Contemporary Authors

• Four Reincarnations: Poems Milkweed Editions (Minneapolis, MN), 2016

1. Four reincarnations : poems LCCN 2016030740 Type of material Book Personal name Ritvo, Max, 1990-2016, author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Four reincarnations : poems / Max Ritvo. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, 2016. Description 79 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9781571314901 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3618.I8 A6 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/author-page/max-ritvo/

  Max Ritvo is an MFA candidate at Columbia University, where he teaches writing. His chapbook AEONS was selected by Jean Valentine for the Poetry Society of America’s 2014 New York chapbook competition. His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry Blog and The Yale Literary Magazine. He was nominated for a 2014 Pushcart Prize by Poets and Artists. His critical prose has appeared in The Huffington Post and is forthcoming in Parnassus: Poetry in Review. His translations have appeared in Lyrikline, and he is working on an endangered language conservation project. He is a comedian in the sketch comedy troupe His Majesty, The Baby, and an assistant editor at Parnassus.

• New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/books/max-ritvo-poet-who-chronicled-his-cancer-fight-dies-at-25.html

  Max Ritvo, Poet Who Chronicled His Cancer Fight, Dies at 25
  By JOHN SCHWARTZAUG. 26, 2016
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  Max Ritvo in 2014. Credit Ashley Woo
  Max Ritvo, an accomplished poet who spent much of his life under the cloud of cancer while gaining wide attention writing and speaking about it, died of the disease on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 25.

  His mother, Dr. Ariella Ritvo-Slifka, confirmed his death.

  Mr. Ritvo talked about his work and illness in interviews on radio programs including “Only Human” on WNYC and “The New Yorker Radio Hour.” His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine and The New Yorker, and his first published volume of poetry, “Four Reincarnations,” will appear in the fall.

  The poet Louise Glück, who taught Mr. Ritvo at Yale, called the book “one of the most original and ambitious first books in my experience,” adding that his work is “marked by intellectual bravado and verbal extravagance.”

  Mr. Ritvo was 16 when he learned he had Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare pediatric cancer. He had gone to doctors after feeling pain in his side. At first they suspected pneumonia, but fearing something worse they took a tissue sample while he was under sedation.

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  He woke up in a cancer ward.

  “I remember thinking, ‘This is so terrible!’” he told Mary Harris of WNYC. “‘I’m just a young, acrobatic, wiry, handsome bloke of 16, and it’s so sad for all these old people, because they must have run out of beds and I just have pneumonia.’”

  A year of aggressive treatment brought about remission, and over the next four and a half years he finished high school and attended Yale.

  The cancer returned in Mr. Ritvo’s senior year. He nevertheless completed his degree in 2013 and this year earned a master of fine arts from Columbia University, where he became a teaching fellow. He also served as poetry editor at Parnassus: Poetry in Review.

  Throughout his illness, he rejected the clichés of being an “inspiring victim of cancer,” his mother said. He counseled other families going through treatment for Ewing’s sarcoma, and spoke out often about the disease and the importance of research.

  His poetry, said a writer for Boston Review, is composed “of candor, of splendor and of abandon.” It could veer from despair to humor in lines like these, from “Radiation in New Jersey, Convalescence in New York”:

  I come from a place where the water

  is so barren that when you drink it

  the fish of the throat die,

  causing malignant thirst.

  What’s a dazzler like you

  doing in a dump like my bed?

  Last August Mr. Ritvo married Victoria Jackson-Hanen, now a doctoral student in psychology at Princeton. They had met during a summer academic program at Cambridge University in 2005. After she moved from England to the United States, they began dating in 2013.

  Dr. Ritvo-Slifka, a research scientist, recalled that her son, thinking about marriage but knowing his prospects for survival were questionable, had asked her, “Is it fair of me to propose?”

  Max Joseph Ritvo was born Dec. 19, 1990, in Los Angeles. A literary prodigy, he was writing at 3, his mother said.

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  At Yale, he joined an experimental comedy group called His Majesty, the Baby. He entertained its other members with outlandish and often profane riffs, said Andrew Kahn, the group’s producer and manager.

  His sketches could be challenging for audiences: in one, he used the medical port in his chest as a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy, putting googly eyes on the protrusion and jiggling it with his hand while chatting with it about cancer treatments.

  Mr. Ritvo’s body bore three tattoos depicting birds that he had acquired after enduring each new wound or scar. “He wanted to juxtapose it,” Ms. Ritvo explained, referring to his cancer, “with something beautiful.”

  In “Poem to My Litter,” which The New Yorker published in June, Mr. Ritvo wrote of an experiment in which cells cloned from his tumors were placed in mice in the hope of finding more promising treatments. He names each of the mice Max. He wrote:

  My doctors split my tumors up and scattered them

  into the bones of twelve mice. We give

  the mice poisons I might, in the future, want

  for myself. We watch each mouse like a crystal ball.

  The hoped-for therapies did not emerge. He wrote:

  And since I do absolutely nothing (my pride, like my fur, all gone) nothing happens to me. And if a whole lot

  of nothing happens to you, Maxes, that’s peace.

  Which is what we want. Trust me.

  Along with his wife and mother, Mr. Ritvo is survived by his father, Edward Ritvo; his sisters, Victoria Ritvo Black and Skylre Oryx; and a stepbrother, David Slifka. His stepfather, Alan B. Slifka, a New York investor and philanthropist who was the founding chairman of the Big Apple Circus, died in 2011. Dr. Ritvo-Slifka leads a foundation that bears Mr. Slifka’s name and which, among other missions, supports research into sarcoma.

  In Max Ritvo’s final weeks, he remained cleareyed. In a podcast interview on Aug. 14 with the media personality Dr. Drew Pinsky, he said, his voice weak, “This is end-of-life stuff.”

  Over time, he said, his work had shifted “away from sort of ebullient death poetry and fighting poetry and poetry of, sort of, the bloods and the squirmies and the guts, and more toward trying to figure out what death is, and what my place in the world is.”

  His poetry sustained him, his family said. “He said the day he stopped writing, that would be the end of it,” his wife said in an interview. She added: “He was writing three days before he died.”

  On Monday, Dr. Ritvo-Slifka said, her son was too weak to write poetry.

  “That’s it,” she said quoting him. “I can’t write any more.”

  The family called in the hospice nurses, who gave him sedatives. He died the next morning.

  A version of this article appears in print on August 27, 2016, on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Max Ritvo, 25, Poet Who Chronicled His Cancer Fight. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

• Poetry Foundation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/max-ritvo

  Max Ritvo
  Poet Details
  1990–2016
  http://maxritvo.com
  Black and white image of Max Ritvo
  Ashley Woo
  Max Ritvo was the author of the poetry collection Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Editions, 2016) and the chapbook, AEONS, for which he was awarded a 2014 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. He earned his BA from Yale University and his MFA from Columbia University.

  Ritvo's poetry has also appeared in Poetry, the New Yorker, and on Poets.org. His eight poems that appeared in Boston Review, introduced by Lucie Brock-Broido, were named as one of their top 20 poetry selections published in 2015. His prose and interviews have appeared in Huffington Post, Divedapper, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His radio appearances include NPR’s Only Human, the New Yorker Radio Hour, and The Dr. Drew Podcast.

  Ritvo was a poetry editor at Parnassus: Poetry in Review and a teaching fellow at Columbia University. He lived in Manhattan until his death in August 2016.

• NPR - http://www.npr.org/2016/08/27/491664516/max-ritvo-poet-who-chronicled-his-battle-with-cancer-dies-at-25

  AROUND THE NATION

  Max Ritvo, Poet Who Chronicled His Battle With Cancer, Dies At 25
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  August 27, 201610:45 PM ET
  THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

  Poet Max Ritvo who chronicled his long battle with cancer has died. He was 25.
  Judith Eigen Sarna/AP
  Max Ritvo, a poet who chronicled his long battle with cancer in works that were both humorous and searing, has died. He was 25.

  Ritvo died Tuesday morning at his home in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, his mother, Ariella Ritvo-Slifka, said Friday.

  Ritvo was diagnosed at 16 with Ewing's sarcoma, a rare cancer that affects bones and soft tissue in children and young adults.

  Treatment brought about a remission that permitted Ritvo to finish high school and attend Yale University, where he performed in an improv comedy group. His teachers included Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Gluck.

  Ritvo's cancer returned in his senior year, but he completed Yale and this year earned a master's degree from Columbia University.

  Ritvo's battle with the disease informed his works. A June poem in The New Yorker discussed an experiment where cells from his tumors were used in cancer drug treatment experiments with mice.

  "I want my mice to be just like me," Ritvo wrote. "I don't have any children. I named them all Max. First they were Max 1, Max 2, but now they're all just Max. No playing favorites."

  Ritvo's first book of poetry, "Four Reincarnations," is scheduled to be published this fall.

  In radio and podcast interviews, Ritvo spoke about his suffering. But he rejected any idea that he was a victim of the disease - especially a heroic one.

  At their wedding last summer, Ritvo and his wife, Victoria, banned words such as "inspirational" from the speeches, his mother said.

  "He was about love and compassion, human and animal rights and about writing and sharing himself with the world," she said. "He didn't want people to see him as an invalid."

  Ritvo saw humor not as a coping mechanism but as an intrinsic part of dealing with his illness.

  Web Resources

  WNYC's Only Human podcast: The Prank Your Body Plays On Life
  "You know, we imagine in our hysteria that it's disrespectful for the sadness. But when you laugh at something horrible, you're just illuminating a different side of it that was already there and it's not a deflection, it makes it deeper and makes it realer," he said last month in the WNYC Studios podcast "Only Human."

  Ritvo also inspired people with his attitude, his wife said.

  "Max said 'I love you' to everyone. He hugged everyone. He just wanted there to be more love and laughter," she said.

  Ritvo was writing until several days before his death and had told his family that the end would be near when he was no longer able to write.

  The day before his death, he told his mother and wife: "I can't write anymore, I can't speak, I can't breathe ... I'm not me ... You guys have to be OK with me going," his mother said.

• Slate - http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/10/a_conversation_with_the_poet_max_ritvo_about_friendship_and_cancer.html

  “I’m Glad That I Don’t Have to Figure Out the Meaning of Life”
  1.1k
  50
  2
  A conversation with Max Ritvo.

  By Shon Arieh-Lerer and Andrew Kahn
  Shon Arieh-Lerer, Victoria Ritvo, Max Ritvo, and Andrew Kahn at Max and Victoria's wedding, August 1, 2015.
  Shon Arieh-Lerer, Victoria Ritvo, Max Ritvo, and Andrew Kahn at Max and Victoria’s wedding on Aug. 1, 2015.
  Ashley Woo

  Our best friend Max Ritvo died on Aug. 23. He was a poet whose work appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and the Boston Review. Max was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma at the age of 16, and again at 21, about a year after we met him in college. We performed with him in our comedy troupe His Majesty, the Baby; edited each other’s poems and term papers; and ghostwrote each other’s texts to our crushes and parents.

  Max’s poems are intimate and exuberant. They speak directly to the reader’s body. We talked with him on July 13 and 14 in his bedroom in Los Angeles, focusing on one poem, “Universe Where We Weren’t Artists.” The poem is about our friendship and ends his first book, Four Reincarnations, which was published this week. Max’s wife, Victoria, was present for one of our sessions; for some of the time he was doing exercises with a physical therapist. He was in pain, but he was accustomed to being in pain. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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  Max Ritvo: There’s going to be loose ends, at any point, for anyone speaking, for anyone existing, and that’s fine. It doesn’t really matter how old you are. The present tense presents you with feelings of irresolution, and the future tense, if you let it, will, too, fathomlessly, for all time.

  I’m glad that I don’t have to figure out the meaning of life. There are a lot of things that I was worried about when I was younger—like, I’ve gotta figure out my relationship to privilege perfectly, I need to figure out how to live a life that’s balanced and ethical, I need to be totally autonomous and independent. And I didn’t get there, and it’s fine.

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  In this interview I don’t expect us to do anything other than what we do every time we speak. I’m less and less interested in intellectual athleticism and lifting heavy weights. I’m not Atlas. In the end, what Kazuo Ohno did was finger dances. You get a lot done with your fingers.

  Universe Where We Weren’t Artists

  I am given a reward:
  You two will pick
  where I rest.

  We are three sweet hunters gazing
  at the fat-soaked bog.

  Down each gun-hole
  we seek the glass lens

  that would explode the image
  of our prey.

  A cuff of air.
  We look up to
  the hilarious moon.

  I fall down in white mud.

  When the breath starts to be ragged,
  tickle me, my deepest beloveds—
  so that the raggedness becomes confused.

  Reprinted with permission of the Poetry Society of America.

  Max: I wanted to write a poem in which I felt the most fundamental loss of all. And the most radical, the most extreme, the saddest universe I could envision was the universe in which we persist, but we aren’t artists. It’s you guys giving me comfort in the saddest of all possible worlds.

  This last stanza to me is one of the most tender I’ve ever written. It’s what I want at the end. My breath is getting ragged as I talk to you guys, right now, and there will come a time where the raggedness is lethal, but if you tickle me, it’ll be lethally funny. It’ll be unclear whether the last thing that comes in is a note of pleasure or a note of agony. That’s what I wanted the book, as a whole, to end on. It’s what you guys have taught me—that I get to have a confused end. And that having a confused end, that’s the complete end.

  Andrew Kahn: Your poems do seem to embrace states other than perceptual clarity: anger, confusion, compassion.

  Max: I haven’t really departed from writing poetry for the reasons I did when I was 12 or 13. At that point I was very angsty and confused. I had a lot going on internally and writing was a space where I wasn’t really asked to resolve it or figure it out but to crystallize it.

  I’ve been in therapy a very long time and the kind of therapy I was in wasn’t really interested in changing me. It was interested in getting me to have “insight.” There’s something kind of horrifying about a life model that teaches you that all you gotta do is get it. You don’t need to try to be a better person, really: That’s all going to come along secondarily. Your job is to get it so articulately that your psychosis becomes part of your speaking apparatus.

  Andrew: The images in this poem are different than the images in your other poems. They’re haiku images, in a way, to the point that some of them are freestanding nouns, the way in a Zen haiku you’ll have freestanding nouns.

  Shon Arieh-Lerer: “A cuff of air.”

  Andrew: The space in it, mentally, is very different. I find that there are big cognitive leaps between the stanzas. I feel like each stanza is like a little stone placed on a grid, and then far away, there’s another stone somewhere.

  Shon: It’s very dreamlike. A lot of what goes on in dreams is how you think during the dream. My experience is that those dream thoughts also control what physically happens in dreams. But this is different—this poem is like the visual percepts of a dream without any of that mental stuff.

  Andrew: Do you see yourself as shooting yourself in the poem?

  Max: No. Just looking. And then air knocking me over.

  Shon: The cuff of air comes right after the explosion. So that’s like the world picking up on our minds—

  Max: Yeah.

  Shon: —and knocking us over. The whole thing is about inversions. Inverting the gun seems to represent how we invert our thoughts in order to examine the act of thinking itself. We look deep into our minds and bodies, and then that’s what creates the outside world.

  Andrew: I see it as shooting oneself with a blank cartridge.

  Shon: That’s how I originally saw it.

  Max: And then we look up to something. It’s the moon, it’s hilarious. It’s everything we worship. It’s how silly a cocked gun is, how silly whatever we’re doing is. That’s what we look up to at the end of the day. And that’s not what proper hunters venerate.

  Shon: This reminds me of the Zen aphorism “the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.” Here, our guns are like the finger—but we’re pointing the guns at ourselves, not the moon. Then by examining ourselves—looking into the scope—we’re suddenly knocked on our backs, and we’re looking straight at the moon. No more fingers, no more guns. It’s kind of like a Zen moment of sudden enlightenment.

  Max: Yeah, exactly. It’s so much realer of a moon than when the finger is telling you to look at the moon. But in the end, I fall down, because it’s hard doing all this. It’s hard enough being an artist, it’s even harder being in a universe with your loves, who are artists, and not being an artist. Which I think we’ve all been forced to do at times.

  Andrew: Yesterday you had an angry exchange with somebody on the phone. You were in a state of discursive hyper-clarity and lucidity: This is exactly what I’m thinking, I’m going from Point A to Point B. It’s a state that I’m familiar with, too. Does that state enter into your work?

  Max: I think it’s a newer mode to my anger repertoire. My anger repertoire used to be: Look at how demented I can get. If you push me, you’re going to produce an image-making faculty unlike anything you’ve ever seen. You’re going to get the kind of curses you get in Ezekiel.

  “As much as we like to pretend we’re in it for the journey, we’d actually like to create the final piece of art.”
  Max Ritvo
  The newer mode is some of my nastier elements merging with my mentor Louise Glück, who taught me that if you really want to cut somebody, keep your logic as sharp as an obsidian knife. That’s going to be able to cut way deeper than chainsaw.

  Shon: You do the same thing in play, in comedy, and in conversation. Sometimes you build a universe out of a single detail, giving that detail friends and company: images and what-ifs and mixed metaphors. But when you’re in a lot of pain, you don’t always have the energy, patience, or will to build worlds, and then you just want to say truth and that’s it. That’s also a form of play. Some people would call it truth-seeking, but that’s not the point. The point is to stab with that obsidian knife, not to kill the thing you’ve stabbed.

  Max: I think Louise has an essay where she says there are two different voices when you write good poetry. One is: Look at all the stuff I have to say to you. Isn’t that neat? The other voice grabs you by the throat and says, You really need to hear this right now. The first voice is what gets me up and going: flashes of purple and science fiction and robots. That’s a general firing impulse. But as I get sicker, I’m more and more drawn to that second voice. I think part of that is me maturing as a writer. I think the older I’ve gotten the more interested I’ve been in little electric whips of truth as—they make me laugh more.

  Shon: So why are we hunters?

  Max: We’re seekers. As much as we like to pretend we’re in it for the journey, we’d actually like to create the final piece of art, a perfect piece of art, to have that ecstatic communion—which we know doesn’t really exist. But there’s still that urge.

  It doesn’t make any sense for us to hunt anything in the outside world because we’re nonviolent. So we take our guns and flip them upside down, like Elmer Fudd. We’re looking in the barrel and there’s a telescope lens in there. I almost put “inept hunters.” There’s no such thing as a sweet hunter, especially not to a vegan.

  Shon: That’s the main thing that confused me. Why would I ever be a hunter?

  Andrew: I was also projecting certain anxieties onto the poem. There have been moments—when we were getting to know each other—even after we were getting to know each other—where one of us felt that the other was judging them. These moments were almost always miscommunications of some sort. But they were extraordinarily painful. And I was afraid that in depicting me as a hunter you were suggesting that I was in some way an aggressive or adversarial person.

  Max: I’ve never felt … I’ve felt, Andrew, sometimes, like I’m letting you down. And that’s been very hard on me. But I’ve grown stronger over the past year or two. And in that time I think you’ve grown stronger, too. And those feelings have really been secondary or tertiary to me.

  I didn’t know this poem had hurt you guys. I saw it as a very pure expression of the greatest gift I could give you, to tell you that when my life is meaningless you give it meaning. Do you remember what was happening when I wrote it? I was getting terminal scans for the first time. Aggression towards you was not in my mind at all. What was in my mind was: This is now me being told I’m dying.

  Shon: “You two will pick where I rest.”

  Andrew: I’m getting very emotional.

  Max: You guys will bury me. Now look at where we are. Do you want to get up in there and start tickling?

  (Shon tickles Max’s palm.)

  Andrew: Finger dance.

  (Max pretends to die.)

  Max: That would be so funny. (To his wife Victoria:) How mad would you be?

  Victoria Ritvo: Very mad.

  Shon: You’d come around. That would be such a great death.

  Victoria: No, don’t do it! When we’re all sitting around your deathbed, we’ll tickle you, OK?

  Slate Academy: A Year of Great Books

  Rediscover the joys and surprises of great literature! Spend 2016 reading and discussing six great novels alongside Slate's books and culture columnist Laura Miller and her fellow Slatesters. Join us today.
  ---

  Four Reincarnations by Max Ritvo. Milkweed Editions.

  See all the pieces in the Slate Book Review.

• New Republic - https://newrepublic.com/article/137253/max-ritvo-it-takes-ton-chutzpah-reincarnate

  Max Ritvo: “It takes a ton of chutzpah to reincarnate.”
  An interview with the poet Max Ritvo about illness, improvisation, and his first book, published posthumously next week.
  BY SARAH RUHL
  September 28, 2016

  FOUR REINCARNATIONS: POEMS by Max RitvoMilkweed Editions, 88 pp., $22.00
  Max Ritvo, a poet of uncommon grace, vision and originality, died in August at the age of 25. You can read his poems in the New Yorker and Boston Review, and you can even hear and see his poetry read aloud and animated on WNYC. Max wrote with an incandescent mind, a fearless and playful heart, and a thrilling ear. He received his M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia and won a 2014 Poetry Society Fellowship for his chapbook, Aeons. He wrote of the body and his cancer with a scope and metaphysics beyond any simple narrative about illness.

  In his poem Afternoon, he writes, “When I was about to die / my body lit up / like when I leave my house / without my wallet. What am I missing? I ask, patting my chest pocket.” His poems have both a staggering range and a palpable intimacy. To his friend Melissa, who was taken by Ewing’s sarcoma the year before Max was, he writes: “I have spoken to you of heaven—I simply meant the eyes are suns that see. / Seeing is the faces’ nervous delicious Lord.”

  I was lucky enough to interview Max Ritvo this past summer about his beautiful book, Four Reincarnations.

  Sarah Ruhl: Four Reincarnations engages illness, spirituality and the body in utterly direct and transcendent ways. Can you talk a little bit about this word “spirituality”? I feel it’s a word that is out of fashion in poetry circles, and only in fashion in certain sections of the bookstores these days. How can the poetry world reclaim the world of the spirit in a secular age?

  Max Ritvo: How can the poetry world reclaim the world of the spirit in the secular age? What a wonderful question! It points at a big, terrible misunderstanding we’re all in.

  Secularity has done a lot to challenge our relationship to anything supernatural. But spirituality needn’t be intrinsically supernatural. It can be paranatural. Or sometimes just natural.

  I am a spiritual person. It means a lot to me to be able to say this. But my spirituality doesn’t require me to pray a number of times a day, or accept any particular cosmological order, or even to believe in things that there aren’t proof for. All my spirituality asks of me is that I put myself in situations that feel holy. That take my breath away and make me go I can’t believe something as beautiful as this is happening to me.

  Religions are amazing at giving people feelings of holiness. They’re great spirit-catalyzers. The first time I heard Schubert’s Agnus Dei at a Mass, it made me feel like my forehead had never belonged anywhere, but suddenly knew that it was right where it belonged, holding my face together. As the minister of my best friend’s wedding, I spent some time meditating in a room where someone had prayed every day for the past fifty years, never a day missed. The air I breathed in that room—full of an enormous, palpable effort of love—was the air I breathed into their ceremony an hour later. And it made my speaking more beautiful than I could’ve managed on my own.

  On an fMRI we see the exact same neurons fire during both feast and fantasy.
  I also think blueberries are holy. When I see a bowl, in the kitchen, I sometimes get filled with cravings so strong they border on hallucination. As I fantasize about the blueberries, I think about fMRI’s. That the neurons I use to imagine blueberries being eaten are identical to the ones that fire when I actually, really eat them. On an fMRI we see the exact same neurons fire during both feast and fantasy. Imagined blueberries just produce weaker electrical activity. In a funny way then, my cravings are prophecies. They reincarnate, or pre-incarnate, the actual brain that will be in my skull when the blueberries are in my mouth.

  My spirituality, I’ve found, is richest when I let myself use tools that are both secular and mystic to make the world holy.

  I write poems about Buddha. I also have a poem about Blindsight, a neurological condition in which an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain allows an otherwise completely blind person to “see.” Though the person describes seeing absolutely nothing, they slot discs into flaps positioned around their body with astonishing accuracy. I have written a poem in which Elohim and boiled green beans both require lavish cogitation and the full resources of my heart. My family is holy, and so I write them poems. I can’t think of anything right now I could immediately disqualify as the spiritual centerpiece of a poem.

  I don’t think the spiritual world needs to be claimed or reclaimed by anyone or anything. Let religion lay hands upon it. Let secularity lay hands upon it. But let the hands be gently laid. Let anything that clasps offer the kind of prayer it wants to pray. Let this all be poetry.

  SR: Can you talk about the significance of the word reincarnation in the title of your book?

  MR: Each of the four sections in the book is a different life. The first witnesses the birth of the universe, the second goes through a nasty break up, the third tells of perfect love in a time of cancer, and the fourth sends poems from an underworld. But every “I” in the book is me, however much time has passed between sections, however different the voice sounds as it passes into the world. So the lives are reincarnations.

  A reincarnation also contains within it the depths of death and the peaks of life and heaven. To reincarnate is perhaps the most difficult and courageous journey one could ever take. You go to hell and back. You leave behind not just your loved ones, but your memory of them. And it’s a journey without a destination. It takes a ton of chutzpah to reincarnate.

  Furthermore, reincarnation is sort of a defiant screw you to my cancer and death. If I can have four reincarnations I can have four hundred. Reincarnation is a kind of immortality where I’ll keep crawling out of hell and back to the card table to play another hand forever.

  SR: You have a background in comedy and improvisation and performance, which is perhaps rare for a poet. Do you see your poems as improvisations or performances at all?

  MR: I think all poems are performances. Any time a poem is read out loud, it’s performed. (Sometimes quite badly!) And I think language performs itself in your head when you read alone. We made language up to perform for one another. There’s this kind of intrinsic intersubjectivity in words.

  Improvisations... now that’s more complicated. (And I should say up front, I perform primarily sketch comedy and mostly voraciously consume improv.) Improv is in some ways extremely messy and anarchic. If, god forbid, someone ever decided to restage an improv show, the first thing they’d start doing is making a lot of cuts. At the same time, improv relies on tropes and performance clichés to get the performers on the same page, and also as a touchstone for the audience. Since there’s so much that lurks in the unpredictable waters of an improv show, everyone takes any flotation device thrown. I don’t my want my poems to have excesses, and I don’t want any stock characters showing up in them.

  But improv has these flaws because it’s so ambitious. It’s something new on stage every time! I want my poems to thrill like that. And an improv scene has to, by definition, make room for whatever the performers, and even the audience, puts into it. I want my poems to be so brave, so capacious, so Whitmanian.

  Any improv performer will tell you that the first rule of improv is to say yes to what your scene partner offers and the second is to say and, and build upon your scene partner’s offering with your own. And I hope that my poems, as I write them, are willing to say yes, and in their more solitary way. If a metaphor wants to get out of hand, I have to let it get out of hand. Say yes to it, let it and me. Improv performers really listen to one another. They listen very deeply. And I want to listen to my poems. And, for that matter, I want my poems to listen to you.

  SR: How do you know if a poem is listening to you?

  MR: When your memories, things you’ve never disclosed to anyone, start appearing in your mind as you read the poem. When you discover that a poem links up to a chain of images from your own life like a song links up to its music video. And one more bellwether—when you read a poem, you ask yourself, “What is going on in me internally, to cause me to feel this way?” I call this Fruitful Bewilderment, and it’s the only way I ever want my readers to feel bewildered.

  Sarah Ruhl is a Pulitzer prize finalist playwright living in Brooklyn. Her new play Scenes from Court Life is currently in production at Yale Repertory Theater.

• Poets & Writers - https://www.pw.org/content/the_world_beyond_a_last_interview_with_max_ritvo

  The World Beyond: A Last Interview With Max Ritvo

  by Dorothea Lasky
  ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
  9.30.16
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  Max Ritvo (1990–2016) is the author of the poetry collection Four Reincarnations, which will be published by Milkweed Editions in September, just over a month since the poet’s death, on August 23, 2016, after a nine-year battle with cancer. He was twenty-five. Poet Dorothea Lasky spoke with Ritvo in June about his new book, performing poetry, the Illiad, and Sufjan Stevens.

  I met Max Ritvo just over three years ago, on the first day of his first workshop at Columbia University’s MFA program, which I was teaching. After that first class, he told me he wanted to try something new with his writing process and asked if I could help him. I obliged and sent him a series of experiential writing exercises: take several baths, drink many juices; adorn many costumes. After being the subject of my sadistic enterprise, he started writing new poems, many of which are included in his 2014 Poetry Society of America prize-winning chapbook, AEONS. In the following years, he published poems and prose in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Boston Review. His first full-length collection of poems, Four Reincarnations, is a book that in its four parts tells the tale, in four directions, of a soul unafraid to speak. The persona of his book transcends fear, with a voice draped with echoes of Samuel Greenberg, Wallace Stevens, lounge singers, and holy hymnals. The voice is wholly American, because Ritvo’s poetry represents the hard-won language of suffering and rebirth: Ritvo was diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer, at age sixteen. After a few years of remission the cancer returned, and eventually began to spread. When we spoke this past summer, Ritvo’s cancer was terminal; he passed away two months later, at the age of twenty-five.

  The book’s title is fitting. Ritvo’s voice is one that will surely live on, well beyond the physical plane of the young poet’s tragically short life. His work, as his former mentor Sarah Ruhl tells us, will “make [us] love poetry again.” To use Ritvo’s own words, from an interview with NPR last year in which he spoke of making plans for the future with his new wife, despite his prognosis: “I think as long as you engage with reality sometimes, it’s okay to acknowledge the fact that reality isn’t very well suited to us. We do better elsewhere.”

  When did you first decide to become a poet?
  I’ve written poetry since I was four, and have never taken a break longer than a month. It’s just a part of how I get by in the world. I used it to pick up chicks in high school. I used it to help me through my cancer. Poetry has always been there for me. And it’s never felt like a burden to make time for it, it’s so much fun to write. When my second cancer came back, and I realized my life was going to be very short, I decided to use every minute I possibly could to write poetry. This is perhaps the moment I decided to become a Poet. I still can’t bring myself to put “Poet” on business cards though, I just say “Writer.”

  You are bicoastal and grew up both in Los Angeles and New York City. How did this sense of the United States play into the crafting of your poetic voice?
  Cyeah dude. Totes magotes I can talk about Lah! I lived in L.A. until I was sixteen, then moved to New York City for cancer treatment and have been back and forth ever since. When my poetry is set in a city, it’s almost exclusively New York. Or a phantasmagorical city that is distinctly New York-tinged. Apartments, subways, dirty birds. When my poems are set in the natural world, they come from my west coast life. No meadows, no forests. Oceans and deserts. I grew up scrambling after lizards and writing haikus about granite in Joshua Tree National Park. And I have spent far more time on a Jet Ski than any non-L.A. person on the planet.

  My voice has a certain breeziness and ease to it that I associate with L.A. diction. But I really care about words, I’m passionate about them to a point of neurosis, and that’s all New York. New Yorkers have a very special relationship with reading. People read here. All sorts of people. On the subway. And in parks and coffee shops. And they sell dingy books on the side of the street. And they buy dingy books on the side of the street. Sure, people write in public in L.A.—but they never read in public. L.A. people just want to be seen writing a screenplay and get discovered by a producer. New Yorkers, they just wanna read, even if it’s a Rupert Murdoch rag.

  Can you tell me about what inspired you to write Four Reincarnations? How did the book come to be?
  It’s funny how a conceit can sometimes get away from itself and become a good book! I initially had a very rigid idea for what my first book would be. It was called Eight Reincarnations. It was divided into eight short sections. Each section opened with a Heavenly poem. These poems were taut, elegant love poems, complete with dedications. Then we moved from Heaven to Earth. Three or four messy, bombastic poems full of Indian mythology, cancer hospitals, and ex-lovers. Then, of course, each section resolved in the Underworld. A single ragged, clipped lyric about death. I even color-coded the poem titles to hammer the point home—a lovely lavender for Heaven poems, and green for the Earth poems, and the Underworld was pitch black.

  Of course, this was untenable. Goofy. I love Changing Light at Sandover (James Merrill) a bit too much for my own good, probably. But the poems forced me to my senses. They started to speak to one another in ways I couldn’t predict, and demanded that they neighbor poems who would make them more emotionally and dramatically rich. The tiresome eight sections shrank to four. But each section did have the feeling of the same life form, or I inhabiting four very different narratives, four different lives. So they were still Reincarnations! I got to keep that in the title!

  What was your writing process in creating Four Reincarnations? Is it the same or different from the poems you are writing currently?
  The poems from Four Reincarnations span a broad time period. From my second semester my sophomore year of college back in 2010 all the way up to a few months ago. My process had some remarkable consistencies considering this, and considering the radically different circumstances these poems were written under. In this book, there are poems written during my remission, when I thought I’d live to be eighty or ninety. And there are poems written with the knowledge that I’ll probably die this year. There are poems written in the unimaginably comfortable bed at my honeymoon hotel, and in hospital cots. But, almost exclusively, these poems were composed between 11 pm and 1 am. Almost all of them were composed while listening to the Sufjan Stevens song “Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois” on loop. For reasons beyond my understanding, this song is the only one I can tolerate when I compose poetry. It’s not even my favorite song. It’s just my poem song. It makes my brain feel like it’s being shaken clear like an etch-a-sketch.

  My editing process is also very consistent. I write a poem. Send it to my reader, Elizabeth Metzger. Elizabeth insults the poem. I smart and vow to never change a word. A month later I accept almost all of her edits. Three months later I decide half the poem is irrelevant and boring and cut it. Most of my poems, in the first draft, are two or three pages long, and they rarely break a page and a quarter after editing. You’d think this would make me self-conscious when I’m writing a first draft. That I’d worry much of what I’m writing isn’t important, and will end up being cut. And that that would paralyze me. But no, I’m always convinced this poem is different, and needs to be this length, and I’ll keep every word. And I never do.

  You said earlier that poetry has helped you get through cancer. Can you ruminate on that? How does Four Reincarnations engage with mortality within the context of your diagnosis?
  Poetry is the purple plastic squirt gun I brought to The Shootout with cancer. This squirt gun is both useless and my super secret weapon. I write poetry about my emotions. It’s purgative, cathartic, even sometimes angsty. I also write poetry marked by my experiences of the world beyond me. When I write a poem my favorite little bits of what I’ve seen or heard or read are, in a way, sealed into my mind and body. It’s like I’m filling myself with World-Tumors in the hopes that they’ll push out the tumors built of my DNA, the Me-Tumors. This method of combat has proved itself useless in the empirical battle against my tumors’ spread. But it gives me the energy and peace of mind to shovel hateful, curative chemotherapies into my maw for nine years and counting. (With some long breaks.)

  Writing Four Reincarnations in the context of cancer forced the poems to meditate on the relationship between growth (or growths) and death. It’s a book in which dead things grow—in which bones shoot right out of the ground as in the poem “The Big Loser.” In which promising things grow wrong and wish to die—as in “Dawn of Man,” in which a caterpillar ends up being in a human body post-chrysalis instead of becoming the butterfly he dreamt of being. Cancer isn’t really out to kill you; it’s just out to grow. My cancer wants to explore new places, just like me as a hospital-bed-confined sixteen-year-old. I just happen to be those places.

  Dying is easy to talk about. It’s just another kind of growth. It’s just more of the passage of time. Talking about death itself is another story. Talking about no time at all is hard. All my work approaches a limit in what it can express. I try not to force it—grace will leave you if you try to hammer a poem too hard and get it to say one specific thing. But maybe one day my distress and cognition will give me that last little bit of insight. I have to keep trying. I’m too frightened not to. I’m too curious not to. But I wonder if cancer, which is growth and violent pain, must be stripped out of that particular piece of writing in order for me to do it. Cancer reflects back at me my desperate will to live. It’ll never let me interrogate Death Itself. The question is how to let it all go slack, while still being in the world of language long enough to cough up a truth or two.

  What poets and artists have influenced you the most?
  Berryman has been a massive influence. Abject comedy, and an outsized self, and silly voices. Plath too, and Glück. Perfect metaphors and lethal irony. Thylias Moss really made me feel like my poems could be massive one-man-shows, self-epics. And her metaphors are so wild and bonkers but cut right at the heart. Like you could never come up with it, but once you heard it, you know it’s the only possible way to express it. And Homer is a big influence. I really love theIlliad and Odyssey, as flawed as they are. I read them once every six months or so. Since I was a little boy, I’ve had deep faith in biting off more than I can chew. Homer is still the best at this.

  Now having done it, what advice would you tell a fellow poet beginning to construct a first book?
  Come up with your plans. Be ready to let them go. Let the poems do the talking. They know who they need in their corner better than you do.

  Order and sequence really matter. A book is its own artwork.

  All poets are heroes. Your book is your hero story. The sequence of the poems needs to tell that story. Take your reader on an adventure.

  Be willing to drop a great poem out of your book for the sake of the book. Chances are, if it’s really vital to your story, it’ll find a way back in eventually.

  What are two favorite first books of poetry and why?
  I love Alan Dugan’s first book, Poems. It’s one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, and nobody in the world thinks like Dugan. Many of the I’s of the book are monstrous exaggerations of all that’s worst in Dugan. Even as he hates on other people, the take-away is very obviously self-hate. And it’s a riot. The second section of Four Reincarnations is a hate section, and it wouldn’t exist without “Lovesong, I and Thou,” the funniest poem in Poems. The book also has so much confidence, clarity, ease. I worship its light touch.

  My other favorite first book is Prufrock and Other Observations. It’s spooky, it’s vaudeville, and it fuses high phantasmagoria with social anxiety and crippling neurosis. In some ways, both Poems and Prufrock remind me of Van Gogh—they show me a world refracted back and blown out of all veristic proportion by the intensity of the artist’s emotions. The poem Hysteria, in which Eliot essentially travels down a laughing woman’s mouth until he’s in her screaming stomach, has never left me for longer than a week since I first read it. Another thing I love about Prufrock and Other Observations is how short it is. It’s a mercilessly brief book—no more than forty pages. And that makes it that much more unforgettable. It’s like how the chef Thomas Keller says that he deliberately portions his courses so that they’re slightly too small. Your mind tries to hold onto the flavors that much harder if your tongue feels abandoned just a moment before its ecstasy is completed.

  When you read your poems out loud, you ooze charisma, like the way a classical performer does—how does your understanding of the effect language and gesture has on an audience affect the way your poems are constructed?
  Performance is central to my understanding of what a poem is, because all the language that’s moved me the most has come out of the mouths of human beings. The speech that has come out of my wife’s mouth, my mother’s mouth, the stupid mouth of the guy in high school who super-soakered me in front of a girl I was trying to impress—this is the language that has moved me most. All of that speech was full of music that tore open my heart. The music of natural speech is fathomlessly deep. Just by peeling my vowels open and pitching my voice up, I can make a sentence sarcastic, I can make it mean its opposite and riddle it with nastiness. Just by growling the syllables under my breath, a simple statement of fact turns into a threat. Why would I divorce language from this magic power? What more could I want for my poems than for them to participate in the drama of human life?

  Dorothea Lasky is the author of four collections of poetry: ROME (Liveright, 2014) Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), and AWE (Wave Books, 2007). Lasky has also written several chapbooks, includingPoetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). Her writing has appeared in Poetry, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Atlantic, and Boston Review. She is a coeditor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s, 2013).

• Divedapper - https://www.divedapper.com/interview/max-ritvo/

  MAX RITVO
  Interviewed By: Kaveh Akbar
  About Max

  Max Ritvo's debut collection of poems, Four Reincarnations, will be published this fall from Milkweed Editions. Ritvo is the author of Aeons, selected by Jean Valentine for a 2014 Poetry Society of American Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Manhattan.

  Max's Website
  Four Reincarnations
  Buy

  The failure of the sublime is part of the sublime. I’m instinctually a big-game hunter. I think most poets are.Each poem is both, “I want you to have this jewel,” and me handing them the jewel.So since mustard gas, the medical community has really been playing ketchup!Everybody dies with loose ends. You can be ninety, you can be twenty-five. These are my particular loose ends.I am a sense-organ guy who loves magic. And dreams are magic. Whatever one can say of heaven or hell, there’s a supernatural realm and it’s right in front of us.I was very very sad, Kaveh. I’d gotten a terminal cancer diagnosis, and a two-year relationship fell apart in a chemo room. I was very ruminative.My body seems, on the face of it, to be the first thing, the main thing about me! But somewhere along the line I’ve learnt my body is basically a giant nutrient and blood supply. For some horrible, and white, and smelly cosmos. It’s full of malignant fat.In the past month or two, Kaveh, I’ve barely had the ability to make eye contact with my loved ones. So the idea of wasting my energy trying to make eye contact with a dead person when I could be spending that time talking to my wife, or my mom, or even you right now, that feels wrong. Funny composition story with that poem—I’m a vegetarian, and I had a night where I was smoking some pot, and I was eating a dish I thought was vegetarian, but it actually had lamb’s blood in it.I’ve never ever lost my basic fourteen-year-old desire to make people fall in love with me, and to give them something that has never existed before, to make them so angry that they cry and hate themselves.
  I’ve never read a book like Four Reincarnations before. It’s so much weirder than a person might expect. Obviously I’m not using weird as a pejorative. It’s totally its own thing.

  I know what you mean, I love weird.

  Clearly!

  I’ve never really understood the point of poetry, if not to expose you to different forms of mentation. You can write about whatever you want to write about, it’s your prerogative as a poet, but at the end of the day, what a poet does is let you inhabit a different way of thinking for a brief moment of time. For a very very brief bit of time, logic tacks together in ways it never has, and you’re able to have a series of free associations that’ve never been in your brain, or hopefully in any brain, before. I think that this endures so much more than the message of any poem. I’m a big Wittgenstein person and I think language is a game. The way we evolve and develop our sense of definition and truth comes down to playing—playing with language. That’s the only thing it has going for it (laughing).

  Haha, the only thing! That sense of play, of language as a site for fun, is so essential and loadbearing to these poems. Discovery through play, like you’re a child trying to figure out which hole the star-shaped peg goes into. The process of discovery in these poems is so tactile. “Do you pity my imagination? It will kill you. / My mother will kill you. / She is my imagination.” It works back on itself. It’s like you’ve created your own physics.

  Yeah, I love that. I worry that as contemporary poets we have this pressure to always be moving forward. To always be elliptical and surge ahead, for every line to floor us with the unexpected word or image or turn. But sometimes, in doing so, we lose track of very very good ideas from the beginning of the stanza. Or the poem itself. Lethal imagination—good. Lethal imagination that is my mommy—way better. I think my next turn in the poem is that I’m a leather horse mommy is riding. You talk about language as a site for play—well, dalliance is play for me!

  I also love the ancient Vedas, pre-Buddhist and pre-Hindu texts from India, a lot. The way they move poetically is through these limitless portals of comparisons. “This is this, which is really this, which is really actually this is that,” you know? “The altar is the naked woman, and the palm brush that cleans the altar is a sexy combing brush, and all of those things are also a tiki for the universe, and the woman’s head is an abyss.”

  You’re right, it’s all star-shaped pegs. I love all the different pegs. And my favorite is when you can rotate the peg in two different ways and it goes in both ways. That’s nuts.

  Haha, yeah.

  I love that line you picked. Mother as imagination. I love therapy, I’ve been in therapy most of my life, and one of the very fun things about therapy is overhearing yourself on mommy, and daddy, and God. Those are the only things to overhear, really—mommy, daddy, God. I mean, romantic love is just God and mommy, or God and daddy. And power is just daddy and God. It’s all this plus/minus game. I started therapy when I was nine for night terrors. Is this interesting to you?

  Yes, totally! I love this.

  I just figured I’d ramble a bit. When I was nine I kept having these two things going on, recurring nightmares and more ambient existential dread.

  I actually saw a special on how special-effects torsos are made, which should have been the least scary thing because it’s demystifying—it’s all polycarbonates and plastics, but for some reason the image of that assembly line with all those bloody torsos on it really stuck in my imagination and I couldn’t sleep.

  And while this bedtime panic was going on I was having a lot of existential dread: I was coming into contact with a more complicated understanding of religion, or joy and suffering. My parents were becoming more complicated to me, becoming real humans. Mommy daddy god stuff, you know? My shrink’s name was Herbert Eveloff, a wonderful man. I was sitting in his office, this little slobbering Jewish tween, saying “Dr. Eveloff, Dr. Eveloff, what does it all mean?” I would say the most ludicrious, melodramatic, hilarious stuff like “there are more moments in my day that are sad than are happy. (Keep in mind I had the most Pokemon cards in my entire class) What is the endgoal of an afterlife? I just don’t understand what my purpose is if the math doesn’t add up!” And he gave me this very sweet boiler-plate existentialism, and I remember him saying, “You just carve out your own meaning, Max. Every moment you check in yourself, and you pick the myth that you want to be.” You decide that you’re going to be a writer, or you decide that you’re going to be an astrobiologist (those were my two big choices at the time) and you make a little alcove of meaning.

  I’m instinctually a big-game hunter. I think most poets are. And it was nice, no—it was important to be told a little meaning was enough. The meaning to get you through thirty seconds is enough. I’m into Buddhism now, and I think if Eveloff hadn’t had his shaggy beard, and passionate smile, and pipe-smoke smell, if he hadn’t told me to just focus on getting myself through the next day or two, I’m not sure I’d be the Buddhist I am today.

  That’s beautiful. When did you find Buddhism?

  My mom and step dad raised me with a hefty dose of Buddhism and meditation around the house for as long as I can remember. We always had Tibetan singing bowls to play the universe with. In terms of Four Reincarnations, Buddhism happened in my college years. During my second existential anxiety in my senior year, I started meditating regularly. I wrote that first little poem from the book’s last section, “Second Dream.” In “Second Dream," a dying Max learns his future is to marry flowers. My friend Shon, from my comedy troupe, who practices Zen, is the one who tells me. In real life Shon goes to temple every day and reads his Zen. But Shon is very funny about everything, including Buddhism. I remember a conversation I had with Shon in which he said, “Have you ever noticed how ludicrous you look during a panic attack? Like Barbara Walters during a shell-fish allergy attack? And you do realize, Max, that during a panic attacks you’ll say things to me like, ‘I’m never going to have a coherent sentence again.’ And you’re speaking a coherent sentence! You realize how funny that is.” Zen is playful, a bit slap-you-up-around-the-ears. This isn’t just Shon, Zen as a whole has a deep comic record. A creed of playfulness, that’s what I needed.

  And to be real with you: I was very very sad, Kaveh. I’d gotten a terminal cancer diagnosis, and a two-year relationship fell apart in a chemo room. I was very ruminative. A lot of time was spent processing the same three or four thoughts over and over again. So to heal me—get out of the mind, go into the breath. To know there’s a little current of meaning going through my body at the same time that my mind is being so savage, that was really kind of a miracle. That’s amazing.

  I think that tension is there in the poems. The tension between an idealized sublime, this Zen ideal, and a mind that is deeply self-critical, often in ways that are very funny and charming.

  You could call it neurosis.

  Yeah, yeah. Neurotic, and self-critical, and often ill-at-ease. There are many places in the text that you look toward the natural and end up back in the sort of violence in your head. “I come from a place where the water’s emptiness / is so savage that / when you drink it / the fish of the throat die, / causing malignant thirst.”

  That’s really interesting. I actually never noticed how Zen the line “I come from a place where the water’s emptiness” is. You’re right, there is a kind of holding, repose, there. It's hard for me to notice my own calm, sometimes! I think the failure of the sublime is part of the sublime. For whatever reason, I have this emotional rhythm when I write. I write something beautiful, and then something to knock it all down. But then the knocked down thing is kind of pretty, too.

  Right.

  There’s a body, and that’s followed by a neurotic and complicating mind. The poem “The Curve” is actually getting a lot of what you talk about as well. It’s unclear why we humans are here—if we’re here to be bodies, or to be language. Language somehow seems too deep in me. It’s almost more me than I am.

  How do you mean that?

  Well, that poem I just mentioned is sort of a creation myth. God tries to make human beings, but God’s a little too neurotic for them, too fluxing and complicated. So God made language instead. It made “X.” It turned us into a first draft. Do you know Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem?

  Yeah!

  A lot of it takes place in the voices of the Andoumboulou—this first, goblin-like, draft of humanity made out of clay, and then kind of shoved into caves because they were ugly and embarrassing. I have never been able to get over that idea, the first draft of humanity.

  And Andoumboulou as well, they’re the defenders of the crippled, the defenders of the handicapped. There’s a lot of West African mythology about the defective being first-drafts. But to get back to me, I was very touched by these myths when I read them in college.

  Maybe people are a series of palimpsests. God tried to make bodies, but bodies didn’t work, so he scribbled language on top of them. It’s not that he threw out the body. He took away its role as the seed and plant and made the body soil instead. And he has new plants now—language. He took what should have been the human and turned it into a nutrifying force for something else.

  You can see how I’d connect that with cancer. My body seems, on the face of it, to be the first thing, the main thing about me! But somewhere along the line I’ve learnt my body is basically a giant nutrient and blood supply. For some horrible, and white, and smelly cosmos. It’s full of malignant fat.

  Right, yeah. It’s like Yeats talking about being a beautiful soul “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal.”

  Yeah! Yeah. My body is a soul sick with desire, and my cancer is a body being dragged along behind it! But I think, going back to just souls and bodies, and leaving the star-shaped pegs aside for a minute, the soul is forced to bear the yoke of the body, which puts a burden on it, like a labor animal. You know what I mean?

  Do you mean the stress of the body diminishes the soul?

  The Yeats you brought up makes me picture this big soul eagle, and it’s attached by this long cord to a body that’s sort of dragging along behind it. And the body has this beautiful heroic Promethus suffering thing going on for it, and the soul is perfect and would just be doing so awesome without this tether. But for me, it’s more like my body is a very very tired donkey, and my soul is Sancho Panza.

  Hahaha.

  It’s not even Don Quixote. It’s Sancho Panza sitting up there. And all he wants to do is take a nap. And everybody just wants to take a nap and be done. But maybe the divine is Don Quixote pulling us all along.

  Wow. I think that’s the most Ritvonian possible take on that. I think that’s exactly perfect.

  Are we going with "Ritvonian"?

  Well, this is your chance. You can establish a precedent right here.

  I want you to pick one. What about “Ritvonic”? “Ritverian”?

  “Ritivinides”?

  Oh, I like "Ritvinides." That makes me sound like a Woody Allen short story character. Like “Diabetes.” I think I like “Ritvonian,” your first one. First thought, best thought.

  Yeah, that seems right to me, too. I wanted to pick up on something, and we can cut this if you want, but last night when we were talking, you texted, “I haven’t had any sense of exterior communion in a month or two.” I think that’s really interesting though, in light of the book. Would you want to elaborate on that at all here?

  In all honesty, I think there are many different ways people engage with the exterior world of art. It’s like introverts and extroverts. I think people can be very extroverted and thrill and feed off the presence of text. I think you’re like that—I see you when you touch something and it turns into flame in your hands.

  Haha.

  And then there are people who don’t get any nurturing from the external world. I don’t know that any artist is like that entirely, but certainly somewhat. I’ve always felt a little guilty that I err more on the side of the internal. It was actually very liberating to hear Louise Gluck tell me, as a freshman, “Your work comes from conversation and being a smart guy.” I watch TV, and read mystery novels, and read People Magazine. I also read Isak Dinesen every once in awhile. I’ve had very passionate and deep engagement with some exterior sources that I’ve really loved, that lit me on fire. But I’m very monogamous with them. Splay Anthem was one, the book has never left me. Don Quixote has never left me. I don’t think I nourish as easily as others.

  In the past month or two, Kaveh, I’ve barely had the ability to make eye contact with my loved ones. So the idea of wasting my energy trying to make eye contact with a dead person when I could be spending that time talking to my wife, or my mom, or even you right now, that feels wrong. This conversation we’re having feels like an investment to me. It’s deeper. And I do believe we exert the same kind of energy into books as we do into people. And it’s pretty hard for me to be talking to Kafka right now. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think any human being should go through life not having talked to Kafka. It’s life-making. But when you’re sick, when your body hurts, that’s not what you necessarily want. Even now, over the phone, I hear your voice, and I hear in it tenderness towards me, and that lets me flower. It lets me flower and that’s what I want.

  That’s beautiful. It’s absolutely true that people have finite social reservoirs, and I think people who are deeply empathetic often expend what’s in those reservoirs when they’re reading texts, when they’re engaging narrative of any sort.

  I think that’s astute. Keep going.

  Well, knowing you and knowing your poems, it’s very obvious that you’re a deeply empathetic person. It makes complete sense in my mind that if you’re dealing with a finite and diminishing set of these resources, you wouldn’t want to waste them on Kafka, or Cervantes, or whoever when you could be spending them with a tactile person who loves you in the present.

  I like your addition of the word “empathy” into this conversation. I think that’s good. Thank you for putting it there.

  It’s obvious in the poems. I mean, I haven’t counted, but I’d offhandedly guess that at least half of the poems in the book are written to a specific person or addressee.

  I think that’s on the conservative side, yeah.

  Right, maybe two-thirds. And this is a book written by a very sick person to his loved ones, so it’s hard not to think of the poems as being little wills, as you leaving little wills. You’re addressing each person, sometimes several times.

  That’s a very sensitive way of characterizing it. Seeing it as a series of wills is a very beautiful way to see it. Each one is a reciting of the will and a bestowal of whatever’s in the will. Each poem is both, “I want you to have this jewel,” and me handing them the jewel.

  Ahhh, yeah. That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. I’m a little choked up.

  What color jewel do you want? Maybe red?

  I swear to god, I shit you not, I was going to say red.

  I had a feeling, somehow. It’ll either be that or a Pokemon card. I’ll try to send you a fire energy or a Charmander.

  Haha, that’s perfect. I love it. You know, I could pick any of these “To…” poems, but maybe we could talk a little about “Poem to My Dog, Monday, On Night I Accidentally Ate Meat.” First of all, you’re one of my favorite poem-titlers ever. You’re up there with Richard Brautigan. Every title is totally perfect.

  Hell yeah!

  I want to hear you talk about that poem. “I will live in your small ecstatic brain / and take your life, / and you can take mine / and we won’t give our lives to cancer, / but to each other.” And it’s just the most beautiful address to a pet. I could read it a hundred times and be devastated a new way each time I read it. I guess I’m just clapping like a seal now instead of asking an intelligent question. Do you want to talk about that poem a little bit?

  Sure, I can talk about that poem, and maybe also segue into talking about titles in general. Funny composition story with that poem—I’m a vegetarian, and I had a night where I was smoking some pot, and I was eating a dish I thought was vegetarian, but it actually had lamb’s blood in it.

  Whoa.

  I got really violently sick. I’ve been a vegetarian for a few years. Initially it was about global warming, but as time passed, it became more and more about eating flesh and taking life away from living things.

  So I got violently ill from eating this food, and I started thinking about my dog’s flesh in my mouth, because I was upset and that’s what happens. That poem was composed in a very strange way. I’m normally driven very much on the page, but I actually wrote the first three-quarters of that poem by reciting it to myself like Stevens did. And I had a very strange voice on, probably because I was high, so I sounded like, “The liiiights went ooooout on Mooonday, laaaaaying on a green ruuuuug.”

  Hahaha.

  I don’t know why, but that was the voice in my head drawing the poem. There were a series of tones that I needed to hear out loud to soothe me. I needed to somehow get from my abject terror to that saving sweetness at the end where I give my life to Monday, and he gives me his. I think I needed that emotionally, poem aside.

  Sure.

  And then, to sort of address what you said about titles, which was lovely. Thank you.

  Any time.

  There’s part of me that isn’t really in my poetry as much, but it’s a part of my creative life—I love world-building. I love fantasy novels and sci-fi. I spend three or four hours watching Game of Thrones every week with my wife and her brother, who is a brilliant mathematician. And I love coming up with scenarios, plot-summaries, and projections. I’ve written all these tracts about the religions in Game of Thrones, how they could work cosmologically. There’s a producer element in me. I was born and raised in LA, so there’s this showbiz kid in me.

  And for whatever reason, I almost always title poems after the poem. Less than ten percent of my poems are titled before they are written. Somehow this makes me feel like I’m a producer. Like, “BAM! Got it!”

  And it lets me do work between the poems. It allows me to modulate and play. I feel like my poems are more intrinsically limited tonally because of the weird stuff I say and the weird ways I say it. But I get to be a little more Berryman when I do titles. I don’t take titles as seriously, they’re just fun for me. I think that’s helpful, you know. I do comedy, I’m a ventriloquist.

  Oh, I didn’t know you were a ventriloquist.

  I do a ventriloquism act with my medical implant. He’s called Mediport Michael. I have a giant plastic node stitched under my skin above my left breast, and I put googly eyes on him and draw a mouth on him, and I flex his mouth by flexing my boob. And there’s a routine I do with him to teach children about cancer. He’s an educational speaker for children. I talk about the early history of chemo. Do you know what the first chemotherapy drug was, Kaveh?

  No, I don’t think so.

  It was mustard gas.

  Really?

  Yeah, in World War I they started doing autopsies of soldiers, and they noticed that some soldiers with tumors had experienced tumor death after being exposed to mustard gas. So they decided to put people on tables and gas them. And it shrunk some of their tumors. Believe it or not, Ifosfamide, listed by the WHO as one of the top twenty life-saving medications in the world, is mustard gas derived. There’s a direct lineage.

  That’s wild.

  So since mustard gas, the medical community has really been playing ketchup!

  Hahaha.

  I’m full of dark medicines and silly puns. So that kind of play, that character-building, I think that gets to come out in my titles.

  That’s great. I love that. And I think Berryman is an interesting person to bring into the conversation because of the way he invents his own language, and I think you do a lot of that, both in your titles and in your poems.

  He’s one of my great heroes.

  Mine, too. I hadn’t made that connection in thinking about your work, but now that you’ve said his name, it seems totally obvious to me.

  It’s so funny because I see him in your work, too. But it’s in such a different register, like you picked up on the stuff in the front of his mouth, and I picked up on the stuff in the back of his mouth.

  Totally, I love that!

  We’re clearly both in his mouth together.

  Yes! To pivot back a little bit, there’s an obsession in your book with dream logic. There’s repeated cocoon imagery. In “When I Criticize You, I’m Just Trying to Criticize the Universe,” you have that section that’s almost like a Li Po poem. “I went to the bathroom to sleep. / I dreamt two dreams—one inside the other— / the outer dream, a shell, / the deeper dream, a yolk.” It’s exactly what the poems feel like they’re doing.

  That means so much to me.

  It’s weaving between the layers.

  I am a sense-organ guy who loves magic. And dreams are magic. Whatever one can say of heaven or hell, there’s a supernatural realm and it’s right in front of us. The language of the dream.

  I love philosophy, too. I love Hume, I love Wittgenstein—I also like Plato, but he’s a separate conversation. My point is that I like truth a lot, and I think philosophy has developed these really immaculate systems for mapping ideas and getting the truth of the world out much better than I ever could. So what truth does that leave me as a poet? Well, the truth of dreams. That’s the one kind of language that’s impenetrable to sentence diagramming. So that’s the unconquered territory for me, since, I have to admit, at my core is a pretty truth-seeking guy.

  If you are admitting that you are ultimately truth-seeking, and we’re also seeing these poems as playgrounds, and we’re also seeing them as wills, as gifts to give to your beloveds, it’s so poignant to me that all of those can fit in the space of a well-crafted poem. In a well-crafted book of poems.

  Hm. Humf. Yeah. We were talking about how the act of speech is also a transaction, and that’s really what poetry is. The will on paper and the giving of the gem. Poetry can never just be purely the language. There’s motion and function in it. In this light, I guess it is maybe silly to call myself a truth-seeker. Can I revise myself? Let me say it this way—I have desires. And I never want those desires to encroach upon my world-view, which loves truth-seeking. But, at the end of the day, I want stuff, Kaveh. You know, like when you’re fourteen and you think, “This is gonna make that girl fall in love with me!”

  Yeah.

  You don’t even care what’s in the poem. It literally could have been someone telling you, “Draw this circle, draw a square, whisper these three magic words, then hand it to her and she’ll fall in love with you.”

  Totally. It feels like a sort of ceremonial magic.

  Completely. And I’ve never ever lost my basic fourteen-year-old desire to make people fall in love with me, and to give them something that has never existed before, to make them so angry that they cry and hate themselves. I have desires for people like that. I can talk all I want about ideas, but, at the end of the day, I want that to happen.

  I don’t understand people who outgrow their childhood desires. When I read your poems, I get this very elemental sense. You brought up childhood very early talking about me, and I feel in you a giddiness, like the top of your head is being blown off, and all this language is coming out of it. Like Busta Rhymes. Or like in the Vedas, priests would get into these rhyming theological battles and if they got outfoxed, their heads exploded off their bodies. And you, Kaveh, have that kind of unfettered joy that has probably been intact in your writing for as long as you’ve ever existed. And I do feel many writers lose track of that. But I don’t think you have, and I don’t think I have.

  That’s maybe the best thing anyone’s ever told me about my writing. When I’ve written something that pleases me, I think it has the characteristics that you’re describing. And that’s what I look for in the work I take in, that’s what really thrills me. I think that’s what thrills me so much about your book—there’s this sheer wanting. Early in the book you write, “I’m told to set myself goals. But my mind / doesn’t work that way. I, instead have wishes // for myself.” And then you offer around a fifty-page catalog of those, you know? And set against the foil of a terminal illness. What does it mean to be so full of these wishes, so “sick with desire,” and then for it to have a timeline?

  Well, that’s the thing. It’s okay that nothing ever works out. All I really wish is for every poem to feel like a perfect completion, to feel that I will get exactly what I want out of it as I’m writing it. And also, I don’t give a shit once it’s done. I love the enactment of the magic. If I could just get personal for a second?

  Please do.

  Everybody dies with loose ends. You can be ninety, you can be twenty-five. These are my particular loose ends. And it’s been very very comforting not to really try to do anything other than do today. I want to do this interview with you today. I’m not trying to think about whether I’m going to be well enough to edit it. Whether I’m ever going to see it in the world. What happens to me is just the next step. It’s been immensely liberating to realize so much of joy is made worse by trying to make joy stay. And so much of suffering is made worse by trying to make suffering go away. When you’re just comfortable allowing whatever sensations are there to be there, allowing the paths whatever their paths, that is healing.

  Wow. Yeah.

  You know, I love that line you picked about having wishes for myself. I was worried nobody would notice that one. It was important to me.

  It’s a staggering line. It’s a staggering book. “My poor little future, / you could practically fit in a shoe-box.” You can open to any page and find these lines. I don’t want to keep you too long. Is there anything you would want to say about the book that I haven’t asked, any Easter eggs?

  Actually, I do have an important thing to say. Being funny is always good. And always important. And it’s not a deflection. Everything in the world is very funny, and I don’t like people calling humor “coping.” Humor is a kind of wisdom. Okay, I think I’m done. I’m just getting crabbier and more gnomic as I go along.

  No, that’s great. I think humor is so essential to this book, and not in ways that feel evasive.

  Well, I hope the saddest moment is the funniest, and the funniest is the saddest. Nothing could speak more highly to my attempts as an artist.

  That’s perfect. Thank you so much, Max.

  It’s been a privilege, Kaveh.

  Interview Posted: July 18, 2016

Four Reincarnations
Publishers Weekly.
263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p45.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Four Reincarnations
Max Ritvo. Milkweed (PGW, disk), $24 (96p) ISBN 978­1­57131­490­1
Slippery and terrifyingly urgent, funny yet despairingly so, Ritvo (1990­2016) hits all the right notes in an
accomplished, surprising, and bizarrely erotic debut made more poignant by his death weeks before
publication. Diagnosed with terminal cancer at 22, Ritvo produced vital and unflinching poems that emerge
from the unflagging energy of a mind embedded within, yet constantly struggling beyond, the suffering of
his body. His mind, he says, is "like a black glove/you mistake for a man/ in the middle of a blizzard."
Alarming imagery, paired with supple and electric turns of logic and sound, define the collection: "I'm told
to set myself goals. But my mind/ doesn't work that way. I, instead, have wishes// for myself. Wishes aren't
afraid/ to take on their own color and life­­/ like a boy who takes a razor from a high cabinet/ puffs out his
cheeks and strips them bloody." In his poem "The End," Ritvo muses whether "death just meant spending/
all your time with your past.// The more there is, the more loss there is­­/ true not only of the world, but of
perceiving it,/even the imagination sizzling on top of it." Ritvo's poems sizzle over the all­too­brief fire of
his hungry and staggering imagination. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Four Reincarnations." Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 45+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464352698&it=r&asid=3f42050823569728953ed5b80283c3c3.
Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464352698

"Four Reincarnations." Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 45+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464352698&it=r. Accessed 30 May 2017.

• Meridian
  http://www.readmeridian.org/review-max-ritvo-four-reincarnations/
  Word count: 783

  Review: Max Ritvo, Four Reincarnations
  February 7, 2017 in Meridian News • 0 Comments
  “The bed is on fire, and are you laughing?”

  With the first line of Max Ritvo’s stunning collection, we are welcomed into a world where sorrow and joy, desire and loss, cannot be untangled. The opening poem, “Living It Up,” is a perfect introduction to the poet’s singular and extraordinary mind:

  The springs want to embrace each other

  but they’re afraid if they break

  their spiral, they will never

  be able to hold anyone.

  I wish you would let me know

  how difficult it is to love me.

  Then I would know you love me

  beneath all that difficulty.
  A majority of the poems in Four Reincarnations are written as direct addresses to loved ones. And that, though tragic, feels completely appropriate considering the story behind this incredible body of work: at sixteen, Ritvo was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare pediatric cancer, and after a year of intense treatment and a period of remission, he finished high school and enrolled at Yale. The cancer returned in his senior year, though he was able to finish his degree in 2013, and this Spring, earn an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. Max passed away in August 2016, at the age of 25, a month before the release of Four Reincarnations.

  Max has left us with a gift of a book. These poems are gorgeous and moving and stranger than I ever could have imagined. Where another poet might have closed himself off, considering his bleak diagnosis, Max’s poems are always open to the world, to the reader. These poems are graceful, beautiful, generous and loving. They are often difficult to witness. Take these lines from “Poem In Which My Shrink Is A Little Boy”:

  Things don’t change unless we want them to.

  And why would we want to give up

  the little things we know,

  when we know so little?
  These poems transcend a solely emotional reading. Ritvo continually presents surprising images and moments, the tremendous effects of which are difficult to articulate. There is a completely unique and intuitive logic at work here that I’ve never before experienced in poetry. In that opening poem, “Living It Up,” Max takes the bed, an obvious symbol of intimacy, and zooms in like an x-ray, as close as he can, to find an even deeper source of intimacy. He then pulls back: a heartbreaking confession to the beloved, a newly acquired acceptance, the difficult reality of things.

  The leaps Ritvo makes, from poem to poem, line to line—even within the line—are extraordinary. “Do you pity my imagination? It will kill you. / My mother will kill you. / She is my imagination” (“To Randal, Crow- Stealer, Lord of the Greenhouse”). The act of imagining features heavily in Four Reincarnations, but so much of the poet’s wondering is made flesh, real.

  I have spent weeks with this book and can’t shake the word: reincarnation. I can’t help but think that Ritvo has written himself into an afterlife that is both physically and spiritually manifest. “Where was I expecting death / to take me if everywhere it is / is on earth?” (“The Big Loser”). “I know this isn’t the heaven we wanted. / What ever is?” (“The Watercolor Eulogy”).

  The collection often poses its own theories of the afterlife, without relying on religion or myth, but rather playfulness, youthful exuberance and possibility, even in the face of the great unknown. Consider these lines from, “Poem to My Dog, Monday, one Night I accidentally Ate Meat”:

  I will live in your small ecstatic brain

  and take your life,

  and you can take mine,

  and we won’t give our lives to cancer,

  but to each other.
  Mercy and tenderness pour forth from these poems as well as sorrow, even anger, at times. How could it not? The defining event of these poems is so complex, it is a wonder it doesn’t overwhelm the collection. Ritvo never courts pity, only genuine connection. No one could have written these poems besides Max Ritvo. His voice is unlike any other. In “Hi, Melissa,” he writes, “I have spoken to you of heaven— / I simply meant the eyes are suns that see.”

  This review by Michael Dhyne appears in print in Meridian 38, Winter 2017

  Four Reincarnations is published by Milkweed Editions

• Guernica
  https://www.guernicamag.com/phillip-garland-on-max-ritvos-four-incarnations/
  Word count: 941

  On Max Ritvo’s Four Reincarnations
  A poet's call to bravely inhabit the body.
  By Phillip Garland
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  Photo by Ashley Woo.
  Poets have long attempted to chart the (dis)connection of the body and the mind. It is maybe the quintessential philosophical question because it not only shapes how we understand ourselves, but how we order and study the universe. This dichotomy informs our most basic human schema, and it is no wonder that so many poets have written about the body in hopes of getting at the mind, the soul, the ecstatic, the erotic. Too often in poetry, though, the body is a door that opens onto another room, in a house faraway, abstracted. In Four Reincarnations, Max Ritvo has reinvigorated poetry of the body by turning to himself and composing playful and frightening ruminations on the breakdown of his own body. These poems are characterized by their proximity, as if their words were inscribed on his own skin, making the body less a subject of inquiry and more of an existential task. Ritvo shows that the body, bearing scars as well as birds, is a thing to be carried through life.

  Four Reincarnations serves as a document of Ritvo’s long fight against cancer, its title an ode to persistent creation. He passed away on August 23, 2016. But it is also a very beautiful, odd, funny and heart-startling book. Although the subject of his cancer does permeate these poems, Ritvo’s meditations range from grandiose (“Dawn of Man”) to ostensibly mundane (“Poem to My Dog, Monday, On Night I Accidentally Ate Meat”). The titles of his poems often feature his side-eyed humor that regularly erupts into a sort of zen prankishness that brightens Four Reincarnations and gives the reader an entrance to his world. Ritvo bravely pursues intimacy to the point of bare vulnerability, recalling such confessional poetry icons as Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. When he writes in “Heaven Is Us Being a Flower Together” that “winter, by being so white, / is trying to talk to me—”, Ritvo is also quietly inviting the reader to lean in and listen.

  Ritvo has many things to tell us about our bodies and our minds. He shows how frequently the door swings between the two. In “Black Bulls,” rich, tangible imagery veers abruptly into the speaker’s psyche: “Three black bulls stomp the hills of sand / into blistered glass. / Their hooves swelter against these / wrong bells. / I am so sorry that you have come to this mind of mine.” The body and the mind are intended to operate independently of each other in “Stalking my Ex-Girlfriend in a Pasture,” but Ritvo notes the futility of instructing either when he writes, “she instructed me to unyoke the mind and body / so that the mind could speak / as the body came / but I split wrong.” When loosed, the mind floats, and Ritvo masterfully captures the fuzzy drift of thought with rare clarity in “The Senses:”

  I thought my next thought would be a vision of my suffering;
  I thought I would understand the yellow lightning in a painted storm—
  the crucial way it disappears
  when I imagine myself flung
  headlong into a painting.

  Instead I have this picture of dissatisfaction,
  the thought not rising, but splitting in half
  on the unanswered question of lightning.

  In “Lyric Complicity for One,” thought rises and races: “for every thought, a new fish soars / right under the anchored boat.” The mind it returns to the body with a jolt in “When I Criticize You, I’m Just Trying to Criticize the Universe,” where Ritvo writes, after falling asleep in the bathroom, “the shell dream broke and I woke again, / my back stippled with tile, a scar of soap in my ear.”

  In the centerpiece of this collection, “Poem to my Litter,” Ritvo grapples directly with his body’s fight against cancer: “my doctors split my tumors up and scattered them / into the bones of twelve mice.” What follows is a series of failed clinical trials in which the mice bleed to death or are injected with other harmful diseases. A harrowing portrait, yes, but one not untouched with love and bravery, as Ritvo adopts the mice–all of whom he has named “Max”– into his own family before addressing them: “I hope, Maxes, some good in you is of me. / Even my suffering is good, in part. Sure I swell / with rage, fear—the stuff that makes you see your tail / as a bar on the cage. But then the feelings pass.” A levity hangs over this poem and others, and it stems from the refusal to view the body as anything but a loved object. In “Touching the Floor,” Ritvo tends to his body as one would to a dying lover, writing “I used to want infinite time with my thoughts. / Now I’d prefer to give all my time / to a body that’s dying from cancer.”

  Ritvo has left behind a rich collection of poetry that emboldens us to bravely inhabit our bodies and to look toward the future as he does in “Afternoon”:

  When I was about to die
  my body lit up
  like when I leave my house
  without my wallet.

  What am I missing? I ask
  patting my chest
  pocket.

  and I am missing everything living
  that won’t come with me
  into this sunny afternoon.

• Tethered By Letters
  https://tetheredbyletters.com/book-review-four-reincarnations-by-max-ritvo/
  Word count: 607

  Book Review: Four Reincarnations—Max Ritvo
  by Samuel Dymerski
  FourReincarnations_PGW_RGB_300_0

  It’s a widely accepted practice in modern criticism to refrain from analyzing any particular work that deals heavily with—or has been brought forth by—disease, within the confines of its predicating sickness. The reasons for this are pretty straightforward: in symptomizing a piece, we’re essentially anchoring it to one very specific meaning, ultimately silencing further abstract discussion and selling the work short in the process. I tend to agree with this—with the exception of a couple works, where I think the presence of the disease allows for a better interpretation of the text. Four Reincarnations is one such case.

  Still, to say Max Ritvo’s collection is strictly about cancer would be to severely dwarf the content of the work itself. Four Reincarnations is a captivating, strange, and lonely collection that doesn’t atomize or belittle its topic, but instead expands upon it in confusing, abstract, and occasionally very funny ways. (And when I say funny, I mean these odd moments in the collection are absolutely hysterical.) Reincarnations is such a sobering experience overall that, when you encounter something that contrasts so much, it breaks through in such an unexpected way that the reader can’t help but at least smile in response. For example:

  They call it a punch line because I punch you

  in the fucking face if you step over the line.

  (30, Mommy Harangues Poor Randal)

  But, of course, Reincarnations’ bleak tonal return is inevitable, and even these odd moments cannot remain funny for long.

  Ritvo displays an intense devotion to abstract image in this collection: often dreamlike, as well informed and deformed by the condition of the work itself. Nearly every poem in this collection lays claim to its own set of vivid and surreal pictures.

  The Moon was dark

  like it had taken too many pills

  to produce light.

  (63, The End)

  An unspoken, but perhaps the most prevalent, aspect of Four Reincarnations is the lingering frustration that surrounds disease. Sickness is not an object to be conveyed, nor is it a topic easily discussed and understood between people. And while the phenomena of cancer stories set out to define everything, to say “this is life with cancer,” Ritvo’s writings sidestep that concept entirely. Reincarnations is not a collection about cancer so much as it is a work which itself embodies cancer; it is a look at the world through the obsidian glasses the disease makes you wear. And that is perhaps its most valuable strength: that the reader will set out upon the first reincarnation looking to understand its topic, and at the end of the fourth cycle they’re only left with a translucent notion. The answers aren’t, and they never really are, handed to the reader—because, with works such as these, the act of the speculation is made largely more meaningful when the reader has to perform it alone.

  Afterword: From the staff at Tethered By Letters, our deepest condolences go out to the family and friends of Max Ritvo.

  S.J. Dymerski is the name given to a resident spectre of the vague and inactual TBL halls; while most know of ‘him’ through whispered hearsay, only a couple witness accounts have bubbled to the surface regarding the spirit’s errant activity on the site overall. Purportedly, you can contact him through Ouija Board, or at SDyme@tetheredbyletters.com.

• Iowa Review
  https://iowareview.org/blog/max-ritvos-four-reincarnations
  Word count: 1722

  Max Ritvo's FOUR REINCARNATIONS
  THU, 10/06/2016 - 11:20AM
  DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA

  Max and I were first introduced to each other in 2015 and immediately bonded through a series of ensuing e-mail and text correspondences—usually about poetry, but also about painting, glass blowing, and balloon races, among other things. In addition to this more casual exchange, I read and gave Max editorial feedback on early versions of Four Reincarnations. Indeed, I loved the poems I found within its pages so much that I ended up publishing several of them in The Iowa Review, where I serve as the poetry editor, and in Horsethief Magazine, a publication I co-founded with Justin Boening.
  In one of our last exchanges, Max sent me a drawing of a courtly man in a white powdered wig with the caption, “this is you in my heart—very esteemed.” I have yet to figure out who the man in the drawing is, but I like to imagine Max identified one of my former selves, or one of his, and gifted me with an introduction to him. If you read Four Reincarnations, he’ll likely do the same thing for you—hold up a mirror in which you see a face you’ve never seen before and know, in an instant, it’s your own.

  “I want my poems to be funny and to cause pain, but not lasting pain,” Max once told me. This struck me, upon hearing it, as less a riddle than an acknowledgment—a nod to ecstatic poetry’s debt to suffering (look no further than Rilke’s “let this darkness be a bell tower / and you the bell”). Max’s poetry is abundant in ecstasy and, yes, its counterpoint: he often creates a kind of double exposure in his poems, one in which grief and anxiety underlay—and are made visible through—pleasure and discovery. Take the following passage from his poem, “The Curve,” in which we are given an image that at once invokes permanence and solidity, transience and immateriality, as well as the embryonic, the cancerous, and the cosmic—this in the span of a single tercet:

  When I hear the word rock,
  a translucent lump
  shimmers in front of the world.

  Indeed, Max’s poetry—its high contrasts and stakes, as well as its subtleties—reminds me of Caravaggio’s paintings, with all their dramatic chiaroscuro and contradictory human conditions. I think of the way in which Caravaggio tends to fix the gaze of his viewers on the doomed or the erotic, often both at once (Judith Beheading Holofernes, Bacchus, The Fortune Teller); but I also think of his style, his predilection for placing the darkest shadows right up against the brightest of reflections, this the legerdemain which offers such a startling sense of depth—of reality—in his work. Max’s work, similarly, forces contrapuntal elements—not values of gray, but states of being—up against each other: Whether starvation touches abundance, humiliation gives way to revelation, or rebirth parameterizes erasure, the contrast is dramatic and makes evident a heightened state of reality.

  “The bed is on fire,” opens the book, “and are you laughing?” Emergency—that intensification of the at-hand—thus initiates us into the world of Four Reincarnations and serves as nothing less than architecture, nothing more than the drama that undergirds living.The bed is on fire!—at once feverish in the erotic sense, but also in the sickbed sense, the poem lets us know it is ringing in more than one octave. Then the question: are you laughing? As in, have you forgotten life, not just death, is a joke the body plays upon the soul? And, will you laugh with me? Will you hold this body of text in your hands and find delight within its fevers?

  “You leave the bed / and leave me without thought,” the poem concludes, its last four words serving double duty as adverbial phrase and noun clause. Then, in “The Senses,” just two poems further into the collection, we are given a “picture of dissatisfaction / that loves to be thought.” Note the way in which “thought” is permitted to act as both verb and noun, as interior action and interior object chasing its own tail as if it were the translucent koi gracing the cover of the book. Before the end of the first section, we then encounter the brilliant homophonic play in “Poem to My Litter,” wherein the speaker’s “litter” is not only composed of mice who have—like him—endured experimental cancer therapies, but comprises the readers of the poem, the children the speaker has never had, and that litter which is chaff.

  So Max shows he is at home with wordplay subtle and overt, with rhetorical inversions and doubling—as at home as if he were one of the Metaphysical or Elizabethan poets. In his unabashed approach to human emotion, his willingness to lay bare his interiority (“I wish you would let me know / how difficult it is to love me”), and in his fearless leaps of imagination and music (“Just like neurons fire into a mind, / part habit, part chaos, / so too the world’s voices fire into a God”), Max shows us his is an imagination beyond any given school of thought. Indeed, his mind moves by such perilous bounds as to give us the unprecedented image above—that of humans as neighboring neurons, the exchange of their voices the very synapses of god.

  Max’s influences are broad and uniquely combined, such that a discussion of a given tradition or aesthetic is limited in its helpfulness when approaching his work. Take the way Max enmeshes the meditative mode—so heavily influenced by religious traditions—with a surrealism rooted in rapid transformations, physical puzzlements, and paradoxical imagery. In “Hi, Melissa,” he writes, “When I kiss your ankle I am silencing an oracle. / The oracle speaks from the hill of your ankle.” In an act more of alchemy than of stylistic grafting, Max transforms a human ankle into the hill from which a new gospel might be spoken.

  As a writer of Jewish descent, Max was familiar with the gallows humor of such masterful writers as Rachmil Bryks and Bohumil Hrabal, who rendered human suffering as inevitable as it is unnecessary, as hilarious as it is devastating, and both of whom drew upon classic Jewish folklore to invoke the figure of “the sacred fool”—that complicated character who fuses innocence and the irrational, who stumbles into the presence of the divine and marks it human. Max, time and again, in his own poems, casts himself as such a figure, as a man reduced, irreverent, and, therefore, closer to the gods who may, of course, be other versions of himself. This refraction of selfhood is meaningful not only in the context of Jewish history and literature, whose surrealism he once noted is less “cool” and “more imperiled” than its French counterpart, but also within the context of fighting cancer. Max, through his invocation of the hallucinatory and blurred “I”—“I” that is “cathedral / of musical blood,” “three black bulls,” a caterpillar, “the people,” a litter of mice—is able to enact the singular yet multiplicative suffering one endures in the attempt to live.

  It might be important to note here that Max is on the same page with William Blake when it comes to pity, an emotion so often marked by condescension. Max not only doesn’t ask for the pity of his readers, he shuns it in “To Randal, Crow Stealer, Lord of the Greenhouse:” “Do you pity my imagination? It will kill you. / My mother will kill you. / She is my imagination.” No, rather what he seems to ask is that the reader risk imperilment with him. After all, these poems risk themselves, their lives, at every turn. They plunge and leap and strike the ground. They enact fatality, not only in the way their lines snap and extend, but in their will to pass beyond the realm of the possible-to-be-lived: “Your eyes are globes and hunched beneath them / is my ghost who blinks them shut,” he writes in, “Mommy Harangues Poor Randal.”

  Perhaps tellingly, Louise Glück, in her blurb of the book, refers to Four Reincarnations as “an extraordinary body of work.” Body of work. It seems to me that Glück understands something at the pulmonary matrix of this book, which is its desire to have a life of its own—to encapsulate the warmth, endurance, fragility, dolor, laughter, longing, dictions, and contradictions that reside in a single human body. In the great modernist poems, it can take the resurrection of that body just to tell someone how you feel: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”). But in Max’s poems, the act of telling requires not just the resurrection of the speaker, which marks a return to the life one left behind, but a collaborative and ongoing reincarnation, a return to life by the very means of radical transformation: “You catch up and have my thoughts. / Your brain binds around mine, a gold gauze” (“Poem About My Wife Being Perfect and Me Being Afraid”).

  The thought of reincarnation haunts me. I’ve carried the polysyllabic bulk of it around in the back pocket of my brain since reading Max Ritvo’s book of poems, and I have yet to understand the breadth of the word’s magic (a task for the ages, to be sure). What I can say, though, is this: if Shakespeare’s metaphor for literature was procreation—imagination of Reader impregnated by imagination of Writer—then Max’s metaphor for poetry might be reincarnation—imagination of Writer resurrected within imagination of Reader. Surely, with each new reading of Four Reincarnations, each instance of Max’s words animated into new experiences and memories,he proves his metaphor is less hypothesis than reality. “I hear my own voice, in the moaning,” he writes in the fourth and final section of the book, “from the world beyond,” which might be to say, this world.

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2016/11/four-reincarnations-by-max-ritvo/
  Word count: 1262

  FOUR REINCARNATIONS BY MAX RITVO
  REVIEWED BY ERIC FARWELL
  November 11th, 2016

  In Four Reincarnations, Max Ritvo captures the experience of slowly dying of cancer, illuminating the inner life of a patient, husband, and writer at the end of their journey. Ritvo was an editor for Parnassus and a teaching fellow at Columbia, and the fussiness needed in both of those stations is apparent in the collection. With exacting language that is at once metaphysical, dreamlike, and concrete, Ritvo lays his soul bare, putting to rest ambitions while attempting to ease the pain of those around him.

  One of the main focuses of the collection is how Ritvo considers his wife, who loves him so intensely despite the temporary nature of their arrangement. Here, Ritvo creates a space for the last cinder of romance to seep through, as he celebrates her patience and strength in the face of heartache. “You leave the bed/ and leave me without thought,” he says in “Living It Up,” before continuing to express awe at her sturdiness and companionship. This gives way to darker notes and questions, with Ritvo saying, “I wish you would let me know/ how difficult it is to love me./ Then I would know you love me/ beneath all that difficulty.” There’s a need for knowledge beneath this apparent appreciation, as he reckons with not just the spectre of death, but how his condition might taint the kindness of his family. In many ways, this collection is an attempt to gain and offer clarity on both the experience of disease and what might come after.

  While Ritvo heaps hallelujahs on his beloved, telling her “Thou art me before I am myself” in “Poem About My Wife Being Perfect and Me Being Afraid,” he also considers her life without him. In “Heaven is Us being a Flower Together,” Ritvo promises that he has written this poem inside of her, is becoming a soft bend in the body. This is an attempt to soothe any reservations about where that magic and connection goes after death, even if Ritvo isn’t necessarily sure himself. In “Plush Bunny,” Ritvo offers a simple example/extended metaphor that pleads for his wife to move on when the time is right. In discussing his discarding of a favorite stuffed rabbit, he offers, “Of course there is another world. But it is not elsewhere./ The eye traps it so where heaven should be/ you see shadows. You start to reek./ That’s you moving on.” As excruciating as it may be to advise your partner on matters of the heart and body, these poems attempt to push through that pain to reach and clasp the hand of mercy, of light.

  This mercy finds hiccups and stranger shades in the work concerning regrets, exes, and the larger idea of life. In “Dawn of Man,” Ritvo deals with the limits of the body, and the lack of magic it possesses: “I’d do this every few minutes. I’d think to myself/ What made me such a failure?/ It’s all a little touchingly pathetic. To live like this,/ a grown creature telling ghost stories,/ staring at pictures, paralyzed for hours.” There are poets who transcend the boundaries of vulnerability to reach something resembling intimacy or possession, and here we inhabit that moment, the delicate lines threatening to shatter like glass. Disease is difficult to confront, and yet we’re invited to consider how imperfect we are and witness another human come to grips with that on the page. “When I Criticize You, I’m Just Trying to Criticize the Universe,” reads – like most of the poems here – like a diary welded into poetic form. Beginning with a question about defecation, the poem goes on to discuss memory and old partners, with Ritvo saying, “I go to the bathroom to visit my ex-girlfriends./ They’re two lily pads, fire-white – one in the bath,/ the other in the toilet – and they call me Kermit,/ and beg Kermit to swim.” Here, there’s an implication of rumination if not masturbation, which is separate from sincere desire. Ritvo is trying to remember a time when he had more control over his body, and that time happens to feature lust without caution. In this way, the collection deals with male-centric considerations of death, as Ritvo recalls and tries to reconnect with those things that made him feel masculine. In the wake of his cancer, he feels needy and broken, and the bathroom is a way to escape that, if even for a minute.

  Cancer and death-focused poems form the bulk of the collection. Ritvo is at his most wistful in these, which lends him a unique command over the poem. It’s as if surrender unlocks a new capacity to render his internal life. In “Poem to My Liter,” he captures the frustration with having no cure, compounding it with a sober-eyed acceptance of the inevitable. In discussing an attempt to grow tumors in mice as a way to experiment with treatment options, Ritvo writes, “The mice only have a tumor each, in the leg./ Their tumors have never grown up. Uprooted/ and moved. Learned to sleep in any bed/ the vast body turns down. Before the tumors can spread/ they bust open the legs of the mice. Who bleed to death.” The tone isn’t one of anguish or peril, but resignation. The violence takes on an almost comedic quality in the futility of the endeavor. Here, the clarity Ritvo has allows him to guide the flow of information with laser-like precision, gifting him the ability to wring pathos, carnage, and disappointment out of such plainspoken lines. In “Poem to my Dog, Monday, on Night I Accidentally Ate Meat,” this sober understanding plays out in the tender connection Ritvo feels with his dog, who is also dying. Lines like, “Monday, it’s leaving me too./ Why does life love flowers most/ when they are still bulbs?” or “Monday, with your millions of small horns,/ I will slip behind your poodle eyes/ loading myself like a cartridge of light./ I will live in your small ecstatic brain/ and take your life,/ and you can take mine,/ and we won’t give our lives to cancer,/ but to each other” wind through the connection between man and beast. Here, that sense of maleness found in “When I Criticize You, I’m Just Trying to Criticize the Universe,” mutates into a different shade, and in that shade, utter desperation and love are found.

  It may be uncouth to say, but in making room for death, Ritvo is able to write truly remarkable poems. Craft and language are part of that dazzlement, yes, but it’s the sheer force of feeling that sinks each piece like a stone, right into the pumping heart of sympathy. In Ritvo’s capable hands, love, mercy, and memory become tools that form the scaffolding of poetry, easing into demise like a river. As he writes in “Crow Says Goodbye,” this is how love functions, so, “Have some sympathy for the great spasms/ with which I must open myself to love/ and close again, and open.”

  Eric Farwell is an adjunct professor of English at Monmouth University and Brookdale Community College in New Jersey. His writing has appeared in print or online for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Esquire, Spillway, PANK, Ploughshares, The Village Voice, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, and The Writer's Chronicle. More from this author →

• Verdad
  http://verdadmagazine.org/vol21/poetry/book-review.html
  Word count: 1206

  Four Reincarnations By Max Ritvo
  Review by Bill Neumire
  Four Reincarnations, Max Ritvo’s first and last full-length poetry collection, is as much about Ritvo as it is about the poems. Ritvo was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma when he was 16 and died this year at 25, though in the interim he managed to graduate from Yale and Columbia, get married, and become a stand-up comic. As a result of Ritvo’s briefly brilliant life, this book is the first I’ve ever read for which I’m as eager to discuss the dedication and acknowledgments pages as I am the actual poems. For six pages, Ritvo effusively and affectionately thanks those he’s loved and felt connected to in prose plain and powerful in its sincerity. One section goes like this: “I think heaven is just an eternity of us telling one another jokes. Dad, you kept my metaphors clear and simple, and kept my mind skeptical but never cynical, and always treated my small emotions with respect, since they were emotions. This is all I think good poetry is.” Indeed, one of the refreshing elements of this book is its unapologetic emotions and the way they trump any kind of striving for cleverness. Several poems address the speaker’s (a thinly veiled Ritvo) lover with lines like, “[l]istening to you makes me naked” (13) or this more vulnerable moment from ‘Living It Up’:

  I wish you would let me know
  how difficult it is to love me.

  Then I would know you love me
  beneath all that difficulty.
  The poet, with clear New York School methodology, seems to view autobiography as a form of personal responsibility, an interesting alternative response to New York School poets and memoirists who revel in the anxieties and ethics of rendering personal experience, and thus “incriminating” relations. Ritvo’s speaker’s stance? “This autobiographical moment. // I must take full responsibility” (69).

  I suppose not surprisingly for a cancer patient, Ritvo’s images and motifs often emanate from the body. His extensive experience with doctors is clear, as in this section from ‘Stalking My Ex-Girlfriend in a Pasture’:

  I refuse the doctor’s fizzy tincture
  because each bubble is me
  until it pops on my tongue
  and then it’s you.
  The speaker’s sense of the body becomes increasingly complex and transcendent, as in this reflection on snow:

  We call it snow
  when the parts of God

  too small to bear, contest our bodies
  for the possession of our smallest sensations (67).
  Ritvo’s aged-early experience extends to his view of other living things around him, as in this pensive observation from ‘For Crow’: “Black blurs the eyes of crows as they grow old” (23). Frequently, the speaker addresses his beloved with sensual, somatic lines like “Your bones when I bite too deep / are the phone’s wires, / full of voice, blue marrow” (37). While ​at Yale, the poet joined an experimental comedy group called His Majesty, the Baby,​ and at the end, at the cancer patient’s lowest moments, he reverts to his core belief in laughter, the body’s joy: “When the breath starts to be ragged, / tickle me, my deepest beloveds— / so that the raggedness becomes confused” (70).

  Though sometimes sentimental and emotional, Ritvo’s poems do possess a peculiarly unpredictable vision: his metaphors and images swerve in unique directions, pulling wildly disparate elements together, wielding metaphor as a means for illuminating connections in an Alan-Watts- ‘we-are-the-universe-experiencing-itself’ manner. He describes “Eyes like blisters / leaking fondness” (4) and his mind “like a black glove / you mistake for a man / in the middle of a blizzard” (7). He also seems to equate or bring together people and natural phenomenon in lines like “[h]er brain / moans chilly / and low, like lightning that wants to stay” (61) and “I will slip behind your poodle eyes / loading myself like a cartridge of light” (45).

  The dedication page for ​Four Reincarnations ​reads, “to my fathers, to my sisters, to my nephew, / to my teachers, to my friends, to my exes, / to my shrinks, and to my doctors,” a fortuitously Whitmanian, and it turns out Ritvoian, gesture toward inclusion, connection, embrace, and democratic spirit. In fact, in his constant struggle to pin down impossible ideas such as Death, God, Heaven, and Joy, he finds “the secret to making people happy (...) is that I am the people!” (26). It’s fitting that for Ritvo, the answer to a difficult question--how does one achieve joy?--is simple and communal. All of these poems reveal Ritvo’s perspective on death, and thereby on life: that meaning resides in relationships with others, and at times with nature: “Winter, by being so white, / is
  trying to talk to me--” (49). At other times, this impulse is utterly erotic: “She described an orgasm / So imaginatively that I longed to become her.” (28) And at times it’s a dark yet primal and undeniable manifestation:

  That night the child dreams
  he’s inside the box.
  It’s burning hot, the heat coming
  from bugs and worms
  raping and devouring one another (59).
  But in the end, God and heaven are about our potential as a human community, as “the world’s voices fire into a God” (38). This collection is most certainly written in the voice of a young poet who is, ironically, very old in his proximity to death. This position inevitably leads to some aphoristic assertions, some kernels of wisdom left behind for those of us with more time to employ them. Thus, we get gems like this section from ‘Poem to my Litter’:

  I hope, Maxes, some good in you is of me.
  Even my suffering is good, in part.
  (...)
  And if a whole lot
  of nothing happens to you, Maxes, that’s peace.
  Which is what we want. Trust me.
  “All of death is right here” (58) the speaker informs us, and “I know this isn’t the heaven we wanted. / What ever is?” (12). Ritvo is quite explicit in addressing a biblical God, alluding, in one instance to “Enoch [who] has written / we are made in His image / but God may have many images” (64).

  Laughter, love, and curiosity permeate these poems about death. In his acknowledgments manifesto, the poet says, “I hope that art is an act of unconditional love.” I don’t know about all art, but Ritvo’s affectionate, tender, and final collection certainly stands as evidence that of such a philosophy.

  click to see Four Reincarnations at Amazon.com

  BIO: Max Ritvo (1990-2016) wrote Four Reincarnations in New York and Los Angeles over the course of a long battle with cancer. He was also the author of the chapbook AEONS, chosen by Jean Valentine to receive the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship in 2014. Ritvo's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and the Boston Review, and as a Poem-a-Day for Poets.org. His prose and interviews have appeared in publications such as Lit Hub, Divedapper, Huffington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/wishes-harbor-poems-max-ritvo-heather-hartley/#!
  Word count: 2100

  The Wishes That We Harbor: The Poems of Max Ritvo and Heather Hartley
  By Stephen Burt

  435 2 1

  SEPTEMBER 5, 2016

  MAX RITVO’S Four Reincarnations feels like, and is, a first book: it follows a young poet finding his footing, disentangling the kinds of things he alone can do from the things, the sentences, even the kinds of words, that his models and peers — from Louise Glück to, say, Kathleen Ossip — might deploy. Like them, he seeks discoveries that are both allegorical and visceral, true for him but not for him alone. In a short tribute to a painter friend, for example, he exclaims, “Seeing is the faces’ nervous delicious Lord.// Listening to you makes me naked.” (If you saw her paintings, you might feel that way too.)
  But Four Reincarnations also feels like a last book: as the publicity around it, and some of its best poems (e.g. “Poem to My Litter,” from the June 27 issue of The New Yorker) make clear, Ritvo has serious, likely untreatable, cancer. He seems to have written most of this book with the clarity, the near equanimity, the distance from ordinary reversals and struggles, of much older poets who know that they are dying (say, the Wallace Stevens of The Rock). “Poem to My Litter” addresses the tumorous mice in which new cancer drugs are tested. The poet gives each of them his own first name, then hopes they can look past their own “rage, fear — the stuff that makes you see your tail / as a bar on the cage. But then the feelings pass […] if a whole lot // of nothing happens to you, Maxes, that’s peace. / Which is what we want. Trust me.”
  The title of the book, which may refer both to Ritvo’s own personae and to Stage 4 cancer, tries to let us see (as Randall Jarrell once said of late Stevens) what life looks like as you leave it, and for this poet of Generation Y that life can look — ironically, quietly — like a glowing screen. At “the end of suffering,” on “a dark porch,” he discovers
  The chairs watching shadows on the glass top
  like white poodles, all named Handsome,
  from different phases in your life,
  watching television pictures of your sex-dreams play out.
  Contemplating his friendships, his marriage, his hospital stays, the other things he has really seen — like “Holding a Freshwater Fish in a Pail Above the Sea,” or Melissa Carroll’s paintings — Ritvo turns, time and again, to mortality, be it his own or somebody else’s (several poems commemorate Carroll). But mortality is rarely his only subject: shyness, gratitude, and erotic attachment are as important as death itself.
  In “Touching the Floor,” Ritvo writes about stretching, about light exercise, in a way that emphasizes his physical awkwardness, his intuition that his mind does not quite live in his body — an intuition that some of us whose doctors believe we are healthy also share. “Poem Set in the Day and in the Night” takes on the same topics. It opens: “Just do things that are meaningful to you. / Go to the beach, says the Doc.” But the man in the poem discovers that he does not belong in his sunlit body, would not belong to it, even without the disease: he needs the light of imagination, the moonlight, “to bathe the body in soapy light” where “memory breaks apart.”
  If you read academic lit-crit, you may have encountered Jesse Zuba’s The First Book, which examines poetic debuts as covert manifestos, ways to position oneself among styles and institutions, and yet to “resist conformity” at the outset of a career. You might also have read Last Looks, Last Books, Helen Vendler’s compact, magnificent look at how modern poets “to whom the concept of an afterlife is no longer available” consider “the interface of death and life.” Not every first book is a First Book in this sense, nor is every final book a Last Book, but Four Reincarnations certainly feels like both. One of the poets in Last Looks, Vendler writes, “learned to examine death with an impersonality of style that announces her eventual critique of poems exclusively personal in utterance.” That poet is Sylvia Plath, and while Ritvo’s temperament never resembles Plath’s, he too wants to make sure that his poems about facing death are not just about him. Instead, he tries to make himself at once distinctive and representative, and at his best he can do so with an understated, disarming informality:
  When I was about to die
  my body lit up
  like when I leave my house
  without my wallet.
  One of his finest poems about his illness is also one of his simplest, “Plush Bunny,” which begins with the lines:
  My poor little future,
  you could practically fit in a shoe-box
  like the one I kept peshul bunny in
  when I decided I was too old to sleep with her.
  The nonstandard language of children — “peshul,” “Pee Pee Priestess” — provides rare relief from the very common words, the restricted diction, that come as naturally to Ritvo as they do to, say, Glück. They invite us not to feel bad for him, but to imagine more about him.
  It’s tempting — it might be accurate — to call Four Reincarnations post-ironic; if there were not so much mortality in it, I might even call it (approvingly) faux- or neo-naïve, since Ritvo is able to give poems titles as richly wet as “Heaven Is Us Being a Flower Together” and to mean them as gestures of affection (there is not a sarcastic line in the book). Sometimes (as when he’s self-conscious about the word “lyric”) the Generation Y, recent-MFA aspects of Ritvo’s poetry get in the way of his subjects: breaking descriptive passages short, or breaking them off in order to comment about them, he shows signs of what another young critic, Gillian White, calls “lyric shame,” the awareness that some forward-thinking readers consider single perspectives, consistent world-building, and prose sense passé. Sometimes, though, the self-aware extravagance, the faux-naif aspects, and the simpler descriptive aspects work together: the poems are equally conscious of impending death and of the next day’s life, having spent time in a pool of self-skepticism and then emerged shining, shockingly clean:
  On the other side, you’re the body again
  and the shadow is again shadow.
  You can enjoy anything — you don’t remember
  how clumsy the old hands were, how picky the tongue.
  When you smile, every tooth is a perfect circle,
  when you write, every letter is a perfect circle,
  when you weep, sorrow comes clean out.
  Hello again, you say. Hello again.
  Heather Hartley’s Adult Swim is her second book — Knock Knock came out in 2010 — but it too feels like a debut: it announces her goals, and tells us what it is doing while it does what it does. Hartley, like Ritvo, has become a poet of tempus fugit, of carpe diem, but she is ungainly and effervescent, where he is deliberate; her poetry speaks as if impromptu, “to me, to that guy, to my Mom, / or to the grieving sky, out of range of any god.”
  Rather than saying a balanced hello to the world, Hartley’s poems encourage us to embrace everything embraceable. She seems, like Ritvo, post-ironic, but she has nothing of Ritvo’s reserve, nor does she insist (as he does) on turning details into tropes. Instead, she’s willing — indeed, she sometimes requires herself — to get literal. Her fast-paced, delightfully unpredictable verse asks you to celebrate “your doggish slavery to what- / ever you’re a slave to, even your potato chip obsession, or what- / ever makes a craving in you, makes a hole in the heart of your / dark night, like for chewing gum.” Her rationale is that “Life can be / abrasive & you need / some sort of sweetener, it’s that simple.” Sometimes it is; sometimes we wish it were.
  Often long and never remotely metrical, Hartley’s lines can seem ephemeral, much as stand-up comedy seems ephemeral. Yet, we know by now, the best stand-up routines do last, and so could the best of Hartley’s poems, fueled as they are by friendly chaos, the wish to keep talking. “Rules sometimes are nuts,” and Hartley would like to find ways to live outside them, to live more — both in the sense of experiencing more (raised in West Virginia, she lives in Paris and writes poems of European tourism) and in the literal sense of living longer than she once expected.
  Hartley, too, has recently been treated for cancer , but she accords less attention to medical history than to the bubbly, inconsequential hours of her life: “It’s the kind of cafe that makes you want to steal spoons.// It’s the nape of a Friday’s neck, the first Friday of sun, of shedding, of everything” (“Lifting Spoons”). Such a day looks more important after the kind of days envisioned in the poem below, given whole, along with its title:
  What I liked best was the long flume & —
  We’re in for a ride —
  it’s the amusement park you were never expecting
  sans s’amuser:
  cancer.
  Find your deepest sea legs,
  now.
  Hartley shares Frank O’Hara’s sense that the littlest things are really the big things. She seeks, as O’Hara did (the line is on his tombstone), “grace to be born & live as variously as possible,” and her excitable phrases tell us why they are glad to encounter every street scene, every stone:
  And then, they
  saved my life — saved
  my life.
  Lutetia, Paris, Ile-de-France,
  city & island & bridge,
  whatever name you want,
  I’m yours.
  In certain Renaissance paintings, signs of worldly enjoyment — fruit, for example — also remind us that we will die; in Hartley’s poems, though, signs of apparent dejection or disappointment remind us that the sun comes back and days go on. (Her enjambments, her frequent hyphenations, are ways to resist the idea that any one end is The End.) When she’s on — and, of course, she is not always on — she doesn’t so much risk triviality as enjoy it, and even when she complains, she’s having barbed fun. Here, again, the title runs into the poem (which Hartley arranges in monostichs):
  Every time you leave, the basil plant dies
  like clockwork, I’d like to say, but nothing is like clock-
  work — sprockets & digits & regular pay-
  checks in the — how do you say dying stronger? — sun of early Nov-
  ember when some drowsy gods crash the apartment . . .
  What I want
  to know is why all the saints don’t come in & save
  us, or at least the plant, or some apprentice
  savior slip us an idea of how to pro-
  ceed.
  The difference between Hartley’s best poems and your uncle’s boring tales of his week in Toulouse isn’t just that Hartley’s phrases are better composed but that she acknowledges and puts in its place the possibility of total loss, the nearness of death, the fragility of all pleasures, such as tourism, pop music, and conversations with strangers:
  Yes, the saxophonist is playing ABBA under a tree, under sloping
  sun in the garden of Villa Borghese, it’s springtime, you see
  this from the long benches and trees greened, this one has no
  scent, when you want every-
  thing to go away, he said it goes
  away.
  Everything does go away, sooner or later; poetry exists in part because the language of prose, the language of verifiable propositions and confirmable requests, cannot fit all the wishes that we harbor within ourselves, or in spite of ourselves. Not least among those is the wish for more time, more experience, on this Earth. We can delight, with Hartley, in what we might find next, or we can learn, from Ritvo, to look around, into the realm of wisdom, and then back again, at what we have already learned.
  ¤
  The poet Max Ritvo passed away on August 23, just weeks after this review was written.
  ¤
  Stephen Burt is professor of English at Harvard.

• Southern Humanities Review
  http://www.southernhumanitiesreview.com/review-four-reincarnations-by-max-ritvo.html
  Word count: 1192

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  Love (Re)Incarnate: On Max Ritvo’s Four Reincarnations
  By DOUGLAS RAY | DECEMBER 13, 2016

  L et’s begin with the ending, which illuminates everything: Max Ritvo’s stunning debut collection, Four Reincarnations, is also his life’s work. And his last work. He died at the age of twenty-five at the end of August, and Milkweed Editions brought his book—his words incarnate—into the world a little over a month later. Even the copyright page seems unwilling to accept the fact of Ritvo’s death: the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data reads “Ritvo, Max, 1990- author.” No ending date. And if we can think of life’s journeys as many and disparate, as the book’s title suggests, Ritvo’s most recent incarnation was ended abruptly by Ewing’s Sarcoma, but it also brought into the world these poems, wise events that illuminate suffering and love, the mind and body in grief and in gratitude.

  In an interview with The New Republic’s Sarah Ruhl, whom he thanks beautifully in his book’s bursting-with-love-and-grace Acknowledgements section, Ritvo says of his title: “Each of the four sections in the book is a different life. The first witnesses the birth of the universe, the second goes through a nasty breakup, the third tells of perfect love in a time of cancer, and the fourth sends poems from an underworld. But every ‘I’ in the book is me, however much time has passed between sections, however different the voice sounds as it passes into the world. So the lives are reincarnations.” Ritvo’s idea of moving through the book’s sections as one moves through life (or many lives) is reminiscent of the speaker in “The Layers,” a poem by Stanley Kunitz—another wise poet—who talks about the many lives he’s lived and how even though his lives were numerous, he found that some singular “principle of being / abides.” If there’s a principle of being that abides with Ritvo’s selves, it is a commitment to love and to accept, even when confused and imperiled. Just take these two simple lines from “Second Dream”: “Me: What is my future? / Shon: Flowers. You are marrying flowers.”

  But though the story, the making of these poems, is so deeply sad, and perhaps the sadness makes things even more numinous, this book is not drenched in grief. It resists the maudlin and knows the power of joy, of laughter. At the end of the final poem, “Universe Where We Weren’t Artists”1, Ritvo commands—maybe exhorts is more accurate: “When my breath starts to be ragged, / tickle me, my deepest beloveds— / so that the raggedness becomes confused.” Yes, it is the body that complicates things, that demands passing on, but it is also the site of joy. The body, touched by loved ones, overrides suffering.

  We understand in this life that suffering is the status quo; just as the Buddhist concept of reincarnation is fundamental to understanding the philosophy, so is suffering. And we’re always asking what is the antidote to suffering? Perhaps Ritvo suggests it is creation, community. Perhaps the acceptance of limits—except when it comes to love. Some of my favorite lines come in “The Blimp,” a poem in the last section, or “incarnation,” that speaks to how we can choose to approach difficulty:

  I was asked to describe
  some letters scratched on the wall
  but making sense of them
  was difficult, so I loved them, like mother,
  and many years later, in the spreading
  serenity, there was no place for this
  as there is never a place
  for struggle in a living room
  where someone is pouring you ice water
  in exchange for grateful silence you
  learn to love.

  Maybe, in order to learn to live fuller and to be better to each other, we should seek the fluid syntax and searing vision of the dying. Like the “letters scratched on the wall,” Ritvo’s particular lot—a rare, terminal cancer for someone very young—given to someone with things to say and people to love is difficult to suss out. But Ritvo chooses to love the inscrutable. His hermeneutic is one of love, not of dominance or mastery. In other parts of the book, we read poems to his wife, Victoria, that already seem enduring, lessons we’ll come back to in order to remind ourselves what’s good, what’s possible. I would place this collection alongside Tim Dlugos’s very late poems, including the magnificent “G-9”, as among the best poetry of the dying, the best writing as witness to disease, frailty, and lives cut short.

  Just as Max Ritvo left his most recent incarnation on earth and ascended (hopefully) with laughter to some more perfect state, I was teaching my tenth-grade students Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. We discussed how Vasudeva, the wise river keeper crucial to Siddhartha’s enlightenment, could easily be read as a Bodhisattva, an enlightened being destined to be a Buddha who purposely remains on earth to teach others. As I’ve read and re-read this book, this gift from Max Ritvo, I am convinced that he remains our poet-Bodhisattva, enlightening us to the power of loving through suffering enough to write, to touch, to give. I’m sure that when my students read his poems, they will feel the same way.

  You’ll finish this book and undoubtedly feel a lot because its making is as exceptional as its contents. You’ll reel in a state of wonder at what you’ve read (experienced is a better word). You’ll be angry that this first is a last. You’ll want to read these love poems to your beloved. You’ll text a friend and tell him to buy the book. You’ll feel gratitude for the fact that these poems have connected you to those you love.

  NOTES
  1 To make this moving poem even more full of heart, read, in Ritvo’s Acknowledgements section, the address to Andrew Kahn and Shon Arieh-Lerer.

  DOUGLAS RAY is author of the poetry collection He Will Laugh and editor of The Queer South: LGBTQ Writers on the American South, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. He is at work on a new project, Supporting Transgender Students: A Guide for Schools and Teachers. A graduate of the MFA program at The University of Mississippi, he teaches at Western Reserve Academy, a boarding school in Hudson, Ohio.

  Picture
  Four Reincarnations, by Max Ritvo
  Milkweed Editions, 2016

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• Booklist Online
  https://www.booklistonline.com/Four-Reincarnations-Max-Ritvo/pid=8406498
  Word count: 197

  Four Reincarnations.
  Ritvo, Max (author).
  Nov. 2016. 96p. Milkweed, hardcover, $22 (9781571314901); e-book (9781571319579). 811.
  REVIEW.
  First published October 28, 2016 (Booklist Online).

  In “Poem about My Wife Being Perfect and Me Being Afraid,” Ritvo writes to his wife, Victoria, “Thou art me before I am myself.” And in this distinctive collection—part debut, part finale, part indelible legacy—Ritvo does confront the fluidity of the self and selves, man and mouse, suns and sight. As the title suggests, these transformations often materialize through reincarnation. In “Poem Set in the Day and in the Night,” “man becomes a web / and his shadow becomes a spider.” Ritvo reimagines language, too. “Lyric Complicity for One” envisions a dialogue “so passionate . . . and imaginative . . . that . . . personalities / . . . dissolve . . . / and a thing . . . / much more beautiful than . . . our voices / . . . begin[s] to speak.” By turns carnal and cerebral, prophetic and pragmatic, crude and contemplative, Ritvo’s voice is a wildly imaginative and frenetic force. After a nine-year battle with Ewing’s sarcoma, Ritvo died in August. He writes in one concluding poem, “I hear my own voice . . . / from the world beyond.” There’s no doubt we hear it, too.

  — Briana Shemroske

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