de Bellefeuille, Montreal to count more on the formal and semantic issue on the
Stricoff Fine Art, Ltd, New York painting. Each work holds a different subject according to
the books used and this way I sort of create a utopic
Plus One Gallery, London, UK library.
Arden Gallery, Boston
Winsor Gallery, Vancouver Do you have a ritual or specific process you follow when
Robert Kidd Gallery, Detroit creating art?
Although my painting is figurative, I love doing things on
the spur of the moment. My ritual lies more on the fact that
I come to the studio every morning at 7:15 Monday-Friday
and during summer I take my bike to ride to the studio, it
prepares my mind and body to a very productive day.
I would say I am very “well-disciplined”.

What is your secret weapon?

I would say my secret weapon is intuition, good feelings.
I avoid long Freudian analysis. I like to rely on my instinct
and this way my intellectual potential arises, becomes
nervous and is very helpful of a tool. In my creation
repentance exists as well in, but I would say the essence
of each work has a lot to do with intuition.
 71 ORANGES & SARDINES

Les humanitiés CCCLXXVII acrylic on canvas 24” x 72”

Les humanitiés CCCLXXXII acrylic on canvas 30” x 75”

Les humanitiés CCCII acrylic on canvas 26” x 80”

Paul Béliveau
 72 ORANGES & SARDINES

Les humanitiés CCCLXV acrylic on canvas 54” x 54”

Paul Béliveau
 73 ORANGES & SARDINES

Les humanitiés CCCXXVI acrylic on canvas 40” x 60”

Paul Béliveau
 74 ORANGES & SARDINES

Peter Ciccariello
[Link]

Peter Ciccariello is an
interdisciplinary artist, poet, and influence on your work?
Q&A
Which artists do you admire or have had the biggest
photographer, whose work
experiments with the fusing of Albert Pinkham Ryder & Marcel Duchamp.
language and visual imagery. He
has studied art and design at How do you choose your subject matter?
Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY,
Rhode Island School of Design, It chooses me, it finds me.
Providence, RI, and Parsons
School of Design, NY. What is your opinion of digital art v. traditional art?
RECENT SELECTED GALLERY Digital art is tomorrow’s traditional art. A computer is a tool
SHOWS and a tool is nothing but a tool.
AND EXHIBITIONS:
PETER CICCARIELLO: Recent Work What was the first piece of art you were paid for?
Uncommon Vision at the Gallery An abstract painting done with paint rollers.
Above, Providence, RI
- June 19 – July 15 2008
Speech Acts: Art Responding to Do you have a ritual or specific process you follow when
Language, Rhetoric, & Politics creating art?
Harvard University, I surrender then take no prisoners.
Dudley House, Lehman Hall,
Cambridge, MA  - 2008
Conceptual Poetry and its Others What is your secret weapon?
- 2008 Exhibition of Visual Poetry, Unmitigated temerity and the empirical knowledge that
The University of Arizona Poetry
Center absolutely nothing is real.
Souped-up Pontiac - Group
exhibition at the Museum of New
Art in Pontiac, Michigan - 2008
First Prize winner of the Donnie
2007 Contest, MOCA Museum of
Computer Art – February 2006
First Prize Co-winner of the MOCA
Museum of Computer Art -  
October 2006
First Prize Winner of the Corel
Manipulated Photography
Competition, July 2006 and 2007
ViSual POetry* Exhibition
Harvard University,
Dudley House, Lehman Hall,
Cambridge, MA - 2006
 75 ORANGES & SARDINES

Glyph Poem 11 fine art limited edition pigment print 18” x 24”

Peter Ciccariello
 76 ORANGES & SARDINES

Glyph Poem 1 fine art limited edition pigment print 18” x 24”

Peter Ciccariello
 77 ORANGES & SARDINES

Glyph Poem 8 fine art limited edition pigment print 18” x 24”

Peter Ciccariello
 78 ORANGES & SARDINES

& Hummingbirds And Fish

BY JACK ANDERS

Notes on Bob Hicok

There is no cliché in the present moment. The way that a hummingbird flits
about the feeder, were I only to observe it as sharply as it is, cannot be a cliché
because this is the first time I have seen this and the first time I have said it to
myself in my mind. A cliché is a image fixed to the point of banality. The present
moment is not fixed. Within the images of the present moment, the cycling of
possession and dispossession, presence and absence, displays and effaces itself,
as can be readily made apparent if I were to ask you to describe to me what the
fuzzy oval of a hummingbird’s wings looks like, or, the turning colors of its narrow
pointed body – colors like those of a pigeon’s neck or carnival glass, acidic and
sweet pinks and greens of a Christmas ornament. The possession and
dispossession cycles so fast in the thresh of a hummingbird’s wings that its
presence is infused by absence, just a blur. In the words of Bob Hicok:

The hummingbird
no living person’s seen,
blue unless red until green.

(Hicok, from “The Invisible Man”).

The Greek aphorist Heraclitus wrote once, “it rests by changing.” The colors of
a hummingbird are visible only as they are in movement, arising as they fall, as in
certain images from Rilke, for example that of a fountain falling through its
upward thrust, and so here, even as the color blue is said, it is changing to red, or
then again it goes green. The cycling of appearance and disappearance in the
hovering flight is a partially effaced blurriness (the flitting wings never truly visible
or truly invisible, like the soft circle-blur of a helicopter’s propeller). Likewise the
iridescent colors of a hummingbird’s darting body change in the sun like the
colors in soap bubbles or to use an image from Mark Doty describing the skin of
mackerel at a fish market:
 79 ORANGES & SARDINES

Iridescent, watery
prismatics:
think abalone,
the wildly rainbowed
mirror of a soap-bubble sphere,
think sun on gasoline.

(Doty, from “A Display of Mackerel”).

The changing is only fixed into words as paradox, with the frozen and
symbolic quality that entails, like a picture by Escher or an infinity loop, the
endless quality becoming vulnerable, exposed as being illogical, compromised
by sight, like the angles of a hypercube which can’t all be ninety degrees in this
merely 3-D world. And so in Hicok’s poem it is the hummingbird “no living
person’s seen.”

The hummingbird
no living person’s seen,
blue unless red until green.

The pleasure of these three lines has something to do with the faintly archaic
rhyme, which has an effect of slightly increasing the accent on the word “seen,”
along with the use of the comma and line break to isolate that word; this is an
organic reflection in form of the point being made in content that the colors of
the hummingbird are constantly changing and so to describe them as blue or
red or green is imperfect and even to add temporal modifiers such as “unless”
and “until” does not wholly correct the imperfection.
Thus an imperfection of observation or of description is incorporated into the
presentation – which is a good thing, since it’s true to reality.
Birds in poems are often used as images at the verge of a void. Just like a bird
in flight is literally the only thing you may see against the void of the sky behind it,
in poems we often find a bird deployed as a sort of last or liminal image along
the margin of a void. For example from Wallace Stevens:

The palm at the end of the mind,

Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

& Jack Anders Hummingbirds And Fish

 80 ORANGES & SARDINES

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason

That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.

The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

(Stevens, “Of Mere Being”).

The bird is a bridge, a link, a messenger, like an angel (the word “angel” is
etymologically related to the Greek “messenger”) even if with Stevens’ aesthetic
skepticism, it sings a foreign song without human meaning. The bird is at the
edge of space, at the edge of a void, at the end of the mind, beyond the last
thought. By virtue of that placement it is heightened as an image accordingly,
fire-fangled, golden. Recall also the “green freedom of a cockatoo” in Stevens’
much earlier poem “Sunday Morning,” and its ending:

And, in the isolation of the sky,

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

The birds occupy a liminal space before a void. They are final findings or
possessions of the eye before that transcendent or nihilistic dispossession (nothing
to see) of the void. They are beautiful in themselves, and their beauty is as if
heightened by the imminent negation of the void which follows them. The birds
are paradoxical – “ambiguous” – symbols of the imminent dispossession of sight,
loss of images. The void as dispossession of sight is fearful because as Nietzsche
said, when you look into the void it looks back into you. I.e., in looking at the bird
before the void, you are starting to look into the void as well, in a figure/ground
sense, and you are in danger of falling into that void, there is nothing for your

& Jack Anders Hummingbirds And Fish

 81 ORANGES & SARDINES

eyes to grab hold of and stand on, and the void without the image becomes a
forceful dispossession because it is hard to see how poetry can exist without the
image.
And so arguably in this sense the lyric poet must endure or tolerate an
unpoetic, apoetic, de-poeticized area (the void), in order to access the image
(the bird).
Chinua Achebe has written that “the psychology of the dispossessed can be
truly frightening.” To view the liminal image at the edge of the void is truly a
fearful situation because the closer the image, or the word itself, gets to the
edge, the more absolute and reversible it gets – the closer it comes to total
dispossession. There is the ambiguous nature of Stevens’ birds. Likewise
ambiguous are Rilke’s guardians of the void, his angels. Are Rilke’s legendary
angels positive or negative figures, in a passage like the following?

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’

hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us.

(Rilke, from “The First Elegy”).

Despite all of Rilke’s wondrous metaphysical efforts to salvage a believable
angel out of western nihilism, after reading him, do you really believe in angels as
being more than ciphers for death and void? There is some strength to the
contention that Rilke is a death poet and not the benign Rumi-esque figure
proposed by Stephen Mitchell and others (which is not to disparage Mitchell
whose translations of Rilke into English are as good as A.E. Poulin’s underrated
translations into English of the poems Rilke wrote in French). At the liminal margin
all and naught are strangely reversible and, for the word, angel, you might as
well use the word, zero, or, nothing, because there is a strange reversibility of the
all into the nothing, a continual usurping of absolute possession by total
dispossession, and to the extent that a poet inhabits this psychology, it can be
truly frightening.

& Jack Anders Hummingbirds And Fish

 82 ORANGES & SARDINES

In this sense the simple study of poetry can be dangerous, not in a physical
way like the handling of guns, but in a psychological way because knowledge
itself is experience, and to put thought into words is to experience thought, and
there are many thoughts which are painful and dangerous especially at these
limits, where figure-ground relations become asymptotic and gorgeously
agonized, the figure crystallizing and encrusted with iridescence and diadem in
correlation to the ever-greater emptiness of the void. The image coruscates with
its imminent dispersion.
This sort of in extremis imagism or seeing of the thing may however simply be
the natural way of seeing things, for the lyric poet – the naked lunch, if you will,
the way the meat on the end of the fork really looks. It is the ubiquity of its
unbearability which leads to potential strain on the lyric poet’s psychology and
to the pathos of the lyric. T.S. Eliot said that we can’t bear very much reality, and
there is a continuity to how he accepted the conservative religious structures of
the Anglican Church even as he endured the radical nihilism glimpsed in “The
Waste Land.” It is necessary to resort to some formal protection against the
desert of the real. Thus Stevens’ fire-fangled bird at the periphery, or just this side
of the void, or, likewise, the golden mechanical bird which ends Yeats’ poem
“Sailing to Byzantium,” similarly encrusted and diademed, but now just that side
of the void, over in the safety of the artifice of eternity:

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

& Jack Anders Hummingbirds And Fish

 83 ORANGES & SARDINES

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Like these poets, Hicok has his own survival strategy which negotiates and
manages the void. For one thing, he is an unusually sociable poet. He has done
poetry slams, traveled around on the road with other poets, he teaches poetry
classes, etc. So often it is the presence of one or more other people and the sort
of sociable lightness or humor that accompanies that, which keeps things from
getting dark. Consider the following extract:

The person
who drove me home
said my smile was a smeared
totem that followed
his body that night as it arced
over a cliff in a dream.

(from “What Would Freud Say?”). You can see a preserving humanism and
society: the other person, the companionship of the two, even as one goes into
a dream.
Another example from later in the same poem:

To be loved
by Blondie, Dagwood
gets nothing right
except the hallucinogenic
architecture of sandwiches.

Humor and American pop culture as saving graces. Again, the poem has
other people in it – something that’s often missing from lyric with its tendency to
self-obsession. Another example:

I’ve known a few singers who’ve done well

locally, they have gigs, fans, they own microphones
and water their voices, one wears a red scarf

& Jack Anders Hummingbirds And Fish

 84 ORANGES & SARDINES

around his throat like it’s a Christmas tree. They say

they feel abandoned when the night ends, when the crowd
breaks into particles, into dust, I’ve imagined this grief
as skin made of butterflies when the butterflies leave.
There is no business like show business, nothing like the voice
reaching out, nothing I can do except listen, and scream,
and every morning, when I put bread to my ear, I hear fields
coming closer, wind walking fingertip by fingertip
across the wheat, singing nothing, nothing but eat.

(Hicok, from “Consideration of Song”).

Once again, you can see the sociable aspect, not only in the presence of
other people in the poem, but also the conversational tone. But I don’t get the
frequent take others have on Hicok as being a humorous poet or a light/witty
poet in the main; I see an intermix of darker tones. In this passage though I want
to focus on the significantly placed words “grief,” “scream” and “eat.” The first
two words relate to despair and loss of control at the level of content. The third
word, eat, is placed ambiguously close to such a relation, by being deployed
outside of its normal discursive context. “Eat” is a word of necessity, in a sense an
ugly, unpoetic word. Simone Weil made an entire metaphysics out of the spiritual
ramifications of that word. She died of illness secondary to starvation because
she refused to eat more than the rations allowed to the populace by law during
the Second World War. In a notebook, Weil quoted the following from Heraclitus:
“Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, living each other’s death and
dying each other’s life.” Weil interpreted the passage in these terms: “To live the
death of a being is to eat it. The reverse is to be eaten. Man eats God and is
eaten by God.” The interesting and or terrifying quality to the word, eat, can be
seen if it is decontextualized. This quality in the word is not found if I say, “I want
to eat a sandwich,” which would be ordinary context. If we isolate eating and
look at it in a more naked or lyrical way, it becomes quite peculiar and absolute,
if not terrifying. The way meat looks, the naked lunch. If I die of a virus, the virus is
eating me, it is living off my tissue. We will all eaten by worms, or staph infection,
or the mouth of an oven, and by taking the word eat out of its normal use in a
sentence such as “I want to eat a sandwich” and in recontextualizing it in a
fabric of words which includes words such as grief and scream, and putting it not
in a human mouth but a mouth of wind, as in Hicok’s poem, we now see the

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word eat more along the lines of the way that Weil used it.
The final image in the poem I quoted an extract from above was as follows:

and every morning, when I put bread to my ear, I hear fields

coming closer, wind walking fingertip by fingertip
across the wheat, singing nothing, nothing but eat.

It may be compared to:

The feel of things, if I cherish, helps me live

more like a minute than a clock. Rain crossed
my neighbor’s field at the speed of a million mouths
per second kissing corn. Just before my house,
it stopped, then started on the other side of my life
with a sound like the valley being told to hush.

At the mailbox, I saw the mailbox had been beaten again,

I sat, looked down the road at the fallen loaves
of metal bread.

(Hicok, from “Odyssey”).

The similarity between the image in the first poem of the wind across the fields
and the image in the second of the rain across the field is apparent. There is also
a similarity between the comparison of wind and fingertips in the first, and rain
and kissing in the second. And again, between the image of bread in the first
and in the second. The conflux of these images in the two different poems raises
the question of whether it was an intentional or known conflux for the poet or
whether it was unconscious. The conflux is apparent, but its meaning is less so.
Heraclitus said that an unapparent connection is stronger than an apparent.
Here, there is a strong connection between the images I have mentioned, as is
evidenced by the fact that we find the same conflux in two different poems.
However, what the images mean is ambiguous. In this sense Hicok’s poetry has a
quality of unifying without reducing the question. Stated differently, it brings
together without reducing the mystery. He says in an interview that writing “is the
unifying activity of my life,” and the poems do appear to be a unifying activity.

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The poems have fragments which are becoming subject to a unifying activity
which is nothing other than the lyricism of the pursuit. As an example:

When it was her turn to pee, the body’s excuse

for reading graffiti –

Life is like trying to hang a painting of the sky

to the sky

My boyfriend curves to the right but votes straight

Democratic

(from “O Canada”).
His method here is cognizant of the fragment as a dominant aesthetic mode
over the last 100 years, but the feel of the poem is of fragments moving toward
unity as opposed to moving toward greater disjunction; you could call him an
optimist in this sense. The individual images, motifs, or quasi-fragments, can be
somber, in the way that Chopin can be somber, but the relationship between
each image or motif generally has a feeling of a unifying activity at work and
there is a certain pleasure to the text in that respect. Both Stevens and Barthes
said text must give pleasure and with Hicok I think it is done in part through using
narrative and story modes in his poems, which act as connective tissue. The lyric
moment is diffused through the temporality of narrative. Whereas Ashbery like
Stevens is more strictly lyric and constitutionally incapable of plot, character or
dialogue (try reading Stevens’ play in Opus Posthumous if you don’t believe me),
Hicok is generous with story effects. For example the following has a sociable
aspect that indicates how he includes narrative, dramatic, or short-story
techniques in his poems as opposed to staying on an obsessively lyric axis:

At least once you should live with someone

more medicated than yourself. A tall man,
he closed his eyes before he spoke,
stocked groceries at night and heard voices.
We were eating cereal the first time,
Cream of Wheat. He said that she said

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we’re all out of evers without explaining

who she was or how many evers we had
to begin with or where they were kept.
I slept with an extra blanket that night.
This was strange but that year
I had to read Plato for a grade,
each circle’s the bastard child
of a perfect O I remember he said,
and Kierkegaard I thought was writing stand-up
with the self is a relation which relates
itself to its own self but my roommate
nodded as I read this aloud, he’d stood
so long before carnival mirrors
that the idea of a face being a reflection
of a reflection of itself was common sense.
On the calendar the striptease of months,
dust quietly gathering on the shoulders
of older dust and because he’d not taken
the microwave apart and strapped its heart
to his head or talked to the 60-watt bulb
on the porch he thought he was better
and flushed his pills. Soon he was back
where windows are mesh and what’s sharp
is banished and what can be thrown
is attached so unless you can lift
the whole building everyone is safe.
We had lunch a year later. Or
he spun the creamer and wore skin
made of glass while I ate a sandwich
and by that I mean I was hungry
and he was sealed in amber, a caul
of drugs meant to withstand ants and fire
nor did his mouth work but to hold words in.
I’d wanted to know all that time what happened
to our evers, to ask if he remembered
what he said and explain to him

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he was an oracle that day, I wanted him

to tell me about the woman who whispered
or screamed that our chances were up
because the phrase had stayed in my life
as a command to survive myself.
That was the day I learned you can sit
with someone who’s on the bottom
of the ocean and not get wet.
By the time he said things were good
he’d poured twelve sugars into a coffee
he never touched

(Hicok, “Bottom of the Ocean”). You can see the conversational tone at work
there and the use of storytelling strategies and willingness to put other people in
the poem, to get away from the self. As another example, in the below passage
from another poem we see a strategy of dialogue which like something
you would find in a story, although it is tweaked tonally, line by line, in a way
which is lyric:

What do you think of the bible?

—I own one or two, don’t read them, I enjoy

turning the pages, the paper thin as slices
of garlic.

Garlic slices are thicker than that.

—Slices of cloud.

Though it would be cool, cooking with the bible.

When someone asked you, how’s the spaghetti, you could say,
needs more bible.

—I could say that anyway.

But you don’t.

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—Nor dolphin toothpicks or advanced

geothermal calisthenics. Why do you ask about the bible?

I’m trying to inject one into my arm.

(from “The Religious Impulse”).

There is a measured quality to the words. The emotional inflections of the
phrases are modulated. The lines throw off overtones; various potentialities of the
comedic and the tragic are actuated and blended or modified by each
successive line. The use of dialogue here, or of feints toward dialogue, is similar to
passages found in Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands, for example:

We don’t have a dog.

We have a hostile cat.

Why is it always family with you?

Can’t we ever be two adults?

They’re nothing like us; they don’t

travel. That’s why they have a dog.

(from “Meadowlands I”). In these and other passages in Gluck’s book we hear
echoes of dialogue of two spouses reflecting an exhausted marriage. The
technique is all the more interesting since Gluck is typically very lyric and
dialogue which is narrative or dramatic in nature is typically absent in pure lyric.
But to note these story aspects in Hicok’s work is not to deny the passages of
pure lyric, for example these three examples:

I’ve imagined this grief

as skin made of butterflies when the butterflies leave.
*
Life is like trying to hang a painting of the sky
to the sky
*
Slices of cloud.

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The repetition of butterflies in the first bit and sky in the second indicates the
potentially tautological aspect of lyric. An image still more liminal than a bird on
the sky is the sky on the sky but that is when the image disappears. A tautology is
a statement of the form, A = A, and but for the possibility of a poetic statement,
it may be the most accurate thing that can be said about a thing. It has no
doubt. But it is empty. It is true only at the expense of meaning nothing, as
Wittgenstein would say. Hicok uses movement to prevent the tautology from
affixing itself too severely. In his images above there are gestures of movement:
the butterflies leave, someone tries to hang a painting. These gestures of
movement are critical to prevent the fixity of tautology which when it occurs in
poems resembles a desiccated emptiness, a gray taste like the gray that occurs
when mirrors reflect mirrors. We seek emotional identity, emotional truth, and
emotional truth and color that is not strictly logical – cannot be strict tautology.
Yet from a logical point of view, it is difficult to see how any statement of the
form, A = B, can be as true as the statement, A = A, since in the example of A =
B, there is a differentiation or a variance between A and B which is in conflict
with strict identity. But equality need not be identity, and that is the emotional
truth we seek in poetry: a way of seeing us as the other, or to use the phrase of
Rimbaud, “I is an other,” equality of being which is not identity – allowing the
other to be other (not I) yet equal.
Hicok’s poems are interested in emotional truth as being something received,
and in some fashion to be kept separate from the essentially rational and logical
care which is the mere craftsmanship of poetry. His poems represent a delicate
ongoing negotiation between craft, which is at its worst a denial of the wildness
of talent, and talent which need not be negated by craft insofar as talent may
not be anything the self can construct or control but rather something that
speaks into the poet from elsewhere, something the poet simply receives and
cannot take credit for. This was Czeslaw Milosz’ poetics and he was a poet with
great talent and great craft. Milosz said his poems were not something he could
take credit for because he was taking dictation from what he called a
“daimon,” which other poets might call, the muse, or, inspiration (to be breathed
into, as if physically receiving a voice from the other). Like Milosz or Yehuda
Amichai, I think that Hicok wants to receive (and not take credit for) an
emotional truth, which is not controllable by the ego, which comes from a
wilderness separate from deliberate craft, and which can only by corralled,

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pastured, or sufficiently formatted and framed so as to be put forth in a poem, as

a result of the most exquisite craft, and this being not only a craft of words but of
self, since the self but be humble and selfless and a receiver of the other, of the
muse, to be a poet.
And so the morality of the poet lies in the part of the pursuit that he can have
some control over without interfering with the raw other or the necessary
wilderness; and Hicok is clearly a poet who works diligently at craft. He is not as
much of a “first thought best thought” virtuoso – or fool – as Ashbery or Kerouac.
Rather, Hicok’s skill and folly is that of daring to believe that humble day-to-day
unromantic craft can be something that is possible. A lot of writers try to follow
the “I never revise” practice without having the specific virtuosity that would
allow such a practice to not be damaging. On the other hand, a lot of writers
damage themselves through the application of craft and of revision when it has
the effect of freezing out the necessary childishness, irrationality, and potentiality
of failure which is inherent in allowing otherness to come in without control, from
the wilderness. Otherness, the raw voice of poetry, has a childish aspect. Milosz
told Seamus Heaney once that he felt like a child playing next to a river. One
must become like a little child to see the kingdom of god; those who enter the
kingdom are like little ones, says the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas. Forever is a
child playing checkers; the kingdom is a kid’s, says Heraclitus. There is a sense of
optimism in such statements, not the less because of the wondrous heartbroken
quality found in them.
Hicok falls into two categories that I always treat with great suspicion and
trepidation: he is a professional (he teaches at a college), and he is
conventionally successful (books published, awards). He stands for the
proposition that perhaps it is possible to be successful and to survive and get
along with others and even win poetry awards without being a banal mediocrity:
in this sense, again, Hicok is in some sense an optimistic writer. It is an optimism
with plenty of ambiguity and nuance such as in Emerson, not something vulgar.
The optimism we despair of is the optimism that seems tied to denial and
obviously falsifiable belief (think: the optimism of religious fundamentalists)—an
optimism which is tone-deaf to the fact that a necessary precondition to it is the
denial of any allowance that the other could also be optimistic in their own way.
The other must be sad for the crude optimist to be happy. The Christian
fundamentalist says all Muslims go to hell; and vice versa. There is a mirror aspect

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to degraded optimism: the Christian and the Muslim fundamentalist negate

each other’s optimism which, ironically, they mirror. It makes us despair often in
secrecy because by its nature a false optimism seems often to be one which no
amount of communication is able to reach: it is a deafness. You can’t talk the
person out of it; you often find it in people who in so many other ways are sweet
and empathetic people. For example from time to time where I live, I meet
someone who is nice, kind, considerate, thoughtful, sympathetic, but then it turns
out they are also racist. They do not know that this is a false belief: the evil is too
subtle to be reasoned with or argued out of. It’s like when I try to argue with one
of those Mormon tag-teams that occasionally knocks on my door. They have no
doubt. It is insidious because sometimes unless someone has at least a little bit of
doubt in what he thinks or believes, there is no way you can engage him in a
discourse about it. And doubt is also painful. When I hear a perfectly sweet and
sympathetic older lady tell me that it is only because of her faith that she has
been able to handle her husband’s death, and, that Muslims will all go to hell
because they have a different faith – what am I supposed to say? The faith that
is wrongheaded also holds her together. Further, the corrosive and vertiginous
aspects of continuous doubt probably have something to do with many of the
fragile or what Rilke called “exposed” qualities I find in lyric poets. Keats was right
that what he called “negative capability,” or, the ability to doubt without denial,
is integral to [Link] is also dangerous and painful. It is to be dispossessed of
certainty. But then, when I come across someone like Hicok, I wonder, maybe it
does not have to be so painful? In this sense I see Hicok as a poet of the middle
way, someone who is legitimately able to engage in lyric and at the same time,
not go crazy – which is, when you think about it, a real achievement.
This optimism is a precious thing when it is found in a poet. To locate a poet
who has actually been able to negotiate the corrosive shoals of American
business and academic life while still accessing the wilderness of the other in his
writing is a good thing. The ability of someone to access that wilderness, and still
hold down a job and survive in this society, is becoming more tenuous. America
today has the highest incarceration rate of any country that keeps such statistics.
The median among all nations is roughly a sixth of the American rate. The
wilderness of the other has led to violence. The suppression, denial, and ridicule
of the other in American societal circles is evident in daily life. The pessimist in me
believes that this is not just a condition of America but of human life in general.

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To survive we have to eat. Life is based on exploitation and killing. I am not sure
that there is any way around this. Eating demands a context which is safe and
non-terrifying, but that context is fake. One’s possession is another’s
dispossession. The psychology of the dispossessed can be fearful. And so to me
there is a purity to be found in a poet inhabiting profound dispossession, for
example Jean Genet, who was not only poor, gay, but in jail as well, during
World War II (a sort of dispossessed trifecta). Or Holderlin, Nietzsche, Artaud, the
sanctity of insanity as a refuge. Or Hart Crane, Kerouac, Verlaine, Cocteau,
Baudelaire, the sanctity of the extreme. Poetically speaking, those may be easier
places for authenticity, than, say, if you were in an administrative committee
meeting at an English Department somewhere. I can demonstrate this
bypointing you to the horrible politicking that goes on among the poets in those
departments, the corruptive pressure of poetry being tied to preferment and
career; this often leads to a stylistic entropy in writing. Look at the blurbs poets
write for the backs of each other’s books; the awfulness of book prizes, of
selecting and editing as political acts when the forces that drive the process
include the economic aspirations of those involved. In the end they force the
poet’s mind to spend large amounts of time dedicated to and thinking in a
corrupted and banal prose discourse which can’t help but infect his poetry. The
gap between what he really is thinking about (promotion, position, self-doubt,
self-image, banal chores of the day) and what he is writing about becomes too
great: a sucking entropic effect emerges out of the disparity between the life he
lives and the one he would write about. What an icky situation to be in. I think
that is why writers such as William Stafford so persistently tell us to look at the small
things, the little details, the daily moments, as sustenance and for poetry,
because at least there, the life we lead and the life we write overlap.
With Hicok, there is a sense of the moment as something in motion. Look
again at these two images:

Rain crossed
my neighbor’s field at the speed of a million mouths
per second kissing corn.
*
I hear fields
coming closer, wind walking fingertip by fingertip
across the wheat

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 94 ORANGES & SARDINES

Chinua Achebe also said that although fiction is fictitious, it can still be true or
false. There is a sense of that in these images: of an emotional veracity in the
images, though they are overtly fictive in the sense that rain does not have
mouths nor breezes fingers. Both of the images give a fleeting sense of something
too large to be sensed. We can barely handle sometimes what our one mouth
feels; how much less could we possibly handle what a million mouths feel. In the
same manner, when it rains it is impossible to hear or count every separate
raindrop. By using the figure of a separate mouth for each raindrop, we feel a
momentary expansion of the senses or a momentary sense of seeing more than
we can really see. So we have felt otherness just for a second. The same thing
happens in the second image, where now the stalks of the wheat or the invisible
fronds of the wind are described as fingertips. The figure is similar in both
passages: the mouths in the first, the fingertips in the second, each as a way of
allowing a fleeting experience of multiplicity, of the numerous nature of the
drops of rain or the ears of corn, the bits of wind or the stalks of wheat. The use of
gestural motion by Hicok connotes multiplicity. Personification of a nature image
is a traditional motif; but the deployment of it across multiplicity is specifically
contemporary and brings to mind meditations on similar themes by Jorie
Graham and Mark Doty:

It has a hole in it. Not only where I

concentrate.
The river still ribboning, twisting up,
into its re-
arrangements, chill enlightenments, tight-knotted
quickenings
and loosenings—whispered messages dissolving
the messengers—
the river still glinting-up into its handfuls, heapings.
glassy
forgettings under the river of
my attention—
and the river of my attention laying itself down –
bending,
reassembling—over the quick leaving-offs and windy

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 95 ORANGES & SARDINES

obstacles—
and the surface rippling under the wind’s attention—
rippling over the accumulations, the slowed-down drifting
permanences
of the cold
bed.
I say iridescent and I look down.
The leaves very still as they are carried.

(Graham, “The Surface”).

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe
of shimmer—would you want

to be yourself only,
unduplicatable, doomed
to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous.

(Doty, from “A Display of Mackerel”). I think the use of the word “iridesce” by
both Doty and Graham is indicative of their wish to catch something as it passes
and attach words to transience. Iridescence is a moving glimmering. The
iridescence of a school of fish is like that of the moving surface of a river.
Attachment of the lyric to themes of multiplicity is not only a way to stretch lyric
beyond the single moment into a temporal series, but also, a way of focusing the
lyric on something besides the romantic or confessional “I.” Doty, Graham, and
Hicok all avoid the devastated “I” figure we see in Robert Lowell, John Berryman
or Sylvia Plath. The key may be the selflessness of multiplicity, which however
introduces a new set of questions. Consider how Doty finishes his poem, which is
a meditation upon the sight of a bunch of mackerel fish laid out on ice at the fish
market:

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 96 ORANGES & SARDINES

How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,
which is the price of gleaming.

Although the end is ambiguous in its illumination of the absence of self which
occurs with the presence of the selfless, I would not characterize its tone as
ferociously negative in the manner of Lowell’s confessionalism. Lowell’s
observation, his image, is always overlaid or intermixed with the ongoing drama
of his self, its suffering and exhilaration and conflagration. To continue with our
aquatic theme, compare the above example from Doty with this from earlier
Lowell which indicates what I mean:

Where the heel-headed dogfish barks at its nose

On Ahab’s void and forehead

(from “The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket”). The poor fish here is individualized,
single, is somewhat abused by the pummeling of the words “heel-headed” and
“barks,” and then is immediately tied into a tormented human ego-figure, Ahab.
Another example from Lowell:

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;

my hand tingled to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the crowded, compliant fish.

(from “For the Union Dead”). In this case too, the separate image of the fish is
only there for a little while on its own before it is overlaid with or mixed with
something bluntly human, individual and mortal that takes us back to the
concerns of the “I,” of the speaking and dying self stated in lyric terms. Doty is
less like Lowell than like a hybridized postmodern self which is somewhat lighter
and gestures toward the suppression of the explicitly confessing self in favor of
the freedom of observation of multiplicity. Both Doty and Hicok are closer to
Elizabeth Bishop than to Lowell. Consider Bishop’s fish poem:

I looked into his eyes

which were far larger than mine

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 97 ORANGES & SARDINES

but shallower, and yellowed,

the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.

(from “The Fish,” Elizabeth Bishop). The tone of the “I” here is intangibly lighter
than that found in Lowell, perhaps because of a humility which prevents the “I”
from the presumptuousness of explicit suffering, or because the observation of
the image is allowed to portray the image rather than the self. The things in
Bishop’s poem feel more as if observed on the spot; those in Lowell feel more as
if recalled from memory. Doty with his lightness of tone is closer to Bishop than to
Lowell, however he is much more explicit with the use of the subjective “I” than
Bishop; in this respect, he like so many others has been influenced by Rilke. Now if
I compare all of the above to a Hicok poem (with a fish in it to boot) we can see
how his tone at its best has an otherworldly optimistic lightness, and he writes in a
measured moderate fashion which may be a survival strategy for avoiding the
conflagration of the “I,” of the romantic and confessional self:

Chairs move by themselves, and books.

Grandchildren visit, stand
new and nameless, their faces’ puzzles
missing pieces. She’s like a fish

in deep ocean, its body made of light.

She floats through rooms, through
my eyes, an old woman bereft
of chronicle, the parable of her life.

And though she’s almost a child

there’s still blood between us:
I passed through her to arrive.

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 98 ORANGES & SARDINES

So I protect her from knives,

stairs, from the street that calls

as rivers do, a summons to walk away,
to follow. And dress her,
demonstrate how buttons work,

when she sometimes looks up

and says my name, the sound arriving
like the trill of a bird so rare
it’s rumored no longer to exist.

(“Alzheimer’s”). Somehow this avoids bathos. The ending of that poem is pitch-
perfect, and I think you can see how addressing a subject that could easily take
the poem into entirely negative territory, the tone is somehow in a subtle way
optimistic. In part this is achieved through the use of metaphors which are in
themselves, all else being equal, positive: “child,” “a bird so rare,” and the fish
described in a manner that brings to mind those strange illuminated transparent
deep sea fish found in the pages of National Geographic.
The Alzheimer’s poem tells us how to possess anything in this world is, at
another juncture, to be dispossessed of it. Everything must die, all things must
pass. Further, to possess anything is to be dispossessed of that other possession, or
that absence, which preceded it. For we cannot possess an infinite number of
things and we cannot hold an infinite number of things in our attention. To turn
attention toward one thing is to turn it away from another, and as one thing
possesses the attention, another thing is dispossessed by it. There are things that
we possess that we swear we will never lose, we can never lose. Those things
leave trails in our memory once they go away. How we handle, or better, how
we are handled, by that state, is the beginning of elegy.
 

& Jack Anders Hummingbirds And Fish

Bob Hicok
 100 ORANGES & SARDINES

Jorge-Alberto
[Link]

Jorge-Alberto Gonzalez was born

in Cuba and emigrated influence on your work?
Q&A
Which artists do you admire or have had the biggest
to the US in 1965. He presently lives I always admired the masters especially Michelangelo da Merici
and works in Baltimore, Maryland,
and paints under the name of da Caravaggio, he has had the biggest influence on my work.
Jorge-Alberto. I also enjoy the work of IXX Century American trompe l’oeil painter
William Harnett.  Contemporary artists that I admire include French
He is the recipient of many honors trompe l’oeil painter Jacques Poirier, Chilean painter Claudio
and awards including a bronze
medal for his work at the Brabo, and Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum among others.
International Biannual of
Contemporary Art from the City of What is your opinion of digital art v. traditional art?
Florence in 2001 and most recently: I was a graphic Designer for 18 years before I decided to dedicate
2006 Still Life /Florals. (Second myself to fine painting so I am quite familiar with digital art. Today I
Place) International Artist
Magazine.
use this knowledge to help me in the creation of an idea I want to
paint. I think is important, like the artist of the Italian Renaissance
Shows: period, to be able to know and take advantage of the tools
MUSEUM TOUR 2008-2010 available to them and make good use of it.
“The New Reality: The Frontier of
Realism in the 21st Century” What was the first piece of art you were paid for?
Art by International Guild of My fist piece of art I was paid for was copying a painting by Henry
Realism Artists. Raeburn Inglis title “Boy and rabbit”
2008 Artists’ Choice. (Group of
selected Artist ) Principle Gallery, Do you have a ritual or specific process you follow when
Alexandria, Virginia. creating art?
As I begin to paint, my primary focus is to be true to the subject I
Corporate Collections:
am working on, whether it be a still life or the figure. I was trained
Eastern National Bank, Miami, FL to paint from life and my goal is to create a life-like painting.
Banco Santander International, Although sometimes I might
Miami, FL introduce some element from
Fundacíon Universidad de my imagination I always go
Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina back to the source of
Jorge-Alberto’s displayed art are inspiration and that is the
courtesy of the following galleries: setup in front of me. All the
“Sphere and Obelisk” information I need is there
Troika Gallery, Easton, MD to be captured.
“Capricious Love”
Principle Gallery, Alexandria, VA What is your secret weapon?
“The Martirdom of St Sebastian” Hard work and attention
Gallery RoCa, Habre de Grace, MD to detail.
 101 ORANGES & SARDINES

Sphere And Obelisk oil on panel 8 1/4” x 8 1/4”

Jorge-Alberto
 102 ORANGES & SARDINES

Capricious Love oil on linen on wood 44” x 32”

Jorge-Alberto
 103 ORANGES & SARDINES

The Martirdom Of St Sebastian oil on panel 51” x 37”

Jorge-Alberto
 104 ORANGES & SARDINES

Cathryn Cofell
[Link]/cathryncofell

Cathryn Cofell’s fifth and Appeal For Eclipse

latest book comes from
Parallel Press, titled Enough about the damn moon.
Kamikaze Commotion. 
Bulimic bitch, four fits
of clothes, all that cellulite
It’s also a fitting
and she still prances,
descriptor for her poetic still tries
style, personality and to light up the sky
parenting abilities.  when he wants only to be dark,
You’ll find examples of to be Johnny Cash and strum
the poetry in places like the train ride right out of her.
MARGIE, Slipstream,
Enough from the poets,
Prairie Schooner, Nerve
the artists, the astronomers.
Cowboy and Main Street Quit humping her behind his back.
Rag, but you’ll have to She needs to learn the ways
travel to Appleton, of a docile woman,
Wisconsin for a look at to be viewed askew
the latter two.  from inside a cardboard box,
her trashy peep show ass
puppeted from the earth,
strung up behind the sun,
a promise
of horrifying blindness.
 105 ORANGES & SARDINES

High-Speed Connections
I took a digital picture of my hand
and sent it away,
emailed to a psychic in West Bend.
At first, it was undeliverable.
Then a suspicious attachment, needs
authentication.
A third time she replied,
said my palm was fuzzy.
I became her $20 Pay Pal
and suddenly she had clarity,
a map quest, a maze of intersections.
She saw a scoundrel’s name,
Lucy or Cin,
a flamboyant but unremarkable life.
Wrong, I said, that was not my life-
line she was reading,
it must have been a silver hair
caught on the lens as the shutter closed.
But she held firm,
said it was more than just the palm
she read, she knew me, she saw
how my lines crossed with others,
a flash of pain in every touch.
She saw a future as a circus act
or a hit man and I knew she had me,
caught in her sites, that day
I let you fall from my slick palms,
that endless Hitchcock drop,
hands forever clutching,
cliffs of straw and chaff.

Cathryn Cofell
 106 ORANGES & SARDINES

Justin Wiest
[Link]

Justin Wiest lives in

Q&A
Which artists do you admire or have had the biggest
influence on your work?
Ann Didusch Schuler was my first teacher and instilled my
Connecticut. He paints love of painting at a young age. Subsequently I was
full-time and teaches part- fortunate to study with Will Wilson (who taught me how to
time at the Silvermine Arts paint), Eric Fischl  (who taught me what to paint), and
Guild and The Lyme College Vincent Desiderio (who taught me why.)
 
of Fine Art. His primary focus How do you choose your subject matter?
is painting portraits and I paint models and observe how they interact with the
figures; he believes they setting. With still life it is a matter of setting players on a
stage, however my paintings don’t delve into allegory or
have been and will continue symbol.
to be a central element of  
Western art. What is your opinion of digital art v. traditional art?
My training started in a traditional atelier-type school.
Since then I think any means of getting the best image is
Galleries: fair game and digital art and its process is very important.
Gallery Roca,  
What was the first piece of art you were paid for?
Havre de Grace. MD The first painting I sold, I think was “Lait pur Nicholas”,
Stricoff , NY, NY which was a still life of a milk bottle and butter? A dairy
theme as I remember. It didn’t sell for that much but the
Principle Gallery, buyer bought 12 other paintings over the years, which I’m
Alexandria, VA very grateful for.
Silvermine Galleries, Do you have a ritual or specific process you follow when
New Canaan, CT creating art?
My daily ritual is making my paint. I grind powder pigment
with a special oil I make. It takes about twenty minutes
and in that time I focus on what I need to do that day with
my painting. I think the optimal tools can make the
experience of painting all the more enjoyable. My overall
process is very heuristic, creativity through
experimentation.  I wrestle with an idea in my head and
do oil sketches. The final painting is usually much different
than my original idea.
 
What is your secret weapon?
My secret weapon would have to be Maroger Medium,
there is no substitute. There probably is but I haven’t found
it yet.
photo: Dean Fisher © 2008
 107 ORANGES & SARDINES

Donuts oil on panel 20” x 24”

Justin Wiest
 108 ORANGES & SARDINES

Requiem oil on paper 19” x 30”

Justin Wiest
 109 ORANGES & SARDINES

Sandra Reading oil on linen 48” x 60”

Justin Wiest
 110 ORANGES & SARDINES

& AGrace
Snap-Shot Narrative Of A Snap-Shot Life:
Cavalieri’s Anna Nicole: Poems
REVIEW BY JEREMY HUGHES

Menendez Publishing, 2008

Before the reader reaches snippet from Anna’s whole story,

the poems themselves, Cavalieri a snap-shot narrative of a snap-
begins with the caveat that “these shot life, surrounded by a cast
poems are fantasy, not fact. Any of interviewers, designers, critics,
resemblance to persons, living or trainers, doctors, lawyers and
dead is purely coincidental, or pure lovers. Through writing Anna’s story,
luck”: if the reader were tempted Cavalieri exorcises and investigates
to conflate this Anna Nicole with the particular contemporary concern
the person of the same name who with celebrity-worship, and gives the
led her life in the media spotlight, bimbo she has created a voice and
they have been warned. It is platform to which she would not
necessary rather than disingenuous, usually have recourse. Cavalieri even
and commits the reader to reading manages to put the pen in Anna’s
these poems as poems. What follows hand so she can speak for herself,
is an exploration of the life of a however bluntly, in a cathartic
physically beautiful young woman outburst:
who is, by turn, innocent, abused,
betrayed, worshipped, exploited, she took a big fat crayon and wrote SHIT
troubled and vulnerable. all over the white wall.
Essentially, the book is a Then the pavement outside
biography of a modern-day SHIT SHIT SHIT.
Aphrodite seeking happiness which, She knew now what it was to be a writer.
due to her particular sex-goddess It felt good, cleaned out.
profile, proves to be a more difficult
quest than most. Each poem is a (‘And Even More Than That’) It also
 111 ORANGES & SARDINES

represents an individual who struggles pay “his way through anthropology”

with an inner self, a person who has (‘Toytown’). To the reader’s relief, he
not had the opportunity to be possesses a moral integrity far more
anything other than an object of profound than the other people in
visual and sexual gratification. her life: “He told her this was his first
The book opens with day on the job/and he couldn’t go
“Anna’s Estate”, enumerating and through with it.” Here is a man who
summarising her life: “ . . . the moral will talk to her and, more significantly,
issues, the legal issues,/the spirit of the listen, “a sweet soul, an intellect”
law, the letter of the law,/the cause (‘Reveries’). Coming from such
of death, junkies, drug addicts,/ disparate worlds, the reader’s
probable criminal cause, bodies suspicions that it will not last are
exhumed,/frozen sperm, mystery hinted at in the gap between their
sons,/living in sorrow, wrongful minds, since “Rushkin was teaching
death,/undue influences”, preparing her a lot of verbs. They were called
the ground for the poems that will action words” (‘It Started Out
explore Anna’s over-arching search a Perfectly Wonderful Day’). The
for happiness in love, a difficult alter gap widens in ‘Recreational Prozac’
ego, the way others regard and use in which “the college took him
her and her self-conscious attitude to away” and ‘Starburst’, which plays
her ‘intellect’. This innocence – or poignantly on their different
naivety – is such that when she sleeps definitions of a noun: “Rushkin had
with the rich old man who ‘buys’ her, gone to take his orals. She thought he
it is “like being a little girl when your was not all that good at it”. Here
mother/would make you hug your Anna’s ignorance balances neatly
smelly/Aunt”. She sleeps with her with a naïve expression of her sexual
bodyguard, also, but never feels prowess. Nevertheless, in ‘Even the
“quite right” (‘Bitter to Better’) Stones Have Hearts’ the connection
because it is not the “True Love”. She she feels boils down to the simple
experiences what she believes is declarative, “But she loved Rushkin”.
happiness quite unexpectedly from The relationship she has with
‘Rent-A-Guy’. She specifically asks for her self is just as tortured. There are
a professor, someone a million miles several poems here accessing her
away from her own artificial world of psyche through what she refers to as
hangers-on, who arrives in the guise Anima, initially presented as her twin
of a PhD student, Rushkin, whoring to who died at birth, her “Angel of

& Jeremy Hughes A Snap-Shot Narrative Of A Snap-Shot Life

 112 ORANGES & SARDINES

contradiction” (‘House of String’) and Anna herself.

who “claimed to be a helping angel” This is typical of Anna’s life.
(‘Wealth, Talent, Fame’). In fact, Throughout the book there are
when Anna is hospitalised, Anima repeated references to the lack
represents that part of her which is of what is necessary for her to
abnormal – “the mad twin” (‘Anger is believe that her life is worthy. Her
an Issue’) and which is interpreted by lack of education enables a
medics as a voice she is hearing simple expression of uncomplicated
(‘Didn’t She Almost Have it All’). Yet Christian belief, in which she will find
Anima is physically part of her, salvation. “She knew Jesus would
“swimming in her blood” (‘Anima save her” (‘A Flock of Ravens’), and
Says Life is a Balance’) and therefore in hospital she hopes the doctor “will
impossible to destroy. Whatever Anna hold her in the warmth of his
does, she cannot get away from wings”(‘Dead Eyes’), implying that he
her body. is an angel. More secular angels,
Her physique, especially her birds, are a recurring motif. There are
breasts, is the organ through which benign species such as wrens and
she senses the world and the world pigeons, but the most affecting are
senses her. In essence, she is a the typically black and portentous
product, something which will make ravens, for which the collective noun
herself and, more importantly, others, Anna learns, is “an unkindness” (‘A
a great deal of money. This is most Flock of Ravens’). They bring
evident in ‘Showtime’ in which she is misfortune – “a flock of ravens/
the object around which a team landing in your hair means you will be
work to get right: a blind make-up forever lonely” (‘The Music Man’),
artist, a dresser, a person to put on they herald the arrival of Anima – “a
the shoes, and a couple of creators flock of ravens would gather on the
identified as Henri and Yvonne. roof” (‘House of String’) and
Essentially, she doesn’t have a comment retrospectively on Anna’s
relationship with these people, but relationship with Rushkin which,
exists in the whirl of some big game. ultimately, fails, their presence a
And being presented to the world as mocking told-you-so – “A flock of
a product rather than a person, her ravens over the roof cawing her
‘fans’ are not actually meeting (if name” (‘Air Kisses’) before they fly on.
that is the word) her real self. Denied happiness with Rushkin,
Whatever it is that they love, it is not she is also denied motherhood, her

& Jeremy Hughes A Snap-Shot Narrative Of A Snap-Shot Life

 113 ORANGES & SARDINES

body and mind sensing maternity She also says that poets, like children,
strongly and biologically when she feel the world in a particular way but
holds the maid’s child, “she loved that she does not “know the name
how it felt/with the baby” (‘Unlikely for poetry” (‘A Tiny Boat Caught
Relationships’), and when she hears Sideways’). Within the context of the
the cook’s baby cry “all the book this awareness of poetry and
honeybees/gathered at her heart” poets jars a little with a persona
(‘Bitter to Better’). In hospital Anna whose response to the world around
meets a woman who has had three her is more usually physical. It could
children by three different men, “a be the ignorant idea of what poets
good idea,/Anna was jealous”. It is are or poetry is i.e. people who
sadly humorous, showing us a woman respond in a ‘special’ way, a way
whose moral compass is faulty and unknown to her. In a life bereft of
leads her in directions rather different poetry, Cavalieri bestows poetry
to generally held acceptability. For consciously to beautify an otherwise
Anna to be a mother would, in some meretricious life (rather than a
respects, be a baby looking after a meretricious person). Firstly there are
baby and, in any case, it might seem the quotations of others, as when
obscene: holding the maid’s baby the “True Love” quotes Celan,
against her chest feels “like a new Shakespeare and Rilke, and secondly
rug on a dirty floor” (‘Unlikely her own memorable lines such as
Relationships’), the child merely “the flat wet hand of grief/against
perpetuating Anna’s gross way of life. the hot cement of her heart” (‘And
It is a life upon which Cavalieri Even More Than That’). Cavalieri
imposes the sensibilities a poet may asserts that poetry is found even in
be assumed to exhibit, explicitly in superficial lives lived in a superficial
Anna’s own thoughts explaining that manner. It would be too easy to
she does not know how to show her suggest that the Anna who lives in
grief: these poems is just a dull blonde
she wouldn’t since she is as complex as the next
know to hang it out on a person, in whom the spiritual and
tree and watch it, as poets did. secular co-exist uneasily, struggling
to understand the world without
and within.

& Jeremy Hughes A Snap-Shot Narrative Of A Snap-Shot Life

 114 ORANGES & SARDINES

Dana Clancy
[Link]

Dana Clancy is a painter and an

Assistant Professor at Boston influence on your work?
Q&A
Which artists do you admire or have had the biggest

University’s School of Visual Arts, My time in the studio is neccessarily solitary, but I tend to like to
College of Fine Arts. She surround myself with a crowd when it comes to influences. 
received an M.F.A. in Painting Painting is less lonely when I’m in conversation with images and
memories of paintings that have  transported me, changed me,
from Boston University and a B.A. and challenged me. Combinations occur that help me through
from Vassar College.  Ms. my work.  Ellsworth Kelly’s cool shapes + Edouard Manet’s cool
Clancy has had solo exhibitions subjects.  That Piero della Francesca’s tightly organized paintings
at the Danforth Museum of Art, evoke more than they answer + Philip Guston’s brave, honest and
and the Sherman Gallery at immediate responses to Piero and to himself.  The private and
Boston University and has public moments unfolding within the stunning geometry of space
exhibited her work in group in paintings by Hishikawa Moronobu.
exhibitions, including shows at
Delta Axis at Marshall Arts, How do you choose your subject matter?
Memphis, Bowery Gallery, New Most of my subject matter in the past ten years has to do with
York and Gallery 100, Saratoga calling the viewer’s attention to the act of looking, though on the
Springs, NY.  Her work has also surface the work has ranged widely from paintings based on
been shown in New England at webcam images, to self portraits (some with binoculars), to the
Green Street Gallery, the Boston current paintings of viewers in museums.  I work in series toward
Center for the Arts’ Mills Gallery, completing a body of work.  When I am in the midst of this series
FPAC Gallery, the South Shore there is a flow - while painting one piece another comes to mind,
Art Center, and ArtSPACE@16, though the finished painting may be very different than what I
and is in the permanent initially imagined.  The choice of subject matter that I’ll work with
for a couple of years usually happens when I am just working in
collection at the DeCordova my studio trying out ideas or when I travel to a new place with
Museum and Sculpture Park.  both distance from the studio and a sense of attentiveness to
She is currently working on a what is new.  The series of binocular paintings came about
solo installation of portraits in because I had a pair of toy binoculars and I was looking through
conjunction with the Brattleboro them and saw myself in the mirror.  The series of museum paintings
Museum’s portraiture show, came out of a trip to the Tate Modern where I was struck by the
scheduled for December, 2008.  experience of seeing so many levels of space at the same time,
and by the geometry of the space, and the way the figures in this
  space reminded me of what I love about Ukiyo-e imagery. 

Do you have a ritual or specific process you follow when creating

art?
I really need to spend time at the beginning of each session
mixing color, and I love the process of laying out four bright colors
to begin with and ending up with a range of subtle grays next to
acidic greens and saturated reds and being excited by how
much a color changes depending upon where it is placed in the
painting.  I also have the slightly corny habit of choosing an
album that, in my mind, fits the mood or even place that I am
trying to evoke and playing that album whenever I begin work on
the painting.  For “Split Vista”, of the Tate Modern it was David
Bowie’s Hunky Dory.  For the paintings of the Venice Biennale it
was Electrelane.

 
 115 ORANGES & SARDINES

Spin oil on canvas 58” x 58”

Dana Clancy
 116 ORANGES & SARDINES

Carry It With You oil on acrylic on canvas 52 1/2” x 48”

Dana Clancy
 117 ORANGES & SARDINES

Written Material oil on acrylic on canvas 24” x 44”

Split Vista oil on acrylic on canvas 24” x 48”

Dana Clancy
 118 ORANGES & SARDINES

David MacDowell
[Link]

David MacDowell is a self

Q&A
Which artists do you admire or have had the biggest
influence on your work?
taught artist who paints As a kid, I was always blown away by Norman Rockwell
with acrylics on canvas. and the caricatures in MAD Magazine. Growing into my
own, and in fear of being categorized or influenced,
His subject matter focuses there’s not one individual or group of artists that I focus on.
on the Lowbrow / Comic Im constantly learning, and pushing to enchant my own
Surrealism, and often take individual style into reality.
a satirical view of popular
culture. How do you choose your subject matter?
I’m always trying to make my portfolio stronger, so if I feel
the need for a simple portrait, ill do it. Lately my work has
His works can be seen in been molded to market into group show themes. I fit the
galleries throughout the theme, and then try to usually make the visual a satirical
US, including: statement or parody.
Thinkspace in CA
AdHoc Art in NY What is your opinion of digital art v. traditional art?
Any movement that can change or improve the future of
and art should surely be embraced. Whether its on canvas, a
The Gallery of Atlanta computer, or macaroni glued to a paper plate, “Good art
in GA. is Good art,” regardless of the medium.

He Paints 9-11 hrs a day, is What was the first piece of art you were paid for?
I won $50 in a Fire Prevention Poster contest when I was 9.
open for commissions.
I remember spending it all on games, Snoopy models and
Flintstones figurines to paint!

Do you have a ritual or specific process you follow when

creating art?
I always start with a short prayer over a blank canvas.
I’m a big “planner,” so I try to get the illustration as fully
realized as possible before I paint. I love painting more
than drawing, but its something that needs to be done.
I always paint with a small script brush, in order to cram in
as much detail as possible.

What is your secret weapon?

Being humble, kind and gullible.
 119 ORANGES & SARDINES

Jack acrylic on canvas 24” x 30”

David MacDowell
 120 ORANGES & SARDINES

Go Ask Alice acrylic on canvas 24” x 30”

David MacDowell
 121 ORANGES & SARDINES

Feed The Children acrylic on canvas 16” x 18”

David MacDowell
 122 ORANGES & SARDINES

& Grace Notes:

GRACE CAVALIERI INTERVIEWS DANA LEVIN

Dana Levin is one of America’s

best promises. Her poetry is wry, tragic, funny,
ironic, bittersweet, lyrical, hip, tough. She is a
narrative poet who jettisons the line to new
directions of meaning. Dana’s first book, In
the Surgical Theatre, was awarded the 1999
American Poetry Review/Honickman First
Book Prize and went on to receive nearly
every award available to first books and
emerging poets. The Los Angeles Times says
of her work, “Dana Levin’s poems are
extravagant . . . her mind keeps making
unexpected connections and the poems push
beyond convention . . . they surprise us.”
Levin’s poetry has garnered fellowships and
awards from the National Endowment for the
Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and
the Library of Congress, the Rona Jaffe
Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation. A
2007 Guggenheim Fellow, Levin teaches in the
Creative Writing and Literature Department at
the College of Santa Fe. Her most recent book
Dana Levin Photo by Debbie Fleming Caffery is Wedding Day (Copper Canyon Press, 2005).

GC: Death is the DL: Ah, well. To have as both, four years
esthetic in your new three of five members apart, were
poetry (see the July/ of my immediate unexpected and swift
August 2008 issue of family die (father, and due to the
The American Poetry mother, sister) in a unremarkable, if
Review). Would you four-year period was hidden, failings of the
speak of the life - and self - body.
paradoxes, in that altering. The deaths
family deaths of my mother and I think, more than the
brought you the sister were actual absence of
richest gifts? particularly shocking, their physical selves,
 123 ORANGES & SARDINES

it has been the total asked to endure, your first book, In the
dissolution of the for a while, loss after Surgical Theatre?
family construct, the loss; they have made
swift destruction of me a wiser, more DL: An interesting
assumptions about relaxed, more question. My current
stability, longevity, grounded person – work certainly seems
family and home, if with a certain a lot more interested
that has jarred and unshakeable . . . in a whole sentence,
moved me. I now sobriety of spirit. a whole line, not
really get A tempered heavily enjambed, if
imper manence – personality. And a enjambed at all,
and have realized, lot more periods in even to the point of
and was startled by the poems! developing some
realizing, that most prose poems, a for m
of us don’t. We I suppose the I’ve never much
can understand it paradox of art from worked with. When I
intellectually – but death is the paradox track line length from
to feel it, know it, of life from death. Surgical through
I think is nearly But that’s a lesson Wedding Day and
inconceivable we’re being asked to into the new work,
without undergoing a lear n all the time: the line does seem to
trauma of physical spring from winter, get longer and
loss: through and all that. We longer – not always,
devastating fire, deem it ‘paradox’ but more often than
catastrophic illness, because we in the past. My
plane crashes, freak generally have such intuitive hit on your
accidents, the a hard time really question is not that it
unrelenting dailiness accepting that life/ is spirit that drives this
of war, famine, death is a whole longer, more
plague. And yet, package. complete line, but
encountering the the encounter with
absolute indisputable GC: You speak of death: as if writing
irrevocable fact of your spiritual life. This against death,
our imper manent is more present in the despite death, to be
natures has also line than ever before. less inclined towards
been intensely Do you believe your breakage.
liberating. I feel very for m is different on
humbled and the page? What are GC: Please talk about
grateful that I was the changes since compassion in your

& Grace Notes Dana Levin

 124 ORANGES & SARDINES

poem “White Tara” that true forgiveness, psychoanalytical

(to read the poem of self and other, is thought. Does the
and essay impossible without writing of a poem
commentary on it, compassion: to move release blocked
see the APR issue beyond (usually feeling, or shift it
cited above or mental) indictments elsewhere?
read it online at of behavior,
[Link]). interpersonal DL: Both, and not with
It’s a poem of many dynamics, and feel every poem.
facets, but most into the suffering that
of all, the poem made them so – to GC: What
examines become an actual distinguishes your
compassion. If asked “bleeding heart.” work is the declared
what compassion is, experience, the
how would you Compassion and perception of the
answer? kindness are of experience and then
course well-known your response to this
DL: Compassion Buddhist precepts, to – all within a single
literally means to the point of seeming poem. Can you
“suffer with,” which I like ‘isms.’ But what I speak to this?
take as having find most buoying
empathy for the and amazing is to DL: “Poem as act of
sufferings of self and remember that the perception and
other. In the case of injunction to reflection” I wrote
the poem, I was practice kindness below this question.
really wrestling with and compassion Then I thought: well
the experience of towards self and really, that is what
missing and loving my other is made in the the experience of
dead mother, and context of accepting being conscious is:
being astonished and imper manence. If I perception and
devastated by that, can phrase it my own reflection. I guess I’m
since while she was way, I would say: we interested in poems
alive I was much are all going to die; (writing them,
more ambivalent why not be kind to reading them) about
about (and with) her. one another? Which being conscious. A
The APR essay goes seems utterly, utterly certain kind of literal
into the details of sensible. self-awareness
this, but I guess what interests me (and of
I could say here is GC: You value course, to be truly

& Grace Notes Dana Levin

 125 ORANGES & SARDINES

self-aware depends Lowell to Olds) never be fully human

on the capacity to had sole ownership. on the page.
stand outside the Things like: Emotions.  
self, become some Psyche. Family. I guess my view is
other witnessing and Trauma. The Egoic fairly Hegelian:
evaluating thing). self (that thing in something new
each of us that has a comes that helps
GC: You seem to write fir m sense of “me- refresh the art
in the Confessionlist ness,” or at least (and us), gains
tradition without more fir m than how ascendency, then
falling into its traps. that me-ness can hegemony, gets stale
What do you think play out in dream and predictable,
courage is in writing and art). These have ceases to do much
the personal; and driven some of the for the art (and us),
how do you try to greatest poems in and so then the
teach it? English since Beowulf. next thing comes,
And not just poems in often with qualities
DL: I try to teach English: Read Homer that present
historically and with (and Dante, and corrective. Thus
encouragement to Cervantes, etc.) and Confessionalism, and
not buy into the dos- these same elements then Language
and-don’ts of any are in play. It is a pity Poetry with its
period style. It that we have a knee- general reminders: to
can take a lot of jerk avoidance try to get back to
courage to write response to raw lingual textures and a
unfashionably. The feeling, family issues, more fluid sense of
problem I have with personal issues, self/p.o.v, which is
our current poetry trauma issues in a lot what post-moder n
climate has to do of our poetry today. poetics in general
with knee-jerk A pity because: are reminded us we had
assumptions and these not authentic in the tool-box,
generalizations. human experiences? after 20 or so years
Today it seems Is not poetry of end-state
‘confessionalism’ is a supposed to give Confessionalism:
word that stands in entrance to plain-speech, fir m “I”,
for all sorts of things authentic human true-personal-fact
of which the experience? The poems. It’s been very
Confessionalists courage rests in important and fruitful
themselves (from allowing yourself to to be reminded we

& Grace Notes Dana Levin

 126 ORANGES & SARDINES

have sonic play, emotional way: sometimes you

lingual texture, and authenticity AND I just encounter
poly-self experience want art! Something something, someone,
to use for our art. a lot of tail-end that seems the
And yet: Confessional confessionalist essence of
poems don’t have a poetries ceased to malevolence. You
monopoly on dullness give us. feel it on a gut, non-
or conventionality. thinking, animal level.
GC: What would you I actually think such
Ultimately, in our have to say about encounters are rare –
current poetry good and evil as most of what we
climate, the tight- compared to right deem ‘evil’ is cruel,
roping those of and wrong? cold, bungling and/
us who feel or thoughtless
compelled to in varying
write about “I want emotional proportions – but
the personal, such encounters
the psychological, authenticity do happen.
the familial, the
traumatic must
do in order to be
AND I want art!” I do also think
there are good,
emotionally authentic ‘right’ codes by
and artistically DL: Good and evil: which to live well,
interesting is we’re made of both. most of which can be
generative, as much To pretend we’re not distilled as ‘Do No
as it might be seems related to Har m.’ A relative
torturous. The poetry I absolutes of ‘right’ statement in practice
myself am most and ‘wrong.’ (such is the stuff from
drawn to reading which lawyering is
often walks this tight- I’m no longer of a made), but it’s what
rope. Anne Carson mind that ‘nurture’ is we’ve got.
walks it. Gluck walks the most power ful
it (just look at component in GC: How do you get
“Aver no” and see creating evil. I don’t away with talking
how she herself has mean this in some about getting ‘the
incorporated avant kind of hell-fire, clap’ or a cat ‘crap-
approaches). Any Judgment Day kind box’ in poetry and
number of emerging of way – more in a still achieve such a
poets. I want phenomenological high resonance of

& Grace Notes Dana Levin

 127 ORANGES & SARDINES

beauty? A Janis embodied, crass and sacrifice, from the

Joplin howl is not raw, even in the sterilized, clinical
easy to maintain. midst of marvelous embalming room
vision. of the mortuary to
DL: Wow! Interesting the Forensic
notion, ‘to get away GC: What is the new Anthropology Center
with.’ Maybe it has book coming from at the University of
something to do with Copper Canyon Tennessee, Knoxville,
sonic pleasure, in Press? How do you known as The Body
“White Tara” at least: describe it? Far m. I spent a lot
‘the clap’ in slant- of time researching
r hyme with ‘attack,’ DL: Well, first I have to corpse decay
‘crap-box’ relating to submit it and then and tantric Wrathful
an earlier ‘rot’ and the editors have to For m deities, the
later ‘cats.’ And decide if they want process of insect
‘crap-box’ in it! Which I hope they metamorphosis and
particular feels great do, as they run a Japanese Buddhist
to say : the broad a great press and have approaches to the
sound and sharp ex, been wonder ful to sticky question of
getting a little growl work with. ‘soul’in regards to
with the r (as r lets us abortion and
do). And I suppose Death and Spirit miscarriage. I guess I
‘get away with’ infor m the new book. went to the world of
assumes these words I suppose awareness art and knowledge as
break some kind of and awe of both go salve for the world of
poetry decorum – as hand in hand. New loss and suffering.
they do, I guess, our poems seem to be Not an unusual path.
idea of poetry as a integrating these
vehicle for more death/spirit GC: From what side
fragile and exotic experiences by of the family did you
beauties. I know engaging cross- inherit your gorgeous
dropping such words cultural responses to hair?
in a poem with a death and birth.
generally vatic or Poem subjects range DL: My father’s,
dissociated from T ibetan Buddhist along with bad
atmosphere feels burial practice and teeth, allergies and
grounding to me, as philosophy of cracked heels. I am
if no poem gets to imper manence to completely grateful
forget we live Aztec human for the hair.

& Grace Notes Dana Levin

 128 ORANGES & SARDINES

Nahem Shoa
[Link]

Nahem shoa was trained by

the painter Robert your work?
Q&A
Which artists do you admire or have had the biggest influence on

Lenkiewicz from the age of There a many great artist throughout history and today that have
inspired my painting practice and changed my life. If I had to
sixteen to twenty six. He also make a list, Rembrandt, Titian, Velazquez, Tintoretto, Veronese,
completed a degree in Bellini, Vermeer, Ruben’s, Chardin, Goya, Ingres, Turner,
Manchester University and Constable, Gericault, Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Monet,
later a Post grad in drawing Cezanne, Rodin, Van Gogh, Bonnard, Picasso, Matisse, Braque,
in The Prince of Wales Morandi, De kooning, Rothko, Bomberg, Auerbach, Freud,
Drawing School. His work Bacon, Uglow and Lenkiewicz. There is at least another fifty
names missing from this list. My biggest influences are the painter
has been exhibited in major Robert Lenkiewicz, who taught me painting for ten years. If it
British museums such as, weren’t for him I wouldn’t be an artist today. When I paint I am
The Royal Academy and always thinking of Cezanne, Monet and Freud, somewhere
National Portrait Gallery, between the three of them is my vision of nature.
London. In the last four years
How do you choose your subject matter?
he has had four major I never choose my subject matter and have no idea what the
one-man exhibitions in next project will be. What draws me to things is often quite
museums across England, random, but once I start to paint and I can grasp the unlimited
and his work featured along potential of the subject, this usually leads to a series of works
side Lucian Freud, Frank on the same theme. I get deeply inspired by things that at first
Auerbach, Robert I didn’t even see, that’s natures magic. I tend to work slowly
and spend up to a year on a painting and up to two months
Lenkiewicz and David on a drawing.
Bomberg. In August, 2008
his work is to be Included in What was the first piece of art you were paid for?
Threadneedle figurative art When I was a first year painting student In Manchester I used to
prize, The Mall galleries, paint copies of 18th century portraits for my local Butcher, who
London. His has five used to pay me in meat and vegetables.
paintings in National Do you have a ritual or specific process you follow when
collections around England. creating art?
I don’t work with a specific process that I follow when creating
art, but there is a kind of pattern that I follow. I tend to repaint
almost all of the canvas each time I work on it because I always
want my painting’s to be about the now, painting what I see
when I see it. I don’t trust if areas of my paintings come too easy
for me, and will always paint those bits out. I would hope that
by the end of a picture that the paint itself has become a force
of nature in itself and not a mere copy. My motto is, “you are
only as good as your last painting,” this drives me to alway take
my work further.
What is your secret weapon?
My secret weapon is knowledge combined with vision. Being
trained by Robert Lenkiewicz was the greatest prize life could
Victoria Mckenzie have given me.
 129 ORANGES & SARDINES

Big Ben 2 oil on canvas 74” x 64”

Nahem Shoa
 130 ORANGES & SARDINES

Caroline 2 oil on canvas 60” x 48”

Nahem Shoa
 131 ORANGES & SARDINES

Self With Hand oil on canvas 60” x48”

Nahem Shoa
 132 ORANGES & SARDINES

& Anon by Chris Pusateri

REVIEW BY CHERYL TOWNSEND

Anon by Chris Pusateri - BlazeVOX Books /

1934289671 / 76pps

If Piccasso were a poet, this ice cream to think so.” These are all
would be his signature. Juxtaposed excellent bumper-sticker material.
mismatched fragments of observation Zingers! I’ll buy them by the dozens.
and generalization lain into quick Allow me this poem in it’s entirety,
paragraphs of Burroughsesque tellings as my favorite:
that, as a whole, splendidly jive. The
snippets of quasi-philosophical thought, vi.x
as in “chapter 1.1” where we are
informed “West is not west if you’re The hangover crept up on him
west, south or north of it.” for some midafternoon. Sing to the bird its
reason had me thinking of The Wizard song. Syntactical tomfoolery, void
of Oz’s Scarecrow. Then “The senior where inhibited. He’s from the
author is the first one listed, an et. al. Canadian Midwest, which isn’t much
Othered at the ass-end of the listing better. Batter-dipped cover corner,
experience.” brought his receiving his but no mention of apartheid.
diploma (brain) scene to mind. Danger, beauty, then danger more,
Then a sullen eloquence sneaks nowever, how not now, then when?
in .. “Listen to my lips is a deaf breath” Every price has its discount. Prisoner
replacing Oz with a more sultry visual. stripes are horizontal and referee
Misty and humid. I think Mickey Rourke stripes are vertical. It had all the
& Faye Dunaway in Bar Fly .. deaf makings of a trust issue. Nobody
breaths of intoxication ... both of lust orders it for the parsley, but no one
and liquor. And they listened. Intently. would stand to be deprived. White is
There is a cornucopia of great equated with surrender. He was
lines in each piece; “Rage is anger white and getting whiter.
that doesn’t follow the recipe.” -
“Wouldn’t it be funny if all wars were It brings to mind one of those
the products of misinformation?” puzzles where all the pieces are there,
(You mean they aren’t?) - If you have a in front of you in a nice tidy box, and
vivid imagination, you don’t need you have to arrange them to create
anesthetized.” – “He said: if it’s culture the intended picture. Yeah... that’s
I need, then I’ll lease it.” - “It melted his what it’s like.
 133 ORANGES & SARDINES

Patrick Duggan
[Link]

Patrick Duggan has

Still-Life of Alien Autopsy
studied photography & -for Matt Swagler
literature at Emerson
College in Boston, and 1.
writing at California Raising your hand to be recognized
College of the Arts in as a blind astronomer
San Francisco. He is
editor and co-founder, burning cigarettes
along with Elliot Harmon in a thirty year rain storm.
and Marcus Merritt, of
Idiolexicon, a Black 2.
River chapbook finalist,
A snowball.
and his poems have
appeared in numerous
A tiny, crowded desert.
journals including
Beeswax, Floating 3.
Holiday, Hazmat “Are we talking lonely lonely or Elvis lonely?”
Review, Mirage: A
Periodical, Monday 4.
Night Lit, Noö Journal, A mistranslated man and his inkwell.
Parthenon West Review, The horizon a rusted iron buffalo,
Traffic and 26 Magazine. umbrellas, space ships.

5.
Clovers growing out of the door jambs.
His face has been stenciled in.

6.
There is architecture
just as there is mathematics

to self-pity. Men and women on a beach

holding kite strings with no kites.
 134 ORANGES & SARDINES

The alchemy of painting

turns most of us on. “Is that

the I-Ching?” Small talk. Baseball.

“No, just basic addition.” Our bodies at rest

mountain ranges
visible only from space.

7.
A poet jittery against a pink wall.
His stubble is making inroads.

8.
A wet canvas of busted bicycle tires.
An avenging angel of espresso and bluegrass
all robot tattoos and damaged longitude.

9.
His clouds
are the bones of a coelacanth
kissing the wingtips of pigeons.

10.
America goes on laughing.

11.
An Etch-A-Sketch knot of denim.
One hundred sentences in which I’m a car.

Patrick Duggan Still-Life Of Allien Autopsy

excerpt from
The City Is Burning
≠

Unapologetic
beach, pino grigio, hardcore punk
through an open car window.
You, a fallen acoustic angel
a morning star searing skin making war
against my daydreams
chained and blue. Every line I end
is an exorcism of hope, a burial
a wish and you
an alert halo of air,
eyes the sky’s color at five
in the morning. I’ve managed the past
twenty-four years without a cell mate,
tattooed awkward artwork
from picture books, portraits of saints.
I am a sheet rock wall
over hollow space - knock
on my skin
it echoes.

Patrick Duggan
 136 ORANGES & SARDINES

& Babbling And Strewing Flowers

COLUMNIST TALIA REED

On Squinching Naked Before the Masses

If you’re reading this then there does matter. You really don’t care
is a good chance that you’re that they read the poem, and they
considered the “artsy-fartsy” one in really don’t know what to say about it.
your family. Perhaps you are the one You don’t regularly share your poems
who studied something interesting and with people who don’t appreciate
“impractical” in college, like writing them, let alone people who know you,
— especially writing poetry. Your people to whom you are vulnerable.
grandmother or aunt introduces you to Or maybe you don’t even
friends as “the writer,” or the redundant bother to show them after all.
“published author,” though they never Or you send them a link to your
inquire to actually read any of that poem online, and imagine their
stuff you write. Being an impractical crinkled up faces as they try to
poet in a world of streamlining and decipher what childhood memory
high mobility seems archaic, but this is you’re referring to and are they
not a column lamenting the woes of a responsible for this? Is this some kind
society that fails to appreciate the arts. of charge upon their upbringing of
Rather, this is a column about being you? Now, you’re just embarrassing
the one who does. the family.
So, you have a poem in a Nicole Cartwright Denison,
literary magazine. You hand the author of the chapbook Recovering
printed book to your mom and dad to the Body, (Dancing Girl Press, 2007)
show them, “Look! I’m published! and Co-Editor of Tilt Press, describes
Someone thought my poem was this strange phenomenon she
valuable enough to do so.” You do this experiences with her mother as “the
because you don’t think they ever squinch:”
really understood what it was you do
with your poetry (who reads poetry?), Upon her initial reading I feel squinchy,
and now you have some proof that it as if she’ll figure out I wasn’t always a
 137 ORANGES & SARDINES

virgin, trying to suss out some hidden reading, dedicated a poem to her.
event, or wonder where she went The poem was beautiful, raw, and
wrong in parenting, feeling responsible exact; depicting a mother whose
for my dark, poetic feelings. Usually, privacy is invaded by her children,
she mutters something about how she while she nakedly attempts to shave
can’t understand all the “hidden her underarms. Despite the quality of
meanings” and how she just doesn’t the poem, I couldn’t help thinking that
“get” literature, especially poetry, such an unveiling of truth, even in art,
sometimes. Again, the squinch can feel like the stark bright lights of
overtakes me since she’s the woman inspection being shone upon one —
who’s responsible for my literary right there in a public café crowded
background; I cut my teeth on her with people whose eyes are darting
books and she read to me and bought between poet and the mother of
me any book I asked for, and even whom she was speaking. To borrow a
some I didn’t. She was always an astute phrase, I squinched. I held my breath.
student of literature and imbued me I wondered how my own mother might
with a deep love and reverence for it. react, but the mother of this scene
She’s my greatest influence and for that proudly wipes a tear from her eye as
I’m eternally grateful. She’s also the first the speaker takes her seat amongst
person to receive a copy of my applause. The poem does its job of
chapbook: I’m not sure she’s read it encapsulating veracity, candor, and
yet, but it’s there with all the others, brilliance, even if nakedness — literal
waiting in its vainglory. It doesn’t hurt and figurative — is a part of that
she bribes me with presents upon equation.
publications either; it’s kind of like still Then, there is the topic of
being on The Honor Roll. sexuality which the customary
American eyes and ears encounter in
It’s that sort of a bittersweet ways that are not necessarily in the
accomplishment: there will likely be vein of the aforementioned benefit of
some questions incited by all of those art, but rather in an element of
images of body parts and explosions. scandal. So, offering your beloved
I recently took part in a reading in poetry to someone with the untrained
downtown South Bend, Indiana. eye (read: second-rate Hollywood
Another participant brought along her amusement-driven) becomes a
mother, and during her portion of the gamble, but the writer knows that it

& Talia Reed Babbling And Strewing Flowers

 138 O R A N G E S & S A R D I N E S

isn’t for the opinion of the work itself Naoko Fujimoto, a graduate
that it is being exhibited, but rather for student at Indiana University has a solid
the appreciation of those whose stock of darlings of her own, across the
judgments are realized. This issue of globe in Japan, cheering her on in her
writing about sexuality might become educational endeavors here in the
a consideration when one’s own states. They know their daughter is a
children happen upon the writing. talented writer — they can find her
Charmi Keranen wrote and published work online, but when they use Google
a short non-fiction piece, “Train Translate something gets lost in the
Language” in the online magazine translation — like a context for all of
Slow Trains. In it she compares the these sensual images.
thundering, powerful trains heard Film Director David Cronenberg
outside her bedroom windows to the in an interview with Scott Macaulay
activities taking place within the in September 2007 says something
bedroom. The trains become a about art that might explain why
soundtrack and metaphor to the the squinch experience occurs when
sentiment of lovemaking. “Train one’s bare naked poetry is exposed in
Language” won an award and was broad daylight to the lion’s share
published by her University, and it is of society: “The idea of a mass
very likely that her teenaged children audience is an invention of the
have read it. Industrial Revolution.”
We the poets are ever so
The fact that I write empowers my kids aware of this by the piling on and
to write.  They see it as a valid means of injecting of labels and categories of
expression and exploring the world. contemporary poetry. We camp out
They don’t seem to be embarrassed at with schools of thought and try to
all by my topics.   In fact, they show my
predict, create, and join movements,
and none of this is apparent nor of any
writing to their friends.   I think it also
relevance to the non-poet. Instead our
helps them see me as a whole person,
poem stands before him, looks him
not just as their mom. The other day
dead in the eye, and smears the
[my daughter] Jojo said, “Before I get raucous essence of ourselves out in
married I’d like you to buy me a sex front of him for him. How could we
book.”  I said, “Okay, how soon should possibly ask the trusted thing to do
I be shopping?” anything less?

& Talia Reed Babbling And Strewing Flowers

P U B L I S H E R O F
Oranges & Sardines,

MiPO

OCHO

and other literary publications

[Link]