poemoftheweek poemoftheweek.com poemoftheweek.org poem of the week
09-17-2013
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
The Body Deformed by Tidal Forces
Darkness still here, hunkered against the trees.
Spring so uneasy this year.
No matter morning's boundary culling our bodies,
another romantic passage assaults us!
O limp future centered on this body!
In the model solar system, planets suspend & twirl
as if from a spider's whirl.
The quantum in backpedal, in decline, spring so un-
gripping this year. Bored mouth. Bored fingers.
The umpteenth day/night running like such-
truly, truly-this troubling with physics!
Not still winter, not yet anything.
O thuggish awakening.
All planets but this one were named after gods.
Click here to read an early draft of The Body Deformed by Tidal Forces
In Leaving My Lover Teaches Me Half a Bible Story
Inside my heart's blackening egg, where some might say they see
a lake of fire, or, Asmodeus picking his fingernails
in the doorframe of my wedding nights
I see a slack-jawed barn down on its knees, cradled up against
the interstate. You know the one. Call it clairvoyance
or sorrow from self-undoing.
Mutable water signs or what-
ever. Lion/lamb of the calendar. My sound denatured
-all cluck and bang-knowing
the too-late clang of this road travels long and longer. My mouth
is full of permissions, more sleepy talk of killing
this man or that man. I stuff my lips with wine and livers.
Inside I see a crown of violets
crowding the carcass of a deer over Nameless Creek,
over Mad River, past Mount Comfort
& up the knoll where they bury it in the dirt of the barn floor-
flinty & stalwart. Watch its body vanish
in the mouths of shimmery creatures that slip flesh from bone.
In some years this deer will want to rise & see what kind of day it is.
Will it still be March? Will Tobia be walking still? & Sarah
with her drowsy hips padding the earth on her nth husband's grave?
Knocking this way then that way, the bones curl up from crisp dust
to ring
with the hard laughter. Always a kind of wailing.
Click here to read an early draft of In Leaving My Lover Teaches Me Half a Bible Story
Medicine Lake
What I invent is for you to talk to me when all I hear is the petite cat's ghost I
pretend your mass is here redshifting with the rigs pumping their brakes a little
closer than we'd think they'd be Out in the country where we are still inventing
ourselves and the empty room I never got around to so I call it your room I say you can
have it You're in Hugo's NeverNeverLand strong-arming Russian Olives from the
ridge to the chipper & what's a promise to a crow in hungry season I practice my
fist to mimic physical phenomena The heart thing your father grappled last week
They say fist is about the size of heart but only if you're a kid By the time his heart
hears about Saturn's new ring its blood will have dilated & receded through space
Imagine you are overshadowed by debris so large you miss the debris entirely A
galaxy of sandhill tracks flowering in the snowy mud along Medicine Lake & your
father calling out oldest to youngest the names of his seven children
Click here to read an early draft of Medicine Lake
Behind the Christian Door
And when is the state gonna pay us? And
when is the state gonna pay us? And when is
the state gonna pay us? And when is the
state gonna pay us? And when is the state
gonna pay us? And when is the state gonna
pay us? And when is the state gonna pay us?
And when is the state gonna pay us? And
when is the state gonna pay us? And when is
the state gonna pay us? And when is the
state gonna pay us? And when is the state
gonna pay us? And when is the state gonna
pay us? And when is the state gonna pay us?
And when is the state gonna pay us? And
when is the state gonna pay us? And when is
the state gonna pay us? And when is the
state gonna pay us? And when is the state
gonna pay us? And when is the state gonna
pay us? And when is the state gonna pay us?
And when is the state gonna pay us? And
when is the state gonna pay us? And when is
the state gonna pay us? And when is the
state gonna pay us? And when is the state
gonna pay us? And when is the state gonna
pay us? And when is the state gonna pay us?
And when is the state gonna pay us? And
when is the state gonna pay us? And when is
the state gonna pay us? And when is the
state gonna pay us? And when is the state
gonna pay?
BIO: Lillian-Yvonne Bertram has been a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference work-study scholar, a writer-in-residence at the Montana Artists’ Refuge, and is a Cave Canem alumna. Her poetry has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Narrative Magazine, Subtropics, and other journals. She received first place in the 2011 Summer Literary Seminars poetry contest, has won the Gulf Coast Magazine Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, and has received second place in Narrative Magazine’s poetry contest. Bertram is a graduate of the writing programs at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was a 2009-2011 Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow at Williams College where she taught creative writing and literature. Her first book, But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise, won the Red Hen Press 2010 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, judged by Claudia Rankine.
She is a proud member of the Steeler Nation, and is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She reads for the journals Arsenic Lobster and Quarterly West and currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with her partner and their cat, the inimitable Hipólito Yrigoyen aka CatMonster.
INTERVIEW: An Interview with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram by Jenna Bazzell and Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
Jenna Bazzell and Andrew McFadyen-Kecthum: In your poem "The Body Deformed by Tidal Forces," you use two exclamation points. The use of the exclamation point in poetry can at times feel over-wrought and bring attention to lines and the sentiment/statement being made. While you use it to highlight the poignancy of the declarations being made, it seems that you're taking a bit of a risk here. What do you see as the function and purpose of the exclamation point in this poem and its effects on the reading of this poem? Do you enjoy taking risks in your work?
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram: I'll start with the last question and work backward: Yes, I enjoy taking risks in my work. And why not? The way I see it, the worst possible outcome for a poem is nowhere near the worst possible outcome for, say, skydiving.* Someone might not read your poem, and if they do, they might not like it and in the scheme of things, that's really not too bad. I don't see punctuation as a real risk. An exclamation point in a poem is risky in context only, because somewhere American poets** took to the notion that the best of poetry is understated and underemphasized, and treats the emphatic like it walked in the room with something smelly stuck to its shoe. In this poem I think the exclamation points are emphatic but also more hyperbolic than anything. They are the excessive rouge on the cheeks, play-acting a bit. They are a bit of a risk, again, because of how the reading public for this type of work contextualizes the exclamation point. Though I often wonder, why not bring attention to lines and sentiment and statements? If I wanted camouflage, I guess I'd be out duck hunting?
*Unless you are, say, Lorca. Then yes, the worst possible outcome for writing a poem is pretty damn bad.
**This isn't exactly true. The great majority of American poets (the ones at the slams, at the open mics, on the streets, in their bedrooms, etc.) are exclamating all up and down the street and have no idea that the exclamation point isn't "classy."
JB & AMK: In "The Body Deformed by Tidal Forces," the "O" is a mark of vocation- it indicates that whatever name or object appearing next in the sentence is being called or addressed, but it also invokes a certain quality of voice, a sense of antiquite the poem otherwise wouldn't possess. Was this your intention? Why use the antiquated "O" here?
LYB: The "O" is there to create an antiquated mood. On the one hand, it is kind of jocular (who says "O" seriously anymore?) which I like to think creates tension with the sonnet form. But the tone of the poem is serious and despairing and I like to think that a reader will feel that no amount of playful dramatis can lighten this mood, that the hyperbolic despair is a tenuous defense and deflection of the real despair.
JB & AMK: "In Leaving My Lover Teaches Me Half A Bible Story," uses the I as well as (once) the you. "I" and "you" are, of course, exact opposites: I cannot be spoken of someone else while you cannot be said withoutsomeone else. This creates an interesting dynamic in the poem.
LYB: I hope it creates something interesting in the poem...in a lot of my poems the "you" is really the "I" but in this poem, it's someone else.
JB & AMK: In "In Leaving My Lover Teaches Me Half A Bible Story," the first line of the poem creates a stark metaphor-"the heart's blackening egg." When I first read this, I thought how odd, how beautiful. Could you talk about the significance and use of this metaphor in this poem and how you came about it?
LYB: Thanks! I'm glad you found it odd and beautiful! Believe it or not, this is probably the best line and image to come out of my undergraduate education and was recycled from a poem that no longer exists. So it's been around for the better part of a decade, circulating here and there throughout my work. I can no longer say with certainty how I might have come about it, but I imagine it must have had something to do with thinking of what an egg might look like from the inside-all dark--, and what the heart might also look like from the inside-also very dark.
JB & AMK: Is "oddness"/surprise something you work toward in your work, something you look for in others' poetry?
LYB: Yes.
You're probably looking for more than just "yes," such as what kind of oddness and surprise I like in a work or what it looks like when I find it, but I don't have a good answer for that because oddness and surprise is contextual. It depends on how much oddness and surprise one has or has not seen. For example, taxidermy can seem quite odd and surprising. But one's senses get dulled to it the more it appears and it becomes less odd or surprising and just something people do. Once I saw, on a pier, a seagull with one and half legs. It was missing the lower part of one of its legs and was hopping about, amputee and all, with the other seagulls. How does a seagull lose a leg? It was surprising and contrasted more oddly with the swinging pier life than, say, a stuffed bird in someone's house. I still think about that seagull. What a trooper!
JB & AMK: You use the ampersand quite a bit. Can you talk about your use of the ampersand and how you see it functioning in your poetry? In what instances would you choose to use the ampersand versus "and"? Why?
LYB: It looks pretty & sometimes I dislike the look of the word "and." The word "and" can become aesthetically displeasing to me. I don't know about the "proper" employment of the ampersand, but my personal experience of it is that it is best used to connect two things that go together nicely, like "milk & cookies" or "hugs & kisses" or "poetry & poetics" and the like. Usually it seems to link either two nouns that have some sort of relationship together, "peaches & cream" as opposed to "peaches & steak." That just looks weird. Of course, you can create a relationship or at least try to force one by using the ampersand to link two things, but it doesn't always work. I also think it works well to unite two independent clauses "they went to the restaurant to eat steak & afterward they had some peaches." But this is just my impression of the workings of the ampersand, so kids, don't quote me. Ultimately I use it when I feel uncomfortable with how "and" looks on the page, when I think two nouns or clauses have some relationship, or when I think a plausible relationship and closeness can be created between them.
JB & AMK: In your poem "Medicine Lake," you use no punctuation, but you indicate the end of a thought with the capitalization of words in the middle of lines. How did you come up with this "form"? Why the lack of punctuation?
LYB: The poem initially took on so many different forms and I was never happy with it-couplets, tercets, quatrains, etc. I just got so fed up with the way it looked. And then I wrote another poem that is part of another book and it had a structure similar to what "Medicine Lake" looks like now (widely spaced lines) and I thought ah-ha, and decided to port it over, so to speak. I didn't want both poems to be too similar and after messing around, decided that punctuation would be a way to differentiate them.
JB & AMK: Given the variety of structures in your first book, But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise, it seems like you are interested in how form and structure interact with content. Some poets yield on the side of a less experimental form and structure, whereas you seem to be somewhere near the opposite end-pushing the boundaries of form and structure. To what degree do you think about form and structure of your poems and what do you think this lends to the reading of your poems?
LYB: Reading is a visual medium. I always think about form and structure because I want to look at different kinds of things when I read, so I like to do different things when I write. I try not to write consistently about things or in such a way that I get bored. And maybe I am of that television generation or whatever, where my attention can be held for only so long, but give me a chance to get bored and I'll get bored. So I like to think that form and structure can create a dynamism that keeps readers engaged, interested, and excited. Now, some will argue "well it has to be the content that carries the poem" or that "form is nothing without content." Whatever. You'll rarely hear someone say that content is nothing without form, at least, I've rarely heard it. I'm very concerned with how things look and feel. Form and structure are all part of the mood of a piece, the experience I can put into it and that, hopefully, the reader can get a taste of.
JB & AMK: Is form and structure more important, less important or equally as important than content, narrative cohesiveness, and clarity for you? Has this changed over your career or just something you began experimenting with in this book?
LYB: That's a knotted question. I could say that structure is less important than content, but that form is more important than clarity, and so on. I don't necessarily think of those things as being more or less important. Maybe different priorities or emphases? Sometimes clarity rises to the surface as a chief concern, and sometimes mood does, and sometimes form and structure. This hasn't really changed over my career, it's what I have always been interested in, and I am really glad that I got to put together a book that highlights all the different ways I am interested in creating work.
JB & AMK: What are you going for in "Behind the Christian Door"? It's a pretty wild poem. Typically, I'm not sure I'd care for it, but it evokes a sense of prayer, a sense of longing and dissatisfaction that is oddly appealing.
LYB: I think I'm going for prayer, exhaustion, frustration, excessive dissatisfaction--daring to express an excessive notion in an excessive way, to communicate that feeling of frustration without holding back. Sadly, I think it's daring in American letters to be really overt, unapologetically overt and committed to expressing that. It can frighten people or make them wrinkle their noses. The poem with a message is like someone farted in the room. A kind of historical and/or literary amnesia pervades where it is hard for readers to engage with the art of overtness, to consider the obvious or excessive as being literary. There will be those that say this poem is too obvious or political or too didactic, to which I would say, you betcha, and I'm not ashamed of it. It's all of those things--obvious, political, didactic--but I would disagree with the "too." Sometimes I am on board with "tell the truth, but tell it slant" (Dickinson) and other times, nuh uh. You gotta tell it straight. To which someone else will respond "ok fine but that's not a poem, that's not art" and from there we would probably go on to disagree, and agree, on a great many things.
JB & AMK: "Behind the Christian Door" uses the same anaphora "and when is the state gonna pay us?" in which the poem repeats like a ditch running the length of the poem. At the end, the "us" has been omitted as well as the "gonna" which would be at the end of the line on the other side of the ditch. In what ways does the omissions change the reading of the poem?
LYB: I think that's a question for a reader of the poem? I like to think that it ends it somewhat incompletely, like suddenly falling off the curb or missing a step. Or how in those movies someone is running really fast in a direction they aren't totally sure of and woah! Out of the mist comes the edge of the cliff. That is, things were moving in one way at a certain speed and then suddenly, a difference is encountered that makes you reassess what led you there.
JB & AMK: The use of the informal "gonna" seems to represent speech within a narrative or conversation. How do you think this affectsthe reading and interpretation of the poem?
LYB: As a fluent speaker of Spanish, I can say that English is a rather cumbersome and rocky language (just look at that word "cumbersome.") I think "gonna" makes the poem sound smoother, especially on the tongue. I like to think that the poem sounds conversational, that the reader could hear the words coming out of her mouth, or her friend's mouth, and so on.
