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FPJ Blog post: “Transition”

 You feel as though you are swimming through the heat as you load the last few items into the U-Haul trailer attached to your truck. A lamp from the nightstand, a pair of flip-flops that failed to make it into the suitcase, the metal toolbox with a dent next to the handle. These are just small fragments of the last three years. The big stuff is already loaded. You grab the leather notebook holder sitting on the stairs and open it. The most important parts were cluttered inside in the forms of the final poems you had written and the medallion awarded to you for completing your Honors Thesis. You open the passenger side door on the truck and set it on the seat before rolling down the window and closing the door.

You explore the desolate apartment in search of any lost treasure that you might have missed. Kitchen cabinets fly open to reveal only dark crannies robbed of all value, purposeless voids of cheap woodgrain laminate. You walk down the hall and can almost see the ghostly reflections of friends drinking beer on the couch in the polished living room floor. Walking up the stairs to the bedroom, you see the claw marks left on the door by your dog during a particularly rough fight with an old girlfriend. You push open the door and see the pee stains he left on the carpet. Two hours of hard scrubbing still could not remove his stains from your life.

The heat rises in your cheeks, so you walk back down the stairs. Since your roommate will be around another day, you hang the key up next to the door and walk out to the truck. You roll down the window, and take a deep breath as you start the truck. The pickup crushes the dried pine needles on the curb as it pulls away and into the street. Intentionally driving the long way through town, you pass the Potato Shack.

It is still too early for the patio to be filled with old friends drinking themselves into a stupor, and you have already said your goodbyes in a spectacular liquor-filled fashion. You raised your glass of cold Shiner Bock one last time before reading your well-loved potato poem to a group collected in the corner. Fellow vets, writers, and drinking buddies all stopped by for one last send-off. You reminisced, debated, and even planned a US Senate run for the old drunk at the end of the bar. This is where you learned to relax and take a break from the grueling pressure of your new life.

You follow the curve around Sam Houston State, waving to the Evans Complex. Professors there helped you develop new levels of anxiety while you worked to rid yourself of the old ones. On your first day of class, you explained how your choice of seat location directly resulted from the physiological reactions of post-traumatic stress. In fact, every first class period for three years revolved around that same discussion. But this is also where you learned to write, learned how to make friends, learned to analyze literature, learned how to hate the constructed values of your former life. Here, the soldier intersected with the scholar.

You follow the road through the downtown construction and take a left on 11th Street. The little shops and restaurants all fade into one another. Your favorite Salvadoran restaurant passes out of your peripheral as the Popeye’s comes into view. The Golden Corral becomes a gas station, then a post office. You pass the laundromat where you once wrote a six-page paper on Hemingway while sharing Skittles with a girlfriend writing for the same class. The sweetness of the candy mixed with the smell of warm lint created an illusion of domestic bliss. As you continue down the road, you pass the theater with $5 movie tickets and the mall with two stores and offices for prison administrators that mark the boundaries of Huntsville.

The true trademark of East Texas overtakes the scenery as pine trees line the highway. You are tempted to pull over and take one last look at Huntsville. Instead, you settle for the memories that waft with the heat from the road up towards the sky.

You remember the first few months, working at McCoy’s while living in a rundown trailer with your sister and her three-hundred-pound homebody of a fiancée. A month into your first semester, he tried to fight you over the use of a truck he never drove, so you stayed on the couch of a six-foot-ten coworker named Sam before finding a nice apartment. You still owe Sam a few beers.

You think back to the time you met your first non-work friends, a former Army officer-turned-bearded hippy named Charlie and a solid-but-shy park ranger/musician named Jay. The drunken antics of that night led to a karaoke bar next to the prison where all the executions happen. This seemed to occur quite often in the ensuing years.

You think back to the tailgates that defined the Saturdays each fall. Last year, you and your fellow vets in the Collegiate Veterans Association managed to team up with the IT guys and win third place for the best set up. They had oriented the campus wi-fi towards your spot and set up a television under the pop-up canopies. You remember the literary readings in 100-year-old buildings and how, at every one, you ended up standing in line with your college’s dean. You think back to the arguments with the two girlfriends you dated and wonder if you will ever learn how to build a healthy relationship. Then, there was the puppy. He was a sweet dog, picked up from the shelter. Unfortunately, his separation and need for attention turned out not to be conducive to apartment life with a college student. You held on as long as you could, but the financial costs associated with the damage he caused daily and the knowledge that he needed more space led to finding him a new home with a big backyard at a friend’s house. You did the right thing, but that does not remove the guilt of letting him go.

You drive through College Station almost an hour later. Your hometown seems much larger than you remember. It has grown over the years, hot concrete replacing the trees and fields. You remember the cows that roamed in the pastures around town, wondering what happened to them. Did they find their way to the slaughterhouse or move to another ranch? Maybe they escaped as construction crews arrived and tore down the barbed wire fences. Probably not, but the cows planning a jailbreak could be a fun story if it hasn’t already been done.

As you drive through town, you see your favorite restaurant, Wings-N-More. You brought friends and girlfriends here to prove that you knew where the best wings in the world were. Everyone seemed to agree, though they probably just did not want to hurt your feelings. You continue past the signs for Texas A&M and shudder at the thought that you were once part of its cult.

You stop for lunch with your sister and nephew at an old hamburger place inside an ancient wooden shack. The SHSU baseball team mounts a losing effort against Florida State on the television screen. Your sister complains about your stepmother’s refusal to babysit her son in emergencies and little Hunter sits on your lap, rubbing your ear. You will miss being close to them, but you wish you had connected more. The last three years seemed like a failure in attempts to reconcile with the father who largely ignored you through most of your life. You need to keep moving, so you hug the two goodbye and hop back into your truck.

The clean concrete of College Station softens into the shabby neighborhoods of Bryan before you find trees again. You remember a shortcut from Hearne to Temple and chug along the open farmland of Central Texas. You grow frustrated as the trailer fishtails every time you hit sixty-seven miles per hour. You stop at a four-way intersection halfway down the farm road, happy to see stop signs. You once stumbled on an accident here after an eighteen-wheeler smashed into a woman’s Prius. You and a former Army medic opened the door to an unconscious face half-way covered in blood and dangling tissue. A cross marks the intersection now. Once in Temple, you weave through the I-35 construction and head towards Killeen.

Half an hour later, Fort Hood appears on the right side. You hate this place. The two years you spent here before leaving the Army were the worst of your life. You were promoted, but lost your family and your sanity.

A few more minutes of driving takes you through Copperas Cove. You lived here once upon a time. When you were not in the field, you would go home each afternoon and play with your son before bathing him and putting him to bed. He once pooped on the fireplace before you could place his diaper back on him. The fights grew worse and she began to accuse you of cheating if you worked out at the gym on the way home from work on the nights when the platoon got off at a decent hour. One day, she took little Linus from your arms and left. Now, you understand that much of it was your fault, but you still refuse to forgive her. That event served as the catalyst for quicksand that choked you to death over the next year. You attempted suicide four times and tried to drink yourself to death before leaving the military. After your exit, you continued downhill, freed from the constraints of a soldier’s life. You left the Army, but never your problems.

But, you also remember that this journey to redemption began here. The smoke from your cigar swirled from the ash tray on your coffee table up to your nostrils as you took another sip of Shiner and turned the page. The thirteenth chapter of your favorite book spoke to you differently that night. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was your go-to as a young infantry private and a source of comfort on long slow nights when the howitzers boomed a few hundred meters away. Something about Hemingway’s work always helped you to understand that you were not alone in feeling the pain of patrol after patrol down the streets of Baghdad or in the sands of Kandahar.

You began to understand what Jake Barnes meant when he said that a bullfighting aficionado could be forgiven for anything. A man with passion for something could transcend his mistakes and exist beyond his wartime experience. Hemingway gave you the secret to moving on with your life. You understood that eight years as a soldier did not define you. That evening, Hemingway saved your life.

You focus back on the road and drive up and down a few hills to Lampasas. After stopping at every red light in the small town, you pull out your phone and type in the address on the Google Maps. You do not know the way from here. Midland is still a long drive ahead.

The roads widen. The tall oaks turn into short mesquite. The land flattens into a wide open field. Five hours of driving through sparsely populated farmland turns your brain to mush. You turn the radio knob, cycling through static, but you cannot find many stations. After San Angelo, you realize that you are getting close. Oil derricks and giant windmills punctuate the oranges and reds of the setting sun. You drive two hours through oil fields before arriving at your mother’s apartment under pitch black sky. You park the truck and trailer next to a fence and walk inside.

Your mother greets you and gives you a blanket and pillow for the couch. Your back aches at the thought of sleeping on it for two months, but you are grateful for having somewhere to stay during the transition. You know that you are ready for Texas State University and San Marcos, but the waiting drives you insane. This is your first break from school in three years, and you feel that all momentum and purpose is lost. You begin freelance work, writing blog articles for strangers over the internet. The writing does not feel the same. Instead of writing the truths that life has delivered, you write about fish oil supplements and social security entitlements. Instead of an essay on Chaucer, you are focused on a 300-word article on John McCain for an Arizona news agency. You are ready to move on and get back to writing what matters.

New memories wait on an empty road. New professors prepare to give you a map in order to traverse the strange path ahead. The time grows closer for the next step to begin. Potato Shack will blur into Zelick’s, becoming an updated version of the same memory. New friends and fellow writers will take the place of old ones, but, right now, you are just bored. You are in a mesquite-studded oil field with no one around to grow with and no one to learn from. You yearn for the classroom and all that surrounds it. You are all set up, ready to move, ready to work, but you still wonder if you will survive the wait.

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Clayton Bradshaw served eight years as an infantryman in the US Army. He earned his BA in English from Sam Houston State University and is entering the Texas State University MFA in Creative Writing. His work can be found in The Deadly Writers Patrol, the Second Hand Stories podcast, War, Literature, and the Arts, and O-Dark-Thirty.

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FPJ is proud to bring you original blog posts from our MFA students right here at Texas State. Stay tuned for our next contributor’s post on the theme of change and movement. 

#txst #fpjoriginal #originalpost #neworiginalwork #mfa #hemingway #army #writer #scholar #move #movement #change #transition #texas #texasam #frontporchjournal #frontporchblog #sanmarcostx #sanmarcos #growth #writing #writinglife #roadtrip #community

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The MFA for the Emotionally Stunted by Robert

We came to an MFA creative writing program. We eat food, and read books, and attend classes to learn things, and secretly hope to publish something and win accolades and fame and fortune, before our Panoptical doubt sounds the alarm and rushes in riot-gear clad. We attend the cool readings of visiting writers. We smoke cigarettes, which according to science, activates the writer gene in our DNA. We struggle and struggle to write human characters.

By “we,” I mean me and the baby in my stomach. But not in a pregnancy way. I’m a guy. I have balls. The baby is also a guy, but really, he’s just a small dick motherfucker. I mean, look at that little baby dick. I’m laughing.

I only include him in the we because he goes everywhere with me. He just bounces around in my gut, as we ride the bus, buy milk, go to coffee shops. I feel I should explain the bouncing verb—I’m not an idiot with no conception of human anatomy; I understand human midsections are full of organs and blood and digesting shit and the whole 37 yards, or whatever our 8th grade science teacher told us, of coiled up small intestine—so I get that the kid wouldn’t literally be bouncing around in there; he’d be drowning, and clawing at my liver, and trying to poke a hole in my lung to put his little mouth against to breathe. I’m laughing. But anyway, I say bouncing because in my visual representation of my guts, I imagine a dark pit: it’s part prison (my ribs as a cage), and part cave (I fancy the imaginary floor of my pit gut as nature-ish, with dead leaves, dust, maybe the skeleton of a dead squirrel, etc.). The kid has room to move is what I’m saying.

But I’m also saying he doesn’t move, at least of his own volition, for two reasons. Firstly, I’ve been beating the shit out of him for as long as I can remember. Not because he’s a bad dude or anything—rather, when I was a kid, I thought he was pretty awesome; we were pretty tight. I couldn’t even tell the difference between him and me. If we’re talking pronouns, him and me was probably just I. But as I got older, I learned there was supposed to be a we—I saw other guys beating their babies down into their guts, and I was like oh, guess that’s how it’s done, and I started beating mine. Since I spent so much time depicting the gut pit, I’m probably obligated to depict how the violence works (and you’re a real sick fuck for expecting that from me)—essentially, the brain secretes an ooze from the stem that drips down the nasal cavity, coagulates in the squeezing tight throat, gains size and speed at the chest, and runs four taut knuckles straight at the small, scared, upturned face…no, no, I won’t be describing that after all (if you’re disappointed, you need Jesus).

[SCENE OF VIOLENCE]

I learned, I would say in adolescence, that you are supposed to cripple the little bitch, but you shouldn’t kill him. When you kill him, he decomposes worse than roadkill and mucks up all the plumbing (back to the more anatomically correct conceptualization). Most guys usually try to drown the putrid carcass with alcohol (I mean it makes a kind of sense, right?). Or they just take to beating someone else. Usually once you kill the kid, you’re on a timer until you kill yourself. I don’t recommend it.

Secondly, I keep him asleep. You can beat him into submission, but he will still catch a mood occasionally and start screaming and screaming, and that’s never fun. I went to cut out his tongue one day, and shit, he’s a little goddamn savage. A lullaby of grinding my teeth and clenching my fists accompanied with steady rolling melodies of seething anger usually keeps him quiet. Because as we all know, the world, or is it society? or is it family? or is it friendship? or is it romance? is essentially an airplane, and no one wants to hear your baby cry on an airplane.

Except in an MFA program. (And we’re back, I hope you can forgive the digression.) The MFA is all about the baby. Or maybe that’s wrong. The MFA is all about people who seem to have actually raised the baby, became the baby, but, you know, like the adult-version of the baby. We walk into class and see other baby-saturated adults doing cool things like talking about their feelings and encouraging each other. Suffice it to say: some weird ass shit. Which is all well and good as a tourist, but the thing about MFA programs is they’re full of sharers: you have a turn.

And so, I’m up for workshop and I’m sitting with my laptop trying to think of a story. I look to the baby for help: Hey! I need you right now—but as usual when I’m writing, he runs feral, smearing himself in intestinal oils, slippery as a greased pig. I grab at him, chase him, catch his ankle before he squirms away, lose him entirely and hear only his mocking laughter, until I finally pin him down. I cut off one of his fingers and leave him to howl and kick. I fingerpaint the story.

When workshop begins, they start with a round of compliments. The round lasts 1 minute and 47 seconds. Long enough for the baby to flush pink and crawl inside my head, nestling warm, and to look out my eyes, little mouth pressed so close it fogs the pupils, trying to see other children like him in their faces. The round ends.  

The workshop is unimpressed.

“It needs more paint.” — I throw him from my brain.

“Deeper color here.” — I shove him back down into the pit of my gut.

“Another stroke here.” — I grab his shoulders and shake him and blame him.

“This character just doesn’t feel human to me yet.”

Next time I’ll cut his arm off.

#original blog post #frontporchjournal #frontporchblog #mfa life #mfa program #writing workshops #struggles

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Spring Cleaning by Ashton Kamburoff

Those of you that know me know that I am a neat and orderly guy. I try to keep my price-gouged San Marcos apartment in working fashion and I like to stay on top of my chores. I’ll admit, that yes, I let duties slip from time-to-time, but I have always believed that a clean, organized home leads to a well-oiled writing life. Less clutter on the desk, less clutter in the mind.

 As I have gotten closer to graduation and thus, kissing my dingy abode “so long,” I have noticed my apartment wasn’t as precise as I had envisioned. Sure, the dishes were done, the clothes hung up, and the trash taken out, but there was a presence on my bookshelf. And also on top of my fridge. Turning my head, it appeared again on my kitchen table and once more on my window ledge. It was at this moment that I realized that I had gone three years without throwing away any actual paper. I had somehow managed to accumulate everything that I had obtained since 2014. Term papers, student essays, rough drafts of poems, peer’s poems from missed workshops (you’ll get them back soon!), utility bills, administrative forms, and even birthday cards. O! Agony! My ideal perception of the organized self had been smothered in an avalanche of unopened envelopes.

As I began judicially deciding which student blue books I would keep and which ones I would toss out, larger dilemmas revealed themselves in the back of my brain: Why would I keep any of these dumb things? Why couldn’t I throw them out when I got them two years ago? And why, in this, my finest hour of cleanliness, was I actually saying “Yeah, but this student wrote a pretty alright thesis, I should keep this one” to myself as I stood barefoot on my tile floor? The fact that I had to debate this with myself prompted a long, hard look in the mirror. 

My friends, I am admitting it to you now. I am a packrat. I save things. I tuck them away in drawers and I stack them in semi-organized piles. I ignore them until they spill out or have to be moved or become questioned by visiting eye. But for all my hording away, I’ve noticed that the issue is only with paper. Why?

Maybe it is because I am a writer. Because I believe that words, no matter who wrote them or where they come from, deserve to be saved. Maybe it is because I cherish language and think that anyone who made an attempt to form a coherent thought on the page should be spared from the wrath of a garbage truck. Maybe I am lying to you and I am just lazy (probably closer to the truth, dear reader).

But something amazing has happened since I began this cleaning process. I have also became a little more liberal with my other possessions. I am tossing it all out. I am starting over. I believe that life post-MFA (a life that will include a new approach to writing) should be a clean slate. I am ditching the box and the bed, the clothes and the cutlery. I’ve had enough. I think it is important for writers to shed some possessive skin and start anew. So, to all my old tables and chairs – thank you for supporting me these past few years. And to all my colleagues and classmates, let me know if you need any home furnishings – it is goin’ cheap.

 Ashton Kamburoff is a MFA-Poetry candidate at Texas State University. He is originally from Cleveland, Ohio. An overnight radio DJ, Ashton can be heard spinnin’ some of the finest doo-wop, Motown and soul from the 50’s and 60’s on kzsm.org from midnight till three on Sunday mornings.

#ashton kamburoff #post mfa life #original blog post #new beginnings #frontporchjournal #frontporchblog #spring cleaning

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The new issue of Front Porch Journal is live with new fiction, poetry, interviews and more! Check it out today. 

#frontporchjournal #frontporchblog #issue 35 #new original work #poetry #fiction #interviews #texas state MFA

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Novel or Stories? by Luke Helm

My wife and I moved across the country and out of two full-time jobs for me to pursue my MFA. Upon my arrival, I noticed that every time I met someone from the program, the same question surfaced—and I’ve gotta say, I loved it. I had grown accustomed to raised eyebrows and smirks when I let slip that I was a writer, so in those early months, I loved the question simply for its assumption: novel or short stories? Obviously, we were writing—the question was what. The sense of community, of belonging, was built in.

I, from the outset, was Team Novel. My writing life started in service to a large project, and I entered the MFA with the single-minded purpose of getting through my first book. While this put me in the minority in our cohort, it was not until later in my first year that my commitment to Team Novel began to worry me.

I began to worry as we learned lessons about points of view, points of telling, verb tenses, narrative stances, and the like, and as my classmates churned out stories that utilized these tools in ways unavailable to me in my one long-form pursuit. I worried as my classmates experimented with short stories of vastly different themes and lengths and styles, and I looked through my pages knowing that there was no quicker way to kill a novel than to wrestle it into a second-person point of view just for kicks.

As someone unfamiliar even with an undergrad English department, I spent the first year of my MFA assuming that my story-writing classmates had known a secret I didn’t (as it turned out, they knew plenty I didn’t; it just wasn’t secrets about whether writing novels or short stories was a better use of an MFA). On the bad days of novel writing, I was certain I was squandering my opportunity to develop as a writer and would spend the rest of my days bemoaning my MFA decisions.

This isn’t to say that the lessons of my early MFA classes were unhelpful to me as a novelist—they clarified and sharpened choices I needed to make or had already made. One workshop clarified the need to maintain both short and long lines of tension in each of my chapters. Another made clear that narrative distance, overdone, quickly flattens prose. But even given these valuable lessons, there was no denying that my choice to work solely on a novel curtailed the opportunities to experiment and play with variables.

Fast forward a year. We are now wrapping up semester four of six and preparing to start work on our theses, due now in a little under a year. Reflecting now on my decision to stay resolutely on Team Novel, my early fears have largely faded. Would I have done it any differently if given the opportunity? Not a chance. I know I’ve missed out on some opportunities to play with levers and dials and buttons in the storyteller’s repertoire, but I know, too, that I’ve got a stack of pages waiting for me as I turn my attention to assembling a “publishable manuscript.” Coming into the program, I was intent on getting my first novel written, and I am now well positioned to do just that.

Perhaps in another year I will realize that I was wrong, that I should’ve been writing stories all along. But from what I’ve gathered so far, and from what I’ve heard from the students who have already walked the long road of the thesis, the best thing you can do is to work as diligently as possible on whatever you believe in the most. I hope they’re right.

#luke helm #original blog post #novel writing #short story #novel vs story #mfa program #mfa life #thesis #transition #mfa community #frontporchjournal #frontporchblog

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Sandra Cisneros is my shero by Marilyse Figueroa

I am in the community of people who freaking LOVE Sandra Cisneros. We’re kind of wild. We get her poems tattooed on our bodies. We spend our gas money compulsively on her quotes made into totes, tiles, and t-shirts, but hey! They’re as powerful as un milagro. And she is lovingly and seriously called La Sandra because when we ugly cry at her book signings, she says: I can tell you’re a writer.

Here is something to new to celebrate. Sandra Cisneros’ archives have recently been acquired by the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University. OK, yes, Cormac McCarthy’s are here, too, but LA SANDRA’S?! Now we’re big time. The archives consist of hundreds of boxes with locks of her hair (What? My mamá saved mis pelitos from my first haircut, too!), to early drafts of her stories, to her writing table!!! At the Witliff, you can sit at La Sandra’s table, and, and, and WRITE!!! Amigxs, I wouldn’t lie to you!

Look, Sandra Cisneros is my shero, and having her archives nearby is like someone building a temple to my #1 goddess. For this Xicana and Puerto Riqueña, it’s probably no suprise, but no less a shame that I wasn’t introduced to Sandra Cisneros until I was twenty-four years old ( I lived in Oklahoma for 15 years, ay!). It was entirely too long to wait to read House On Mango Street, but at least it happened. I think we all remember what it was like when a book changed our lives, so here is my account with House: I had just taken my first creative writing course, and developed a close enough relationship to my professor to convince her I was serious about creative writing. When I told my professor I wanted to write about my family, she gave me House. Other than reading Gloria Anzaldúa (which wouldn’t happen for another semester!), I had never felt like a book spoke to my background. What they say is true: most children’s literature is about white boys and their dogs. It doesn’t always get better when you grow up. But House was like a love letter to my experience. I remember having to wear hand me down shoes like Esperanza. I remember thinking my family was weird for speaking Spanish, and I remember wanting to fly away from my upbringing so I could write. And like Esperanza, I would leave only to want to return.  I hadn’t felt seen before in literature, and that made how I perceived my existence so different.

What’s also so different about the Wittliff Collections is that they focus on the Southwest region. So, while Sandra Cisneros could have given her archives to New York or Los Angeles, she chose to keep her archives where many of her most excited fans are, and, of course, where many of her stories originated. (Fact: Because of this special acquisition, the Wittliff and Cisneros organized the exhibitions together, and quotes about her life are written on the glass cases by La Sandra’s own hand. Swoon!)

I hope all you Sandra fans out there get to visit San Marcos while the exhibition is on showcase until July 1st, 2017. For a day full of celebrating her life and works, you can come to the Wittliff on April 29th for a special Sandra Cisneros Symposium. The official opening of the archives is April 30th in which Cisneros will give a public reading, book signing, and be interviewed by the lead archivist.

As you continue to write, as Sandra would say, be a macha. Be a beast. Be shoot-sharp, sharp-tongued, sharp-thinking, fast-speaking, foot-loose, loose-tongues, let-loose, writer* on the loose!

#marilyse figueroa #sandra cisneros #wittliff collections #TexasStateUniversity #we are writers #xicanx writers #finding community #cisneros archives #finding mentors #house on mango street #gloria anzaldua #literary crush #frontporchjournal #frontporchblog

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Sliding & Balancing in Poetic Translation by James Thomson

As I think about translation, my mind somersaults into complexities of languages and ethics and permissions and accuracies and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I have a tendency to complicate most things. Translation is, obviously, no different for me – I complicate it at every turn. Because I have been conditioned as a poet and a thinker to consider all angles around all obstacles, I make translation complicated. Because I know it is dangerous to assume that anything is simple, I make translation complicated. But I really want to let all that go. I want to make translation simple. I want translation to be the shifting of languages into other languages so that thought may be exchanged freely and openly. I want translation to be a formula. I want translation to be a math problem. But that’s not how language nor thought operates. It’s not how language and thought should operate. There are nuances and multiplicities because the human race is nuanced and multiple. Therefore, translation is nuanced and multiple. Translation is complicated. Yet, still I wonder if there is a place where nuance and simplicity could live side-by-side in the poet’s approach to translation. I wonder if it is possible to remain multiple and complicated as one merely desires to share free and bold ideas across language barriers.

Edward Hirsch, in A Poet’s Glossary, explains, “There is a sliding scale in translating poetry from the strictest literalism to the freest adaptation.” While this broad statement seems obvious, it is liberating (and a little scary) to understand that, within the spectrum of translation, all has been done, or, at least, all has been attempted, previously. There are translators implementing the line-by-line, word-by-word, formulaic approach, there are translators taking art and re-sculpting its possibilities, and, of course, there are all the translators that fall inside the infinite promise of both of those approaches. So upon this “sliding scale” is the permission of all translation in poetry. But, all in all, Hirsch’s select words do nothing to narrow translations scope or to open or close any neglected or ill-conceived doors. He simply says that a “sliding scale” exists. So, while acknowledging the endless possibilities of translation, I’m still left wondering, as an individual poet, where to approach translation on Hirsch’s “sliding scale.”

Recently, I, and a handful of my peers, was given a poem written entirely in hieroglyphs and asked to translate it to English. After our cursory initial resistance, we actually quieted and attempted our “translations.” Of course, none of us knew how to read hieroglyphs, so we were taking bold liberties, falling very close to the free adaptation side of Hirsch’s scale, but the results were telling. First of all, many of our poems’ images and words were similar. This was expected since we were translating ancient symbols resembling images, but, I also believe, this says something about the classroom’s collective American consciousness, as well. Additionally, each of our individual “translations” plucked something new from the original poem that, not only, wasn’t there in the first place, but also became unique to each single “translation” in the room. At that point, it was if the one Egyptian poem became ten poems that were the original and, at the same time, something completely different.

In executing or merely attempting translation, the poet immediately wobbles the complex risks involved in uncertainty. Raza Ali Hasan, in his essay The Uncompressing of the Line, comments on the poet in the act of translation, stating, “What we lose is the peace of mind, the assurance that we know what we are doing – but that might just have been an illusion in the first place.” I tend to agree that most all “peace of mind” is illusion, but it seems, to me, that, in translation, assurance is a dangerous thing while uncertainty is equally troubling. Translation may be a tightrope to teeter only when the poet understands balance. Maybe only when a poet understands that complexities and problems exist in the translation of poetry at all points on the “sliding scale”, can he or she begin a conversation with and through a poem existing in another language. The Egyptian hieroglyph poem became an inspiration to and of itself. And, while our translations were extremely free in their adaptations, according to Hirsch’s scale, they are akin to other translations that are strict in their literalism. The poems were a conversation with each other. The poems were echoes. Yet, I still wouldn’t say the poems were the same. No two poems are the same. And that realization may be the largest thing to understand in the complex realm of translation – nothing is the same. There is no formula. There is no this equals that. There are echoes – while they are as literal as possible or freely inspired, poems in translation embody one another in versions. Translated poems share themselves within themselves, and once the poet respects the balanced world of sharing, living side-by-side isn’t just an approach, it becomes the only option.

#james thomson #original blog post #translation #poetics #translating poetry #edward hirsch #raza ali hasan #frontporchjournal #frontporchblog

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Weekly Roundup March 20th-24th

In his blog post, James Thompson mentions Edward Hirsch’s A Poet’s Glossary. After reading this overview of the book from the Washington Post, you may decide that, like us, this is a book you have to own. 

Read this article about literary escapism being out of tune with today's tumultuous times. The critic, Sam Sacks, takes  popular writers from the 90s (Chabon, Saunders, Eggers, Lethem, and Whitehead) to task for their nostalgic and less than nuanced stories.

In the Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Benjamin Markovits talks about stylistic bias of professors in writing programs, and professors' lasting influence in what gets read. 

#edward hirsch #poetry #poetics #translation #sam sacks #nostalgia #new york times book review #benjamin markovits #frontporchjournal #frontporchblog

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Bolaño Revisited by Jeff Karr

In the weeks after Trump's election I found it difficult to read and write. Art felt strange, futile, maybe even immoral. The country had been suckered by a pervert and a racist who constitutes a serious threat to some of society's most vulnerable populations, and here I was in an MFA program, talking about plot and point of view and the believability and humanity of people who don't exist. I thought about rereading All the Kings Men, like maybe it'd help me identify some faint sliver of humanity in the recently elected führer, but I couldn't get past the first page. Instead, I reread Roberto Bolaño's By Night In Chile. 

This was the right decision. 

Whenever I read Bolaño I'm reminded of a quote from Chekhov's letters: "You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist." 

In his work Bolaño probed his own anxieties and questions about the role of art in a country whose central authority had fallen into chaos and totalitarianism. He was a voracious reader and writer, and yet his work evinces a haunting skepticism of literature and literary culture. 

In By Night in Chile, the narrator, a priest and literary critic, tucks himself away from the violence of the military coup and reads the Greek classics. He writes a review of a novel called White Dove: "I gave it a good review, you might say I hailed it in glowing terms, although deep down I knew it wasn't much of a book." Set against a backdrop of violence and terror, the priest's literary preoccupations come across as grotesque and immoral, an avoidance for which Bolaño seems to believe his narrator should be made to answer. 

Bolaño simultaneously revered and reviled literature, so it's no surprise that some aspects of his work are decidedly unliterary. His sentences are deadpan and often emotionally flatlined. He's not one for metaphor or analogy, and much of his work forsakes such fundamental conventions as paragraph indentation, quotation marks, and page breaks, as though he's trying to distract from the fact that what you're reading is indeed a work of literature. His narrators are often engaged in a kind of secondhand storytelling. They tell stories other characters have told them, and they gain narrative authority by surrendering any pretense of narrative authority.

Embedded in most of Bolaño's work is a mystery concerning the disappearance of a particular writer or artist. In the short story "Last Evenings on Earth" a young man named "B" vacations with his father in Acapulco. He spends much of the trip dwelling on the disappearance of Gui Rosey, a surrealist poet who went missing in Nazi-occupied France. Toward the end of the novel Distant Star, the narrator has moved to Spain and has decided to go in search of a fictional propagandist named Carlos Wieder. When he finds Wieder in a cafe, the narrator turns his attention back to the collected works of Bruno Schulz, the painter and surrealist writer who was shot and killed by a Gestapo officer in Nazi-occupied Poland: "I felt that Wieder’s lifeless eyes were scrutinizing me, while the letters on the pages I was turning (perhaps too quickly) were no longer beetles but eyes, the eyes of Bruno Schulz, opening and closing, over and over, eyes pale as the sky, shining like the surface of the sea, opening, blinking, again and again, in the midst of total darkness. No, not total, in the midst of a milky darkness, like the inside of a storm cloud."

By all accounts Bolaño felt a tremendous sense of guilt about leaving Chile to pursue a life dedicated to poetry. He used his work to grapple with the confluence of emotions this created in him. His allusions to surrealist writers are contrasted with the deadpan realism of his prose. His work calls to mind Theodor Adorno's quote that "there can be no poetry after Auschwitz." For Bolaño, no work of literature could adequately capture the scale of suffering the people of Chile experienced during the coup. This realization led him to reinvent the form of the novel and use it as a space in which he could examine his conflicting thoughts and feelings about literature itself. None of this is to say that literature could ever function as a substitute for meaningful political action. Bolaño certainly didn't feel that way. Right now the United States' defining characteristic might be its burgeoning fascism. The importance of active engagement cannot be overstated, but Bolaño's work can serve as proof that when it comes time to sit down and write, maybe our anxiety about doing so is in and of itself a fruitful resource to draw from. 

#jeff karr #blog post #roberto bolaño #critical engagement #the writing life #frontporchjournal #frontporchblog

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Fifteen Takeaways from My MFA by Danielle Zaccagnino

Since I’m in my last semester of the MFA program here at Texas State, 78 days away from graduation, I’m starting to think about my takeaways from my time here. I didn’t know much about poetry before I got here, so my list starts with the very basics.

Year One

Poetry isn’t just prose with line breaks.

Regardless of whether you consider yourself experimental, your poem still has to do something. Sonically or tonally or syntactically or emotionally, it has to do something.

Nobody wants to wade through a bad poem to get to a “punchline.” Be strong from your very first word -- from your title.

Your poem should sound like you wrote it.

What you write and how other people respond to it does not determine your self-worth.

Year Two

Read all of your work out loud. That’s how you catch what’s truly embarrassing.

A lot of pleasure can come out of texture -- minute changes in meter, rhyme, language. As in comedy, good poems build up and then subvert expectations.

That thing you’re avoiding writing about? The only way past it is through it. (That doesn’t mean anyone has to see it.)

Cross-genre work is extremely helpful, even if you suck in the new genre. Personally, poetry has taught me how to let go of linguistic, imaginative, and emotional constraints. Nonfiction has shown me what kind of emotional work is required for writing with nuance and depth. Screenwriting has taught me how to slow my imagination down and catch more of the details. Right now, fiction reminds me how to be at a loss, but that’s something too.

If you don’t spend a lot of time alone with your thoughts, everything you write will be what you’re expected to write.

Year Three

Listen to your body when it tells you to dig deeper, to step away, when it tells you to sleep or stay up until the work is done.

Years of workshop will help you have a stronger critical eye, but once you have it, let go of the reins a little bit and write what comes naturally.

Advice from my adjunct reader, Gabrielle Calvocoressi: Don’t be the hero of your own poem.

If, like me, you have an obsessive personality, funnel at least some of that obsession towards submitting to literary journals (once the work has pushed you out and been revised several times).

Reading bad writing and articulating why it’s bad is extremely helpful, but keep reading good writing, too. Find a few writers whose work will always reinvigorate you.

My time in Texas is coming to an end, but there's a lot to take with me: a manuscript in progress, a literary community, and a sense of what I'm capable of. 

#mymfaexperience #danielle zaccagnino #frontporchjournal #frontporchblog

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Conversations at AWP 2017 by blog editor Leticia A. Urieta

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference is a microcosm of the national and international writing and publishing community, where hundreds of writers, publishers, educators and administrators convene in one city for four days and engage in a communal celebration of and conversation about the nature of writing. This year, the AWP conference was held in Washington D.C. and this made all the difference.

I should explain that this was my first time attending AWP, and I went into the experience primed by the charged environment of where we were and what I might experience. I was staying with friends and colleagues who had attended other AWP’s, and so I was given much conflicting advice: enjoy the panels, don’t go to the panels they are a waste of time, attend off site events, the readings are the best, etc. I also had to be cognizant of my scheduled time at the bookfair representing Front Porch Journal. When I downloaded the app the AWP provides to plan your schedule, I was a bit overzealous, like a young Hermione Granger attempting to attend too many classes; since I didn’t have a Time Turner, I would have to split my time as best I could between the bookfair, panels, readings and time with friends who I had the privilege of seeing because we were meeting in this city for these few days.

If I could summarize the conference into one word (besides more colorful words that my friends were using after a few nights of drinking), it would be resistance.

As I said, we were in the capital of our nation, where our president was signing contentious and discriminatory executive orders whose effects were taking place around us. While at the conference, part of me wanted to avoid social media, lock myself in this bubble of literary dreams to hear writers and poets like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speak about her novel or hear the quiet, hypersensitive voice of Ocean Vuong as he read his poetry like I’ve never heard anyone read before. It was invigorating to be around and amongst these talents, some I knew and some I was meeting for the first time, and gave me energy to want to return to my own thesis work, now at the end of my final semester in the Texas State MFA. Then I would get on Facebook and see the ICE raids occurring back home, threatening friends and youth in the community that I served. I couldn’t help but feel a certain amount of guilt and need to perform some form of resistance while I was here, to take some action that would mean something before I left the birthplace of so much fear and division in our country.

As I wandered the Bookfair and attended panels centered around race, language and identity as these facets of ourselves shape our relationship to our writing and to other writers, I saw people wearing black buttons with ‘Resist” written in bold white ink. I saw women wearing “Black Lives Matter” t-shirts and rainbow flags sewn to their coats. All around me, resistance was occurring in a multitude of forms, from the reading of political, angry, passionate poetry from Terrance Hayes, to the conversations taking place. At several points during the conference, there were overt acts of resistance to the current political regime, from several writers creating a “wall” during the bookfair (which I participated in) to inconvenience those trying to pass, as well as readings and candlelight vigils around the capital that made statements-this may be normal, but this is not OK. What was especially interesting, however, was that it seemed that the word “resistance,” meant very different things to different people. During our brief “human wall” demonstration, several people scoffed and complained that we were blocking their way to certain booths at the bookfair, to which we responded that that was exactly the point. It seemed that people who espouse the ideals of resistance, and continuously call for us to avoid normalizing the Trump administration, were in fact resistant to being criticized or made to feel uncomfortable for even a few minutes of their day. The dream bubble of AWP isolation was bursting before their eyes, and they didn’t like it.

Another resistance I discovered, and enjoyed, was people’s resistance to labelling themselves with binaries of genre, language, identity and even style. During my time at the bookfair, I had so many wonderful conversations with people who responded to our questions about what they wrote when they said “everything.” Having had the experience of people trying to label me and my work in binary terms, as fiction, or poetry, as real, or fantasy, as white, or latina, I loved finding kindred spirits who, despite the publishing industry's insistence that branding oneself means reducing yourself to one thing, were embracing hybridity, versatility and even the political act of affirming their very existence through their art. I attended a panel led by mixed writers, and took away so many quotes to live my life by as a mixed woman, including one reminder that stood out: “Insist upon the integrity of your work.”

During my last night in D.C. I went to eat with friends. At the dinner table, I asked a question I had considered before, but never voiced: What is the difference between a writer and an author? The responses varied-some said that writers worked, while authors were already published. Some said that the terms were interchangeable. I argued that there was a level of ethos associated with the term “author,” and that this ethos opened doors for authors to do more work and have a defined platform in the writing community. A poet acquaintance pointed out that you don’t have to be published to be active in the community. Even here, there was a resistance of definitions and delineations because, as traditionally marginalized writers, we all knew that the work for us would never be done. After hearing responses from friends and new writers I met, it was obvious to me that the act of writing is a conversation with the literary communities that form us. With so many of embarking into new and unknown territory, because we are graduating from MFA programs, or because we are beginning new community and artistic projects, we are looking for our places in a social landscape that is often in disagreement.

Sitting here at the airport waiting for my flight home, I am OK with the fact that I didn’t go to any museums or visit any landmarks while I was here. That will be another trip. I am OK that I didn’t go to all the panels and readings that I wanted. The body and spirit are both invigorated and exhausted after a conference that requires so much travel and creative energy. In the end, I am simply grateful to have been a part of a conversation.

#awp17 #awp conference #awp highlights #awp 2017 #LeticiaUrieta #frontporchjournal #frontporchblog #resistance #art is conversation

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If you are in DC for AWP 2017, stop by the Front Porch Table, 609-T at the Bookfair and say hello!

#frontporchjournal #frontporchblog #awp 2017 #awp17 #awp conference #theeditorsarein