Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Radioapocrypha
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.bkfischer.com/
CITY: Sleepy Hollow
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
Teaches The Comma Sutra in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, and is a poetry editor at Boston Review.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LOC Authorities:
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| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2005080760 |
| HEADING: | Fischer, Barbara K., 1971- |
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| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |
| 100 | 1_ |a Fischer, Barbara K., |d 1971- |
| 670 | __ |a Fischer, Barbara K. Museum mediations, 2005: |b ECIP t.p. (Barbara K. Fischer) data view (received her MFA from Columbia University and her Ph. D. for New York University) |
| 670 | __ |a Email from publisher, Nov. 14, 2006 |b (Barbara K. Fischer; b. Dec. 16, 1971) |
| 953 | __ |a lh39 |
PERSONAL
Born December 16, 1971; children: three.
EDUCATION:Johns Hopkins University, B.A.; Columbia University, M.F.A.; New York University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Columbia University, New York, NY, adjunct assistant professor of writing. Also teacher at Hudson Valley Writers’ Center and Neuberger Museum of Art; gives readings from her works.
AWARDS:T.S. Eliot Prize, Truman State University Press, 2011, for Mutiny Gallery; Washington Prize, Word Works, 2012, for St. Rage’s Vault; Charles B. Wheeler Prize, Ohio State University, 2017, for Radioapocrypha.
WRITINGS
Contributor of poems to numerous journals, including Blackbird, Field, Hopkins Review, Kenyon Review, Literary Mama, Ninth Letter, Modern Language Studies, Paris Review, Posit, and Southwest Review. Poetry editor, Boston Review.
SIDELIGHTS
B.K. Fischer is an award-winning poet who lives in Sleepy Hollow, New York. She has taught at the Neuberger Museum of Art, mentored other writers at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, and lectured at Columbia University, where she presents an in-depth consideration of English grammar that she calls “The Comma Sutra.” She is also the poetry editor of the Boston Review.
Fischer’s own poetry takes many forms, some of which bear a striking resemblance to narrative fiction. In an interview on the Offending Adam website, she told Andrew Wessels that one of her interests is “in the ways that the lyric … can be put to the service of storytelling.” She added, however, that she is more concerned with the constituent stories–the elements of a lyric collage–than the connective tissue between them. Later in the interview, Fischer emphasized that she has “stories to tell, suffering to relate, characters to envoice,” though some of the tales are more difficult to interpret than others. Above all, Fisher believes that a poem “must give pleasure,” whether the pleasure is “sensory or cognitive, imaginative or intellectual,” or filtered through any number of other enticements.
Mutiny Galley
Fischer’s first collection, Mutiny Gallery, has been likened to both a novel in verse and a poetic road trip. Claire and Max are a mother and young son on a cross-country trip to escape an abusive domestic environment. The “mutiny” of the title is their flight from fear. The implication is that they will stay safe as long as they keep moving, but they must stop for food, for fuel, for sleep. Their roadside stops form a gallery of disparate experiences, conversational interludes, games of the imagination. Twin beds in a motel room become islands in a shark-infested sea of carpet. Whimsical little museums by the side of the road ignite flashes of memory.
At the website Flogged Clarity, Scott Hightower commented: “Snippets of memories, moments of panic, innutritious snacks, and serendipitous flashes of graffiti fill the voids where more meaningful textures and continuities are missing.” He continued: “Besides the emotional spaces that are opened and collapsed, the poems are carefully lined and well made. Metaphors are thoughtfully introduced, returned to for development. Fischer is masterful with pacing.” Catherine Staples observed on the Rattle website that “Fischer is fluent in the language of childhood.” She added: “What comes through most fiercely in this beautiful debut volume is the intensity of the mother and son bond and the deft capture of the child’s changing perspective as he swings forward towards adolescence.”
St. Rage's Vault
Fischer is also interested in the process of ekphrasis, the use of words–in her case, poetry–to comment on a visual image in order to illuminate or enhance its meaning. The practice of ekphrasis was the subject of her graduate thesis, which was later published as Museum Mediations: Refining Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry. Fischer applied the concept to the little museums in Mutiny Gallery, and it provides the structural framework of St. Rage’s Vault.
St. Rage’s Vault relates another kind of story: a poetic “memoir” of pregnancy, containing one visual image paired with one poem for each of the forty weeks of human maternity. The volume is divided into trimesters and thence into weeks. In her Offending Adam website interview, Fischer told Wessels: “I look at images of maternity–from the Madonna to the monster, from painting and sculpture to signage and journalism–to explore kinship, community, creativity, and mortality.” In Poet’s Quarterly, Ann E. Michael linked the poems in the collection to the incubation of artistic creativity: “The turmoil of a changing physical body … energizes the poems and reflects how the germ of an idea roils and worries at the inquisitive mind.” Michael concluded: “St. Rage’s Vault offers the reader the kind of depth that will withstand several readings and interpretations.”
Radioapocrypha
Fischer told Wessels in her 2012 interview: “Each poem, each project, each occasion for poems or book of poems, demands mystery and accessibility in different measure.” Her third collection ventures far afield from the mother and son road trip and the memoir of pregnancy as she blends New Testament scripture with the popular culture of the 1980s in Radioapocrypha, which Fischer describes at her website as “a suburban gospel.” This is the story of teenager Maren Manning, who is seduced by her thirty-something chemistry teacher in suburban Maryland sometime around the year 1989, when the band Depeche Mode entreated listeners to seek their “Personal Jesus.” The story emerges in the form of poems and parables bearing whimsical titles beginning with phrases like “Our Lady Of … ” and “Parable Of … ” alternating with biblical word-plays such as “enunciation,” “dispassion,” “ascension,” and “renunciation.”
Maren is a pretty girl, a gifted student, and a perfect daughter. With precocious and impatient longings, she faces the uncertainties of the decade to come. Jim Callahan is a popular chemistry teacher as fluent with pop song lyrics as he is with the laws of physics, and he offers hope of salvation. Maren heads off to college, her desires awakened but not satisfied. She takes matters into her own hands and becomes pregnant. The miscarriage takes place in her dormitory room, and the wise men who attend her are the emergency medical technicians who transport her to the hospital. Maren survives, but gone are the leggings and song lyrics. Gone is the metaphoric Jesus, whose life ends, not on a cross, but in a car crash.
Maren revisits her youth as an adult woman with children. Her faith is fading, but her yearning for a savior remains. According to Heather Treseler’s review in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Fischer’s story suggests that the desire to become a god–or to worship one–might be hardwired.” In Radioapocrypha, Treseler observed, “Fischer lends us nuanced ways of thinking about faith and fakes, secular shamans and sexual misconduct, deceit and devotion.” Maren makes a reliable curator of memories, according to a reviewer in Publishers Weekly Online, especially when her account is juxtaposed with the teachings of Callahan to his teenage disciples in the local garage band. Treseler suggested that “we should be startled by [Fischer’s] portrait of the hunger to believe, against reason, in a demagogue who appears to answer a generation’s matrix of fear and desire with promises for a better life.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
ForeWord, February 27, 2018, Matt Sutherland, review of Radioapocrypha.
ONLINE
B.K. Fischer Website, http://www.bkfischer.com (April 30, 2018).
Flogged Clarity, http://foggedclarity.com/ (April 21, 2018), Scott Hightower, review of Mutiny Gallery.
Harvard Advocate, http://theharvardadvocate.com/ (April 21, 2018), Sarah Toomey, review of Poems for Political Disaster.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (February 13, 2018), Heather Treseler, review of Radioapocrypha.
Offending Adam, http://theoffendingadam.com/ (October 24, 2012), Andrew Wessels, author interview.
Pasatiempo, http://www.santafenewmexican.com/ (March 31, 2017), Bill Kohlhaase, review of Poems for Political Disaster.
Poets’ Quarterly, http://www.poetsquarterly.com/ (July 11, 2013), Ann E. Michael, review of St. Rage’s Vault.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (April 21, 2018), review of Radioapocrypha.
Rattle, https://www.rattle.com/ (August 15, 2013), Catherine Staples, review of Mutiny Gallery.
BK Fischer is a poet, critic, editor, and teacher living in Sleepy Hollow, New York. She is the author of two forthcoming books: Radioapocrypha, <> which won the 2017 The Journal/Wheeler Prize and will appear with Ohio State University Press in early 2018, and My Lover’s Discourse, a remix of Roland Barthes due out from Tinderbox Editions later this year. Her previous poetry collections are Mutiny Gallery, winner of the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize from Truman State University Press, and St. Rage’s Vault, which received the 2012 Washington Prize from The Word Works. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, FIELD, Ninth Letter, Literary Mama, WSQ, Blackbird, Modern Language Studies, The Hopkins Review, Barrow Street, Southwest Review, Posit, and other journals. Also the author of a critical study, Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry (Routledge, 2006), she was a finalist for the 2014 Balakian Citation in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She holds a B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from New York University. She teaches The Comma Sutra in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, and is a poetry editor at Boston Review.
bkfischer [at] icloud [dot] com
bk [at] boston review [dot] net
Literary Mama: Writing about the Many Faces of Motherhood
http://www.literarymama.com/contributor/b-k-fischer
Contributors
B. K. Fischer
B. K. Fischer is a mother of three living in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Hopkins Review, Ekphrasis, Southwest Review, and other journals, and she is a frequent contributor of essays to Boston Review. She is the author of a scholarly study, Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry, and teaches at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center and the Neuberger Museum of Art.
Features
"The poem has to have, to make, some kind of appeal, to function as entreaty and enticement. I try the best I can to write evocatively, and to find and publish evocative writing, and what that means is a moving target. I’m not afraid of difficulty, and I’m also not afraid of clarity. <
B. K. Fischer
A Conversation with B. K. Fischer
Interview by Andrew Wessels
B. K. Fischer
ANDREW WESSELS: Mutiny Gallery, your first book, is labeled as a “novel-in-verse,” and I think I would largely agree with that designation. The poems have a singular trajectory following the consistent, developing characters of a mother and her son traveling together across America. However, that “in-verse” aspect of the book seems to exert itself over and above the sanctity of the novel, with the poetic and lyric moment embodied in each individual poem being more important than creating specific plot points. How did you toe this line between poem and novel (or, perhaps, muddy the line)?
B. K. FISCHER: I am interested in muddying that line, and smudging what we mean by the lyric moment. My process in writing Mutiny Gallery was exploratory—I wanted to see what the lyric could do in the aggregate, and to blur the boundaries of what we typically think of as innovative collage-making and narrative poetry. I wrote this book quickly, drafting it almost entirely in a six-month period in 2008, and its initial inspiration was neither novel nor verse, but painting and drama. I had written a short play, a dramatic monologue, that was prompted by and performed against the backdrop of Francesca DiMattio’s 2006 oil on canvas Black Ship, a tessellated image of a clipper ship in a clutter of non-sequiturial details. The play was part of a production at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, New York, where the audience moved among large-scale paintings in the exhibition Size Matters: XXL. My piece evoked the fractured memories and thoughts of a woman named Claire who had inadvertently allowed another person’s child to drown on her watch, while she was wading at a river beach with her toddler son, Max. Claire’s voice was constructed and refracted through the ekphrasis of the painting, and the actor who performed the role staged the anguished and halting attempts at narration against the disorientations of the painting itself. When that production wrapped up, I was looking to start something new, and two things converged: I wondered what would have happened to Max and Claire (or anybody) ten years after a tragedy like that, and a friend gave me a book called Little Museums: Over 1,000 Small (and Not-So-Small) American Showplaces, edited by Lynne Arany and Archie Hobson. One thing led to another, and the scaffolding of the backstory fell away.
I’ve always liked Jasper Johns’s formulation “Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that”—the hybrid genre of Mutiny Gallery evolved in this manner. I did not set out to write a novel from this material. I simply made a list of names of little museums that interested me, and took them as titles for potential poems—riffs, meditations, image-episodes. Later, as I generated more of these, they started to accrue to themselves significances that seemed to connect, and to take the shape of a story. I found that I could put them in an order, and that they suggested both plot progression and character development. I was and am interested<< in the ways that the lyric, in its many forms, can be put to the service of storytelling>>. The lyric as song and as prayer, the lyric as it intersects the prose poem, the disjunctive collage, the monologue, the ekphrastic encounter—all of these forms, and especially the spaces between and among them, seem to me to be ways stories can be provisionally articulated. I’ve never wanted to write a long narrative poem per se, and I don’t think Mutiny Gallery is one. I’m put off intellectually and temperamentally by the notion of writing that creates an illusion of seamless narrative continuity, by the smoke and mirrors it takes to sustain narrative realism, and by the burden of having to connect all the dots. I wanted to write the dots, the pins on the map.
AW: Your use of the museum archetype as inspiration for the poems seems to resonate with your approach to the construction of the collection of poems-as-suggestive-narrative. A museum, in essence, tells a story of something through largely disconnected or disjunctive objects, whether it’s a period of art history through exhibited paintings, the evolution and extinction of the dinosaurs through reconstructed skeletons, or Liberace’s life and career through costumes and pianos. If I’m correct, you have also published a critical work on the relationship between museums and poetry. I’m curious, how did the idea of the museum play into the composition of the book and the individual poems, and also more specifically, how did Little Museums work its way into the manuscript? Is the book itself a museum?
BKF: I’ve long been interested in the ways museums both ritualize cultural narratives and become spaces for interrogation. Researching my dissertation (which became my critical book Museum Mediations), I waded through vast numbers of ekphrastic poems published in the later twentieth century to find those poems that foregrounded the museum setting itself. I made a case that for some poets, the museum—and awareness of the institutional framings and conventions surrounding collections and works of art—becomes a space in which to navigate and critique entrenched cultural divisions, including the divide in verse culture between the lyric-confessional mainstream and the avant-garde. I like to hope that this reductive divide is a critical trope that is now behind us, that it has been complicated by a much more interesting pluralism and eclecticism in contemporary poetry, but it still bisects critical thinking from time to time. “Site-specific” museum poems by poets from different coteries, different places on the lyric/innovation spectrum—Kenneth Koch, Richard Howard, Anne Carson, Cole Swensen, Alice Fulton, Kathleen Fraser, John Ashbery—all seemed to me to be doing critical work regarding experimentalism, avant-gardism, cultural capital, and ideas of liminality and charisma as they pertain to aesthetic experience.
So a museum is a loaded term and a locus of inquiry for me—maybe writing about weird museums in my own poetry was just a way of working out some of the trauma of dissertation-writing. At a practical level, as I was writing Mutiny Gallery, the guidebook Little Museums was a source of potential material, a cache of detail and diction that I could raid to suit my lyric or narrative purposes. I was drawn to these sites as “anti-museums,” as “Museums of Ordinary People,” which is an oxymoron—the elevation of the unremarkable to public display. So, yes, the ways the disconnection and disjunction of artifacts in a museum create a fiction, the ways the arrangement of disparate objects can script an overarching narrative, is very much at the heart of my enterprise in this book. The museum trope allowed me to foreground the artifice of that fiction as such, but clearly I wanted to have my cake and eat it too—I wanted the story to be a page-turner, to propel the reader down the road from one collection to the next, and I wanted it to give pleasure.
B. K. Fischer's MUTINY GALLERY
AW: How does your current writing continue to build on these same themes and poetic ideas?
BKF: My forthcoming book St. Rage’s Vault includes the monologue “Mothership” that is the prequel to Mutiny Gallery. But other than that cameo appearance of Max and Claire, this book follows a different storyline. It is a series of ekphrastic studies and soundings of images of women’s bodies, and it is structured as a pregnancy memoir that unfolds through poems, one for each of 40 weeks.<< I look at images of maternity—from the Madonna to the monster, from painting and sculpture to signage and journalism—to explore kinship, community, creativity, and mortality.>> It won the 2012 Washington Prize from The Word Works and will be released in February 2013. I am currently at work on two more “versa-novellas” that would round out a trilogy with Mutiny Gallery, one about a medieval monk who is reincarnated as a gas-station attendant in New Jersey, and one about euthanasia and television. Don’t ask.
AW: In addition to your writing and teaching, you recently were named poetry editor at Boston Review. How have these various roles informed your approach to the creation of the new, the avant-garde? How do you create, curate, and teach contemporary American poetry?
BKF: Working as an editor and teacher, I find myself in many conversations lately about the need to discover new ways to talk about avant-gardism and innovation in contemporary poetry. Too much discussion of contemporary poetics is hung up on what I’d call the nostalgic psycho-dynamics of the avant-garde—the notion that postmodernism, or Language poetry and its spin-offs, or conceptualism, has liberated us from the false consciousness of the lyric narrative. Maybe they have. But I’m suspicious of the terms of conversion narrative that surround this train of thought, and the piety that accompanies it. I’m leery of unreflective rejection of the first person, or the subject position, or the personal anecdote, or the idea of voice, or normative syntax. I’m also fatigued by fragmentation. When I’m greeted with a text that supposedly invites me to collaborate with it in meaning-making, however moving or riveting the fragments, I sometimes feel impatient and even a little resentful. I don’t need another fragmentary consciousness. I have one of my own, thank you very much.
That said, I’m not inclined to succumb to bourgeois illusions either (at least not the ones I haven’t already succumbed to), and I certainly don’t want easy poetic self-identifications that smack of complacency and privilege (“I am standing at the kitchen window, and I am important”). I don’t want to be controlled by oppressive cultural narratives or hegemonic discourses or corporations or capitalism. If I can send anything out into the world so that my children, so any children, won’t be controlled by those things either, I will do it. But I don’t think fragmentation in poetic writing, or destabilization of the subject position, or ironic performances of marginalized selves, or insouciant re-appropriations of official discourses, as useful and delightful and provocative as these strategies can be (I’m especially fond of doing those last two things in poems myself), are an end in themselves, or the end-all-be-all.
So I find myself, as an editor and as a writer, returning to that first principle: it <
119.3: Tory Adkisson:: Little Boxes Made of Darkness and Light
119.1: Joshua Kryah:: Holy Ghost People
B.K. Fischer
B.K. Fischer is poetry editor at Boston Review. She is the author of St. Rage’s Vault, winner of the 2012 Washington Prize; Mutiny Gallery, winner of the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize; and Museum Mediations, a critical study. She teaches at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center.
B.K. Fischer is the author of St. Rage’s Vault, winner of the 2012 Washington Prize, Mutiny Gallery, winner of the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize, and Museum Mediations, a critical study. She teaches at the Hudson Valley Writers' Center, and she is a poetry editor at Boston Review.
Los Angeles Review of Books (Online)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-gnostic-gospel-for-the-now-b-k-fischers-radioapocrypha/
Radioapocrypha
By Heather Treseler
2/13/2018
WHAT IF CHRIST did not appear as a homeless infant in a Bethlehem barn, but as a chemistry teacher — in “a condo with new car smell” — in suburban Maryland, circa 1989? And what if Mary Magdalen, a recent high school graduate, had an illicit affair with her teacher while other disciples jammed in a garage band in search of “acceleration and shriek,” “hot mercy and radical love”?
The New Testament gets a remix in poet B. K. Fischer’s verse novella Radioapocrypha, a pagan rejoinder to the biblical story of redemption. An homage to a 1980s adolescence, it might also be one of the more necessary poetry collections for 2018:<
Biblical gospels pasteurize the scandal at the crux of the Christ tale: Mary, the virgin mother, conceives a child without sin. Joseph, just as miraculously, accepts a son he did not father. The holy family is not nuclear, and childbirth in a barn, idealized in the Nativity crèche, could not have been a tidy affair.
Fischer’s collection delves directly into these human complications of the Christian myth, staging it in a Maryland subdivision near Washington, DC, where the paranoid edicts of King Herod have been replaced by DEFCON and the nascent threat of AIDS. To frame the story, she riffs from the Gospel of Mary, a fifth-century papyrus codex, as well as songs by Prince, Sonic Youth, Depeche Mode, and Joy Division, among others. Channeling these voices, Fischer catapults the reader into the psychic life of a young woman named Maren Manning — a valedictorian and an admitted “overachiever” — who returns home after her first college semester ends with a miscarriage and an “inpatient clinic where / even the lauded daughter is served up / the same pills in a soufflé cup.” While the biblical Mary is visited by magi, Maren is rescued by emergency medical services and sent home on antidepressants.
Like epic poets who call up a muse in lieu of an ambulance, Fischer literalizes “invocation” with a phone call: the epigraph’s first line reads “This is she.” Maren, now a grown woman with children of her own, skirts questions about her youth:
? ????Speaking.
[…]
Sorry, I didn’t mean to
? hang up on you, you
caught me off guard —
? he was — I wasn’t —
all of that happened
? in another life, none
of it matters now.
The phone call, which kick-starts the narrative, suggests Fischer’s campy engagement with T. S. Eliot, who famously compared the lyric poem to overheard speech and who claimed that blasphemy was, in fact, a specie of belief, “a symptom that the soul is still alive.” In Radioapocrypha, heresy is a version of holiness, one driven by longing: the narrative alternates between Maren’s affair with James Callahan, “a lover and a healer […] a real son of a bitch,” and his teachings, which mix song lyrics and Newton’s laws.
The mock-messiah’s seduction of his former student is complicated by Maren’s perspective. Indeed, <
It is the yearning and aloneness of this gifted teen, tuning into the world’s threats and expectations, which is most convincingly drawn in these poems. Author of Museum Mediations, a critical study of ekphrasis; Mutiny Gallery, a novella in verse about a mother’s flight from domestic violence; and St. Rage’s Vault, a collection that lends new language and metaphor to the experience of pregnancy, Fischer has often written into the gaps in our poetic imaginary including the somatic experiences of women and children. In Radioapocrypha, she turns up the amps to capture the psychological complexities of a teenager grappling with adult danger and desire.
In the prose poem “Miracles,” her character Maren chronicles ordinary benedictions:
The hour the antibiotics kicked in. The last outbound train running ten minutes late. Your aunt hitting the lotto in time to make the mortgage. The thick envelope. The light left on in the van but the engine still turning over. The proximity of the neighbor.
[…]
When you ran out of gas, and he helped you push the car into the parking space at Casa Real. The key to the library bathroom. The rusted padlock. The handkerchief in the pocket. The extension cord. The tarp in the trunk. The single dry match. Stand clear of the closing doors.
Indeed, Callahan’s canned adages (“I don’t come to abolish but to complete,” “root for the underdog, give to anyone who asks”) pale alongside Maren’s tactile attention to the texture of the life she is living.
Gradually, the reader comes to trust Maren as the witness of events. Her observations lend piquancy to the dinning uniformity of a suburban town where even tragedies seem predictable. In poems such as “Parable of the Cheerleader,” “Parable of the Donut,” and “Our Lady of the Prom,” she gives an account of ritualized adolescence: high school’s social hierarchy, adjudicated by the popular; sexual exploration, conducted on the sly; radical haircuts and drugstore cosmetics, bought in hope of instant metamorphosis; suburban sprawl and aisles at Marshalls, bathed in “the sallow / fluorescence of the middle class”; and the petty thefts, auto-wrecks, and deadly virus inaugurating losses of life or innocence.
“[N]o one was surprised sex could kill you,” Maren surmises. “We were raised on cataclysm.” And it is she who interprets the meaning of Callahan’s death when he flips his Nissan. And it is she who sleeps fitfully, “clench-jawed and calling out about the Iron Curtain and the iron lung, voodoo, Virginia Woolf, Watergate, the last man standing in a field of wheat.” Precocious, haunted by polio and the Cold War, schooled (as any 17-year-old) in the “foolish wisdom of the flesh,” she carries revelation before she meets her savior. But her intersection with a charismatic teacher, and his turbulence in her life, has the lucky effect of confirming — rather than destroying — the clarity of what she sees, what she feels, and what she claims as her own.
At college, Maren had sought out her own sexual conquest, one that leads to her short-lived pregnancy and hemorrhage on the floor of her dorm. Though she later wonders if the universe thought her “too chicken for either a baby or an abortion,” she has returned home to face the brutality of a small town’s rumor mill. In “Our Lady of Walgreens,” she states: “I stopped going out much after I overheard, / from the bathroom stall in the bowling alley, / Maren Manning got knocked up but it was / an alien so she threw it in the dumpster.”
Fischer taps into our political fascination with female sexuality: its power, its fetishized purity, its policing. Her protagonist’s circumstances mimic the “monstrous birth” reported in the journal of John Winthrop, Puritan governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who graphically described the miscarriage of the excommunicated Anne Hutchinson, interpreting her malformed fetus as a sign of spiritual deviancy. Miscarriage aside, the power — and production value — of Maren’s physique are evident to Callahan’s disciples. Parker, the band’s pimply singer, notes: “With a body like that who needs college.”
And that is exactly the problem: it is 1989, and Maren is as smart as she is beautiful. So, she must learn how to deploy her resources, much like the experts at the nearby Pentagon. As Radioapocrypha concludes, we learn that Maren survived her go-around with cult and scandal. She has become a suburban wife and mother. But her hallucinatory need for a god has not been satisfied. Even her compensatory obsession with crafts and wreath-making fails to fulfill. She still dreams of her messiah, though she finds that “[e]ach year my faith decays by half, then half again.”
Agnostic, but still riven with spiritual need, one mixed with erotic longing, Maren has become a thwarted artist. Her book of revelation is not one she can write: we learn, in the final poem, that she has recounted her tale to “Barbara,” her confidant and amanuensis. This metapoetic turn is fitting. Women’s gossip has always been its own underground gospel: a way of surviving, a mouth.
Perhaps, as Wallace Stevens observed, it is not the god but the belief that counts. With Fischer’s Radioapocrypha, <
The 2016 Charles B. Wheeler Prize
BK Fischer
Radioapocrypha
BK Fischer - winner of the 2016 Wheeler PrizeBK Fischer is the author of two books of poetry, Mutiny Gallery, winner of the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize from Truman State, and St. Rage’s Vault, which received the 2012 Washington Prize from The Word Works. My Lover’s Discourse, a gurlesque remix of Roland Barthes, is due out from Tinderbox Editions in late 2017 [from sketchwriter--nothing yet]. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, FIELD, Ninth Letter, Literary Mama, WSQ, Blackbird, and other journals, and are forthcoming in Kenyon Review. Also the author of a critical study, Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry, she teaches the Comma Sutra at Columbia University and is a poetry editor at Boston Review.
Radioapocrypha
Matt Sutherland
ForeWord.
(Feb. 27, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 ForeWord http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
BK Fischer; RADIOAPOCRYPHA; Mad Creek Books (Nonfiction: Poetry) 16.95 ISBN: 9780814254646
Byline: Matt Sutherland
Ooooh, baby, the gloves are off. In Radioapocrypha, BK Fischer has done imagined Jesus Christ as a buff chemistry teacher in Maryland in 1989. Does she not fear bolts of lightning? The author of two other superb collections, Mutiny Gallery and St. Rage's Vault, Fischer is the poetry editor at Boston Review.
(INSOMNIA)
Sweet Maren, relent. You are naked because you peeled your damp tank top over your head as you slept. You were clench-jawed and call- ing out about the Iron Curtain and the iron lung, voodoo, Virginia Woolf, Watergate, the last man standing in a field of wheat. You're here, with me, in the bedroom. Sit up and see by moonlight -- there's the picture on the wall, the shape of the fruit, the shaded side of the bowl. Find your spot here on my chest, your damp ear, damp tendril. A carpet will slip on its carpet pad. Prophesies will cease, tongues will be stilled, knowledge will pass away. Only love remains. You don't need to get up again for a drink of water. You don't need to pee. You don't need to put your knee on the vanity to get a closer look at your imperfec- tions. Believe me. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sutherland, Matt. "Radioapocrypha." ForeWord, 27 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529896342/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=e8adac70. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
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St. Rage’s Vault by B.K. Fischer
St. Rage’s Vault
B.K. Fischer
The Word Works, 2013
Paperback, 84 pp, $15.00
ISBN 978-091538084-8
Purchase Link
Reviewed by PQ Contributing Editor Ann E. Michael
Gestation can refer to many in-process creations; we gestate ideas, theories, revolutions and much more before attaining a recognizable outcome. Poems and other works of art need to develop, hidden and protected in their creators’ minds, often for a long spell. The relationship of creative gestation to physical gravidity seems more synonymous than metaphorical, a connection B.K. Fischer’s latest collection makes use of. St. Rage’s Vault takes the concept of gestation in several directions at once with poems that can be read as commentaries on artistic inspiration, ekphrasis, creation in a general sense, the physiological nine months humans spend in the womb, and the need for protection—a vessel, a vault—during the crucial period of formation. The poems are numbered Week 1 through Week 40 and the collection divided into trimesters. Thus, the most obvious interpretation of St. Rage’s Vault is that Fischer’s poems portray pregnancy. The opening poems, however, also suggest that human thought and artistic creation are also undergoing inception, and that beginnings are a struggle.
The first poem, drawn, appropriately, from an annunciation painting, is titled instead “Interruption.” The figure of Mary, disturbed from her ordinary life, appears taken aback not just in awe, as the Gospel depicts, but also with a bit of irritation. The second stanza conveys the feeling:
Can’t you see she’s trying to read?
She keeps her thumb in the book,
thinking she’ll get back to it
Fischer moves from the distractedness of unexpected conception toward the “good, dumbstruck” acceptance of Rodin’s La Pensée, who has “consented to composure.” But the consent doesn’t last long. <
In “Week 8 (Organogenesis)” she furthers the fact of what the body experiences while pushing the metaphor of an aesthetic: “the body as achievement, / indisputable iron, / beauty of the thing. / Body as evidence…” Near-puns and double-meanings abound whenever a writer employs such a basic object as a body in her work, and Fischer manages this feat without resorting to clichés. The title poem offers an example of such wordplay—I don’t want to spoil the poem’s surprise with a reveal—that connects wonderfully with the themes of protection and containment while creation percolates.
The female form has been portrayed in artwork for thousands of years, and Fischer’s poems remind the reader of the symbolism and cultural freight the woman’s body carries, especially when the body harbors another life. Several of the paintings alluded to in these 40 poems are by Alice Neel, her portraits of pregnant women straightforwardly displaying the roundedness and obviousness of pregnancy, its effects on a woman’s figure as the unborn child takes shape. In “Week 27 (Figure),” which references a 1975 Neel Painting, Fischer writes: “No globe, no fruit—only / the redundancy of her desire.” And as the collection moves into the later months of this gestation, that form begins to acclimate to its hugeness like a prehistoric goddess totem, “a magic marker Venus de Milo,” desire everywhere. A very funny poem, “Week 30 (Maternity Bathing Suit),” brought back memories of the maternity suit I wore years ago. The snappy internal rhyming of the couplets and jaunty diction celebrate the image:
her daisy-decal polka-dot
pliant bingo bottom buoyant enough
to balance an elephantine arabesque
off the ladder, smile
at mister-smug-one shrunk
in his trunks in front of
her flagrant magenta bellyful
of flutter-kicks…
<
Ann E. Michael is a poet, essayist, and educator whose most recent poetry collection is Water-Rites (2012). She lives in eastern PA where she is Writing Coordinator at DeSales University. Her website: www.annemichael.com.
Review by Catherine StaplesMutiny Gallery by B.K. Fischer
MUTINY GALLERY
by B.K. Fischer
Truman State University Press
Kirksville, Missouri 63501
ISBN: 978—1-612480-11-4
2011. 89 pp., $18.00
http://tsup.truman.edu/
Self-assured, lyric, and deeply moving, B.K. Fischer is a mesmerizing reader. In March, I heard her read from her T.S. Eliot-prize-winning volume, Mutiny Gallery, at the AWP conference in Boston. Within about ten minutes, I was fairly certain that she, like me, was a mother of three, though I cannot say why. Perhaps it was her comprehensive riff on children’s books, all the classics my husband and I had read hundreds of times, then, too, there were her knowing sketches of a young boy’s gestures and perceptions, a keen accuracy of age and development. Since then, the book has traveled with me from bedside table to car to coffee shop to the breakfast table; all the while I’ve made notes, dog-eared pages, and admired.
Mutiny Gallery is a mother/son road trip in verse, punctuated by stops in quirky, all-over-the-map roadside galleries—many drawn from a book of museums, others more closely approximating metaphysical and psychological states. The “mutiny” alluded to in the volume’s title is a rebellion against the tyranny of an abusive relationship. This road trip is essentially a flight fueled by fear; mother and son flee an abusive husband/ father. His appearance is brief yet sobering. The father’s random violence defines Claire and Max’s itinerant existence—from the necessity of Fritos for lunch to the twin credos of “keep the deadbolt on” and “he’ll never find us if we keep moving.” Fischer brilliantly distills the icy economies of their predicament:
out of reach of direct deposit
and his arm flung heavy as gold
over her chest while she slept.
You feel the gold-laden weight of that arm, pinning her down. Even the rhyme seems to conspire with the dire equation of ample funds and imprisonment: “deposit,” “chest,” “slept.” Although domestic abuse and poverty give the flight the knife-edge of reality, it doesn’t so dominate the book’s varied strands as to preclude all else.
Fischer pulls off an array of shifting tones, a complex and believable weave of voices. The shifts in tone are like the give-and-take of light when swimming in extraordinarily deep-water: peril is counterbalanced by fierce delight, then shot through with fear, and then steadied, despite all circumstance. In “Museum of Motion,” you feel the exhilaration of the escape, the last-minute flight, the mother’s resolve reflected in the haste of their departure, the tripping rhythms of her thought:
No more minutes,
only miles, breaking it down into distance:
five, ten, fifty. Shot, jigger, fifth. Flare
jack, spare. Make like a banana and. Like
a prom dress …
These lyric alliterative shifts—from miles to numbers to liquor to car parts—whip loose into the not-quite-ellipsis of phrases with missing words. We’re already so complicit, we nearly shout out: “split” and “off.” (For those without sassy teenagers, the expression is “off like a prom dress.”) In the next poem, the tone modulates, and gesture does all the work. You needn’t be a parent to intuit the boy’s startled joy at being invited into the front seat of the getaway car, “He knocks the rearview mirror sideways/ clambering over the seat to sit beside her” (“Geographic Society”). Anyone who has logged long hours reading classic children’s books will revel in her splendid mash-up of everything from The Owl and the Pussy-Cat and Curious George to Cat in the Hat, Peter Rabbit, and Runaway Bunny in “Museum of the Alphabet.”
The power of imagination is sustaining in many of these poems. Claire and Max’s freedom swells in poems like “Motel Turkey,” where the two kick off their shoes on the twin beds, playing at islands and sea—like the world of Peter Pan brought to life, where the impossibility of dangling a foot into the shark and crocodile-infested water is pure delight and respite. They become geographic explorers, adventurers who
… steer their dream canoe
all the way to the Orinoco. He says, in my language
the Y is always silent. A marshmallow counts
for less than a Cracker Jack peanut. She lets him
dribble milk on the straw wrapper to see
the snake uncoil …
<
Another reason this road trip feels so real is because of the peculiar funky feel of these museums where you might find a box of shark teeth, all the words to the Beatles’ songs, and a stalagmite “shaped like a fried egg.” There are places where rooms double as churches and—when the chairs are folded up— become again a tribute to Ripley of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not fame. But they are also odd refractions, broken shards of mirrors that chart the changing states of awareness in mother and child. Max dreams his father’s scarf is choking him and wakes wheezing. And in another poem rife with Fischer’s characteristic fluent riffs, the tone comes about hard as the boom in an accidental jibe when Claire asks:
What if the one full moon had never
ripened, the one error never slipped,
traveled its telescopic distance,
caught hold, caught in her, become him.
Would she be free?
The question of faith is never far off. You intuit the Hail Mary’s and Glory Be’s long before you see the rosaries parsed on the grips of the steering wheel. Like the flimsy apparatus of the church’s folding chairs, the makeshift is good enough. This mother is not to be daunted, despite everything, despite all improbability, “she finds herself believing with the ragged force/ of renunciation, the anyway dangling off the I believe” (“Church of One Tree”). Max, like his namesake in Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, is sustained by a lively imagination and alert intelligence. Above all, for better and for worse, these two are bound to one another. <
__________
Catherine Staples is the author of The Rattling Window (Ashland Poetry Press, 2013) which won the McGovern Prize. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Commonweal, Third Coast, and The Michigan Quarterly Review among others. Her chapbook, Never a Note Forfeit, (Seven Kitchens Press, 2011) was awarded the Keystone Prize. She teaches in the Honors program at Villanova University and lives with her husband and children in Devon, PA. (www.catherinestaples.com)
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Review: B.K. Fischer’s “Mutiny Gallery”
By Scott Hightower
“Mutiny Gallery” B.K. Fischer
(Winner of the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize)
Truman State University Press, 2011, $18.00
B.K. Fischer's "Mutiny Gallery"
B.K. Fischer’s Mutiny Gallery, a novel in verse, is an act of earnest imagination. In a period when much poetry is thin- I biography, it is refreshing to come to a first book that is provocatively metaphoric and hearty… and with a personae, one surmises, set apart from the author. The premise of the book is rather simple: a mother and her son are escaping — fleeing “domestic peril.” –– and, in so doing, are engaged in a U.S. cross-country road trip. Tanks of gas are burned; bridges are burned –– and unintentionally preserved; nightmare museums are the temporary stops. What emerges in the deeper kinetic landscape of the novel is not so simple:
Dreams she is naked with a lover but can’t
find a place to be alone––a hotel room laden
with noisy sleepers, a sliding door opening
at an intersection, a wall dissolving into
a department store where she crouches
among the racks, grabbing something…
She lights a cigarette, her first since
she snuffed out her sworn last
by the wheel of his stroller outside
a bodega in November 2001…
Surely a seedy love scene is coming up,
a cheap fling, except she is traveling
with a chaperone too young to leave.
She fingers a key ring, only free
to take a peep, a body broken down
into boxes: ridge of a foot, glans.
(“Exotic World Burlesque Museum”)
There are passages of disintegration; and passages of assemblage. Intimacy seems to collapse down to sleepy arms wrapped around a sleepy neck. New zones of risk have to be navigated. Even without the father’s violence, there were intrinsic problems in the original landscape:
…Take your chances with the big city, take
this ticket out of Gambrills, where all there is, is a divided
highway with a median-strip Taco Bell and a sand quarry….
She wanted to talk about kitsch and the str(i/u)ctures of faith,…
but her advisor leveled his gaze at her chest throughout the defense.
Too bad about those other girls, such promise but they turned out
to be bourgeois opt-out suburbanite incubators come home
to roost and lost their edge. That won’t happen to you, will it?
(“Museum of Bad Art”)
There are also intriguing passages of description; often in what, in any other situation, might pass as nonchalant aside. There is nothing nonchalant in Mutiny Gallery:
Claire is the only one in the museum. Max has run off to the
bottom of a hill to poke around in some rocks. A rotating fan
pushes a cabin smell across and past her, across and past.
Folding chairs stacked against one wall suggest that perhaps
the room is still used for a congregation or at least a group.
(“Church of One Tree”)
There are poignant poems about being dogged by poverty, living near the edge, ever on the go. The aromas are odd mixtures of where the two travelers are, where they have been. Time moves forward and backward. <
At natural Bridge, he…
trotted down sixty steps before the ticket-taker
sent him back up, short by $7 to see the arch.
He thinks about
the Alamo and what would have happened had it
never been avenged. No state of Texas, the USA
a thinner-bellied creature with Louisiana and Florida
at its two front paws.
(“Killing Time Museum”)
<
She is tired.
Paid it all: tuition, dues, tolls.
Where the hell’s
the deus ex machina?
(“American Precision Museum”)
Mutiny Gallery, is so worth the read, and leaves us looking
forward to more from B.K. Fischer.
Scott Hightower is the author of three books. This fall, Self-Evident, his fourth collection stateside, is forthcoming from Barrow Street Press. Early next year, Oases/Hontanares, a bi-lingual book, is forthcoming from Devenir, Madrid. Hightower teaches as adjunct faculty at NYU and Drew University. A native of central Texas, he lives in Manhattan and sojourns in Spain.
Radioapocrypha
B.K. Fischer. Mad Creek, $16.95 trade paper (88p) ISBN 978-0-8142-5464-6
Fischer (St. Rage’s Vault) remixes Scripture with 1980s nostalgia in a smart novella-in-verse that impressively balances high- and low-brow elements. The gestures towards the gospels start off small, with Fischer choosing to worldbuild in such cheekily titled poems as “Our Lady of the Subdivision” and “Parable of the Cheerleader.” This 1980s suburban landscape features bored high schoolers who shoplift and keep piercing guns in their cars. The collection’s protagonist is Maren, a Mary Magdalene figure looking back at her teen years through the lens of adulthood: “I was Keds, leggings, over-sized cable knits,/ Big Hair up-bangs.” Maren makes for a perceptive witness and chronicler in the poems she narrates. The others are rapid-fire monologues dished out by Callahan, a 33-year-old teacher, and Jesus figure to a garage band of teen boys. Callahan is both “a lover and a healer” and “a real son of a bitch,” including in his sexual relationship with Maren. Fischer handles the inherent power imbalance of this dynamic with wit, grace, and a complex yearning: “Each year my faith decays by half, then half again./ In this way it is infinite.” Swapping the crucifixion for a ghastly car crash, Fischer produces a work as smart, satisfying, and nuanced in its climax as it is as a whole. (Feb.)
A Gnostic Gospel for the Now: B. K. Fischer’s “Radioapocrypha”
By Heather Treseler
FEBRUARY 13, 2018
WHAT IF CHRIST did not appear as a homeless infant in a Bethlehem barn, but as a chemistry teacher — in “a condo with new car smell” — in suburban Maryland, circa 1989? And what if Mary Magdalen, a recent high school graduate, had an illicit affair with her teacher while other disciples jammed in a garage band in search of “acceleration and shriek,” “hot mercy and radical love”?
The New Testament gets a remix in poet B. K. Fischer’s verse novella Radioapocrypha, a pagan rejoinder to the biblical story of redemption. An homage to a 1980s adolescence, it might also be one of the more necessary poetry collections for 2018: Fischer lends us nuanced ways of thinking about faith and fakes, secular shamans and sexual misconduct, deceit and devotion. In polyphonic lyrics and prose poems, she tells a story about a teenage girl that makes us come of age, all over again, and rethink our archetypes for prophecy and the divine.
Biblical gospels pasteurize the scandal at the crux of the Christ tale: Mary, the virgin mother, conceives a child without sin. Joseph, just as miraculously, accepts a son he did not father. The holy family is not nuclear, and childbirth in a barn, idealized in the Nativity crèche, could not have been a tidy affair.
Fischer’s collection delves directly into these human complications of the Christian myth, staging it in a Maryland subdivision near Washington, DC, where the paranoid edicts of King Herod have been replaced by DEFCON and the nascent threat of AIDS. To frame the story, she riffs from the Gospel of Mary, a fifth-century papyrus codex, as well as songs by Prince, Sonic Youth, Depeche Mode, and Joy Division, among others. Channeling these voices, Fischer catapults the reader into the psychic life of a young woman named Maren Manning — a valedictorian and an admitted “overachiever” — who returns home after her first college semester ends with a miscarriage and an “inpatient clinic where / even the lauded daughter is served up / the same pills in a soufflé cup.” While the biblical Mary is visited by magi, Maren is rescued by emergency medical services and sent home on antidepressants.
Like epic poets who call up a muse in lieu of an ambulance, Fischer literalizes “invocation” with a phone call: the epigraph’s first line reads “This is she.” Maren, now a grown woman with children of her own, skirts questions about her youth:
Speaking.
[…]
Sorry, I didn’t mean to
hang up on you, you
caught me off guard —
he was — I wasn’t —
all of that happened
in another life, none
of it matters now.
The phone call, which kick-starts the narrative, suggests Fischer’s campy engagement with T. S. Eliot, who famously compared the lyric poem to overheard speech and who claimed that blasphemy was, in fact, a specie of belief, “a symptom that the soul is still alive.” In Radioapocrypha, heresy is a version of holiness, one driven by longing: the narrative alternates between Maren’s affair with James Callahan, “a lover and a healer […] a real son of a bitch,” and his teachings, which mix song lyrics and Newton’s laws.
The mock-messiah’s seduction of his former student is complicated by Maren’s perspective. Indeed, Fischer’s story suggests that the desire to become a god — or to worship one — might be hardwired. As a “goody-goody” with parents who work for the National Security Agency and sleep with a “service revolver in a drawer by the bed,” Maren finds an illusory security in her teacher’s erotic attention.
It is the yearning and aloneness of this gifted teen, tuning into the world’s threats and expectations, which is most convincingly drawn in these poems. Author of Museum Mediations, a critical study of ekphrasis; Mutiny Gallery, a novella in verse about a mother’s flight from domestic violence; and St. Rage’s Vault, a collection that lends new language and metaphor to the experience of pregnancy, Fischer has often written into the gaps in our poetic imaginary including the somatic experiences of women and children. In Radioapocrypha, she turns up the amps to capture the psychological complexities of a teenager grappling with adult danger and desire.
In the prose poem “Miracles,” her character Maren chronicles ordinary benedictions:
The hour the antibiotics kicked in. The last outbound train running ten minutes late. Your aunt hitting the lotto in time to make the mortgage. The thick envelope. The light left on in the van but the engine still turning over. The proximity of the neighbor.
[…]
When you ran out of gas, and he helped you push the car into the parking space at Casa Real. The key to the library bathroom. The rusted padlock. The handkerchief in the pocket. The extension cord. The tarp in the trunk. The single dry match. Stand clear of the closing doors.
Indeed, Callahan’s canned adages (“I don’t come to abolish but to complete,” “root for the underdog, give to anyone who asks”) pale alongside Maren’s tactile attention to the texture of the life she is living.
Gradually, the reader comes to trust Maren as the witness of events. Her observations lend piquancy to the dinning uniformity of a suburban town where even tragedies seem predictable. In poems such as “Parable of the Cheerleader,” “Parable of the Donut,” and “Our Lady of the Prom,” she gives an account of ritualized adolescence: high school’s social hierarchy, adjudicated by the popular; sexual exploration, conducted on the sly; radical haircuts and drugstore cosmetics, bought in hope of instant metamorphosis; suburban sprawl and aisles at Marshalls, bathed in “the sallow / fluorescence of the middle class”; and the petty thefts, auto-wrecks, and deadly virus inaugurating losses of life or innocence.
“[N]o one was surprised sex could kill you,” Maren surmises. “We were raised on cataclysm.” And it is she who interprets the meaning of Callahan’s death when he flips his Nissan. And it is she who sleeps fitfully, “clench-jawed and calling out about the Iron Curtain and the iron lung, voodoo, Virginia Woolf, Watergate, the last man standing in a field of wheat.” Precocious, haunted by polio and the Cold War, schooled (as any 17-year-old) in the “foolish wisdom of the flesh,” she carries revelation before she meets her savior. But her intersection with a charismatic teacher, and his turbulence in her life, has the lucky effect of confirming — rather than destroying — the clarity of what she sees, what she feels, and what she claims as her own.
At college, Maren had sought out her own sexual conquest, one that leads to her short-lived pregnancy and hemorrhage on the floor of her dorm. Though she later wonders if the universe thought her “too chicken for either a baby or an abortion,” she has returned home to face the brutality of a small town’s rumor mill. In “Our Lady of Walgreens,” she states: “I stopped going out much after I overheard, / from the bathroom stall in the bowling alley, / Maren Manning got knocked up but it was / an alien so she threw it in the dumpster.”
Fischer taps into our political fascination with female sexuality: its power, its fetishized purity, its policing. Her protagonist’s circumstances mimic the “monstrous birth” reported in the journal of John Winthrop, Puritan governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who graphically described the miscarriage of the excommunicated Anne Hutchinson, interpreting her malformed fetus as a sign of spiritual deviancy. Miscarriage aside, the power — and production value — of Maren’s physique are evident to Callahan’s disciples. Parker, the band’s pimply singer, notes: “With a body like that who needs college.”
And that is exactly the problem: it is 1989, and Maren is as smart as she is beautiful. So, she must learn how to deploy her resources, much like the experts at the nearby Pentagon. As Radioapocrypha concludes, we learn that Maren survived her go-around with cult and scandal. She has become a suburban wife and mother. But her hallucinatory need for a god has not been satisfied. Even her compensatory obsession with crafts and wreath-making fails to fulfill. She still dreams of her messiah, though she finds that “[e]ach year my faith decays by half, then half again.”
Agnostic, but still riven with spiritual need, one mixed with erotic longing, Maren has become a thwarted artist. Her book of revelation is not one she can write: we learn, in the final poem, that she has recounted her tale to “Barbara,” her confidant and amanuensis. This metapoetic turn is fitting. Women’s gossip has always been its own underground gospel: a way of surviving, a mouth.
Perhaps, as Wallace Stevens observed, it is not the god but the belief that counts. With Fischer’s Radioapocrypha, we should be startled by her portrait of the hunger to believe, against reason, in a demagogue who appears to answer a generation’s matrix of fear and desire with promises for a better life. Our human need for saving grace might rival our need for food and sex more closely than we acknowledge. But we follow the siren songs of what Depeche Mode called, in 1989, “Personal Jesus” at our own peril.
¤
Heather Treseler’s poems and essays appear in Harvard Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Weekly Standard, Notre Dame Review, and The Missouri Review, among other journals, and in four books about postwar American poetry. She is an associate professor of English at Worcester State University and a visiting research associate at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center.
Poems for Political Disaster: A Reading in Recap
Sarah Toomey
The air of urgency came as little surprise. It read in the face of the woman who closed her parchment store early for a front row seat. It read in the wringing hands of the man who wore a Hillary campaign hat and a fixed scowl in upper left corner of the auditorium. It read in the feet of a pack of book-toting poetry students rushing over late from their Monday night workshop. The silence that sits before speech had never felt so fitting.
A poetry reading was held in the basement of the Cambridge Public Library this past Monday, the 30th of January, to premiere a deceptively small and unassuming chapbook of thirty-five different poets titled "Poems for Political Disaster." It was jointly hosted by the library staff and Boston Review, with Review poetry editor B.K. Fisher making the opening remarks. To be introduced on the panel to her side were Lucie Brock-Broido, Jorie Graham, Major Jackson, Ricardo Maldonado, Nathan Xavier Osorio, Monica Youn, and Peter Gizzi.
The chapbook posits itself as a reaction to Donald Trump's election, but the content and combated crises are world-spanning. The exercises in memory and resistance are equally universal. U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera writes in the foreword, "Guess what, America? Everyone in this rough-cut, deep-hearted chapbook loves you as much as they have fought with you and for you. Everyone here wants an American home, an American national house in a global neighborhood..."
Some of the poets read from their own featured work, while others opted to give voice to the chapbook's absent contributors. Brock-Broido, clad in all black and with impossibly long hair pooling onto the podium, delivered a chilling recitation of her poem “The American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act.” The others followed, often prefacing their pieces with a few more colloquial or bitter words about the state of world power. By the close of the hour, the audience had met with intense applause such titles as “Safe House” by Solmaz Sharif, “Ferguson” by Major Jackson, “America! America!” by Ricardo Maldonado, and “A Guide to Usage: Mine” by Monica Youn. The final poem of the night, and one fittingly near to the back cover of the chapbook itself, was Brenda Hillman’s deftly imagistic “Poem of Hope, Almost at Equinox.”
After the closing words, I caught up with Boston Review’s Stefania Heim. We agreed that it was clear that the success and solidarity of the night also demanded momentum. The audience’s respite in this emergency political response was evident—many met in the hall for minutes afterward to linger on striking lines and pressing ideas. The greater artistic community, it seemed, is embroiled in direct communication with international political order. This communication has turned to argument, but the contributors to “Poems for Political Disaster” uphold that there is no stronger fighting force than an uninhibited creative mind. The Boston Review editors appeared confident that many similar events will take place in the immediate future.
"Poems for Political Disaster" and "Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice"
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Poems for Political Disaster, edited by Timothy Donnelly, B.K. Fischer, Stefania Heim, and Matt Lord, published by the Boston Review, 64 pages
Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, edited by Francisco X. Alarcón and Odilia Galván Rodríguez; The University of Arizona Press, 216 pages
What is a poetry of resistance, how does it carry the conviction, emotion, and beauty that’s expected of it, and what purpose does it serve? Two new collections, The University of Arizona Press’ Poetry of Resistance: Voices For Social Justice and the Boston Review’s publication, Poems for Political Disaster, make it clear that poetic protest requires context. Witness and narrative make for the strongest and most inspiring poems. Tell the stories. Make it personal. Be a witness to injustice so that readers can be a witness, too.
Carolyn Forché has long championed the witness movement of political poetry. Her experiences in El Salvador gave us 1981’s The Country Between Us (Harper & Row), a frightening account of the banality of evil and the horrors to which we were complicit. Her 1993 anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (W.W. Norton), collected the work of some 150 poets from across the globe who had witnessed exploitation, cruelty, and genocide. They spoke from personal experience. Poets exposing such evil write in the face of horrible consequences. It can be risky to be a poet.
Most of the poems in the Boston Review volume work from personal experience or bear witness to someone else’s experience. Forché, still on the ground, is represented with “Letter to a City Under Siege.” Through a borrowed book, she puts herself into “your wounded city,/reading the Braille of its walls,/walking beneath the ghost chestnuts.” Her imagination carries her to places where oranges were smuggled and “snipers/fired on the city using gravestones for cover.” She feels the danger, described by her friend, even at distance. After a blunt image of brutality — a dog with a human bone in its mouth — Forché turns at the end to a metaphor for escape and a symbol of life: the smuggled oranges.
The narrative of Major Jackson’s prose poem “Ferguson” (“the ecstasies and muted sorrows of watching a boy sleep in the middle of the street”) is both brutal and dreamy in a fantastical, how-can-this-happen way. Corey Van Landingham’s excellent “Bad Intelligence” takes a matter-of-fact approach to violence: “Pixelated, on a clear day, a shovel may resemble/a rifle. A woman is always a civilian, by definition//and data (416-957 civilians dead by drones/in Pakistan) will not be updated.” By the end of the poem, Van Landingham, as poets have done for centuries, beseeches an ancient god to “protect/trade and travelers, god of transition, and poets.” On the other hand, Katie Peterson’s lament of the way things turned out (“[I] miss the quiet/vote I cast/that the electors/ate”), weaves her father’s breathless mockery of Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch and the first time she made love into a quiet wish for easy breathing. It’s all personal, a witness to our small, finally tragic lives.
The stories aired in Poetry of Resistance are almost all of the narrative sort. The book is anchored in a commemorative poem by Francisco X. Alarcón, dedicated to the nine Latino students who chained themselves to the doors of the Arizona State Capitol in 2010 to protest the state’s anti-immigration bill SB 1070 (“you are nine/young warrior/like nine sky stars”). Soon after it was written, Alarcón started a Facebook page, “Poets Responding to SB 1070,” and asked for submissions. Thousands of contributions, directed at various political developments, have come since the group’s founding in 2010. The book, edited by Alarcón and Odilia Galván Rodríguez, gathers dozens of these submitted poems. The personal stories, told in images both expected and not, give voice to an extended family that shares a history of migration. Daniel García Ordaz’s “Immigrant Crossing” tells of his father’s feet and suggests something of the humor required to maintain resolve. Aurora Levins Morales’ “Grave Song For Immigrant Soldier” is about four “green card soldiers” who died in Iraq. The variety of experiences held in the book, no matter how different, seem to be threads pulled from the same tapestry.
It’s fitting, considering the political attacks currently directed at the arts and humanities, that both books carry a foreword by the current U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. In Poems for Political Disaster, he protests that language and its meaning is being recast and that a “wall of dread” has been thrown in the way of progress. “America what would you do without poets,” he asks, without supplying a question mark. In Poetry of Resistance he takes charge of the language, lifting words from various poets in the collection to arrive at one long paragraph that distills the experiences from the following pages. These voices, he writes, prove “that collective poetry is the answer to the violence-filled policies that increasingly face us in these times.”
Political poetry demands to be taken seriously, but not all of it here can be. The few such examples that fall short of their serious intent, fall short in craft, not passion. There isn’t a poem in either volume that doesn’t convey strong emotions, either directly or experientially. And almost all are written in ways that raise empathy, even for those with little idea of the poet’s experience. This is how the resistance spreads.