Monday, March 10, 2025

Interview with Poet Joan Larkin about Her Book Old Stranger

Joan Larkin’s sixth book of poems is Old Stranger (Alice James Books 2024). Her previous work includes My Body: New and Selected Poems, winner of the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award, and Blue Hanuman (Hanging Loose Press). A lifelong teacher, Joan has served on the faculties of Sarah Lawrence College, Smith College, and Brooklyn College, among others. Her honors include Lambda and NEA awards and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Joan Larkin, poet and author of Old Stranger
Zack Rogow: Many of the poems in your collection Old Stranger are very particular to your own life and memories, and yet they resonate deeply for me. How do you present highly personal experiences so they reach the hearts of readers with different backgrounds and stories from your own? 

Joan Larkin: I’m almost never thinking about a possible reader when I write. Instead, I’m focused on trying to find words for some experience or feeling that won’t let go of me. But thinking about who might be listening does come into the revision process. The reader matters––I don’t want to be obscure,  nor do I want to explain what the images convey. To make a world the reader can enter, I work to describe what I’m seeing with an exactness and vividness that satisfies me as fresh and true, and to make a kind of “mouth music” that gives me a kind of primal pleasure. I feel surprised and lucky when a reader responds with recognition. 

 

You seem to resist making conclusions or tying up loose ends in these poems. Why is it some of the poems come across more as questions than as answers, and who are the questions being asked of?

 

Though I love to end a  poem on a strong image and want it to be a memorable one, my choice not to tie up loose ends or to provide an answer is deliberate. Sometimes I go through several drafts before seeing that I can cut a final line or lines that state something I’ve already physicalized in the poem. The poem can’t be an essay. I want to make a world that goes on spinning.


The language in Old Stranger is precise and crisp, with no wasted verbiage. You also create startling combinations of words, such as “red milk,” or “well of onions her bread signature.” Do you think the texture of your writing has changed in this book, and if so, what was the progression for you to the style in this new collection?

 

I do think that the texture of my writing has changed in this book. Less chatting. More elliptical leaps. I’m less concerned with whether a line makes sense (though I do want to make sense!) than that it be alive. Ezra Pound’s “Deliver it alive” is still the test.

 

I didn’t get there alone. One example of what changed over more than a decade of conversation with a few trusted poets: I’d written a long poem about 17th century Baroque painter Artemesia Gentileschi, line after line filled with details from my research into her life. After a long silence, my friend Jean Valentine pointed to six lines that focused on a single painting and said, “This is the heart of the poem.” Dubious, I asked, “But is it enough?” Her reply, “It is, for me,” changed the way I saw what mattered most in the poem and in many others over the years since.


A number of the poems in Old Stranger are ekphrastic, meaning they’re inspired by a particular work of art. Those include six short poems on paintings by the German artist Paula Modersohn Becker, the woman Rainer Maria Rilke addressed so personally in his major poem “Requiem for a Friend.” What is it about a particular work of art that provokes a poem for you?

 

Music and visual art––made things––have engaged and sustained me from early on. My two brief long-ago marriages were to painters, and I’ve fallen in blind love with singers and other artists, my attachment in part the result of mistaking the maker for the making-ness. Turpentine fumes and the squeak of a bow still attract me like nothing else. I’m drawn to what can I learn from the artist’s process and skill, vision and commitment, and what it can touch in me.

 

The Paula Modersohn-Becker self-portrait I chose for the cover of Old Stranger looked to me as if her face were a whitish mask she was holding up, both covering and revealing the face underneath––suggesting the play between her art and interior life. I saw the beaded necklace as the sole marker of femaleness. The expression of mouth, eyes, and hand spoke of a vivid consciousness I wanted to know more about. Modersohn-Becker painted it in the first decade of the 20th century, long before I attended literature classes in which work by women poets was absent. The college library’s sole book about Emily Dickinson was part of the American Men of Letters series. But Modersohn-Becker, like Dickinson, knew what she was: “wood, with a gift for burning” (Adrienne Rich’s self-image in her 1970s poem “Song”). Modersohn-Becker produced strong, original work before her early death from childbirth. Her cut-short artist’s life, as well as what I saw in a revelatory gallery exhibit, drew me to make ekphrastic work based on her paintings.  Similarly, Camille Claudel’s tragic career and Bonnard’s wife’s role as his barely visible model inspired poems of loss and erasure.

 

Some of the poems in Old Stranger strike me as being almost a new genre, poems such as “My Father’s Tie Rack.” Those poems capture a moment of precise observation that takes place at a specific time, but one that echoes down a tunnel of memories into the past. How did you come upon that form, and do you have a way of referring to it or a name for it?

 

I think of “My Father’s Tie Rack” simply as a list poem. But in the process of revising it, I also thought, What if this could be a kind of loose sonnet? Limiting a poem to fourteen lines or imposing some other rule (for example a certain number of strong stresses to the line) helps me work the language to make it more concise and alive. There’s power in limiting one’s options.


 I often don’t know what shape a poem is going to take until some sound pattern begins to recur and a form suggests itself. But with “My Father’s Tie Rack,” I had a clear idea beforehand that I wanted to write a list poem, in this case a list of images and metaphors to evoke neckties I remembered––something extravagant and unusual about them had struck my young eyes, each tie a piece of art. I didn’t know consciously at the beginning that I wanted to convey my father’s complex, rich personality. And I had no idea that I’d end up intuitively swerving toward an image of his death (“the hole”) and the hint of power or even violence contained in the final word, “belts.” In hindsight, I see that the poem is both a portrait and an encounter.


The way this poem took shape is true of others, too, where my unconscious mind was making choices. I love your discerning that a particular observation “echoes down a tunnel of memories into the past,” but in the moment of writing, I typically don’t understand or consciously control the process. The U-turns a draft wants to take often surprise me.

           

In many poems you describe a vivid incident from your earlier years, such as “All at Once.” Are there particular types of experiences that sparked those poems?

 

I’m still thinking about familial and societal expectations of girls and women, of shame and trauma held under pressure at a depth. But though difficult past experiences still ignite poems, my old ways of seeing and representing them have changed as I’ve loosened my hold on my old story lines. “All at Once” was sparked by a memory of what people used to call a shotgun wedding (do we still say that?), followed by a miscarriage in a car on a cross-country journey. What I wanted to do in that poem was to look back without attachment and evoke the physical sensations of that awful moment in the car. I wanted to find language for the life of the body––the house of pleasure and trauma, wounding and healing.

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Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost



Sunday, February 2, 2025

“Yes”—The Power of a Single Word, by Federico Roncoroni

This charming and thoughtful essay is an excerpt from the Italian writer Federico Roncoroni’s book Words: A Private Dictionary [Parole: Un dizionario privato]. Roncoroni talks about the word “Yes” and how many shades of meaning and emotion even a tiny word can express. Translated and adapted from the Italian by Zack Rogow. Thanks to Sabrina Orefici for bringing this essay to my attention.

Federico Roncoroni (1944–2021)
Yes is such a short word, but so dangerous. It should be used only with the utmost caution. 

It takes just an instant to pronounce the word Yes, but that little word can have disastrous effects.

 

In fact, when it’s not used merely to answer in the affirmative a question that is in itself innocent and innocuous (“Do you like pistachio ice cream?”—“Yes”) or to express assent to a specific proposal of limited scope (“We’re gonna go see that new action movie, you wanna come?”—“Yes”) there is the risk that the word will bind you to a solemn commitment, a promise or a choice with effects that can last a lifetime (“Do you take for your lawfully wedded spouse…”— “Yes”). Everyone knows that answering Yes to such a question has serious consequences, much heavier than being considered a pistachio ice cream lover or spending a bad evening sitting through a boring film in the company of boring friends.

 

The affirmative and binding force of this little word is reinforced by the fact that this one syllable is actually the equivalent of an entire sentence: “Did you buy the newspaper?” “Yes” (I bought the newspaper). So, if you really can’t use its opposite, which is just as short but disengages rather than engages (if you say Yes you’re definitely signing on for something, but if you say No you’re turning in the opposite direction), it’s advisable just to keep quiet and hide behind expressions like “Don’t know,” or “Lemme think about it,” or “We’ll see.”

 

This little word is no less dangerous on the level of significance, rich as it is in shades of meaning depending on your intonation, how you say it, and the pitch you use to release that phoneme, all of which communicate a vast array of sensations and emotions, not always easy to decipher.

 

In actuality, a simple Yes can be, depending on the situation, whispered murmured susurrated meowed stammered barked shouted screamed or muttered under your breath. It can be beseeched requested imposed extorted or demanded. A Yes can be spontaneous sudden impulsive hasty sincere frank blunt cordial false treacherous forced unexpected expected sarcastic providential advantageous or disadvantageous wrong useless absurd too late liberating enthusiastic formal warm festive passionate cold icy humiliating or servile. A Yes can be conclusive decisive determinant and even definitive.

 

It can open up new horizons and perspectives, or it can get you into deep trouble trap and ensnare.

 

Yes can also be used ironically to say that you really have no intention of doing what the other person requested: “Yes…sure, tomorrow,” or “Yes, in your dreams.”

 

When repeated, a Yes can mean forceful agreement, or more often doubt, depending on the tone: “Yes, yes… of course I believe you.”

 

Please avoid substituting for Yes the word Affirmative, which is best left to military personnel, and also avoid saying Absolutely, a highly ambiguous word at best.

 

If you just precede Yes with an article, which is, of all parts of speech the most attentive servant, the word Yes can also function as a noun:

“Was that a Yes?”

“All in favor? The Yeses have it.”

No less a writer than Dante immortalized the Yes as a noun in Canto XXXIII of The Inferno, using it to portray his homeland:

Italy “…that beautiful country where the Yes resounds.”

 

from Parole: Un dizionario privato, copyright 2015 by Federico Roncoroni, Marcello Sensini, and Mondadori Education S.p.A. All rights reserved by the copyright holders.

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Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost


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Saturday, January 11, 2025

The Braided Poem

In recent decades, the braided poem has opened dynamic possibilities for writers and readers. The current wave of braided poems began with the work of Larry Levis in the mid-1980s in books such as Winter Stars.

Larry Levis (1946–1996)
Many other writers then successfully adapted the braided poem to different subjects. These poets include Mark Doty, Lynda Hull, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman, Dionisio Martínez, and Frank Paino. 

I trace the origins of the braided poem back to Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” In that poem, Whitman described the widespread mourning in the wake of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and crocheted that together with images of lilacs, birdsong, and a star that signaled the start of spring:

 

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,

There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

 

What is a braided poem? A braided poem twines together disparate strands of narrative and imagery, connecting them metaphorically. Usually a braided poem restlessly moves from one topic to another, at first perhaps jarringly. As the poem progresses, the reader gradually comes to understand what ties together the different braids, on a figurative level. When done well, the braided poem is electric, following the jumps of the mind and the heart as they come to grips with complex emotions and thoughts that are difficult to fit all in one strand. The braided poem evolved alongside the braided essay, which uses similar techniques in prose, combining different threads to explore how seemingly independent topics intertwine. 

 

One of the most successful braided poems, to my mind, is Mark Doty’s “Fog.” Mark Doty braids together three distinctive subjects in the space of only a couple of pages. The poem begins with an account of plants taking turns blooming in the speaker’s garden. Already in the opening lines, the description foreshadows fatal possibilities, as the flowers last only a few days, and the white peonies have a “blood-color…ruffle”. The second element in the poem, a Ouija board belonging to the speaker and his partner, echoes this theme. Spirits of dead children use the planchette to communicate with the couple. It’s not until line 45 that we come to understand all these hints about blood and death:

 

Though it [the blood] submits to test, two,

to be exact, each done three times…

 

The reader becomes aware that the speaker and his partner are being tested for HIV at the crest of the epidemic that killed tens of millions of people worldwide. Gradually we learn that the speaker is negative, but his partner has antibodies indicating the presence of the illness. The speaker is so stricken by the news that he can’t even use the word “positive.” Nor do the acronyms HIV or AIDs appear in the text. Those omissions reveal that the speaker does not want even to voice the possible outcomes for his beloved. The poem is terribly moving, and uses a device similar to Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln, evoking the cycles of life and death in spring to highlight grief. With incredible skill, Doty braids together the poem’s three strands—the garden, the Ouija board, and the HIV tests.

 

During the time when Mary Doty published “Fog” in his dazzling collection My Alexandria in 1993, the braided poem arrived as a revelation. It was a period when much of the poetry in the U.S.A. was taking paths that had become a little too well travelled: the “I do this, I do that” poems of the New York School, the Beat Generation stream of consciousness howl, or the personal-as-political autobiographical poems of identity. The braided poem allowed for a complex and nuanced exploration of myriad awakenings taking place in North American society, changes that were upending Victorian morality; as well as challenging dominant cultures in class, gender, race, and sexuality.

 

To my mind, the braided poem works best when the varied strands have a strong rubber band holding them together, and the different braids strengthen the poem’s emotional fibers. The strands have to twist together organically, and not arbitrarily or gratuitously. Braiding very different strands in the same poem can feel gimmicky or forced if parts of the poem strike the reader as added on for no compelling reason. Those added parts can then dilute the impact of the poem’s core.

 

Here are a few of my favorite braided poems that beautifully combine multiple strands:


Jorie Graham: “Salmon”

Brenda Hillman: “The Spark”

Lynda Hull: “Utopia Parkway”

Dionisio Martinez: “Bad Alchemy”

Frank Paino: “Each Bone of the Body”

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Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost


Friday, December 13, 2024

Tribute to Jerome Rothenberg by Michael Palmer

Jerome “Jerry” Rothenberg, poet, translator, performance artist, and anthologist passed away at the age of 92 on April 21, 2024. He wrote ninety books of poetry and essays. Jerry’s groundbreaking anthologies include Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, and Poems for the Millennium. He created the field of ethnopoetics, the study and celebration of non-Western, non-canonical poetries, often coming from ancient and autochthonous cultures. 

Jerome “Jerry” Rothenberg (1931–2024)

At a celebration of Rothenberg’s life and work at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, poet Michael Palmer delivered a beautiful tribute to Jerry that I’m posting here in full:

Well, for Jerry, for Jerry and always for his wife, Diane Brodatz Rothenberg, where do we begin? When asked, Gertrude Stein once famously said, “We begin at the beginning, go on until the end, then stop,” or something close to that. Unfortunately, our limited time does not allow for such an approach, but I’ll try to briefly celebrate Jerry’s meaning to me personally across the years.

 

I remember that it was in the winter of 1963–64 that LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) and I went one evening to the Half Note on Spring Street in New York City to hear John Coltrane and his magnificent quartet during that period that Coltrane was first making his extended explorations on soprano sax. Two long sessions with one break, ending somewhere around 1:30 or 2 in the morning. Coltrane performing solos that went on forever but never too long. In an interview around that time, when asked about these solos, Coltrane said that he was “looking for the door.” It struck me that this was exactly what I was searching for, in an effort to find my way to an alternative life to that which had been proposed for me, a life in the company of poets and like-minded folk, a “new life” maybe such as Dante had once proposed in La Vita Nuova. And now I realize that LeRoi was searching as well, for a life beyond downtown bohemia that the Black Arts Movement would soon help make possible.

 

Which brings me to the many doors that Jerry opened for us in our effort to find a way toward something vital and new, some path not yet taken or even known. Jerry as neo-Dada performer, taking on the persona of Tristan Tzara, or Samy Rosenstock as he had been known before he too took an alternate path. Jerry as translator,  bringing parallel worlds into view, forging a dialogue between self and other, and self as other. Foregrounding cultures heretofore excluded by the usual institutional orthodoxies. Contact and multiple conversations, innovative and esoteric strains of song sounding across time. The project then continuing with his many groundbreaking and visionary anthologies that did no less than reconfigure the cultural map, redraw its vectors, and celebrate a range of poetic accomplishment that was at once atemporal and international, defying boundaries or limits or proscriptions, and erasing the conventional Anglo-American cultural timelines. These works by Jerry served and serve now as guides for those of us interested in erasing borders and eliminating border guards, and in coming to understand a visionary tradition in defiance of the warmongers and culture-mongers and profiteers.

 

And then I cannot help but emphasize the immediate, intense humanity that Jerry and Diane offered in their everyday lives, their generosity in countless matters and their commitment to deep fellow-feeling, what the arts fully committed to will bring to our sense of that company I mention above. A shared Cabaret Voltaire in the various ways we always try to reimagine it, ecstatic singers on the stage, good food and wine shared at table, yet never forgetful of the darker forces pulling us toward division and hatred of the other, that bigotry that never seems to wane throughout history, that war against the universal life of the imagination and creative growth.

 

Countless doors opened, no admission fee.

 

Michael Palmer was born into an Italian-American family in Manhattan in 1943 and has lived in San Francisco since 1969. He has taught at numerous universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and has published translations from a variety of languages, in particular French, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian. Palmer has been involved in joint projects with many visual artists and composers in the United States and elsewhere and has also served as an artistic collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for close to fifty years. His most recent poetry collection, Little Elegies for Sister Satan, from New Directions, was published in 2021. In 2023, Nightboat Books brought out a new edition of a prose work, The Danish Notebook.


Michael Palmer
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Zack’s new memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost


Monday, December 9, 2024

The Problem of the Unsympathetic Main Character

Quick!—think of a novel, movie, or play with an unsympathetic main character. It’s not easy, is it? There aren’t many stories that fall into that category. Why? I think humans are hard-wired to identify with characters, and it’s difficult to bond with a protagonist who is fundamentally unlikeable or evil. We have a fascination with evil, which is what makes villains such interesting folks, but as protagonists, villains or unsympathetic characters don’t work very well. 

One example:

 

Even among fans of Charles Dickens, very few have ever read Barnaby Rudge.


This novel includes some of Dickens’ most lyrical writing and a fascinating historical setting, but it’s never been a favorite. I think part of the reason is that the main character, Barnaby, fights with deadly fierceness on the wrong side of a cause. Bad actors manipulate Barnaby to take a leading role in the anti-Catholic riots in London in 1780. Although Barnaby is sympathetic because he is developmentally delayed, he ultimately has a negative impact. His story hasn’t won many readers.

I’m having difficulty finding other examples, because authors are smart enough to realize that unsympathetic main characters aren’t very popular. One of the great things about stories is that they allow us to empathize with another person’s struggles. Empathy is not only a fundamental human trait, it is also a pleasure. When a writer denies a reader that enjoyment, the reader feels thwarted and even neglected.

 

I suppose one could argue that Rodion Raskolnikov of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is an unsympathetic main character. Raskolnikov commits a cruel and unpardonable crime. But Raskolnikov feels great anguish for his sins. He ultimately repents and finds a spiritual love with Sonya. By the novel’s end, Raskolnikov’s suffering and change of heart have earned him some of the reader’s sympathy. The same is true of Dickens’ miser Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.

 

But there are certain types of unsympathetic main characters who do manage to evoke a positive response in a reader or audience. Among male characters, a domineering patriarch can sometimes be sympathetic if that person has overcome great obstacles or worked toward admirable goals. In August Wilson’s play Fences, for instance, the main character Troy, a garbage collector, is a cold and judgmental father. He’s also an unfaithful husband who fathers a child out of wedlock, despite having a devoted wife. But Troy is partly sympathetic because he’s fighting for his dignity. Troy has suffered racial discrimination, and we admire his determination to advance out of the role of garbage collector to become the first Black truck driver working for the city.

 

Another somewhat sympathetic dominating male is The General in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel The Autumn of the Patriarch. The General is an impossibly violent and corrupt dictator, but the reader has to admire the stubborn strength he shows in defying neocolonial domination. Perhaps the exaggerated proportions of the crimes The General commits allow the reader to overlook some of the faults of this strange protagonist.

 

Among female characters, one type of unsympathetic character who manages to win over the audience is the femme fatale.


Barbara Stanwick’s most famous femme fatale role

A femme fatale often acts in amoral and vicious ways, but a moviegoer has to admire her beauty, her sensuality, and her scheming cleverness. If we never completely like the femme fatale, we still identify with her ability to live a kind of freedom that few achieve, male or female.

 

All in all, I would not recommend building a plot with an unsympathetic main character. If you do head down that curvy and cobblestoned street, I would suggest placing some very sympathetic characters along the way, in order to feed that terribly human impulse to identify.

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Zack’s new memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost