Interview with poet Donna Masini about her book “Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?”

Is there a connection between the practice of meditation and the poems in Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? You refer to meditation or spiritual awareness in several places.

The opening poem is called “Meditation.” I wanted a push and pull, a tension throughout the book, between the struggle to get quiet, to be present, and the always-agitated, moving-around mind of the speaker(s). I wanted to get that mind onto the page, not just in the act of thinking, but in the process of perceiving; consciousness, with all its distractions, the many kinds of interruptions.

Poet Donna Masini

I find meditation exceedingly difficult. (Well, let’s not exaggerate. We’re not talking about 12-hour shifts in a coal mine.) I’ve been meditating daily (with lapses) for a few years, though I’ve been on and off for decades. It doesn’t get easier. If it’s a crazy day, it’s the first thing to go. It’s a temporary stay against inner commotion. I try to get it all down in my notebook, the stray thoughts and associations, but so much changes/happens/is put together in revision.

There are recurrent themes in your book of parents and family. Both the speaker’s mother and father appear in a number of poems. How did your grappling with your parents’ aging or end of life shape this collection? 

 

The death of my father, the illness, gradual loss of memory, and death of my mother—I can’t begin to say how these experiences changed me. Writing the poems in this book, these losses came into everything. And then a huge part of the few last years has been taken up, not only with caregiving, watching my parents decline, which of course brings up all the future losses—my friends, my own mortality—but also dealing with all the “stuff.” Going through my parents’ things, confronting my mother’s urge to save. My urge to save. My father and brother are the opposite. My brother walked around my mother’s apartment throwing stuff out—and I followed, pulling it out of the garbage, carrying bags of costume jewelry, potato peelers, report cards home with me on the bus to Port Authority. Those conflicts, dynamics, and tensions are behind the book. This is something many of us go through or will go through. And then I tend to have a memorializing mind, caught up in loss and time: Is this the last time I’ll read Villette? Was that the last time she’ll wear that jacket? In one poem the  speaker says, “Today I wrote the word always and felt afraid. So much less of always now.”

Many of the poems in Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? braid together different strands of thought. For example, in the title poem, there’s a vignette of a woman in a supermarket checkout line interspersed with recollections of her love life and childhood. How do you keep emotional impact in a poem that ranges through different topics and modes?

Well, let’s think about the ways in which we move through the world. I have to pick up Advil and I’m thinking about what to do in class tonight, what my mother said last Christmas, the awful pop-up alert that just surfaced, why did my cat throw up? The smell of coffee I just passed, Gaza, fascism, my pounding headache and what to make for dinner. The problem is how to arrange the various strands in a poem, the rhythms, music, tones; how to capture the movements of thought, unconscious associations. When it comes to emotional impact, as important as these details are, it’s about shaping the rhythms the reader will ride, suspending a sentence to ratchet up the tension. The surprising turn or swerve the reader didn’t expect (I didn’t expect) that catches their breath, or takes it away.

 

There is a self-mocking humor in your book that allows you to disarm the reader and make serious statements. You even use silly but very amusing puns at times. How do you view the role of humor and word play in your writing?

 

I remember Audre Lorde saying that I was really funny, so why didn’t my humor get into my poems, then pointing to a line (a dreadful pun) saying, “and this isn’t the way to do it.” It took a while for me to be able to integrate my humor—which is a huge part of who I am, how I think —into the poems. It’s something I talk about with students. You don’t want a one-liner—but there are lines that prove me wrong because of what they do tonally. My friend Daniel accuses me of inventing etymologies. I can’t help it. Word play comes naturally. In real life, I have to know when to suppress it, no matter how good it is, at, say, a funeral, or if it will hurt someone. But I can always put it in a poem. I think if everyone kept notebooks most of us would have pages of these kinds of observations. It’s the humor of quirky thinking, leaning slightly to the surreal, the hyper-literal or absurd. I love the absurd. (I mean, really, how can we possibly face the world now without it?)

 

Several of the poems in this book are overtly political, for example, “Psalm,” which deals with the environmental crisis, using biblical language. How do you avoid the pitfalls of being didactic or prosaic in a poem that has an overt message on a contemporary issue?

 

The easy answer is, I don’t publish a lot of it. I write so many more poems of every kind that just don’t work. For “political poems” the problem is “writing about.” The particular poem you mentioned—“Psalm”—went through many drafts, because I kept writing about. It’s only when someone mentioned they were writing a psalm that I thought, oh I can speak in the voice of the fish, in the language of psalms, try to enact their suffering. Then the poem began to emerge. I did so much reading about bunker fish the poem was getting information heavy. I had to cut a lot. A poet I was reading as I worked on this book is Wislawa Szymborska. She’s amazing. A lot of it has to do with her tone. (The rest is her brilliance.) Then there’s our mutual friend, June Jordan, who was able to write in the moment out of the crisis. Early on Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us taught me about point of view and perspective, poems of witness. How to not be “the good guy.” What I’m trying to do now is find ways to respond to daily headlines in poems. Right now they are filled with rage and dread. I’m beginning each poem with “Dear America.” Most are still in my notebook and might never see the light of day.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Writing Tips from Italy: Guest blog by Giulio Mozzi and Laura Pugno

A friend gave me a copy of a wonderful manual for writers by the Italian authors Giulio Mozzi and Laura Pugno. Their book is full of great ideas and prompts.
 

Link to: Oracular Manual for Poets

Though the book is particularly for poets, I’ve translated three sections that I think are of interest to all writers. Grazie, Giulio and Laura for giving me permission to reprint these!

Co-author Laura Pugno

Co-author Giulio Mozzi

Do words have souls?

A poet considers every word and every thing as if it were alive. They might actually be alive. What do they want to say?  

 

A good poet is an animist who looks at things as if they were saturated with life, death, stories, and words. And in the same vein, a poet looks at every word they hear, read, say, or write as if it were a living being. Not only that: a good poet is a matchmaker who brings together words and things based on their affinities and preferences. To sum it up: a good poet is like that clever servant who pretends to do the bidding of things and words, but who in reality is the one in charge, the one who masters them, and bends them to meet a particular need in a piece of writing.

 

Who lives in your poems?

 

The “us,” that unknown. How many homes can you make in it that you’ve never even thought about? Collective poetry, choral poetry. There’s a whole world out there: the others.

 

With your own voice, unique and private, you, as a poet, are the founder of a community. But how is it possible that poetry, which is such a lyrical and solitary form of expression, can create a community? Well, each of us is a person who belongs to humanity, so in each of us there’s something shared or held in common with others, maybe with a few others, maybe with many, or maybe even with everyone else. When you speak as a poet, with that shared something, you’re speaking the ”us.” Even when you use the “I.” Even when it seems you’re speaking completely impersonally. As the philosopher Rocco Ronchi once said, “Communication…is not a form of transmission. At its root, communication means to create a common ground, to fasten together a community, even if it is a minority, and to give that community identity and recognizable traits. Communication is the creation of a sense of community.” Poetry does not communicate by transmission, it fosters commonality, founds a community. To quote the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska: “[Jean-Paul] Sartre said one of the most horrific things ever uttered: ‘Hell is other people.’ («L’enfer, c’est les autres.») What does that even mean, that hell is other people? In fact, I would say that other people are the true paradise. Doesn’t ‘other people’ include loved ones, neighbors—not just anybody? And I’m not only referring to lovers here, but also to relations, friends, the care of a neighbor, etc. Where would we be without others? Who would we be? Nothing. A hell.”

 

Rearrange the poetry books on your shelves.

 

Discover the books you forgot you had.

 

When you’re a new employee in a bookstore, the first day on the job you’re taught that you have to dust the books. Every day, when there aren’t many customers in the shop, you run a cloth over one, two, or three shelves and give them a good swipe. Romano Montroni, the founder of Italy’s Feltrinelli Bookstore chain, explained why, in his book Selling Souls: The Bookseller’s Profession. Montroni said that this is useful for memorizing each book, the author, the title, and a couple of sentences from the back cover. Similarly, if you have a few shelves of poetry books at home (and I certainly hope you do!), take the time every once in a while (maybe once a month?) to rearrange your books. You might reorganize them by author, or maybe chronologically, or by the colors of their spines, or by their size, or by when you bought them, or according to which ones you like the most or the least. This will help you (you’ll see, it works!) to find forgotten books, to resume interrupted readings, to read again passages you  haven’t looked at for ages, to discover that, just as you have changed over time, so have your books.

 

From Oracolo manuale per poete e poeti, @2020 by Giulio Mozzi and Laura Pugno, published by Sonzogno di Marsiglio Editori. Reprinted by permission of the authors. Translation from the Italian © 2022 by Zack Rogow.

Zack’s memoir about his father, the writer Lee Rogow: Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Praise and Lament, Part 5: Indirect Lament in Wislawa Szymborska’s “Cat in an Empty Apartment”

In this blog I'd like to talk about what I would call “indirect lament,” or a kind of mourning for loss that is not obvious. As an example, I'm going to discuss a poem by Wislawa Szymborska. 

Szymborska was a Polish poet who lived from 1923 to 2012 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. Her life spans the years of Stalinist communism in Poland and the rise of the Solidarity movement that resulted in her country breaking away from the Soviet bloc. She is known for plainspoken language that expresses a surprising complexity of emotion and thought, her wry humor, and the depth she can encapsulate in just a page and a half of free verse.

Wislawa Szymborska

In the context of this blog on indirect lament, I’d like to talk about her poem “Cat in an Empty Apartment.” You can read the poem here in the translation of Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

It’s very clear right from the first line that this is a poem about death. But the seriousness of this opening is lightened by the figure of the cat, which doesn’t understand its human roommate’s disappearance. There is something slightly different in the cat’s world, but it’s not a major upheaval yet to the cat.

Finally the cat does get angry at the owner—the cat has moved from the first stage of grief, denial, to the second stage, anger. But the cat never quite gets beyond denial—it is not capable of moving beyond that stage. Maybe that is part of what makes Szymborska’s poem so poignant. Even at the end, the cat is still hoping that its human companion will return, and that the cat will be able to show its anger and then forgive the owner's extended absence. But death has made that reconciliation impossible.

Szymborska’s version of lament is gentle, whimsical, even funny. But in some ways, this heightens the sense of loss. The grief doesn’t hit you like an avalanche. The grief in the poem sneaks up on you and leaves a chord in a minor key resonating at the end, like a great jazz ballad. I think it could be argued that indirect lament can be as effective as its more direct sister. It’s significant that Szymborska wrote “Cat in an Empty Apartment” not long after the death of her husband.

Praise and Lament, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

In Memory of Marcelijus Martinaitis (1936–2013)

In 2013 the world lost a great poet: Marcelijus Martinaitis. His writing contained a rare concoction of laugh-out-loud humor, and agonizing poignancy. There are few poets who can hold those two opposites together long enough and close enough to capture them in a poem. It makes perfect sense that Martinaitis is a translator into Lithuanian of Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda, another poet who could fuse those opposites.

Marcelijus Martinaitis

Martinaitis authored at least fifteen collections of poetry. He also played a leading role in Lithuania’s movement for independence from the Soviet bloc, including getting elected to the Supreme Soviet to advocate for his nation’s freedom. His poems about his Lithuanian version of Everyman, Kukitis, were recited and sung during the Sajudis movement that finally gained independence for Lithuania in 1991, after 46 years of Soviet occupation. Those poems were published in the book The Ballads of Kukitis, issued by Arc Publications, and beautifully translated by writer and poet Laima Vince. And Lithuanian is no stroll in the park to translate—it’s an old-school language with more cases and declensions than ancient Greek.

It was after the fall of the pro-Soviet regime in Lithuania that Martinaitis’ subtlety as a poet emerged even more strongly. In his book K.B. The Suspect, with Laima Vince doing the translation honors again, and published by White Pine Press, Martinaitis explores the complex terrain of a country liberated from occupation but still reeling from decades of secret police repression. The Vilnius that the character of K.B. inhabits is a city where ghosts of former dukes coexist with hoboes who sort through dumpsters at night, scavengers whom Martinaitis called “the trash angels.”

Here’s a poem from K.B. The Suspect:

K.B.: About the Hidden Mirror

by Marcelijus Martinaitis

I was permitted inside the room of the hidden mirror.

Time flew backwards at an alarming rate,

and afterwards forwards.

I saw reflected in the mirror images

a few days old, months old, years old.

They materialized before me

then crumbled into dust and decay.

I myself materialized again and again

in ways I hadn’t been for a long time.

Time was falling apart.

I could watch how I was disappearing:

an infant, a teenager, a young man,

a soldier in uniform, a lover in a car

huddled against a woman,

walking a dog, surrounded by well-wishers,

and almost the way I am now, like the day before yesterday—

none of it coherent,

an endless chain of losing myself.

Finally,

I met with the present—

I reunited with my true reflection,

the one that can’t see itself.

(translation copyright © 2004 by Laima Vince)

I love that final irony at the end! The speaker of the poem can view right before him every moment of his life from the beginning, but the one moment he can’t pierce is the present. Irony is the dark bread of life in Eastern Europe, so it’s no accident that some of the masters of that mode have sprouted there, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Milan Kundera to Wislawa Szymborska.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer

How to Deliver Your Message, Part 6: Irony

Irony is one of the sharpest tools at the disposal of a writer. Essentially, irony means saying the opposite of what you are conveying, but with a wink to the reader so it’s understood that you’re actually advocating the contrary of your surface message. The enormous advantages of irony over preaching to your audience are that irony entertains, uses humor to disarm the reader’s defenses, and still strikes right to the heart. 

One of the most famous examples of irony is Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, subtitled For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public. Even the title is devastatingly ironic. Swift published this short essay as a pamphlet in 1729 at a time when dire poverty was common in his native Ireland, and there was no safety net for the poor, who often faced starvation, disease, and freezing weather with no protection or remedy.

Swift pretended to present his solution to this poverty in the voice of an optimistic do-gooder. The narrator proposes fattening children to the age of one year so they can be sold as food for the rich: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust.” The reader has to laugh, but behind that chuckle is the unsettling thought that this is really what it has come to: children are so poorly provided for that eating them almost seems like an plausible alternative.

Part of the brilliance and hilarity of this essay is that Swift never stops acting his part. He always speaks in the voice of the concerned citizen, acting the hopeful social engineer who believes that his solution will work: “I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.”

When is it appropriate to use the sort of wry humor Swift employs so successfully? As the poet Chana Bloch commented on the subject of irony in discussing the Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein, "It's a defense mechanism, a coping mechanism: the more harrowing the context, the more threatening the circumstance, the sharper the irony." The powerless have power when they wield the blade of irony.

Many writers who lived under communism in Eastern Europe were experts with the razor of irony. The poet Wislawa Szymborska was particularly good at playing the role of the naive speaker whose words were just a bit suspect. One great example is her poem “True Love,” which pretends to be an argument against romantic relationships:

True love. Is it normal

is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people

who exist in a world of their own?

Another great example of irony in Eastern European literature is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s chapter in The Gulag Archipelago on “The Ships of the Archipelago.” In this section Solzhenytsin describes the railroad cars used to transport prisoners to Siberia, or from prison to prison, during the worst days of the Stalinist purges in Russia. The conditions he narrates are almost unbearable to read: the crowding worse than any zoo, the disease-ridden water, the lack of toilets or time to meet basic human functions, the brutality of the guards. It would be intolerable to read these details, except that Solzhenitsyn strangely takes the side of the guards against the prisoners. Of course the guards’ behavior is understandable, he argues, because there is no alternative. Instead of hauling fresh water from farther away, why shouldn’t they give the prisoners the more accessible water from the locomotive tender that is “yellow and murky, with some lubricating grease mixed in with it.” Makes perfect sense, right? And, he adds, “why should a Soviet soldier have to carry water like a donkey for enemies of the people?” Solzhenytsin’s argument is close to plausible, so the irony makes us even more acutely aware of how unjustifiable such treatment is. The humor of this completely unexpected argument allows the unendurable information conveyed to be not only readable, but entertaining.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 

How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka