Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Owl That Carried Us Away
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 10/19/1953
WEBSITE:
CITY: Lima
STATE: OH
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
Phone: 419-995-8261
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2008070289 |
| HEADING: | Ramspeck, Doug, 1953- |
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| 100 | 1_ |a Ramspeck, Doug, |d 1953- |
| 670 | __ |a Black tupelo country, 2008: |b ECIP t.p. (Doug Ramspeck) data view (b. Oct. 19, 1953; coordinates the Writing Center at Ohio State Univ. at Lima, where he also teaches English; first book) |
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PERSONAL
Born October 19, 1953; married, wife’s name Beth; children: Lee.
EDUCATION:Kenyon College, B.A., 1976; University of California at Irvine, M.F.A., 1978.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, novelist, and educator. Ohio State University at Lima, associate professor of English and director of the Writing Center.
AWARDS:John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, for Black Tupelo Country; Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, 2010, for Mechanical Fireflies; Michael Waters Poetry Prize, 2014, for Original Bodies; G. S. Sharat Chanda Prize for Short Fiction, 2016, for The Owl That Carries Us Away; Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award (two).
WRITINGS
Contributes poetry to professional journals, including the Kenyon Review, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Coeditor of the online literary journal Asterism.
SIDELIGHTS
Doug Ramspeck is an award winning poet and writer and the author of several collections of poetry. An English professor, Ramspeck works with student interns to produce a yearly showcase of poetry and fiction by undergraduates across the United States and beyond. Ramspeck primarily wrote fiction until he turned 50 years old. He turned to poetry “to escape a severe writer’s block that had persisted over many decades with fiction writing,” as he told Southern Review Online contributor Garrett Hazelwood, adding: “It was liberating to be able to call a work done after a page or two. Still, because I had always thought of myself as a writer of stories, I brought that mindset to poetry as well, and, indeed, focused almost all of my early efforts on narrative poems.”
Commenting on his earlier poetry collections, Ramspeck told Southern Indiana Review website contributor Anthony Rintala that his 2010 collection of poetry titled Possum Nocturne and his chapbook Where We Come From are “the most purely primitive of my books.” adding: “In these works I attempt to inhabit almost entirely the primitive mindset, to summon that ancient voice, even though the poems are set in contemporary times.” Ramspeck went on to tell Rintala that the poems in his later books are an attempt to write from both the “primitive and advanced” brains, noting: “The poems are, thus, often more contemplative and self-conscious. The speakers view the world through both their primitive and sophisticated brains, and these two ways of viewing events bump up against each other and lead to misunderstandings and sometimes woe.”
Overall, Ramspeck has said he is drawn to a wide range of poets and poetry, including poems by W.S. Merlin, Brigit Peegen Kelly, and Robert Wrigley. He is especially drawn to poems focusing on the natural world and how it connects to the human experience. In his interview withSouthern Indiana Review website contributor Rintala, Ramspeck remarked that he gained an interest in animism, that is the idea that objects, places, and animals possess a special spiritual essence. He is also noted the idea of the physical world being imbued by humans with humanlike traits, including a type of consciousness. Ramspeck further remarked that he has very little interest in writing about himself. As a result, he declared that his poems are never autobiographical in nature. “The richest vein I have found to date as a writer, and the one I return to again and again, is the animistic one,” Ramspeck told Rental, adding: “Nature, in these poems, is a kind of human breath, and human breath is one more breeze sweeping out across the tall grass of an open field.”
Ramspeck’s first book of poetry, Black Tupelo County, won the John Ciardi Prize, named after the Italian poet, translator, and etymologist. His 2011 collection of poetry titled Mechanical Fireflies, includes a poem titled “Aporia,” in which Ramspeck addresses the natural world versus the world of the mind. Debrah Lechner, writing for Haydens Ferry Review Online, remarked: “For working poets, Mechanical Fireflies will be refreshing and inspirational.”
Original Bodies
a Green Mountains Review Online contributor called Ramspeck’s collection of poetry titled Original Bodies, “a meditation on personal histories widening toward an eternal extent.” The collection is organized into four sections; “River,” “Moon,” “Crow,” and “Tongue.” The poems explore the primitive mindset that still resides in modern humans, such as the idea that three crows sitting in a black willow tree represent death.
Many of the poems in Original Bodies include the appearance of crows and other blackbirds, often representing a foreboding aspect of nature. For example, in the poem “Field Religion” men ponder death, the muddy fields, and the weather as birds scavenge nearby and “are shown to be churning in a chaotic dance of life and rebirth around them, utterly unconcerned with mortal surrender, as noted by Southern Indiana Review website contributor Rintala. A Green Mountains Review Online contributor remarked: “Throughout this collection, Ramspeck unriddles the illusory, his control of language sure as a fist opening, closing.”
The Owl That Carries Us Away
Despite turning to poetry because of writer’s block, Ramspeck continues to write fiction. In an interview with Massachusetts Review Online contributor Amal Zaman, Ramspeck noted: “If I grow particularly frustrated with poems I am writing, I switch to short fiction, and when the story bogs down I rush back to poetry. Indeed, there are times when I switch back and forth several times in the same hour.”
Ramspeck’s first collection of short stories, titled The Owl That Carries Us Away, features 29 short or short-short stories largely set in the American Midwest. The stories revolve around basic struggles of humankind, from mortality and the ancient need to hunt to more modern dilemmas, such as belonging to a family in which the parents live lives of desperation, unable to achieve their dreams. For example, in the story titled “The Second Coming” the protagonist is seeking a miracle to get enough money to save his family from eviction. Eventually, someone appears with money to pay the rent, but the family remains living at the edge of ruin.
Throughout most of the stories there is a constant threat of real or perceived violence. For example, in the story titled “The World We Know,” a narrator reminisces about one of his sons and the relationship the two had. It turns out that this son ended up killing his girlfriend when he was only a teenager. In another story, a young boy brings home a possum skull he finds in the wood, believing it is a kind of offering for a family tragedy. Another tale features a newlywed thinking that mushrooms are growing out of her husband. In one story, a woman takes her sister’s baby and flees to Florida, where she thinks she can create a new life for both of them.
These stories feature “characters at emotional and psychological extremes,” Ramspeck told Southern Review Online contributor Garrett Hazelwood, also noting that “many of the pieces include idiosyncratic and distorted voices at their center.” In a review of The Owl That Carries Us Away in Publishers Weekly, a contributor remarked:”These precise and resonant stories chronicle humble lives and unspoken traumas, making for a subtle and moving reading experience.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of The Owl That Carries Us Away.
ONLINE
Alaska Quarterly Review Online, https://aqreview.org/ (July 18, 2018), brief author profile and bibliography.
Association of Writers and Writing Programs website, https://www.awpwriter.org/ (July 18, 2018), author profile.
Green Mountains Review Online, http://greenmountainsreview.com/ (January 26, 2015), review of Original Bodies
Haydens Ferry Review Online, https://haydensferryreview.com/ (November 1, 2011), Debrah Lechner, review of Mechanical Fireflies.
Massachusetts Review Online, https://www.massreview.org/ (May 23, 2017), Amal Zaman, “10 Questions for Doug Ramspeck.”
Mediterranean Poetry, https://www.odyssey.pm/ (July 18, 2018), brief author profile.
Ohio State University Department of English website, https://english.osu.edu/ (July 18, 2018), author faculty profile.
Southern Indiana Review, https://www.usi.edu/sir/ (July 18 2018), Anthony Rintala, “A Kind of Faith: An Interview with Doug Ramspeck.”
Southern Review Online, http://thesouthernreview.org/ (January 30, 2018), Garrett Hazelwood “A Writer’s Insight: Doug Ramspeck,” author interview.
Posted on November 6, 2010 by Anders Dahlgren
Doug Ramspeck
Doug Ramspeck
Doug Ramspeck received the 2010 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize for Mechanical Fireflies, which will be published in 2011. His first book, Black Tupelo Country, received the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and is published by BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City). “Epistemology in Cleveland” and “Retirement Years” appeared in that collection. A third book, Possum Nocturne, is published by NorthShore Press. His poems have been accepted by journals that include The Kenyon Review, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. He is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. He directs the Writing Center and teaches creative writing at The Ohio State University at Lima, United States. He lives in Lima with his wife, Beth, and their daughter, Lee.
Please visit Doug Ramspeck’s website at: www.dougramspeck.com
Doug Ramspeck
Doug Ramspeck is the author of the poetry collections Original Bodies (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2014), Mechanical Fireflies (Barrow Street Press, 2011), and Black Tupelo Country (BkMk Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Slate, The Southern Review, and The Georgia Review.
Doug Ramspeck
Doug Ramspeck is the author of six poetry collections and one volume of short stories. His most recent book of poems, Naming the Field, is forthcoming from LSU Press. In 2013 his collection Original Bodies won the Michael Waters Poetry Prize, and in 2010 he received the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize for Mechanical Fireflies. Ramspeck’s individual poems and stories have appeared in such journals as the Southern Review, the Kenyon Review, the Iowa Review, and Slate.
A Writer’s Insight: Doug Ramspeck
By Bobby | Published January 30, 2018
Doug Ramspeck’s story “A Map of Years” appears in the winter 2018 issue of The Southern Review. Below, he discusses tapping into the creative unconscious, writing from the perspective of characters with animistic world views, and his process of generating stories that seem to arrive on the page “of their own volition.”
Garrett Hazelwood: You’ve said before in an interview that you often feel as though someone else is doing the work when you write a poem, and that when composing you become a conduit for a voice that is not yours. Do you have a similar experience when writing fiction? What was the origin of this particular story?
Doug Ramspeck: The first draft of “A Map of Years” was written in a single sitting, while I typed as rapidly as I could, probably over the course of a couple of hours. All I knew as I began was that the protagonist viewed the world through an animistic lens, and that he was going to witness the shadow of a crow passing into the body of his brother. Everything else that occurs in the story, including Cal’s attachment to his brother’s wife, were things I discovered in the writing. This method of leaping blindly into stories and poems has long been my preferred approach. I attempt, as I write, not to decide what will happen next, or even to make stylistic choices, but to simply listen to what the work is telling me. This is not always a successful method, of course, but I have learned, over time, to simply abandon poems or stories that don’t arrive seemingly of their own volition. Writing slowly, for me, is almost always a sign that things aren’t going well. I have come to accept that my conscious mind is less skilled as a writer than my unconscious one. Listening to a story arrive at its own destination, on its own chosen track, brings its own kinds of pleasure, not that far removed from what I find when reading. But it is also a little unnerving. The stories do what they want, and they have little interest in my opinion.
GH: This is your first story in The Southern Review, but our readers have seen a number of your poems over the last several years. Could you speak a bit about the difference? In comparison to poetry, do you find any particular advantages or drawbacks to writing longer prose pieces?
DR: I turned to the writing of poetry at the age of fifty, to escape a severe writer’s block that had persisted over many decades with fiction writing. It was liberating to be able to call a work done after a page or two. Still, because I had always thought of myself as a writer of stories, I brought that mindset to poetry as well, and, indeed, focused almost all of my early efforts on narrative poems. I wanted to join the chorus of storytellers, which is what has always drawn me—both as a reader and a writer—to poetry and fiction. Because of this, I don’t see a large difference between the writing of stories and the writing of poems. Even length isn’t always necessarily a deciding factor, since I have written a great many flash fiction stories and a number of longer poems. Indeed, there have been cases where I have written works that I thought were stories when I began but that ended up as poems, and poems that turned into stories. Even with longer works, like “A Map of Years,” I employ many of the same types of compressed storytelling I attempt in my poems, covering a great many years in just a few pages. These days I move back and forth between fiction and poetry, often on the same day, trying to let the one inform the other.
GH: In “A Map of Years,” Cal seems to read nature, as though occurrences in the wild spaces and bodies around him convey a coded message about the order of things to come. While he struggles sometimes to keep pace with verbal exchanges, he is uniquely receptive to the language of a hawk’s shadow or leaf meal in his brother’s hair. This receptivity to a sort of language beyond language gives him a deeper insight into the way things are, and it also strikes me as a way of seeing that might have profound benefits for a writer. Do you find yourself reading the world in a similar way? What do you make of the connection between wildness and meaning that seems so much a part of Cal’s daily experience?
DR: I have become increasingly interested as a writer with the idea that the primitive brain exists side by side with the rational brain. I am not superstitious myself, but I often create characters who see the world in animistic ways, who assume the natural world is a map we might read if only we could learn the code. Before writing “A Map of Years,” I had written a number of what I thought of as “demented little boy stories,” where the savagery of male children was fully on display. With Cal, though, I wanted to create an adult character who was sympathetic, who viewed the world as a mystery just beyond the reach of his understanding, but which he seemed to think he might access if only he were attentive enough to the signs. So is this how I see the world myself? Not really. Or, more accurately, it is the way I see it only when I am writing poetry or fiction, and then it is difficult for me to see it any other way. This voice has seeped into my sense of the fictional, and I find it very difficult to envision any story without it, though I have written a few.
GH: Your writing is at once so lyrical and full of images in “A Map of Years.” As you craft and edit your lines, do you find that one sense predominates over the other? Are you more likely to see through the eyes of your characters or to hear the rhythm of their thoughts?
DR: I will admit something here I probably shouldn’t. I don’t do a lot of conventional revising. Indeed, whenever I return to multiple drafts of the same work, this is usually a sign that it’s time to pack things in. Why? If I failed to listen attentively enough early on, it is highly unlikely that I will be able to “reason” my way toward a story or poem that coheres. Most of the revising I do, in fact, consists of cutting rather than rewriting. With poems I often carry this to an extreme. I might write a hundred lines then cut the work back to twenty lines or even ten. I also like to cut up poems for pieces. I will take the best lines from four failed poems then try to arrange them into a new work. I have attempted similar methods with fiction, occasionally taking two failed and unconnected stories and rewriting them into one. And I am always searching for new ways to make the revision process as unconscious as possible. I do remember, though, that with “The Map of Years” it wasn’t until after I read aloud the first draft to my wife, and we were walking our dog and discussing it, that it became clear to me that Cal might be suffering from some mild form of autism. Knowing this (though I don’t really “know” it, of course) helped me return to the story and to adjust several things. I also received a number of excellent editing suggestions from Emily Nemens. I envy any writer/editor who can point out ways to make focused improvements on almost every page. I consider this a deficiency on my part. Once I start looking too closely at individual sentences, I am just as likely to muck things up as to improve them.
GH: I found myself particularly interested in your descriptions of the landscape during the funeral that takes place toward the end of the story. Up to that point, Cal seemed to perceive the natural landscape as something foreign to and set apart from the realm of human interactions. But suddenly in that scene, we encounter the landscape taking on human dimensions: the “open mouth of dirt” and the sun imagined as “a plucked eye.” What does it mean for Cal to experience the natural world merging with the human world in that moment?
DR: Well, I can’t say I was aware of this merging when I wrote the story. Indeed, I have to admit I wasn’t thinking about imagery much at all while I was writing. So what was I contemplating? I was trying to hear Cal’s voice inside my head, and trying to block out any of my own thoughts that might interfere. Cal, apparently, began imagining the landscape taking on human dimensions, and undoubtedly this was connected to the loss of his brother, who was at the center of his life. I could certainly try to analyze from the outside what this shift in imagery might mean, or why it might have occurred at this moment, but I can’t claim any real inside knowledge. I suppose, if I were to give a somewhat tongue in cheek answer, I would say, “Why are you asking me? Ask him.”
GH: I understand you recently won a prize for your first story collection, The Owl That Carries Us Away, which is forthcoming from BkMk Press. Can you tell us about the book?
DR: The twenty-nine works in The Owl That Carries Us Away, which received the 2016 G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, are split evenly between flash fiction and full-length stories. Many of the pieces include idiosyncratic and distorted voices at their center, and the characters include a young boy who finds a possum skull and brings it into his bed as compensation for a family tragedy, a newly married woman who imagines that mushrooms are growing from her husband’s body, and a woman who absconds with her sister’s baby and envisions a life for them in Florida. In other words, these are stories about characters at emotional and psychological extremes. The book is in the final stages of production and is likely to appear very early in 2018.
Doug Ramspeck is the author of six poetry collections and one collection of stories. His most recent book of poems, Black Flowers, is forthcoming from LSU Press in October. His books have received numerous awards, including the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, the Michael Waters Poetry Prize, the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, and the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry.
Garrett Hazelwood is the editorial assistant at The Southern Review. He was the 2017 recipient of the Kent Gramm MFA Award for Literary Nonfiction and his work was recently anthologized in Eclectica Magazine’s twentieth anniversary anthology of speculative fiction. He’s currently writing a novel and at work on a book-length essay about the usefulness of pain.
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10 Questions for Doug Ramspeck
May 23, 2017 - By Amal Zaman
“This is how we grew afraid.
The moon wore its bright hat.
The sun was a great wheel
of fire. Children played jump rope
in the crowded street, and everywhere
was the autobiograpical,”
--from “Blur” which appears in the Spring 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 1)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written
After decades of severe writer’s block as a fiction writer, I turned, in 2004, to the writing of poetry, and one of first poems I completed contained these opening lines:
Where we come from
we watch for quarter moons,
black blisterbeetles, cracks in glass,
discarded ringneck snake skins,
vespid wasp nests, pennywort,
split basswood trunks, short-tailed shrews.
I didn’t recognize this voice at the time. I am not a superstitious person, and I was not raised in a rural area, but I found it liberating to listen to someone speaking on the page who was obviously not me. How could I suffer from writer’s block if it wasn’t my own voice speaking? I was simply listening to the words passing through my thoughts, after all, writing them down. This notion of letting “someone else” do the writing has informed my creative process ever since.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Often I find myself wishing I could write the sort of discursive narratives of Larry Levis, poems that stitch together a variety of stories in ways that are surprising and illuminating. Other times I ache to write political poems like Keven Prufer’s National Anthem, or the serious and humorous poems of Bob Hicok. In truth, though, I find that attempts on my part to select the types of poems I write backfire. I was saved from writer’s block by simply listening to the voices, and I am grateful for that, but this also means I don’t get to choose what poems I write.
What did you want to be when you were young?
In most of the photos of me as a child, I am carrying a toy gun or wearing a cowboy hat. I remember, often, growing annoyed with my friends and complaining that they weren’t taking matters seriously enough when we imagined we were soldiers. By the time I reached draft age, however, I was relieved when my lottery number was so high that there seemed little chance I would end up in Viet Nam.
What inspired you to write this piece?
I have no idea. I don’t remember writing it. A technique I have used often in recent years is to write, as quickly as I can, four or five poems that have nothing (as near as I can tell) to do with each other, and then I cut them up for pieces. In other words, I select what sound to me like the best lines and then try to figure out some way to place them into a coherent poem.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
The world of “Where We Come From” is the geography of a great deal of my poetry. This is a place of animism and prophecy and occultations and reliquaries and the cawing of crows. There is mud here, and decaying grass in summer, and a possum waddling out from the undergrowth.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
When I began those early poems of primitive superstition, I heard, in my head, a pounding pulse, an insistent drumbeat. This resulted, I think, in a good deal of parallel structure in the writing, in repetition.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
If the weather is warm, I might ask my wife to read the new poem or story aloud before we head out to walk the dog at the nearby reservoir. Usually the dog lies on the floor of my office with her leash attached, and she whimpers a little with impatience, sighing dramatically, eyeing us, her tail thumping with exasperation. She is not a fan of poetry or stories, at least not mine.
What are you working on currently?
I have a first book of short stories due out in 2017, a new book of poems in 2018, so I am alternating between the two genres, often in the same day. If I grow particularly frustrated with poems I am writing, I switch to short fiction, and when the story bogs down I rush back to poetry. Indeed, there are times when I switch back and forth several times in the same hour. This keeps me, I believe, from thinking too much about either one, and thinking, for me, is the enemy of invention.
What are you reading right now?
On my way home from work today, I finished listening to Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler. What a wonderful novel. I am a great fan of his short story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and now I am a great fan of this work as well. I would play it for my dog, but I suspect she wouldn’t like it.
Purchase our current issue (Volume 58, Issue 1) here to read Doug Ramspeck's poem "Blur".
DOUG RAMSPECK is the author of five collections of poetry. His most recent book, Original Bodies, was published by Southern Indiana Review Press and received the Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Individual poems have appeared in Slate, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and Georgia Review.
Doug Sutton-Ramspeck
Associate Professor
Doug Sutton-Ramspeck (writing under the name Doug Ramspeck) is the author of six collections of poetry and one collection of short stories. His most recent book of poems, Black Flowers, will be published by LSU Press in the summer of 2018. Other recent books include The Owl That Carries Us Away (2017), winner of the 2016 G. S. Sharat Chanda Prize for Short Fiction, and Original Bodies (2014), selected for the 2013 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and published by Southern Indiana Review Press. He is also the author of Mechanical Fireflies (2011), which was selected by Mary Ruefle for the Barrow Street Press Poetry Book Prize, Possum Nocturne (2010) and Black Tupelo Country (2008), which received the 2007 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. His chapbook Where We Come From appeared in 2009. His poems and short stories have been published by literary journals that include The Kenyon Reivew, Slate, The Georgia Review and The Southern Review. He is a two-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.
Co-editor with Erika Schnepp of the online literary journal Asterism, Sutton-Ramspeck works with student interns to produce a yearly showcase of poetry and fiction by undergraduates across the United States and beyond.
Areas of Expertise
Creative writing (poetry)
Creative writing (fiction)
Education
MFA, Creative Writing, University of California at Irvine, 1978
BA, English, Kenyon College, 1976
Picture for sutton-ramspeck.2
sutton-ramspeck.2@osu.edu
Phone:
419-995-8261
401A Galvin Hall
Lima campus
Mr. Doug Ramspeck
Ohio, United States
Member Since: 09/01/2011
Doug Ramspeck is the author of six poetry collections and one collection of short stories. His most recent book, Black Flowers, is forthcoming by LSU Press. Four books have received awards: The Owl That Carries Us Away (G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction), Original Bodies (Michael Waters Poetry Prize), Mechanical Fireflies (Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize), and Black Tupelo Country (John Ciardi Prize for Poetry). Individual poems have appeared in journals that include The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Slate, and The Georgia Review. He is a two-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. An associate professor at The Ohio State University at Lima, he teaches creative writing.
Employment
Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University at Lima
Degrees
Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from The University of California at Irvine (May 1978)
Genres of Interest
Fiction, Poetry
A Kind of Faith: An Interview with Doug Ramspeck
RamspeckinterviewphotoThere is no denying the recursive nature of the poetry found in Doug Ramspeck’s Original Bodies, winner of the 2013 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Even a glance at the table of contents will reveal the repetition of what become key concepts in this collection of poetry. But it goes deeper than that: crows and other blackbirds fly through nearly every poem here, or at least tip a shadow with their wings from just off the page. Nature is a foreboding force in Ramspeck’s poetry, ancient and monolithic, but there is a light touch manipulating this hyperbolic, gothic tone. In poems like “Field Religion,” men are shown to passively brood on the eventuality of “consensual” death while, in an inversion of the pathetic fallacy, the muddy fields, weather, and, yes, scavenging birds, are shown to be churning in a chaotic dance of life and rebirth around them, utterly unconcerned with mortal surrender.
Original Bodies plays with scale. What at first may seem like a collection of poems which each involve birds, when refocused, becomes a single flock, a migratory ribbon in the sky, stitching the individual revelations of each poem into a unique, scarred form.
Anthony Rintala: I lived along the migratory path of grackle in Texas, and experienced them swarming, creaking like swings, on every surface in a Target parking lot, so I read crows in these poems as a wholly physical presence—ubiquitous and oppressive. However, there is such a varied history of poetic blackbirds being used as psychopomps, symbols, omens, and unpacked images that their frequent appearance in Original Bodies places the poems in a liminal space, making everything more concrete and dreamlike at once. What do you intend to be the role of the crows in these poems, and what is it about these birds that keeps drawing poets back to them?
Doug Ramspeck: The question of my “intentions” as a writer is always a tricky one for me, partly because my first impulse is to offer some minor resistance to the concept. My process is to try to turn off my conscious mind while I am writing, to take no ownership of what I am producing, and to simply listen to the voices inside my head. My role, then, is not to coerce the words into a certain shape or meaning, to bend them to my will, but to be an amanuensis. I let whatever words arrive that want to arrive, and I let them mean what they want to mean. Even as I am revising, I make an effort to continue this process of merely “listening.” My job is simple: transcribe what I hear.
Still, I am comfortable with putting on the hat of the literary critic after the poems have been completed. I am skeptical that my insight is any more meaningful than that of an “objective” reader (whatever that might mean), but I am happy to take a crack at it. So what, as the question asks, is the role of crows, blackbirds, and grackles in Original Bodies?
I remember reading once that our human brains have developed like scoops of ice cream in the cones of our skulls. We started with a primitive brain, then developed a slightly more advanced scoop to place atop it. Later we placed another scoop on top of that—until we arrived at the brains we have now. That doesn’t mean that the primitive brain isn’t still there or doesn’t still impact who we are. In fact, a case can be made that the primitive brain is the one that connects all humans in all places and all times. For reasons I’m not sure I can explain, I want to write about that part of the brain, to express its qualities.
This is not because I am myself—at least not in the conscious parts of my brain, that part to which I have easy access—a superstitious person. I don’t count the crows in the distant field to find out if good or back luck is coming my way. I don’t imagine that a lightning strike to a tree in my back yard is an omen or an occultation. Still, like all of us, I have those moments when I catch glimpses of the primitive brain inside my skull. If I hear a sudden flutter of noise behind me while I am walking in the dark, my body seizes with fear and adrenaline. For an instant I recall what it is like to be prey, to worry about the sharp teeth or talons that might be sweeping in to claim me. Dark birds seem to me a symbol for that primitive mind. Crows are highly intelligent birds, but when the shroud of their wings spans out or they land beside a dead raccoon at the roadside, I feel in the presence of something original and ancient. This, I suppose, is my answer both to the question of why I think I return again and again to these birds, and why other writers have been drawn to them as well.
AR: In your 2010 book, Possum Nocturne (University of Akron Press), you create a similar effect through the recurrence of mud, dirt, swampland, and old growth trees. What are you looking for—and what do you hope the reader sees—when you reach back to these ancient, rudimentary symbols in the modern age?
DR: I see that book—along with my chapbook, Where We Come From—as the most purely primitive of my books to date. In these works I attempt to inhabit almost entirely the primitive mindset, to summon that ancient voice, even though the poems are set in contemporary times. The speakers in these poems are likely to see nature in animistic and superstitious ways, to imagine that a discarded snake skin found in the grass is an augury, that the skull of a possum is itself a living manifestation of death. My later books, including Original Bodies, attempt to include all of the scoops of the brain, primitive and advanced. The poems are, thus, often more contemplative and self-conscious. The speakers view the world through both their primitive and sophisticated brains, and these two ways of viewing events bump up against each other and lead to misunderstandings and sometimes woe. In “Crow Epistles,” for example, the speaker says:
My father flew away finally
with the crows. And then it was winter.
At the start of the poem, the boy seems to imagine that his father has transformed magically to a crow (has the man died? did he run off?), and that association is so powerful that he appears to believe that his father is still out there with the other birds. What could be a more primitive understanding of the world than this? His father is gone, the crows are calling, so his father must be a crow. But as the boy begins to describe the events of what followed after his father departed—in past tense, in retrospect—a more sophisticated interpretation begins to emerge.
We heard him calling sometimes
from the woods as snow came down.
It was a kind of faith, the falling snow.
And always the crows seemed harmless
in the trees...
The abstraction of “a kind of faith” seems more the construct of an analytical brain than a primitive one, even though the notion that snow might possess the human quality of “faith” is surely still primitive. In other words, in this poem, as in others in the book, the speakers move back and forth between the parts of their brain that can think in abstractions—and, indeed, use language—and the parts of the brain that view the world the way the first humans, existing in their original bodies, must have viewed it.
AR: Original Bodies is defined by the shifting roles of its crows, but the concepts that the crows link to (absent fathers, religion, survival, etc.) are also spun out into dynamic symbols which serve new roles in subsequent poems. In each of your books, there are similar leitmotifs: The poems in Black Tupelo Country keep returning to images of diseased, inhuman skin, and Mechanical Fireflies connects many of its themes with images of death. Each of your collections is tightly woven to the point that images and phrases overlap and repeat, but each has its own symbolic vocabulary and tone. The poems are so strengthened by the linkages in the book, that it is hard to imagine them separate, though many of them were published so.
Without returning to the question of intent: how did these poems become this book?
DR: My wife likes to claim that I have an obsessive personality, and it is possible she is correct, particularly when it comes to writing. Recently, for example, I have been composing what might be called flash-fiction, prose poems, or some hybrid of the two. Each work consists of a single paragraph that ranges from 900-1,000 words. All of these efforts arise from “distorted” voices, from characters who perceive the world in unusual yet, I hope, consistent ways. I would guess I have completed about thirty of these so far. Indeed, this process of writing in “clusters” is not new for me. Some years ago I wrote a few dozen anachronistic poems, ones that arose from the point of view of historical, mythological, or literary characters flung into present day to fend for themselves. Why did I do that? It’s hard to say. When an approach to a poem or a story comes to me—for whatever reason—I try not to question it. I tell myself to accept any urge to write as a gift (this doesn’t mean that the results are necessarily good, any more than all gifts are good). I tell myself that it is bad form, after all, to turn down a gift.
The first answer to the question, then, is that obsessiveness of form, content, and imagery seems to be woven into the way I approach writing. I often feel as though I am trying to tap into a certain vein in the earth, trying to mine everything I find there. Once I exhaust a vein, I move on to a new one. Usually the new type of work seems inexhaustible at first, and I write with great energy and enthusiasm, often completing first drafts as rapidly as I can type. Later, of course, I approach the keyboard less and less willingly, and the euphoria I felt in those first days turns to despair. It’s time, then, to move on.
The richest vein I have found to date as a writer, and the one I return to again and again, is the animistic one. Nature, in these poems, is a kind of human breath, and human breath is one more breeze sweeping out across the tall grass of an open field. The poems make little distinction between the natural and the human—which is why, I suppose, the speakers can’t tell a crow from a father, a father from a crow.
Another way to make this same point is to say that, over a period of a few weeks or even months, I often feel that I am writing the same poem over and over, coming at it in different ways, approaching it from different directions. There is something there to be discovered, I tell myself, if only I am persistent. These aren’t revisions on a small-scale but a large scale, a re-imagining. And given that this is so, why shouldn’t the same images serve sometimes as symbols for one thing, other times for something else? That’s how the speakers see them, after all, and who am I to question their take on things? The boy, for example, doesn’t imagine that the crow stands for his father. The boy accepts that the crow and his father are identical. I can’t bring myself to doubt him. This obsessiveness of process results, I hope, in what feels to a reader like a complex exploration of interrelated images, themes, metaphors, and symbols—but surely that is more the byproduct of the method than a design.
This same method, by the way, does lead to one of my fears as a writer. Does the obsessiveness come across as complex, a kind incantation, or as repetitious?
AR: The second section of Original Bodies, “Field Song,” is more engaged with an active first person voice and the sparse, brutal nature of earlier appearing poems (like “Field Religion”) coexist in the latter half with more human concerns. What is the relationship between these two sections, and how would you define the relationship of nature and man in (your) poetry?
DR: About a year ago I had surgery for a detached retina. I was put to sleep to have my eye numbed, but was awakened for the surgery itself. To my surprise, the surgeon—while inserting into my eye various gauge needles—told me stories about his former college roommate who went on to translate Persian poetry. It is a testament both to the power of the drugs I was given and to the power of storytelling that I was distracted from what was taking place, that I focused more on the conversation than on what was happening to my eye. This is not to say that I think stories are simply a “distraction.” On the contrary, I believe the case can be made that storytelling is at the center of who we are as human beings and how we view the world. I suspect that our ability to imagine stories (lies? fantasies? scenarios?) has played a crucial role in our survival. Indeed, much of what draws me to writing is the desire to tell stories. From my very beginning as a writer, I have wanted to combine narrative and lyrical elements in my work, to talk about the lives of the speakers and characters I create.
For reasons I am not certain I know, however, I have very little interest in writing about my own life, and most of the poems I create are not the least bit autobiographical. I suspect that readers of my poetry might imagine I was raised on a farm, had a brother who died at a young age, and had a father who studied Goethe. None of this is true. I was raised in a northern suburb of Chicago, do not have a brother, and my father was a lawyer. The voices I listen to when I write don’t seem particularly interested in my biography, and that’s fine by me. I prefer to write about other people, imagined people, and I am surprised by connections and consistencies that seem to arise in these characters, as though they have had a life outside of me yet express themselves in first person. What I would really like—if such a thing is possible—is for my stories to feel universal, outside of time and the specifics of any one person. And this is my answer to the question of how I define the relationship between humans and nature in the poems. I see them as indistinguishable. When I am writing about the natural landscape, I am also writing about the human landscape, and when I am writing about humans, I hope I am writing about what is natural in their conception of the world. Original Bodies, I believe, focuses on a field as its central image, using that field to represent and to explore the more primitive aspects of the human mind and human emotions. The poems explore the slipperiness of natural elements like crows, mud and moon, water and grass, naming, singing and divining, and dying. The poems show how these elements represent our own ambivalence toward the natural world and its human counterparts. Mud, for example, can be viewed as fertile and life-giving, but it can also be seen as the substance in which we are buried, as all that is stained and imperfect.
AR: For all of the ancient symbols that are so prominent in your poetry, more modern voices also are present: George Santayana, Cormac McCarthy, Joseph Conrad, etc. What other voices do you feel are alive within Original Bodies?
DR: As I have mentioned, I have developed a strong interest over the years in animism, in imbuing the physical world with human traits, with human consciousness. In 1757 David Hume wrote in A Natural History of Religion: “There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds . . . hence the frequency and beauty of the prosopopoeia in poetry, where trees, mountains, and streams are personified.”
A portion of these words from Hume—“We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds”—serves as an epigraph for Original Bodies, so surely the voices of writers like Hume, Freud, and Jung inhabit the book. Freud, for example, wrote that a member of a primitive culture imagines that “every danger springs from the hostile intention of some being with a soul like himself, and this is as much the case with dangers which threaten him from some natural force as it is from other human beings or animals," and, in much the same way, he or she “is accustomed to project his own internal impulses of hostility on to the external world.” Many of the animistic poems in Original Bodies are dark in nature and certainly reflect the fears and projections of the speakers. What’s more, the poems often exist half in the real world and half in the dream world, which is meant to emphasize the slipperiness we often feel between the corporeal and incorporeal worlds, and which is the source both of our fears and our longings.
What’s more, I am certainly drawn to poets like W. S. Merwin, Brigit Peegen Kelly, and Robert Wrigley, all of whom write about the natural world and its connections to the human experience. Kelly, in particular, delves at times into the primitive mindset, and I find her poetry both startling and moving. Still, it is next to impossible for me to identify which voices have had the greatest influence on me, in part because I came to the writing of poetry so late in life. For many years I was a failed and frustrated fiction writer, suffering from chronic and debilitating writer’s block. I could write the opening page of a short story or novel, but then, in despair, I would stop. In 2004, when I was nearing fifty, I realized in a single moment that if I wrote poetry I could close up shop after a page or two and call the work done. This has made all the difference for me, but it also means that I have had nearly sixty years of being influenced by voices around me. When I summon them for my poems, I don’t know where they come from, or why they arrive, but I am always happy to welcome them.
rintala
Anthony Rintala is an English instructor at the University of Southern Indiana and the media editor for Southern Indiana Review. His work has most recently been published in New Plains Review, Kudzu Magazine, Muse: A Quarterly Journal, Ishaan Literary Review, Oklahoma Review, Copperfield Review, A Few Lines Magazine, Mad Hatter’s Review, Foundling Review, Muddy River, Penwood Review, St. Ann’s Review, Sakura Review, and the Avatar Review.
Ramspeck, Doug: THE OWL THAT CARRIES US AWAY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Ramspeck, Doug THE OWL THAT CARRIES US AWAY BkMk/Univ. of Missouri-Kansas City (Adult Fiction) $15.95 4, 1 ISBN: 978-1-943491-13-1
Ramspeck's debut collection abounds with flawed families, tense confirmations, and unlikely moments of grace.
In these stories, Ramspeck traces the emotional fallout from failed and imperfect connections. The threat of violence hangs over the proceedings: When recalling his first love, the narrator of "Slippery Creek" recalls her disapproving father revealing his gun. "He almost smiled, as though he thought I might appreciate the gesture," the narrator notes--and that blend of implied violence and unexpected emotion serves as a template for much of what follows. The poverty-stricken protagonist of "The Second Coming" prays for a miracle to save his family; someone who might be his troubled father or a divine presence shows up with "a handful of wadded-up and dirty bills." It keeps eviction at bay, though it doesn't solve all the family's problems--and these ambiguous miracles and flawed salvations continue as a motif. The narrator of "The World We Know" thinks back on his relationship with one of his sons, whose life imploded after he killed his girlfriend as a teenager; in "Bedtime Story," the lines between life and death blur for one grieving woman. Ramspeck eludes easy sentimentality: In works like the title story and "Old Places," he presents an honest view of the irrational violence and petty grievances of childhood. And while he's able to work powerfully in a small number of pages, he can also evoke a more lyrical mode, as in the opening sentence of "Slippery Creek": "When I was sixteen and living with my father for the final winter of his life, I fell in love for a time but did not mean to, and I lost something that was not mine to lose."
These precise and resonant stories chronicle humble lives and unspoken traumas, making for a subtle and moving reading experience.
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Book Review: Mechanical Fireflies
Knowing the Unknown
Mechanical Fireflies, by Doug Ramspeck.
The Waywiser Press, 2011.
Poetry.
Review by Debrah Lechner
debrah.lechner@gmail.com
Doug Ramspeck has authored four books of poetry, and his first book, Black Tupelo County, won the John Ciardi Prize. As a blurb on the back of Mechanical Fireflies mentions, his voice is polished, perfected.
It is also fresh and vital. The light and shadow in this poetry, the natural world and the world that the mind delineates, are renewed in this verse. They are distinct and newly apprehended. From "Aporia":
And so the inexplicable:
the river a drop
cloth collecting moon
spillage, some un-
wrapping of night
among the hickories:
this sweet unknowing,
the shadow
that cannot tell itself
from current.
Or then a turning
and unturning,
an imagined stark divide
between inside
and outside,
as though we open
` our palms that capture
light that seeps from
our own bodies, some implicit
discipline of self-
deception.
This expressed “unknowing” defines what may not last but returns and what is found that is recognized by what has been lost. It’s a flickering revelation, difficult to seize, potent and lovely, and a pure pleasure to find presented to readers in this collection. For working poets, Mechanical Fireflies will be refreshing and inspirational.
Amazon.com is offering three of Doug Ramspeck’s poetry collections: Mechanical Fireflies,
Black Tupelo County and Possum Nocturne. Quantities are limited.
Review of Original Bodies by Doug Ramspeck
by The Editors | Jan 26, 2015
Review of Original Bodies by Doug Ramspeck
Original Bodies, Doug Ramspeck
Southern Indiana Review Press. 2014. 60pp.
Doug Ramspeck’s fifth collection of poetry is the inaugural winner of The Michael Waters Poetry Prize, awarded by Southern Indiana Review. The collection is, from the first strum, a meditation on personal histories widening toward an eternal extent. Honoring another poet’s contributions with this book fits, then, the poem’s voices insistent: We overlap; we name each other; we have no names but dreams.
The book’s four sections are named after the four reverential images in the final lines of its prologue poem, “Crow, Moon, Crow.” That poem begins “So this is how I remember it: / a child is a crow is a moon is a river” and closes “For here is how I remember it: a river is a moon is a crow is a tongue.” Ramspeck welcomes the reader by enacting redefinition from the start, in the way only poetry can name mystery the best order.
Thus “River” is the name of the first section, and the diction trenches with shadow and refrain. “Night Mud” revises the ashes to ashes chant: “as though each body ripens and returns / to the manure field, what clings / to the bottoms of your boots.” The second section, “Moon,” features “October Mud,” which reminds of how “For a long time the spirits thought they were / the alterations, the cadences.” Three poems later, still in the second section, “Mud Grass” tells a birth story:
Here was the oracle of black stains
and their covenant with mud, the moon
a weed drifting above the creek that burrowed
forever into clay.”
Listed as lyric instruction throughout: the body knows the ways to live and make song, but worry has not earned its place. These poems do not decide, despite their declarations of longing, despite their understanding of the lives of crows, fathers’ lessons, owls, grasses, loam, and the overheard conversations of old men fishing.
Rather, this collection’s framework of instinct as its music is recognizable at the end of the second section (entitled “Moon”), of which the final two poems share similar lineation and length, but scratch images palimpsest.
They suspect that the moon each night
is a solitary bird, its white feathers as still
as when the ship of earth is stalled.
And the moonlight on the river is a consolation,
a syringe filling the world with the coming cold.
–(“Alluvial Prophecy”)
On the facing page, “Deposition” begins, “Say two birds at dusk in an auburn sky. / But which is an augury of which?” This statement speaks a central—and elegant—argument of the collection. Further down the page, the birds are “no longer / in their bodies in the darkness,” so that omen and testimony are assigned equal weight. The poem ends with the moon, recast from the previous poem: “Until there is nothing left, not even the birds / darting through the air like dreams. You sleepwalk / into it. The moon sealing itself to the lip of the earth.”
In the book’s final section, entitled “Tongue,” heat and winter (seasonal and personal) hold thematically. “Chronic Offerings” starts
To the gods we give the cold sky,
these meager flares of stars, magic
hair of midnight when we sleep,
entrails of dreams.
Throughout this collection, Ramspeck unriddles the illusory, his control of language sure as a fist opening, closing. This power can be seen in how he rounds out his list of “Chronic Offerings”:
(. . .) our endless passages
of recriminations and regrets, the love
we felt once like a bird speeding toward
the bright light of a window.
The reader, as is necessarily human in our time, needs these poems’ permission to order the world by tending to signs. “Birth Song,” from the book’s third section (entitled “Crow”), assures the reader it is fitting to trust “that sense that our lives are the space / between our heartbeats, / the instant before the eye blinks.”
Emily Borgmann TK