Mike Young – 4AM has something to tell you, but it’s outside. The press has something to tell you they saw, but they always wait until it’s gone

Mike Young, We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough, Publishing Genius Press, 2010.

„Mike Young’s poetry is an absolute stunner. We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough streams one intricate, scenery chewing, note perfect, balletic, swervy, mind blowing composition after another. These may be nothing but great poems, but I can’t think of a paragraph anywhere that can match them for style or cover their emotional distance.“ - Dennis Cooper

„We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough reveals the gestures & tics of common experience as portals to the sublime, the theoretical & the silly. These poems jumpcut like French New Wave & confide like a sinner, always trembling with energy, always trying to contain the tiltawhirl glamour of life & exploding.“ - Mathias Svalina

„We are all good says the book, says the poet. The poet Mike Young is not afraid of marionberries or MySpace, Nyquil, or Dunkin’ Donuts or KFC, or a crucifix on wheels, or Gillis Beukel or Martha Stewart or Minnie Mouse, or Cheetos or Craigslist, or breast milk or milk duds or Cool Whip, or NASCAR or MMORPGs, or a theory of radical alterity or The Decemberists or Barry Bonds, or Arkansas or Crescent City, California. Oh my god, he is not afraid of Chuckie Cheese! This is a reckless, fearless poet we’re meeting, and I think we should all wish him safe travels. He reminds me of Marcel Proust. He is that greedy and that good.“ - Dara Wier

„Mike Young’s first full-length poetry collection, We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough, is an absolute stunner. Young, who is also a regular contributor at HTMLGiant and co-edits NOO Journal and Magic Helicopter Press, has summoned all of his lyrical talents in this 80-page whirlwind of a book.
This fearless 24 year-old poet writes honestly about subjects ranging from Craigslist to The Decemberists to breast milk to NASCAR and everything in between. The poems, written mostly in free verse, are a mixture of concisely written observations and long-winded verbal assaults. The true value in this collection is Young’s ability to switch topics on a dime and not miss a beat.
If the barometer of a great poet is his ability to create an alternate reality so true that the reader is transported there upon opening the book than Young is a top-notch wordsmith with a bright future.
It’s been quite a long time since I’ve read a collection that combines both sheer quantity and elegant quality. Mike Young has succeeded in doing just that. There isn’t one single poem in the book that I would advise skipping over; you’d be doing yourself a disservice.
The lack of a central theme weaving together these poems actually serves as a challenge for the reader. Before reading this collection you must be willing to confront any preconceived notions you may have of what poetry is and what it should do. True poetry should make you think about things in a new way and leave you wanting more. Mike Young has accomplished that because by the end of the book I was left both intellectually stimulated and yearning for more. The challenge for the reader is complex because not only are Young’s topics wide ranging but also he manages to take the most seemingly everyday mundane thoughts and spin them into complex observations that show off his keen eye for detail.
Don’t get me wrong; Young isn’t one of these stuffy, pretentious poets who take themselves too seriously. In fact, he is just the opposite. It seems as though his youthful exuberance serves as far more than the launching point for a burst of spontaneous prose that jumps off the page and actually allows him to show off his more humorous side. The tightrope that he so delicately walks balancing both a sharp sense of wit and a decisive knack for sensitivity is on display in numerous individual pieces throughout the collection.
If asked to come up with a favorite poem or a single piece that defines the collection I’d be hard pressed to choose just one. Several lines, however, jump off the page upon first reading.
“Excuse me. You’ve parked in the towaway zone of
my confidence.”
“When you are near me, I am a confident paper boat
in a bathtub full of Kool-Aid, where I tilt in circles toward
the drain, which does not worry me, for I know that a wet
hand will reach up and carry me into the kitchen.”
Those are just a few. Honestly I could’ve just written the entire review using great lines from this collection but then why would you want to go out and buy the book?
The only thing that would make this collection better, in my opinion, is if there were more poems! I’m afraid that some potential readers may be put off by the author’s display, in the majority of his poems, of a young sensibility. My only fear is that the depth of his work might go underappreciated to some who get lost in his subject matter rather than focusing on the fact that he broaches such topics with a devastatingly mature voice and a wisdom that belies his age.
I’m definitely going to be looking forward to his next release of short stories by Word Riot Press in December to see if he can top this performance. As both a writer of fiction and poetry, Young has showcased all of his writing skills in this book. When asked about how writing fiction influences his approach to poetry he responded, “I feel like poems involve imagining you have a mouth in your brain, and stories involve maintaining eye contact with every body in the room.” Young has let that mouth loose on the public without ostracizing himself from anyone in the room with We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough.
This collection has renewed my confidence in the future of poetry while also making me feel jealous as a writer. I truly believe that all aspiring poets should view this book as required reading if they want to improve their craft.
My advice: GO AND BUY THIS BOOK! If you fail to then you’re taking the chance that you missed out on discovering one of the great new young American poets of this generation.“ - Patrick Trotti

„I am a scholar of, teacher of, student of, and writer of poetry. This constellation of identities means that when I pick up a new book of poetry, I turn into Robert fucking Langdon from the fucking Da Vinci Code: I look for correspondences, connections, patterns, “Symbology,” so that I can solve the book’s mystery and come up with a thesis clever enough to bring down the Catholic church. Mike Young’s We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough stumped me for a long time. There are no correspondences, there is no Symbology, there is just stuff and stuff and more stuff:
All the new bewilderment is about hay fever tablets.
In this it resembles the blind men running from the
elephant. In this it resembles nude appliance repair.
We’re pulled aside and told we’re loved, but listen:
the mustard gas has got to go. If I keep feeling this way
I will have to use a lot of emoticons.
The emoticons line is brilliant, but otherwise this passage is, well, kind of bewildering. The first line is intriguing and reads almost like a word-substitution game, but I can’t even imagine what it would mean to try to explain the “resemblances” noted in the second and third lines. I can make sense of the mustard gas as hyperbole, an apocalyptic version of “I love you, but lose the mustache,” but its relation to the earlier lines is utterly opaque.
My inner Robert Langdon was tearing his hair out until I told him to shut up already. This book is jam-packed with delightful moments, and it’s right and good and interesting that they’re moments instead of coy pieces of a picture-puzzle. “Dancing is just putting yourself on inside out.” “Oh, this is no cello analogy // you weepy motherfucker.” “In 1954, the last documented case of / ‘real people’ buried a milkshake recipe / and two coupons for used boxing gloves / outside Sparks, Nevada.” This book is a riot of noise and joy and weirdness, and reminds us that life is full of interesting things.
But then suddenly, three-fourths of the way of through the book, my inner Langdon found the Cryptex. In case you’ve forgotten or repressed this movie (which I swear I saw only in the dollar theater and only because it was such a cultural phenomenon), allow me to remind you that the Cryptex was the little cylinder with symbols on it that operated like a bicycle-lock and opened up to contain some kind of scroll that helped Tom Hanks solve all the mysteries. My Cryptex to Young’s book is a prose poem called “Now You Try,” and it begins like this:
Your roommate has something to tell you about the sociology of chip brands. Driving has something to tell you about shivering. Your porch has something to tell you about your ex-girlfriend. Evolution has something to tell you about acne. Bea Arthur has something to tell you about drugs. Beaches have something to tell you about community. Your mom has something to tell you, sometimes. The post office has something to tell you about the rest of your life.
It goes on for quite awhile, and it gets weirder:
If you are lying in bed and there is a maple bonbon on your nightstand a little out of reach, how much and what kind of effort you employ through your body toward that bonbon has something to tell you about death. 4AM has something to tell you, but it’s outside. The press has something to tell you they saw, but they always wait until it’s gone. Watermelons have something smart to tell you. Breakfast has something to tell you about your friends. The Decemberists have something to tell you about Russian history — yeah, you and everybody else, dude.
And so on and so on. And suddenly it all seemed clear: it’s not just that this is a book full of weird stuff, it’s that it’s a book full of weird stuff that means stuff. Everything has something to tell you if you know how to listen, and this, I think, is part of what Young is trying to tell us. The title of this poem, “Now You Try,” not only references the title of the volume (correspondences! Symbology!), but it invites the reader into this enterprise. The “formula” of this poem becomes rapidly clear, and the reader is asked to make up similar statements of her own, to look around and figure out which objects are trying to speak.
One thing that’s striking about this volume is that over half the poems are dedicated to specific people. In those poems and elsewhere, moments of real tenderness shine through: “This feeling is called kiss me. This feeling is called hi.” “The word okay is like skydiving. / If I say swingsets, will you make it rain?” “Give me something to give into. / It will be weird. It will be so weird.” These flashes of quirky sincerity put me in mind of Frank O’Hara, whose name I actually scribbled in the margins when I read these lines: “My moments of inward congratulation are / offset by meals alone in pants I really like.” If O’Hara is a patron saint of this volume, it is because he and Young both seem to be giving you a sidelong glance, revealing the marvels of the everyday while checking to make sure that nobody is taking themselves too seriously.
So if you like weirdness — if you like Craigslist, Leonard Cohen, and stray flamingos — if you hate the damn Da Vinci Code — you owe it to yourself to pick up We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough and to ready yourself for Mike Young’s forthcoming fiction collection, Look! Look! Feathers.“ - Erin McNellis

„Mike Young’s We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough reads at first like something disjointed, with lines and images that seem to all bleed into something mostly nonsensical, that leave you wondering the why of what they might be trying to tell you or convey, if they’re trying to convey anything at all beyond sound or silly, because there are poets these days who do only that and you’re not particularly partial to that, you like to communicate with the text.
And, just when you’re about to possibly put down the book, you read:
Amateur opera singers do their own makeup.
The higher you go, the more your face gets
installed. Then it dries and waits for your
approval. I keep getting submitted to
withdrawal. We all say things none of us
believe, like “gift economy.” Or “wait.”
It maybe hurts a little, and if not you at least stop to appreciate the image of installing a face. While appreciating, somewhere far back in your head recalls a title from earlier in the book, “You Can Know That Wait Means Stay,” how it makes those last two words take on a new meaning, a new weight, and you wonder about the earlier poem, this permission granted.
You turn back a few pages and read “You Can Know…” again and this time it reads as an ache and a silence, and there it is—a Rube Goldberg machine in the words and pages, these small and big parts, some silly and some more obviously utile, all working for a greater whole—this gathering of attempts at connection, and just as in life some of it falls short, some of it is perhaps a little close to Young’s brainspace for us to really get the exact object or event or maybe even emotion he’s trying to convey, but then there are these shining moments (“Keep the lights on through all loss. Don’t forget: / brilliant also means that none of us can see.”) where you take Young’s title at its word and try just a bit harder.
You try so hard you think maybe you’re reaching for something not there, but you go ahead and let yourself reach, let yourself go a little into a space more like where Young may have been while seeing the world and writing it into these poems, and ripcord!
You’re off and feeling, and there’s ache and there’s joy and there’s anger and laughter, and you want to shake Young’s hand and call him Mike instead and buy him a gin and tonic and laugh balls.
You begin turning back pages and rereading some poems you thought were maybe just simple strings of sounds and where before there was only mouth cartwheels, now meaning and conveyance! and he’s begging you, Mike is actually begging you, “Please listen I have something to tell you. Please tell me I have something.” And you listen.“ - Christopher Newgent

„In the poem “Money”, Young states “They know that being amusing is good because it makes you feel good and feeling is everything...” This line best summarizes the poems in We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough. There is a sly, yet comfortably awkward self awareness in these poems. The poems that make up this book are a collection of experiences that anyone can relate to, but what sets them apart from most contemporary poetry is they lack overwhelming self-indulgence. They're also really quite fun to read.
The poems in the book are of their time—the immediate present. The lines flow, the images shift with such fluidity and nonchalance they fit perfectly in the technological daydream we live in. But Young also borrows a style and use of imagery that recalls the cultural heroes of the 50's and 60's. Especially “Mindy the Famous Divebomber Visits the Thrift Store We All Care For”, which reads like a delightfully absurd short film treatment.
This is one of the better collections of poetry I've read this year.“ – Casey Mensing

„In ten words (no more, no less), describe “We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough.”
- Lonely astronaut face-to-face feelings that flip language pancakes by flashlight.
Within the Theory of Radical Alterity, what is the first truth?
- This comes form the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, who says philosophy should be more about the knowledge of love and less the love of knowledge (which is the literal translation of the word). “Radical alterity” means the irreducible, at-the-root Otherness of the Other (“alterity” means otherness). In other words, one of our deep-seated duhs is that other people are fundamentally not knowable and cannot be made into objects of the self. We can’t live inside someone else’s feelings. But we can have face-to-face encounters with them, which is pretty terrific, and we can start dialogue from this point, accepting the Other’s mystery/unknowability/whatever you want to call it, and going from there. Martin Buber influenced a lot of Levinas’s thinking, and Buber talks about how we don’t even really exist except in relationships, in meetings. All of this is pretty heady stuff, but gets translated in the book into half-nelsons and sheet forts.
Take a second. You don’t know what is going to happen next, but who is going to be there?
- The poem that’s from, “You Can Know That Wait Means Stay,” was written for Carolyn Z, who is a human carrot cake. But I guess I like to vainly think it’s portable, not for me to use with somebody else, but for elses to use elsewise and ever. One of the best parts of being in love is a certain kind of knowing who you’re with and giving up the knowing of everything else, and I think it’s interesting to recognize that feeling with the person you’re in love with and with everybody who might be recognizing their own love.
At what port does the U.S.S. Bitchface reside?
- Probably the port where I eat burnt chili by myself at some hour that seems the furthest from any sun.
On the cover, what is the single arm dripping?
- Glitter, pop rocks, multi-colored candy corn. Maybe when you go around life collecting all your receipts and movie stubs and Post-Its, and then you accidentally leave a bunch of crayons in your pocket, and all your spare useless paper is ruined, so you chop it into confetti and use it to salt your radishes.
What will you never do, but lie about?
- You can say and mean and truly mean and still know you don’t. Mean, I mean. Which sometimes makes it kind of terrifying to say anything.
Is The Missionary your favorite positron?
- What I like are mirror neurons. Let’s go watch football and wince. Last week I got into an argument, kind of, about mirror neurons as the basis via cognitive science for empathy, but I think we just believed in competing mysticisms we didn’t want to tell the truth about. All I know is I ate a burger and she gave me a business card.
“Gift Economy” – why do you not believe in it?
- I think I do, now. I think I am just worried about the seething niceties of gifthood, the thank-you notes and so forth.
What is the one thing that can tell you about love?
- Love is a recursive function.
What was the last secret you told when you kissed a neck?
- When you tell someone a really good secret, it is like finding a colony of bats inside your chest and rooting them out. In other words, there is surprise and a black mass.
“There will be things you save to tell someone that you’ll never get to tell at all.” Here’s a chance for you, fire away.
- Maybe what that line means is more about the someone than the saving. There are visions and versions of people we wait for that we decide are the only people that fit certain parts of who we are. This is probably not true, but that doesn’t stop anybody, I don’t think. In other news, the dude across the way from me right now has a Q-Bert tattoo and a mason jar full of mozzarella balls. His friend just said “I think you imagine it as a like a disturbance in water. Or, like, a thickness.”
In ten words (no more, no less), describe your next project.
- A letter of YouTube account cancellation that bleeds and frets.“ – Interview with BL Pawelek


„Mike Young: ...My book is a book of poems. Most of them are pretty talky. They're like the things you'd say if death involved sitting in a hot tub on a space shuttle, getting wet in the post-death gravity, hashing out the things you wish you'd said to people walking away. Another way to put this is from a new thing about singing, which is not in the book: "Singing may also be catalogued as Christmas underwater
 / and hiking slowly along the railroad ties with the best candy bar / but no home." I wish I could co-dream with people, but I can't, so I write these poems. There's a quote from Martin Buber in the front: "When they sang of what they had thus named, they still meant You." The other day, I was talking to myself in the shower, and I concluded by saying "a sublime cooperative knowing-of-absurdity that manifests as mutually blissful co-ignorance of that absurdity's terms." It's nice to take showers with a lot of people at once, but if you're not doing that right now, you could read poems instead. Here are some things that are in We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough's poems: scout ants; peanut butter knees; a scarecrow with a lantern in his chest; a mattress factory; someone saying "I want to sell the notions of May on eBay" to a friend he hasn't seen in a while; pissing on a cell phone charger; old man socks; hicks on condors; God's wheelchair; amateur opera singers; FDR's diary; carrier pigeons; huckleberries and hyperthyroids; coconut milk and rhetorical questions; a comparison of the new bewilderment and the old bewilderment; each happy person ever; an essay about money; a kitten in a cedar; dandruff teeth; and the alphabetization of home movies by flashlight.“ – Interview at Orange Alert


Mike Young makes moonbats in your brain

Poems from the book

Mike Young: Is This a Poem For the Year 2219?

Mike Young, Look! Look! Feathers, Word Riot Press, 2010.

“Mike Young is young and his song is real. This book is full of comedy, radiance and devastation.” – Sam Lipsyte

“I believe in Mike Young. I will follow his stories wherever they lead me. They are so fresh and full of the weirdest Americana. If Mike Young were a cult leader, I’d drink his Kool-Aid and it would feel electric.” – Kevin Sampsell

“Equal parts stylist and storyteller, Mike Young chronicles the moribund world with a cool voice and a big heart. Wise, engaged, suspenseful, and exuberantly melancholy, his fiction forges a holy path between the Cliffs of Irony and the Swamp of Sentimentality. Here is a newfangled old-fashioned writer whose stories both dazzle and nourish. What a boon, what a bright talent.”
– Chris Bachelder

“A fascinating book with lots of stuff in it, all the best stuff, funny stuff. Mike Young writes like the guy in the Viagra ad, the one whose erection is way past its four hours. He’s headed for the emergency room now. Go with him. See what happens.” – Frederick Barthelme
Mike Young, MC Oroville’s Answer­ing Machine, Transmission Press, 2009.

"Yr not dreaming. Yes, number 11 in the fantastic Transmission lineage is here. However, you may feel like yr dreaming when reading this book. Yr head might lift off from yr shoulders and you better hope you've got some kind of tether. Otherwise, yr head, bouncing around the stratosphere, might end up in one of Mike's poems. And, also, at least as far as I know, you probably wouldn't survive. Good luck with that.
So, you see, what you got yrself here is a fine book of poetry. Feel that plush poetry-y seating. Notice the spacious back seat. Smell that new poetry smell. And that engine. Holy smokes, does that engine v-room like the dickens. I do believe this is something you could live with a very long time and never want to trade in. What do you say?"

Here's a poem from MC OROVILLE'S ANSWERING MACHINE...

DO YOU LIKE MY SUNGLASSES?

Last seen in the junkyard on a yellow bike. Seen burning his mouth on the Keg Room pizza. Seen bearded at the punk shows in the autoshop lot, where I met a girl who made me lick the rain off the chainlinks and stop talking up a shitstorm. Some say MC Oroville moved south to work at a thrift store in the East Bay. Reprezent! It's not like we won't wait. We sell our water south, but the State keeps the money. In Scoops, the chicken mango dog tastes like the chicken Mediterranean dog. But we're trying. If someone invents a machine to bring murals alive, we will need new brochures. I bought Wayne the river for his birthday, and he promised to build a basement beneath it, in case MC Oroville needs to crash real low. At Staples, a drunk in a blue sundress watches the punks make flyers. She asks them if they like her sunglasses, her John Lennon sunglasses! But they are only the Wild Wild West sunglasses Burger King gave away in 1999. Then the punks split, and the lady photocopies her ID—some dispute with the law, the landlord. After she's evicted, she writes a letter. To my delicious punks, she writes. Kick out the links, eat the rain back to where it starts, find somebody's hair and set that hair on fire.

Natalie Lyalin - A bizarre ecosystem, one in which beaver humans, boy birds, a super dolphin and a mathematic horse coexist harmoniously

Natalie Lyalin, Pink & Hot Pink Habitat (Coconut Books, 2009)

«When you pick up PINK AND HOT PINK HABITAT go directly to the table of contents, look at the titles there, you want to read the poems called by these names, then go to the first poem, being afraid is a good thing, then go to "Watch the Village," and then find the poem where it's written: we do not need a/country. We can destroy ourselves here. Somewhere in these pages Lyalin writes, "I start the time machine." Well, she does, and the heart machine and the brain machine, her poems can go anywhere, and they choose to go where it matters. These poems are gorgeous, surprising, full of necessary knowledge and feeling.» - Dara Wier

«Natalie Lyalin's poems are animated by an urgent, slightly deranged whisper. In the dead of night, when the inane games have finally ended and the "normal" kids are all asleep in their bunks, she calls over to you (Are you awake? Can you hear?). She's asking you to shake off your sleeping bag and go out into that pink and hot pink habitat to commune with the headless boy birds, the beaver humans, and the ghost of Otto Frank. I suggest you do it.» —Travis Nichols

«In Pink and Hot Pink Habitat, Natalie Lyalin makes heat. The pages and words rub at each other to make something more than fire, more like a bomb, more like a thousand bombs going off at once. This poet is more than bombmaker though. She herself is the bomb she constructs and sets off upon your reading. In these poems, Lyalin enacts the old work of Flaubert that “The artist must be in his work like God in his Creation, invisible and all-powerful, so that he is felt everywhere but not seen.” When you are done with this book, your own life is more than bombed out. It is more than a “dusty” “gem” sitting in front of you because “Your family is in flight.” You yourself are transformed into a bird rising out of the fire, a “Miniature Life of a Raven,” where Lyalin has made “stars for your teeth,” where your old ideas are nothing more than “ancient dust on velvet.” — Dorothea Lasky

«YOU STUDIED ecology in seventh grade, memorizing the biomes for your science test: the chaparral, the rainforest, the tundra. You learned about the delicate balance of life, you imagined yourself into each exotic environment from your cold, smooth desk under the fluorescent lights—but you never imagined any place quite like Natalie Lyalin’s Pink and Hot Pink Habitat.
Lyalin’s is a world you will want to inhabit. As the title suggests, the book is a bizarre ecosystem—one in which “beaver humans,” “boy birds,” a “super dolphin” and a “mathematic horse” coexist harmoniously. Lyalin’s vigorous, sparkling language is the life force pulsing through these poems, bringing into balance the wildly disparate creatures that inhabit them. Many of her poems do contain animal imagery, but there are syntactical beasts stalking these pages as well: phrases and clauses as unexpected and marvelous as the blue-tongued skink. “In the nebulous of pushpins you stand sideways.” “The leaf of you, the bend, the fire flicker for the Kazak.” “The electric gems show their horseness, / their speed ability.” In lines like these, we can start to understand what Lyalin means when she says, “language comes in prisms and I cradle it as an animal mother.” Crystalline vision is nursed by organic energy, and the result is something otherworldly yet still somehow familiar.
That flock of sheep is puzzle hearts. I wait after school for safety.
I put cotton in my ears and float to dimension x7y giga heart maggot.
The sweetness factory. Everyone is a flower and human rafts come to shore.
The sleep language is what the eyelids did to each other.
In the above excerpt from “Misarubka,” we are unsure whether to feel unsettled or comforted. The image of “wait[ing] after school for safety” evokes both an idyllic suburban childhood and the threat of violence that necessitates such precautions. There is something tender about seeing sheep as “puzzle hearts,” but “dimension x7y giga heart maggot” is about the creepiest name for a fantasy-world ever imagined. Are the “human rafts” a delightful image suggesting that we can save one another, or are they bloated, drowned corpses? Lyalin suggests that we should “break [our] arms off” and “row to shore,” which is perhaps exactly what navigating this book requires—that we repurpose ourselves, imagining new possibilities for parts of us that we thought we understood. The shore on which we find ourselves will not be listed in any ecology textbook, but it will be worth exploring.» - Erin McNellis

«Poems can be like jokes, which is another way of saying I can interpret the world with my subjectivity. Everyone knows about expectations, undermining expectations in helpful / interesting ways; I laugh when I feel something sublime, and what is sublime can also be small and fragmentary. That’s not to say that the sublime is jokey; but joke-construction feels a lot like a poetry move to me.
Lisa Jarnot has a phrase in her poem “Ode” in Ring of Fire, “The rest of the balance continuing huge,” which I take to mean that everything that happens leaves me irrevocably altered; my head is not the same, and sometimes this phenomenon seems more obvious than others. A poem is a singularity, an axis, an invisible door to a new way of living. A joke is a language maneuver; it may not be hugely significant, but it alters the way we consider certain combinations of sounds, even when it does so almost imperceptibly.
I’ve been an interested reader of Natalie’s poems for six years now. I didn’t get into this whole discussion of jokes because I think Natalie’s poems are particularly jokey. On the other hand, Natalie’s poems seem to exist on the most serious end of the possible joke continuum, providing us with beginnings and endings in which the gap between our expectation and the language provided produces a moment of real electrical charge.
Let’s look at Natalie’s poem, “Vision,” which begins, “The world was not yet discovered.” In this beginning, we have a premise, a thought experiment, a mirror that looks back at you severely. Where are you in this conception? What are you thinking about? She goes on, “It traveled in a galaxy of dinosaur bones and other fossils. / Embedded and waiting. Waiting for decades / when the skirts were different.” This is not a joke; it’s the only good joke. Look at how much time we cover and how much we have changed. Natalie concentrates the vast array of possibilities down from a little world in a galaxy to differences in skirts in the sliver of geologic time which is represented by the tiny, sublime, human lifespan, of, for instance, Mr. O, “In his light blue rental car.” I love the immenseness of the particular here, how sad and ordinary details can be. It’s not a joke; it’s the opposite of a joke, which is not unlike a joke, actually.
As the poem goes on, things get very quiet: “The world lay silent. The giant squid was silent. / The continents were silent. It was quiet as he boarded the plane for home. // It was quiet in the diamond mines, it was quiet in the coal mines.” I’m amazed by at the build-up here, the amazing creation of tension out of images and repetition, as though I am viewing photographs of these scenes in the utter silence of my weird brain. What follows all of this silence is astounding, hilarious, and sublime – a joke which expands to fill the entire space available, “The rest of the balance continuing huge.”
+
In Natalie Lyalin’s first full-length collection of poems, Pink and Hot Pink Habitat, poetry provides the protocol for dealing with one’s own personality.
Mostly, there is awareness. When the poem “Miniature Life of Raven” ends with the line, “He is aware of his un-mammothness,” it’s a cipher; a reader subsequently goes back and shines that sad phrase back on the history that preceded it. To be aware that one is especially unlike a mammoth is to evaluate oneself on strange terms, but these are the terms one is handed down over generations, and when it is impossible to explain that evolution clearly, in factual terms, that’s when we lean on poetry and the imagination.
Often in Lyalin’s poems, the question of how a person evaluates or situates herself in the world is quite literally a question of scale, as in “Vision,” where, “The world lay silent. The giant squid was silent. / The continents were silent. It was quiet as he boarded the plane for home.” These sentences are lucid, but the moves the mind has to make from one to the next are jarring; it’s like playing with the focus until you get it just right, but on a gigantic scale. The maps one would need to make in order to chart what happens here are impossible and impossibly wonderful to imagine.
In “Otto Frank in Macy’s” those leaps of scale turn into leaps of time:
at conception, before heartbeat, being human
Otto, flying, Otto at ten in the bathtub,
at fifteen, a head-on portrait, at twenty learning
in a tight jacket,
The way we move through time creates a rhythm that can be complicated by reality. Time works this way – ten, fifteen, twenty, etc. – in its scientific regularity, but the vignettes which make up our personal histories are far more irregularly spaced. As I follow Otto, as the poem picks up speed and the montage shifts from scene to scene more and more quickly, I get the sensation that someone else’s life is flashing before my eyes, and yet for a moment it feels like my own.
Awareness tends to lead to a restructuring of reality itself, as in “Calf’s Blood,” when Lyalin writes:
It’s as if we linked arms and closed together / all in agreement that this is no longer
our continent / and it is no longer our continent
The imagination – and, therefore, the poet – has the ability to alter experience, and that ability comes with some pitfalls. Given the chance, we don’t always create sunshine and flowers. “Me in Prison” starts, “I suffer and make things worse. Freak myself out.” And yet, that suffering gives our heads a chance to redeem themselves. There are time machines and freight trains, dioramas and continents, and always the brain, toting along the heart for good measure.
The lines
Accidentally I start the time machine. I rattle along and visit dead relatives.
and
Mrs. Bernstein, my symmetrical head is on that freight train.
come at the ends of poems (“Me in Prison” and “Goose Necks for the Baby Baby,” respectively), not at the beginnings. By whisking the speaker away from one reality into another, they carve out a space after the poem in which I might insert myself to consider what the implications would be were these speakers me. Rather than offering solutions to suffering, Lyalin’s poems take a more useful tack; they are the written record of a psychic leap from trouble to something else. Being aware, as usual, has the capacity to make you feel troubled, anxious, fearful, etc., but desperate times call for desperate measures, and these poems aren’t afraid to see where the brain will go when pushed.
The word, “Habitat” in the book’s title, instead of evoking shelter, provides a space for this experimentation, and so the poems tend to present us with strange situations and ask us, what now? “Two Jackals” begins:
The jackal dressed me in the storefront,
a jacket and wide belt and lace-up shoes.
To a customer nearby I mouthed, “Don’t
leave me.” The jackal’s sinister intentions,
she did not want me to speak.
The poem goes on to resolve itself like a virus might: just when we begin to imagine a possible resolution, it mutates and changes. Lyalin’s poems acknowledge the awful truth that we may not be able to control whether it becomes harmless or more destructive. In “Misarubka,” the speaker tells us, “I wait after school for safety. / I put cotton in my ears and float to dimension x7y giga heart maggot.” This is, in some way, the normal instinct; when you are scared, just imagine being someplace different. And yet, it’s twisted by the awareness that being scared is serious, and doesn’t just go away. The imagination helps, but what will we find there? “The stay on x7y giga heart maggot is / brief. / The mothers turn icy.” And how do we get there in the first place? “x7y giga heart maggot is best reached by a river / of schools and numbers. Break off your arms. Row to shore. / Hallelujah.” These last lines are like a horror movie version of “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore,” except, of course, that the original, a slave-song, is terrifying too, and so Lyalin enters herself into the long human tradition of tragedy, in which we create art in the face of all kinds of suffering.
Through poetry, through awareness, people get what they need to survive. In “White Reading Helmet,” Lyalin writes, “See, he found some loophole in the grammar. He held that flapping fish and fondly.” Contrast that with the final lines of “The Animal Passage”:
Across the street a child goes missing,
a cheekbone is implanted. Is the mother mad when she finds the child.
He is pearl scattered in the grass, combed and glistening.
Redemption and despair can each be presented as beautiful because really each situation is unique and exists somewhere on a continuum. Sometimes, as in the first stanza of the long, final poem, “Dune and Swale,” what we are aware of is simply the thoughts of the speaker.
I’m thinking of my teeth right now and the white sparks they give off as they glint in the sunlight of my jaw. I’m thinking of the chariot race and white rabbits. I’m thinking of an ocean, of a hurricane, of a boat ride, of an assassin, of a field, of a snow drift, of a forest, and of my skin as it rests here in the star throne.
In this case, the tone veers toward the epistle; rather than choose between a presentation of redemption or despair, calmness or anxiety, Lyalin pays beautiful attention to the simple fact of language itself, and the act of communication. It seems, finally, that one deals with one’s own personality by constantly placing and re-placing oneself in the world through a deep sense of scale, constantly being aware that one is here now, and now, and now, and in relation to this, and this, and this.
In the poem, “Jeffrey Bloodhound Sans,” Lyalin writes, “Words that do not yet exist. Alibubo. Bubsigtree. Grivstalbikt.” Each moment exists as language, in poetry, where we can create the world with words that pop into existence when we say they do.» - Seth Landman

«Water Experiment In Two Parts
I.
A scientific study reveals: water is alive.
Equal amounts of water is poured into three identical containers.
Zelig Berken died fighting in world war II.
Equal amounts of rice is poured into each container.
Zelig Berken was twenty years old.
The first container is told “I hate you.” The second container
is told “I don’t care about you.” and the third container is told
“I love you very much.”
While Zelig Berken was away at war his entire town was evacuated.
The rice in the first container turned black. The rice in the second container
bloomed. And the rice in the third container rotted.

II.
Water is poured into two identical containers.
The first container goes home with Scientist A.
The second goes to church with Scientist B.
The next day, a droplet is extracted from each container.
The droplet from the first container shows nothing of significance.
The droplet from the second container shows formations of stars
and giant flowers.
Faith is difficult to write. Science is difficult to write. Both are equally on the line of being either fascinating or boring. You have to have each inside you to speak of each in a way, which is easily mistaken.
Characters with unique names are inventions: some would say like faith and science. Much of certain schools of writing asks that characters be defined as parts: look, motive, idea, size. These creations of character invariably fail. Creating a character, then, with a unique name, who operates in a text on terms left uncertain, allow that character to become larger than a body or a human, and left to the untraceable, what we are given. This, again, is like faith, and like science, and perhaps less difficult to write, but more prone to being poked at.
When you google the name ‘Zelig Berken’ in quotes, the only thing that comes up is Natalie Lyalin’s graduate thesis. This is known as a googlewhack. This is also known as creating, but more so, the making of an instance. A singularity. Though he may likely exist for the author in another state, in the building of our texts, Natalie Lyalin creates from void.
And yet it is not clear even after reading the sole instance in which Zelig Berken exists, what or who he is. We know he was 20 years old, and died. We know he left his town and the town was evacuated in his absence. His position in the text is almost happenstance, a causal alignment in the midst of something put forth as a “Water Experiment.”
In the environment of the poem, we learn that environment around water, which is named alive, affects the nature of the water. The nature of the water, then, in turn, affects its environment, a dual feedback system wherein the inanimate, previously benign object, in its conditioned state, creates “formations of stars / and giant flowers.” The affected system affects the system that gave it its affect.
Natalie Lyalin, in the process of pressing buttons on a machines, or perhaps using her arm to drag a stick over paper, has developed, in an economy of words that describe, and therein define, a human body of a void, and a magical (though I prefer: true) property to one of the most abundant presences in our midst.
Zelig Berkin exists. The small stirrups in our language affect our air, our earth, and beyond our air and earth, systems.
This poem is an object that wakes beyond the object of itself. It, in having been written, and printed from the mind, propagated, is an act of not only great faith, but of knowing. The paradox of both.
For me, this faith is not about religion, despite the instance of the church. There are many churches. There are people whose presence or nonpresence creates voids of homes.
What, if anything, are texts for but to make paradox. To create instances of air that did not previously exist. Even outside the realm of the entertainment, in camps where fabrication is intended to comment on its system, there is often a hard lack of the instance, of the glyph, of texts that are not text so much as they are space, and in that space, creation, and in that creation, not an inherent God, but the not necessarily plain-faced mode of exhibiting understanding, concentration, and, the oft-smited and overworked faculty of love.
Love in literature is often cheapened. When we can touch something that shows the interaction of the human with the human, we call it heart, we call it what we write for.
Here, though, in a calm and unassuming column of short undemanding sentences, Lyalin invokes the heart as both spectator and parent, foreigner and neighbor, hoped and clinical, endless and brief. She has the faith, the heart, to give the reader the rope, to invoke in sentences a space that does not demand a pulling, a want, an oh, but somewhere else. The unassuming, the notion of touching rather than prescribing, or deciding, is to me a greater science, a gift that does not demand that it be opened, and goes on regardless, beyond its box. However its presence hits you, whatever of your own faith you might apply, that is up to you: you at or against its face.
I thank her, it.» - Blake Butler

"Because Natalie’s book gave me lots to think about concerning gender and place, these were the starting points of the interview, after the jump.
When I think of gender and place, I think of public and private selves and spaces. Natalie, how do you negotiate between public and private–in terms of gender and/or/in-conjunction-with place–as a poet?
- Wow, what an interesting question. As you noted, you and I are both from the South, where typified gender ideals are quite prominent. My family’s eastern european background certainly adds to a very conventional idea of the female gender role. I think for me gender is an action, or reflex, that I participate in and create daily in public and in private. That is, I consciously and subconsciously see what it means to be a woman, or feminine, and I do whatever that is–I participate in the world-wide construction of the female gender. I’m obviously drawn to some things that would be considered typically feminine–the title of my book and the magazine I edit (GlitterPony) being prime examples of that. As I write this I’m looking at a vase of fat pink flowers, and that makes me really happy. Just writing the words ‘fat pink flowers’ makes me want to write a poem! And that instinct has given me trepidation. I have wondered if someone would assume my book is a princess-scape because of the title and the illustration of the unicorn on the cover. But then, I’m not really writing for that person, so I try to not entertain that ‘what if’. The whole notion of gender “normalcy” is quite frustrating because I do not think that a woman should or does like the color pink, or glitter, or makeup, or wants to be a mother, or even has a vagina. Gender is so constructed that it is hard to see where the stereotypes begin and end. So I’m aware of the gender in my poetry, that it reads as feminine, but I’m also aware of the violence that exists in my writing. I think that is also a part of my gender construction, but I know that many associate violence or physical power with the male gender. I think that violence is a nice juxtaposition to the fluffiness of some of the poems in P&HPH. I like the idea of this book and its title and the severed head on p.12. I’m certainly not a violent person in public or in private, but in a private poetic way I’m very violent, at times. The poems are a place where I’m the strongest and I can do whatever I want, and there is nothing to be afraid of. I certainly do not feel this way as a woman out in my daily life. In that sense, the idea of power and safety come together at the intersection of place and gender. I feel powerful when I construct my own landscape. I think I feel a loss of power as a woman in my public and private life, but I have tremendous power as a poet in my constructed landscape.
Something early on in your answer, about your origins, has brought me to my next question, which you are, as always, free to reject. Would you mind telling me a little bit about your mother w/ regard to poetry, gender, and place? Maybe a little emblematic story, if one comes to mind?
- To be honest, I’m not sure how my mother figures into my poetry. I know she figures very prominently in my life. She and my father had some very traditional views on gender and I would say that her concept of gender leans in that direction as well. But for whatever reason my poems focused more on fathers than on mothers. However, I recently realized that I stopped writing about a father figure and began writing about a mother figure. When writing P&HPH I literally could not stop writing about fathers–menacing and looming fathers kept popping up in the poems. But with my new poems I finally wrote something about a mother. I had this really strong image of my mom in a house watching the news and it just struck me–the silence of the house, and the foods she eats, and how she’s there. I got a really wonderful poem out of that “psychic” viewing of her. And I think I felt a relief that mothers finally found a way into my writing. It’s almost like I had no room for them before.
[Here I gave Natalie a choice of three questions.--McD] I’m thinking about what you say about being drawn to the typically feminine, but having trepidation about that–and I’m thinking that there seems to be a similar fraughtness expressed in P&HPH in regard to place, wherein you play with/disrupt/upend the appropriateness of situations to their settings. I don’t know how to make this into a question, but would still love to hear your answer.
- I began to answer another question having to do with gender and wrote a lot, but then stopped because talking about place and this idea that you bring up of upending the appropriate was really calling to me. I don’t write my poems actively contemplating notions of gender, though I obviously find gender issues in poetry/life to be complicated, compelling, and absolutely necessary of our attention. Place and landscape are much more imminent in my mind. The desire to upend and disrupt place is a power play. I find this to be a really pleasing gesture in writing. For example, in the poem “Goose Necks for the Baby, Baby,” I place a severed head on a freight train. I am both frightened and liberated by that image as the head I’m cutting off is my own. I see that moment as taking back some power that was lost. I will be the one to dismember myself. I also find interest in the uncomfortable, the thing that startles you on the page. It’s like the moment when you bite into an apple and discover a worm. This is the same principal I feel drawn to in my writing. I like to set up a beautiful space and then turn on a weird light that casts a strange shadow.
I think you’ve said something important about poetry and power, something that perhaps non-poets don’t think about, and that perhaps not many poets talk about. Might you say more about poetry and power plays, poetry and consolidating power? I’m thinking at this point that there is no real need to stick strictly to gender and place, though they are nice things to keep in mind. So please feel at liberty to range as far as you’d like in talking about poetry and power.
- I think the relationship between poetry and power is unique for each poet. I’m not sure how many of the poets I know write because they want to feel powerful. Although I recognize this pursuit in my writing it is really a small part of it, and certainly not often conscious. And as much as I like to believe that I have power in my poems there is also the real possibility that they have power over me. Some poets are possessed by their poems and have no choice but to keep writing. I can think of several poets like this, but Osip Mandelstam comes to mind first. He died because of his poems and that is something I’m not prepared to do, and I’m ashamed to say that.
So poetry is powerful. But the concept of power is very relative because it is also close to boasting, cruelty, and oppression. And on the other side it is close to weakness. Weakness and submission are also a type of power. Which makes me think the following: I’m not sure if a great poem or poet has to be powerful. I think it is more impressive when weak poets write powerful things.
Poems are quite powerful and often dangerous. For one, after coming into being they no longer need their poet and survive fabulously on their own. This is wonderful and also creepy! Somewhat similarly, I recently met a poet in Tel Aviv who told me that the government was watching her and her fellow writers and she was serious. Because there are many instances of governments monitoring and silencing poets I’m sure that poetry is actually quite dangerous and very powerful. Again, I come back to Mandelstam.
What do you think about when you think about your audience?
- When I think of my audience I start to blush. I do not think about the audience when I write because then I would worry about cursing or saying something gross. But now, when I am not writing a poem, I am thinking of them and it is strange. I want them to feel something when reading my poems, and I want them to understand, but in their own way. We do not need a unified understanding, but we should all feel something when reading, I think. I felt a great deal when writing the poems, so the biggest concern would be a flatline from the audience. I wish I could look at them more, but I have a hard time looking up when I do a reading. A live audience makes me dizzy, but the abstract audience is super. I float things out to them and they occasionally send back some flares.
How do you deal with endings, as a poet? As in, what kinds of endings are you drawn to? Or as in, what do you think a last line or thought in a poem should and/or should not accomplish?
- Okay, endings: Endings are quite instinctual, and my instincts are to cut things early. This is because I visualize my endings as a camera zooming out of a shot. I like endings that suggest a continuation post textual ending. So, the poem’s ending is akin to that part in a tv show, not quite the cliff hanger, but something like it that is kinder. I don’t like the idea of leaving a reader in torment over what happens past the last line. I want them to be on steady ground and do the work of determining where this poem was going. I also like the “gong” ending. The one where no continuation is possible because the poem is its own perfectly horrifying or beautiful universe and when you look up from the page to the sound of gong. There is nothing before this poem and nothing after.
I think of Joyce Carol Oates’ ending in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and any Joy Williams ending. After reading their work it is clean slate time. What could possibly exist outside of that?» - Interview with Amy McDaniel

Heather Christle - If you are reborn every night into a different extraordinary world, then why shouldn’t it happen when you wake

Heather Christle, The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books, 2009)

"WHEN I AM BORN, the whole world’s born with me,” writes Heather Christle, and it’s hard to think of a better line to sum up The Difficult Farm. Each poem in her book is a new world born with the speaker, who “struts” at one moment in a “matchless squirrel coat” and at another moment feels “like an old sheet someone had dropped / into the river.” The speaker finds herself in places as disparate as forests, battlefields, motel rooms, suburban streets, and Zanzibar—often in rapid succession—but her wry, sensible voice steers us through this surreal safari with remarkable ease.
This casual tone might seem an odd match for the marvelous events Christle describes, but it doesn’t mute their mystery. In fact, it does quite the opposite:
People love to come up to me and say
Hello, you enormous, vibrating bird,
but they are just confusing me
with my invention, an invention
I regret.
The ordinariness of the language here makes the strange content of these lines even stranger. In what universe could this statement warrant such blasé treatment? Christle’s poems challenge us to revise our criteria for deciding what is real and what is imaginary, and demand that we treat everything in them as equally possible and equally significant.
Many of the poems in this book are like dreams, emanating from the dreamer but not entirely in her control. The worlds she moves through are marvelous but frustrating, transforming before her very eyes just as she was starting to understand them: “Now you are quite well. Now you are, // what, made of sand? And leaking. / You are a taxing companion. // If anyone is chasing us they will / surely track us down.” And just as puzzling as the things that do happen are the things that don’t: an unmade birthday cake bears a likeness to the new girl in town who never came to school, “despite the exquisite sharpness / of the pencils we had readied in hopes / of dazzling our unfamiliar friend.” These small absences haunt us like ghosts; they are peculiar thing and person-shaped holes that can’t be mourned but can’t be forgotten. They are exactly the sort of thing that we dream about, the sort of thing that shouldn’t be important but is. The Difficult Farm asks us to learn from our dreams, bewildering as they may be—if you are reborn every night into a different extraordinary world, then why shouldn’t it happen when you wake up in the morning, too?» - Erin McNellis

"A little over a week ago, the second edition of Heather Christle’s The Difficult Farm came out, from Octopus Books, with a revised bunny and some dropped poems. I want to mark the occasion by remembering my old, outdated copy of the book, released September 2009, and how Christle’s poetry started acting like a part of my nervous system.
I’ll be as objective as possible. Here’s what my copy of The Difficult Farm looked about a week ago: bright, bee-yellow cover with a sketch of a one-eared rabbit; “THE DIFFICULT FARM” above Christle’s name written in a shaky, watery font; two blurbs on the back from James Tate and Dara Wier; and about 77 pages of book with a few little gaps from dog-ears. Certainly, it looks like it’s as “joyfully imaginative” and “surreal” as the SPD website has said, and as “fun” as Blake Butler and Chris Hosea have said. Slowly, I’ve made my marks. I drew a fat pen line between “DIFFICULT” and “FARM,” put a small, dense spot in the bunny’s leg. The corners are rough and upturned. I underlined parts of the back, like Dara Wier writing “urgent” and “careful” and “a little scary, very scary, and awfully generous to us all,” circled James Tate’s “This is serious.” Inside, I can’t even count the number of brackets, stars, and “holy shits” I’ve penned in, writing mantras, creeds, and a few knock-off theses on poetry in general. Yet for all this digging, I still feel like I’m not taking Christle’s poems—marvelous, immense, beautiful, literally wonderful—seriously enough. It’s like trying to hold a farm in the hand, easier to imagine as a cartoon than as the actual dirt, blood, and crops it is. The Difficult Farm offers us all the full, raw communication that we’d never expect from an animated bunny, and all the honesty and giving we don’t expect from poetry.
There’s no doubt, though, that this poetry has sheen and surprises, and is intensely pretty. From “It’s Not a Good Shortcut If Everyone Dies,” here are the book’s glamorous opening lines:
Yesterday, looking at a cinderblock’s
reflection—lightest grey on golden floor—
I finally understood painting. I was irate!
Just following the lines, moving immediately with the narrative, we get a nice familiar cinderblock, some dazzling flashes, a golden floor, a painting, and a crazy shift in tone. It’s a bright montage, a film—it could be enough. But there’s companionship, darling animals, and romance too—it could be a movie:
I went
door to door, to my neighbors, trying to explain
the system we actually inhabit, and they became
absorbed, so we all flapped our arms together
and though we did not fly away I finally
understood how geese make decisions. I was
crushed. I wandered the earth for eighteen years,
honking at anyone who’d listen and there were
a few who even fell in love with me, but because
they did not understand I was under a powerful
spell they could not help me…
The turns are heartbreaking in the cutest, most teen-movie way. They via videodetective.com leave you wanting to take the speaker out to some local diner that plays Joy Division at three in the morning. This brand of cuteness certainly abounds in The Difficult Farm, whose very title, very cover suggests a poetic catalogue of MTV movie originals and fuzzy little animals. I—and the poems too, I think—want to get past this, way past this, but these warm bits are worth looking at. Poem number two, “What Is the Croup” (a title I’ll never stop guessing at), reads almost like a cento or collage of these Polaroid moments. “Monday evening I took out/the garbage. Nobody/saw me but I looked beautiful.” Like something from the Xanga archives, the lines don’t seem to do anything but document a life we pretty much already know. “Like you/I live in the area. I live/on the second floor. Even/though our altitudes mismatch/I hope you will think of me.” It’s darling enough to make me stop breathing, and then it goes on. “A good time to think of me/is now.” All this has a kind of deadpan, Wes Anderson quality to it—the quick, slightly predictable line breaks—that any twenty-something could grin at. “Like you/I live in the area” is charming because it’s flat, like forced conversation, like weather-talk, which Christle cites constantly (“and listen, the weather is good”). It’s charted territory. It’s like poetry written on bright red 8th grade valentines. This reading is, sad to say, especially easy and automatic for me, having half-met her and seen how beautiful she is. However, it hardly gets at the poem’s careful, careful work. Note the strange, unmapped space this seemingly sweet and familiar poem enters, without flinching. The flat, dumb enjambment gets even flatter, and the cuteness dies hard: “In my brain I use the town hall/as a landmark and then I make/my way. In my way I am/keeping an order. I killed/the insect after I was born.” These lines aren’t tricky. They aren’t magic. They aren’t charming. The pictures fragment and collide and stack up in jangly piles. “Make my way” is treated like it’s supposed to have some surprising turn, and then, boring as hell, the “way” continues straight into a Foucaultian keeping of order through death, taxonomy, and birth. This weirdness is beyond personality. It’s beyond my theorizing. This is straight-up brain country, and it’s very, very scary.
Christle alerts us constantly to this issue of personality, in a book full of trees, suitors, and animals. The book’s third poem, “Variations on an Animal Kingdom,” starts out goofy, but swinging:
People love to come up to me and say
Hello, you enormous, vibrating bird,
but they are just confusing me
with my invention, an invention
I regret.
Indeed, it’s weirdly easy to read these poems in terms of traits, quirks, and habits—to put (at least in my case) an attractive human face behind it. That could be the bird here. But even without this context, the images here are stunning—poet as huge, probably multicolored bird, confused, surrounded with the test tubes, light bulbs, and beakers called up by “invention.” Then there is the gendered reading. The speaker/poet is reduced to a sexy parrot (or even just bird/dame/crone/chick/girl)—one we nonetheless meet and experience, despite the fact that it’s her own regrettable creation, her own part-deliberate performance. How much of the author’s plumage—real or mistaken—do we put between us and the poem itself? Christle’s bird could just as well be a literal invention, mechanical and creepy. Either way it’s confrontational.
Miraculously, Christle’s poetry is generous enough to let all this go on without stopping the poem. Even when I feel like a patriarchal shithead, there are countless nicer paths to take through the language. Christle seems to sacrifice the personal—her image, her mythology—in the name of the poems. “This is a televised/attempt to bring myself to justice,” she writes. “A way of reaching up to touch again/the harmless, feral sky. I won’t stoop/to demonstrate the birds’ small and frantic/black eyes, but you can probably/imagine and then probably stop.” And we can.
The Difficult Farm almost always reaches out and up, even when its peculiar language—forests, geese, historial fact, line break jokes—is most limited or limiting. Like Jack Spicer said in his 1965 Vancouver Lectures:
Now, if you have a cleft palate and are trying to speak with the tongues of men and angels, you’re going to still speak through a cleft palate. And the poem comes distorted through the things which are in you. Your tongue is exactly the kind of tongue that you’re born with, and the source of energy, whatever it is, can take advantage of your tongue, can make it do things that you didn’t think it could, but your tongue will want to return to the same normal position of the ordinary cleft-palate speech of your own dialect.
Since the Farm’s major cripple would probably be too many adorable bees or too many trees, this might sound a bit harsh. But Spicer’s examples get a little kinder and more to the point. “It’s as if a Martian comes into a room with children’s blocks with A, B, C, D, E which are in English and he tries to convey a message,” he says. “This is the way the source of energy goes. But the blocks, on the other hand, are always resisting it.”
The unique virtuosity of The Difficult Farm is in how it works beauty into this very resistance of language. Take “Acorn Duly Crushed”:
Dear stupid forest.
Dear totally brain-dead forest.
Dear beautiful ugly stupid forest
full of nightingales
why won’t you shut up.
What do you want from me.
Even as Christle crushes her lovely, idiotic trees—through address, the same way she was converted to a vibrating bird—the nightingales emerge. They punctuate her total, justified rage, making it glimmer a glimmer she then, too, snuffs.
Dear rapid bloodless forest
you are talking all the time.
You are not pithy.
You are like 8,000 swans.
With every thrash comes a new, insanely gorgeous sensation. “Dear rapid bloodless forest” is really a poem in itself. The trees sprout 8,000 otherwise graceful heads, which we feel in the chest. It goes on: “Blunt international forest./Forest of bees and of hair.” Every iteration of forest rebirths a forest. Despite the anger, the letter blocks remain. However, through combination and rearrangement, the forest’s genetic makeup seems to change with the poem. Sure enough, it becomes something active and dark, something not fully a forest:
You should come back to my house.
We can bag drugs all night.
You can tell me
about your new windows.
How they are just now
beginning to sprout.
beginning to sprout.
Christle wrote recently on her blog, “Trees happen to be the furniture in my room, but they’re not real trees. They’re figures. They’re the nouns that I need to do the real work, which is all the stuff between the nouns.” The Difficult Farm isn’t here to trick you. It’s here to literally work the old tricks into real magic, to fix poetry’s lame old tools by using them again.
Given this, it’s strange that Christle would frame the book with a title like The Difficult Farm, which suggests exactly the kind of easy, domestic surrealism her poems shake off. It’s also strange that she’d wrap it in bright, cleaning-product yellow (though it’s now available in Robin’s Egg Blue). For an answer—or really, a working solution—we’re offered a poem uncannily titled “Stroking My Head with My Deception Stick.” After a weird arrangement of hair, police, and conversations with the elastic-lipped dead, it comes.
And then you hear the screaming, not to be found
within the dead, but rather in the tiny
black pot which holds the greater part
of our mass and the difficult
farm where all the hens are black
and black are the wheatfields through which
runs a black and silent wind. Thin teachers
explain to our children: if the farm is a burgeoning
snowglobe, then the screaming’s a legend, like glass.
In the difficult farm—“the difficult/farm”—the screaming half-emerges, its other half in a pot, and everything is black, and the farm is propositionally explained as a snowglobe, maybe bounded by its own legendary terror. This happens. The darling snowglobe on the darling bureau gets blown up into something that contains screaming and ash, yet somehow still burgeons. Growth becomes possible in the most charred and cold of places, even a troped-out, boring farm.
Under this new construction, which comes three-quarters of the way through the book, Christle gives us some avalanching moments as sublime as anything from Harmonium or Some Trees, and with their same emphasis on processing and simultaneity. Here’s the ineffable last third of “Pale Lemon Square.”
I feel like I’ve been studying
to become a doctor forever and now, faced
with a real-world pandemic, I’m full
of unmitigated lust for business—as though
I were sitting in a high school classroom
watching the morning’s snow foster impending
cancellations and all the attendant policies. Soon,
if not at once, the library and gymnasium will be
redubbed infirmaries, and you and I will drift
among the cots like swans in ever-wider grids.
The lines pile up like sophisticated, readable snow. There is both immense clutter and immense organization. Narrative works alongside the total change in frequency happening with every enjambment. When one thing happens, another will happen “soon, if not at once.” In the space of one written poem, snow can become policies, become swans, get dropped into a high school campus, then a storm shelter, get seen from the window, then from the sky, then get forgotten among the sweet, familiar cots. We are endlessly propelled toward the bottom, yet resisting propulsion.
And indeed, Christle’s poetry is smart enough to recognize our ability to experience all this, and generous enough to give it all to us. The brain is miraculous and immense, even sacred. On her blog, Christle writes,
If anyone would like to dress my poems in some kind of outfit, it should be a cognitive blouse. When I sit down to write, that is where I am facing, toward the brain. The brain is linked to the earth and to the past, but I can’t head straight toward them. I’d miss too much on the way. Everything is there for me in the brain. It gives me everything I need. And you have one too. And it seems likely to me they have much in common. So that, I think, is where I start.
If there’s an ethical or political project behind the book, then, it’s less capital-F Feminist or capital-S Surrealist or capital-E Environmentalist than it is an Ashberian project of being pleasant with whatever masks, voices, animals, and ceilings strike the mind. Whatever can be thought of is fair game, whether it’s schematic or moral or boring or black and white. Christle also shares with Ashbery (and Stevens) a masterful awareness of poetic momentum, her final lines often turning with the weight of everything that came before. Tough, irritating poems become worth the struggle in their last moments, exploding beautifully. “Now stand and shake that butt as though/some god were shaking it for you.”
via PennSoundWhere Christle and Ashbery differ, though, is their framing. The Difficult Farm’s first line, “Yesterday, looking at a cinderblock’s/reflection,” doesn’t toy with the same hard, unbending, patriarchal authority that Some Trees does, opening “We see us as we truly behave.” The potential power of the cinderblock gets undercut as a reflection. Presence is lost, the glossy mirror takes over. Farm, with its big white bunny, seems to accept classic feminine associations the way Some Trees accepts the masculine—that is, it performs them, bends them, lets them energize the poems, then forgets about them and writes. Still, Christle’s poems, with their frequently TV-like pace, tend to hurry us along through their deepest, murkiest territory, in moments when we need most time. The book seems acutely aware of this, and its response is the poem “Television.” It begins, “People like surprises./Surprise! I am your uncle./And that kind of thing.” The joke is on us, I guess. But the poem goes further than mere acknowledgement. Its arbitrary surprises wind up at an overdetermined end: “Car alarms surprise/nobody. Nobody, you surprise me,/how you are always sneaking in./Ladies & gentlemen, Uncle Nobody./Nobody, this is your life.” Somehow, the speaker seems to be suddenly telling the hard, hurting truth.
These last lines, along with many other closing lines throughout the book, work to put some faith back in the line as a unit, as whole. In poems that undoubtedly reward close attention, this is an important reminder. Difficulty takes time. We need to process the poem. Like difficult Stevens, Christle’s poetry looks both backwards and forwards, communicating without warning across the page, in the faith that you’ll try to keep up. Once we make the effort, big things happen. Here’s a second look at that particularly paisley-dress-shirt-esque passage from “It’s Not a Good Shortcut If Everyone Dies,” the book’s first poem:
I went
door to door, to my neighbors, trying to explain
the system we actually inhabit, and they became
absorbed, so we all flapped our arms together
and though we did not fly away I finally
understood how geese make decisions. I was
crushed. I wandered the earth for eighteen years,
honking at anyone who’d listen and there were
a few who even fell in love with me, but because
they did not understand I was under a powerful
spell they could not help me…
The density of the action is incredible. With its near-uniform line length (a feature we see throughout the book), the poem becomes this space where door opening, wing flapping, total absorption, and physical witchcraft can happen at once—not one after the other, but at once. That The Difficult Farm can offer us this explosive mania alongside a softer, more mediated narrative, is remarkable. This, I think, is what Dara Wier meant by “awfully generous”. There is so much joy in jumping the bright, beaming hurdles Christle throws at us. Maybe that’s the poor rabbit’s secret message. When we accept our compulsion to hop, Christle’s landscape goes past itself, past its pleasant sunlight, and almost touches some harmless, feral sky.
But the compulsion is still primarily to think, and to feel oneself thinking. These are poems that read themselves as they move. Whatever strength it takes to process a word or phrase ultimately gets absorbed, recycled, becoming a part of the poem’s language. The book adds up and expands and implodes and reconstructs, while somehow containing itself. Christle seems to have opened her brain to us in the straightest, most honest ways possible. She’s even lit up and wallpapered the tunnels to get there.
The Difficult Farm is just as difficult as it is a farm, but in it, things happen in spite of the world, and in spite of the poet, and in spite of the reader, and they happen quickly, “and it is the Fourth of July/and it has been for months.”» - Tommy Jacobi

"Forgive me, friends, for looking at this book through poetry-colored glasses. Heather Christle’s lyrics in The Difficult Farm have a great deal to share. Of love, bitterness, generosity, fortune cookies, heartache, empowerment, beasts, and more. You will find so much to enjoy.
I personally, however, couldn’t stop thinking about Heather’s poems as meta-poetry. I read the whole book through at Think Coffee on Bowery and 2nd Street, and these songs sounded to me, at least, like a wild cry of poetics. Too much macchiato? No, folks, I think this one is pretty much down to me.
Here’s why. As poets go, I am not as academic as they come. Yet I am quite academic. I became a poetry fan at college, and like it or not I often reflexively consider poetry in terms of past poetry, dormitories, canon formation, the Norton Anthology, teaching, Major British Writers 10a and 10b, social class, bluebooks, race, psychology, imperialism, wealth, close reading, libraries, feminism, legacy kids, new historicism, the history of the avant-garde, privilege, final clubs, Karl Marx, you name it. I know I am far from alone in this, and this won’t come as much of surprise to anybody who has caught wind of me or my ilk.
Yes, I have backpacked around the world, worked for a medical device consultancy in South Asia, paralegaled, mowed lawns, written obituaries for The Princeton Packet (is this sounding anything like a seventies poetry jacket flap?), done P.R. for Adderall, even rung cash registers at a New Jersey farm stand (is this last more relevant here?). Yet I would lie if I didn’t admit vigorous academic shampooing, grooming, and primping. In front of gilded mirrors with the stylists at an industrial strength deluxe college and the University of Massachusetts Amherst Master of Fine Arts Program for Poets and Writers, where Heather also studied at the time. If, unlike David Byrne, I can’t sing, “I’ve met the people that you read about in books,” I can at least say that I’ve read about them in books. I’ve been conditioned to think about poetry in academic ways. That is, partly in terms of traditions of poetry as codified in academe. Zzzzzz.
Wake up for a minute; it’s time for more true confessions. I have had a lifelong fascination with places where brains grow. Partly as someone who loves to teach and study, but I also mean this in a literal sense. Have you seen The Man with Two Brains? With Steve Martin? I haven’t. I wish! I was ten years old when it came out, and my parents were strict about R-rated movies, particularly films in the gross-out comedy genre. But I remember being really fascinated by the picture’s title and begging to go. Now I see the movie is streaming at Netflix.com. I’ve recently turned thirty-six, so I’m definitely going to watch it soon.
One time, at debate camp, the director, a noise music enthusiast who called himself ‘Tuna,’ gave us all extra-large black tee shirts that read: “BRAIN FARM: WE GROW ’EM BIG!” Tuna was extra large himself, and extra-large tee shirts were fashionable then. The late eighties. I wasn’t a very sportif teen, as you might imagine, but my tee flapped about my paltry frame as I shredded my friend James’ quarter-pipe on a Vision Old Ghosts skateboard. Later, during college, came yawning moments when, just before I stepped aboard the last train, I pondered what for me was the Red Line’s more intriguing terminus: Braintree.
By now you’ve probably guessed that the brain/farm figure germinated thick as sod in my tender mind. Indeed, the brain-farming metaphor rooted itself deeply enough in my psyche, gentlemen and ladies of the jury, that I will now go and misread The Difficult Farm’s opening of the field primarily in terms of an idiosyncratic meta-poetry. As if Heather had written a book of poems about poetry, for crying out loud! This is a quirk, or quark, of my own, and should not prejudice other readers’ readings of this wonderful book. The Difficult Farm is definitely varied enough and vigorous enough and, yes, difficult enough, to invite a cornucopia of readerly responses. As Tuna would say, grow ’em big!
“It’s Not a Good Shortcut If Everyone Dies,” declares the title of the book’s first poem. Sound advice. The poem’s self-conscious speaker is not a little miffed about the contemporary scene. “I finally understood painting. I was irate!” she exclaims, proceeding to grab a “sledgehammer” and demolish a “cinderblock” and “terrarium.” Later, the speaker comes to the realization that she “finally / understood architecture. I was irate!”
…I went
door to door, to my neighbors, trying to explain
the system we actually inhabit, and they became
absorbed, so we all flapped our arms together
and though we did not fly away I finally
understood how geese make decisions. I was
crushed. I wandered the earth for eighteen years,
honking at anyone who’d listen…
These geese are the first animals named in Heather’s teeming bestiary of a book, though before them come human animals (the speaker and her neighbors) and the unnamed inhabitants (if there were any) of the smashed terrarium. The geese made me think of Walt Whitman’s meditations about the (male) goose that, according to Walt, calls the shots:
The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,
Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation;
The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen closer,
I find its purpose and place up there toward the November sky.
Whitman’s sure declaration that the gander’s only seemingly “meaningless” cry of “Ya-honk!” is in fact purposive foreshadows the poet’s famous self-identification with a yowling winged creature, later in “Song of Myself”:
I too am not a bit tamed… I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. (Leaves of Grass, 1855 Edition.)
Through the imitation of goose behavior (“we all flapped our arms together”), Heather’s speaker in “It’s Not a Good Shortcut,” does not discover (as Whitman did) an arrogant, bossy, companionable, authoritative, autobiographical, progressive first-person poetic voice. On the contrary, the trajectory of “It’s Not a Good Shortcut” leads to a radical diminishment of the speaker’s sense of self, to the point where we can’t be sure if the speaker is really there, or even if the poem really exists:
…I’m down to quarks, an idea
so tiny it’s sometimes not even there and it suits
me—I appear, the thought appears: quark.
The speaker is bereft of aesthetic pleasures (which bring anger and violence, not edification); sustainable shelter (“running / outside to see my house collapse”); intersubjective discourse (the neighbors flap together, but it’s unclear if they converse); and lacks even the goose’s instinctual ability to migrate away from inhospitable weather (“so I walked sadly / north, migrating so slowly I never reached / anywhere”).
The first speaker we encounter in The Difficult Farm may be read, then, as a kind of disgruntled and sorrowful poet. One who repeatedly cries, “I was irate!” (I couldn’t resist breaking this last word into its two syllables: “I rate.”) Of course, it would be a grave error to equate this speaker with Heather herself. In fact, the speaker of this complex parodic poem is the first of a motley multitude of characters to cross The Difficult Farm’s burlesque stage.
Okay. Let’s consider Ezra Pound. He made “a pact” with Whitman in Lustra (1916) only to reject as dubious, to a relative degree, certain of Whitman’ tenets about the stability of authorial identity. In Lustra, Pound dons the masks of multiple personae in order, in many of the book’s lyrics, to critique the poems of his contemporaries: either allegorically or head-on. I think Heather’s project in The Difficult Farm analogous in its outlines to Lustra, although different in several important respects.
First, a difference. There is a refreshingly feminist flavor to Heather’s approach that is, shall we say, rather lacking in the Pound. Her poem “One of Several Talking Men” hilariously lampoons the affected paranoia of a pedantic shut-in who asserts, “I am, moreover / a senatorial moment.” “Wilderness with Two Men” gives us a rather pathetic pair who go to ridiculous lengths to suppress the erotic nature of their homosocial bonding and end up shooting guns at each other. “The Barbarist” is voiced by an outraged and outrageous kind of Madame de Salon, who brusquely asks “Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Adams, / Mr. Didn’t-Feel-Obligated-to-Wear-Any-Pants. / Where are your bustling wives?”
Second, The Difficult Farm marks a withdrawal of autobiographical authorial identity to a remove several orders beyond Whitman or Pound, or even the Eliot of the oft-repeated dictum, “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” Of course, a lot of poetry has come down the pike since Lustra, but if I’m not mistaken, Heather isn’t gaming to reclaim the Romantic. She is having a lot of fun pointing up the foibles, small victories, trickery, trumpery and frumpery of the current poetry scene.
As I’ve explained above, for my own autobiographical, quirky reasons I’m reading Heather’s book as a brilliant and sometimes savage critique of the poetry industry today in these United States. Viewed from this slant, The Difficult Farm is a sociological, topographical and zoological study of the poetry farm where American poets work hard and hardly work. A farm that produces difficulty, and not much else.
Which makes each of us poets, in Heather’s world order, a kind of animal. Which we were already, of course, but with a difference. As zookeeper/inspector/overseer Heather’s great predecessors are Marianne Moore with her precise biology of types (see, for example, the wonderful “The Octopus”) and Elizabeth Bishop, with her curious, exacting, overdetermined analogies (“The Fish”).
In “Variants on an Animal Kingdom,” Heather’s speaker begins:
People love to come up to me and say
Hello, you enormous, vibrating bird,
but they are just confusing me
with my invention, an invention
I regret.
In numerous contexts (the reading room of the British Museum, for example) such a salutation (“Hello, you enormous, vibrating bird”) properly could be construed as misogynistic and offensive. But the speaker’s explanation asserts her power and freedom. The speaker claims responsibility for her misidentification with an invention (a robotic bird? a gender identity?) by owning that invention, naming herself its regretful creator. Later, a similarly assertive but distinctly more anxious speaker declares, “I will not renounce the decorative” (“Themselves Performing Small Brave Acts”). The question that lingers in both cases, as the title of the second poem hints, is whether such mini-declarations of freedom and invention amount to a hill of beans. My sense here and elsewhere is that Heather is poking fun, with considerable justice, at the self-seriousness of poets who make bold claims about the powers of the imagination.
The poetry industry might be responsible, in fact, for runoff more insidious than mere rosy pronouncements. In “What an Undertaker Does to His Family at Night,” Heather’s rather sinister speaker asserts, “Most of the world gets embroidered in the end.” Not a very comforting thought in an era of pollution and global warming. The Undertaker goes on, “If you’re under / my feet, you’re a plant in a poem by an Episcopalian poet.” We can read “feet” two ways here. As the feet of the Undertaker, who “steps on” (borrows from?) the pages of an Episcopalian poet (e.g., the famously Episcopalian Ashbery?) in order to climb or to destroy. Or we can think of metrical feet, and again of the inheritance of leaves of poetry. And there may be a hint of Whitman’s bequest, that we look for him, bodily and spiritually, under our bootsoles.
Yet Heather has her unnerving character, the Undertaker, say, “There are times I’d like to be perfect, i.e. digital.” Can we recognize this type of poet? This type of person? Have I looked closely in a mirror today? As the poem’s rather terrifying closing chords go:
…My favorite kind of singing
is choral, but I don’t believe in harmony. When we all
sing the same notes, we wake a newborn monster.
Elsewhere a speaker takes a flustered, impatient, yet kindly approach:
The geese—all of these
wild geese are beeping
There is a lack of new reeds
in the lake.(“Vespers”)
The furiously intense speaker of “Barnstormer” might be calling for the banishment of lament:
I do not feel well do you feel
well? my throat’s on fire I mean
missing something crucial let’s say
the filament say filament!
Yet a page later we hear from a rueful speaker who admits that
when goslings die the nation
gets sadder.(“Because the Limit Seeks Its Own”)
Yet for all of what I see as The Difficult Farm’s mourning for and chiding of contemporary poets (or poultry, as the case may be: “I call the chickens names,” a speaker remarks), this book emphatically is not for poets only. The question of how to foster a closer personal relationship with breathing, with language, is one of those questions everyone can spend more time with. As is the question of where we might find beauty, if not in painting, terrariums, or architecture.
Heather’s book invites us to come in out of the “ad hoc rain.” As one of her speakers generously suggests, “If a farmer wants something / to do with me there is a way for him to get it” (“Upon the River Pang”). Heather’s savage and wild and surprising and critical book contains multitudes, and in doing so forges new pathways for poets and everybody else. Did I mention that it’s really funny, too?» - Chris Hosea