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WORK TITLE: May Day: Poems
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Minneapolis
STATE: MN
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/gretchen-marquette
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor. Water-Stone Review, assistant poetry editor; first reader for National Poetry Series, 2013.
AWARDS:Minnesota Emerging Writer Grant, Loft Literary Center, 2014.
WRITINGS
Contributor to publications, including Harper’s, Tin House, Paper Darts, and the Paris Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Gretchen Marquette is a writer and editor based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has worked for Water-Stone Review as an assistant poetry editor. In 2013 Marquette worked for the National Poetry Series as a first reader. Her writings have appeared in publications that include Harper’s, Tin House, Paper Darts, and the Paris Review.
May Day: Poems, released in 2016, is Marquette’s first poetry collection. In an interview with Euan Kerr, a contributor to the MPR News Web site, Marquette discussed the themes of the collection, stating: “It’s not about things becoming easier in life but about accepting certain things about how life doesn’t always go the way you want it to … and being able to sort of find the beauty in those moments even when things have sort of gone off the rails.” Marquette revealed to Kaveh Akbar, a writer on the DiveDapper Web site, that she wrote the book after a painful breakup that occurred around the time that her brother was sent overseas with the military. She told Akbar: “The book is a report from a dark time. To have it become something that has brought joy into my life, it feels really good. It feels like that’s how life is ideally supposed to work. Something good should come from suffering.” Marquette added: “I think writing those poems helped me come to terms with a lot—obvious things, like this person’s exodus from my life, but I also had this idea that things were going to get easier once I coped with his leaving, and there would be this resolution and happy ending. And I wouldn’t always feel the sort of disorientation that I felt after he was gone. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that if that’s going to happen, it hasn’t happened yet and it’s possible that I’ll never have the kind of resolution that I’m craving.”
Regarding the poem “About Suffering,” Marquette told Akbar: “It’s a political poem in that I’m angry that the vast majority of people on the planet want to lead good lives, and be fulfilled, and take care of their children and their friends, but then there are some really sad and confused and broken people who do terrible damaging things. I resent the insinuation that I can see a photograph like that on the other side of the world and just let it go. I don’t let it go. I can’t.” In “Figure Drawing” the narrator is outside and observes a Cooper’s hawk. At that moment, she realizes that she will not commit suicide. “Want” finds a young female narrator discussing how she wants to own a macaw. The natural world also plays a role in other poems, including “Painted Turtle.” Regarding nature’s role in her life, Marquette told Akbar: “I grew up out in the woods and I lived there until I was ten. Then I moved into the suburbs and I could finally ride my bike on pavement, but I lost a lot. When I was little I wanted to be a wildlife rehabilitator. I spent all my time outside and learned everything I could about trees and animals and plants, and it’s always been something that’s important to me. It sounds more romantic than it was.” She continued: “It wasn’t all sunshine, but it was a beautiful childhood and I felt connected to the natural cycles of the world. Those things still remain powerful to me, and they kind of became more like metaphors.”
A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented: “As she explores longing and want, Marquette deftly navigates the infinite as well as the small and local.” Writing on the Minneapolis Star Tribune Web site, Elizabeth Hoover described May Day as a “startlingly original debut.” Hoover added: “Marquette’s beautiful and macabre images have the feel of a classic fairy tale.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, May 16, 2016, review of May Day: Poems, p. 31.
ONLINE
Book Wars, http://thebookwars.tumblr.com/ (September 23, 2016), review of May Day.
DiveDapper, https://www.divedapper.com/ (February 25, 2017), Kaveh Akbar, author interview.
Midway, http://midwayjournal.com/ (February 25, 2017), author profile.
Minneapolis Star Tribune Online, http://www.startribune.com/ (April 16, 2016), Elizabeth Hoover, review of May Day.
MPR News, https://www.mprnews.org/ (May 6, 2016), Euan Kerr, author interview.
Poetry Foundation Web site, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (February 25, 2017), author profile.
TriQuarterly Online, https://www.triquarterly.org/ (February 25, 2017), author profile.
September 23, 2016
Sometimes you read a collection of poems and you feel it in your bones and other times, you just don’t get it. Gretchen Marquette’s poems are probably beautiful written with a lot of style and feeling but reasons I cannot fathom, I simply don’t…get them.
Which is strange because I didn’t think I was a stone wall and usually I can find some way to empathize with or relate to beautiful words.
Why are so many love stories tragedies?
A verse from the poem “Doe” asks and probably reveals the theme inherent in this collection. This is a sort of extended contemplation on love with lots of deer thrown in. I suppose if I were smarter (or more inclined) I would have delved into the greater meaning symbolized by the image of the recurring deer but I’m not.
Marquette’s imagery is certainly beautiful. For example:
the plum’s gold flesh laced with scarlet veins,
replica of a human brain.
I feel like the are more of a cerebral exercise than an emotional one. Which is not to say they are bad or anything, just that I’m probably out of touch with my heart. Ha.
Why am I so ungainly with love after all the loving I have done?
I don’t quite know how to review this collection. I don’t feel like I am qualified to evaluate it in terms of its technical aspects. I just feel like this collection will mean different things to me at different times in my life. Right now, I’m not much affected by it but that doesn’t mean this will be the case a few years or even months from now on.
So maybe check this out if you like the sound of the bits I have posted?
As it turns out, the second best thing that can happen to you is a broken heart.
Gretchen Marquette
Poet Details
Gretchen Marquette’s first book is May Day (Graywolf Press, 2016). She lives in Minneapolis.
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Discover this poet's context and related poetry, articles, and media.
Gretchen Marquette has served as the assistant poetry editor for Water~Stone Review, and as a first reader for the National Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in places such as Paper Darts, Harper's, and the Paris Review. Gretchen is a 2014 recipient of a Minnesota Emerging Writer Grant through the Loft Literary Center, and her first book, May Day, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2016. She currently lives in the Powderhorn neighborhood in south Minneapolis.
Gretchen Marquette has served as the assistant poetry editor for Water~Stone Review, and as a first reader for the National Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in places such as Paper Darts, Harper's, Tin House, and the Paris Review. Gretchen is a 2014 recipient of a Minnesota Emerging Writer Grant through the Loft Literary Center, and her first book, May Day, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2016. She currently lives in the Powderhorn neighborhood in south Minneapolis.
QUOTED: "It's not about things becoming easier in life but about accepting certain things about how life doesn't always go the way you want it to ... and being able to sort of find the beauty in those moments even when things have sort of gone off the rails."
Minnesota poet Gretchen Marquette finds beauty in trying times
The Thread
Euan Kerr · Minneapolis · May 6, 2016
Poet Gretchen Marquette
Poet Gretchen Marquette in the May Day Cafe in Minneapolis where she wrote many of the poems which make up her debut collection "May Day." She says she chose the title because she likes how it applies to a celebration, a distress call, and a place. Euan Kerr | MPR News
Listen Reading: "Ode to a man in dress clothes"
May 5, 2016
2min 12sec
Listen Reading: "Gregory"
May 5, 2016
1min 10sec
Listen Reading: "Powderhorn, after the Storm"
May 5, 2016
1min 40sec
Listen Story audio
4min 14sec
The May Day Café, not far from Powderhorn Park in south Minneapolis, has a comfortable hippy, lived-in feel — a perfect office for a poet.
"I'm here most days. Sometimes more than once a day," Gretchen Marquette said recently as the place buzzed with the chatter of conversations and a callout to find who ordered the vegan pizza. "It just means a great deal to me to see the same people, to know there are a lot of artists and writers who spend time here and so I can have these extended conversations and then get back to work."
The café provides more than a chair and table for Marquette. It delivered inspiration for her new collection, so much so that she named the book, "May Day." The poems plumb stories of lost love and anxiety, but each unearths glimpses of life's wonder. Marquette wrote many of them while sitting at the May Day.
The poems are about many things, but there are two central themes: the end of a passionate love affair and the anxiety of having her younger brother serving in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Marquette said she still finds it hard to read the poems about that lost love, even though it ended some four years ago. She's happier to talk about her brother. In the poem "Gregory," she writes about going to West Point to see him graduate. One section sticks out.
I kept mistaking
another girl's brother for him, marching in formation,
soft haircuts under plumes of black feathers.
He was already less ours.
Marquette said her brother shipped out just a month after graduation. After he left, she said she felt an inescapable tension.
"And then I would realize I was anxious about my brother being gone," she said. "And there was nothing I could do to calm myself or comfort myself, that I couldn't speak to him, even though I wanted to. I just had to sit with that."
So as she sat, she wrote.
There were poems about her brother, her lost love, the nature around her, her dogs and Powderhorn Park. Some are sad, others funny. All are filled with empathy.
She wrote about a man in dress clothes she saw trying to maintain a brave face while sweating one summer day in a coffee shop near the airport.
When I see a man
in a dress shirt, I want
to walk up behind him,
place my hand
between his shoulders
to rest it there
for a moment.
Marquette says "Ode to a man in dress clothes" has become her best-known poem. She'll probably read it at the "May Day" publication party Saturday evening at the Uptown Church in Minneapolis.
Jeff Shotts, her editor at Graywolf Press, calls the collection a book about "somebody who had been wrecked by grief and was desperately trying to find her way back into a world she loved."
Marquette said it's been exciting and scary to have her work go out into the world and to hear back from readers who say they recognize things in her poems that they have experienced alone. Her brother is back safe from his tours of duty. But she is careful to say "May Day" doesn't promise happy endings.
"It's not about things becoming easier in life but about accepting certain things about how life doesn't always go the way you want it to," she said, "and being able to sort of find the beauty in those moments even when things have sort of gone off the rails."
QUOTED: "The book is a report from a dark time. To have it become something that has brought joy into my life, it feels really good. It feels like that’s how life is ideally supposed to work. Something good should come from suffering."
"I think writing those poems helped me come to terms with a lot—obvious things, like this person’s exodus from my life, but I also had this idea that things were going to get easier once I coped with his leaving, and there would be this resolution and happy ending. And I wouldn’t always feel the sort of disorientation that I felt after he as gone. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that if that's going to happen, it hasn’t happened yet and it’s possible that I’ll never have the kind of resolution that I’m craving."
"It’s a political poem in that I’m angry that the vast majority of people on the planet want to lead good lives, and be fulfilled, and take care of their children and their friends, but then there are some really sad and confused and broken people who do terrible damaging things. I resent the insinuation that I can see a photograph like that on the other side of the world and just let it go. I don’t let it go. I can’t."
"I grew up out in the woods and I lived there until I was ten. Then I moved into the suburbs and I could finally ride my bike on pavement, but I lost a lot. When I was little I wanted to be a wildlife rehabilitator. I spent all my time outside and learned everything I could about trees and animals and plants, and it’s always been something that’s important to me. It sounds more romantic than it was." "It wasn’t all sunshine, but it was a beautiful childhood and I felt connected to the natural cycles of the world. Those things still remain powerful to me, and they kind of became more like metaphors."
“How beautiful does the world have to be before I don’t want to leave it?”
GRETCHEN MARQUETTE
Interviewed By: Kaveh Akbar
Your book May Day is out now—how old are the oldest poems in that book?
Yes, I think about half of the poems in the book were written over the course of a nine month period.
Wow.
I started writing them in the summer of 2012, so I wrote the oldest poems in the book when I was in graduate school. I actually wrote the poem “Prologue" my very first night in grad school.
Your first night?!
Yeah, that’s probably the oldest poem in the book.
That’s a perfect name for it then.
Yeah, yeah. It was a much longer poem at one point, but it became that.
That’s a cool poem, the little itty bitty guy.
The little tiny one.
Were you actively sending these out the whole time, or were you just sort of hoarding them and writing them. When did it start to feel like a book to you? Does it resemble your grad school thesis?
No, it doesn’t look at all like my thesis. One of my friends referred to my thesis as a bloated elk. It was like 130 pages and it was just full. It was as if I was in cosmetology school and it was my mannequin head. I just put everything I was proud of into it, so it didn’t have much of a shape.
And in 2013, I was a first reader for the National Poetry Series. I read hundreds of manuscripts, and I got a really good idea of what a finished manuscript looked and felt like. During that time I was just writing. I had been submitting poems occasionally, but I wasn’t very good at keeping up on it.
When I was in my last year in grad school, Ralph Angel came to visit. And he talked about how he really thought that people should submit to their top choices first. And then once those places rejected you, submit to other places. I sort of decided to take him up on that. I submitted to the Paris Review and they took my work. That was when everything changed for me, as far as being a public writer. I was still writing a lot of the poems that would become May Day, but I wasn’t really writing a book. I wrote the poem “Ode to a Man In Dress Clothes" when I was in graduate school. And it was in the Paris Review , and then reprinted in Harper's in the summer, and then I got an email from Jeff Shotts in July of 2013. He asked me if I had a manuscript.
That’s awesome.
I actually didn’t believe I was seeing what I was seeing. I was living through the worst month of my life. I was miserable and sad. I actually had a friend, who was there with me at the time, make sure this was an actual email I was reading. I didn’t have a book, that was the honest answer, but I did have hundreds of pages of poems. I knew I was close to having something, so I told Jeff it was my goal to have that done by the end of the summer and he said,"Okay, just check back in with me then." He wrote back to me at the beginning of August to ask how I was doing. I said that if I took a few extra weeks or months on it, he would really love it, but if I gave it to him too soon, he wouldn’t like it, and I would ruin the chance for myself. He said he didn’t think that would be the case and gave me an arbitrary deadline of the day after Labor Day. I got my best work together and sent it off to him. He said he would put me out of my misery as quickly as possible. He met with me a few weeks later and we chatted. I signed a contract a week after that.
That’s amazing. That’s awesome.
It is amazing and kind of weird. A weird first book story.
It’s a crazy first book story. That’s the total dream situation, but it’s warranted with the poems. I was totally unfamiliar with your work when I got the ARC of May Day in the mail, but I took it with me to a coffee shop with a stack of books that I was taking to flip through, and I remember opening it up and being totally blown away.
I love hearing that.
It was that thing you hope happens with every new book you pick up and know nothing about.
I wonder where I was that day you took my book with you to a coffee shop. That’s how we started talking. It’s really wonderful.
From the sounds of things, from the story you just told and from the reviews that I’ve read, a lot of people seem to be responding to your work that way. A lot of people are reading a poem in Poetry, or in the Paris Review, or they pick up this book, and they're like, “Holy shit, what is this?”
I’m really touched. The book is a report from a dark time. To have it become something that has brought joy into my life, it feels really good. It feels like that’s how life is ideally supposed to work. Something good should come from suffering.
Totally. For those who haven’t read the book yet, it details the dissolution of a long romantic relationship and also your brother’s deployment to the Middle East and your dealing with those things in your own psychic way. Listening to your story about how you were in the worst month of your life when you got that email from Jeff Shotts—it’s a total close-a-door, open-a-window thing.
Yes. It’s a balancing of the scales or something. At the time I was having such a bad time that I had to carry Mentos with me everywhere I went because I didn’t have enough spit in my mouth to talk to people. I was that anxious and sad. It was to the point where, a friend of mine saw some Mentos fall out of my bag and she was like, "Oh my God! Are you okay?" For so many months I was in such a bad place, and it was during that time that everything changed for me.
That’s a perfect image of that time, the Mentos. I’ve never heard of anything like that. So you were writing the poems when you were still in that time. Has a combination of time and distance from the situation, and the experiences the book has given you, improved your station?
Yes, I’m definitely not in the same place that I was before. I think writing those poems helped me come to terms with a lot—obvious things, like this person’s exodus from my life, but I also had this idea that things were going to get easier once I coped with his leaving, and there would be this resolution and happy ending. And I wouldn’t always feel the sort of disorientation that I felt after he as gone. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that if that's going to happen, it hasn’t happened yet and it’s possible that I’ll never have the kind of resolution that I’m craving. And continuing to write poems is kind of my territory.
I’m trying to explore, like, how beautiful does the world have to be before I don’t want to leave it? It’s already really fucking beautiful, and yet sometimes it’s not enough for me. And I’m a person who really connects with beauty and with the world on a regular basis. Every single day there is something that moves me. But what do I do with the time I have here? How do I make a space for myself to live in when my life just doesn’t look the way I thought it was going to look?
That’s a beautiful way to articulate a complicated sentiment that I think a lot of people spend lifetimes struggling with. That’s a central concern of the book, too. You could look to a poem like “Figure Drawing,” the beginning of that poem is one of those “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm” moments—you see a Cooper's hawk and say, “I knew then, / somehow, that I would never take my own life.” And that’s not layered in a cloak of anything. It’s in the first-person, you are talking about a real moment.
Well, there was a kind of shifting that happened a year after my break up. We kept in touch for a year, which we should not have done. And once I finally closed the door on all communication with him, I started to improve. I was spending a lot of time that fall with my friend Nikki, who was an art student at the time. She was studying figure drawing and looking for a model. So I would just sit still for hours in her beautiful, airy, bright studio while she was drawing me. I was really finding a toehold where I could go a whole day without wishing that I wasn’t there.
That’s fascinating.
There were moments that felt like missing a step going down the stairs—where everything sort of drops for a second. I had these moments where I realized, "Oh, I almost missed this," you know? And what complicated things was the fact that Nikki lost her mother to suicide when she was ten years old.
So when I was spending all this time with her and also trying to get a grip, there were these moments where we'd be walking to the diner and she'd have this paint on her face—she is so beautiful—and I'd think about how her mom wasn’t getting to see her become an adult, wasn't getting to see her ferocious talent. I didn’t judge her mom for that. I identified with her a little bit, and it freaked me out to think I could be missing this part of my life where I get to love Nikki and sit in her studio. Now there are drawings and paintings from that point in her career where I’m the only figure. She still has them.
That’s beautiful. I love that story. Some of that—the "smudge / of yolk-colored pigment under your nose"—is in the poem, but it’s cool to hear the whole story behind it. The first time I read through the book, that was the poem where I was like, "I need to talk to this person."
You haven’t told me that.
Yeah, I think that was the one. It speaks to both the redemptive powers of art and also the redemptive powers of friendship, the latter of which is nodded to in the book’s dedication.
Oh yes, definitely. I don’t think I’d be here if it wasn’t for those friendships. Which is strange because we give such a privileged place for romantic love and familial love, but in both of those forms of love you are under a contract in some way. But then you have friendships, which have actually been some of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in my life.
Yeah, totally.
We can leave each other at any time. We have no obligation to one another, and I think that makes friendship more powerful than romantic love. For people who don't immediately find a partner in adulthood, these reliable and durable friendships are what help us find the strength to go out into the world and be brave because that is what we can come back to. It would be ideal to have one person to rely on predominately, but it’s really beautiful to have a lot of people.
Totally, that’s so well put. I think about that all the time, how people privilege romantic love. The way a person treats their friends is often a pretty good indicator of how they are going to treat a romantic partner. And I’ve been missing my oldest, closest friends terribly since moving to Florida last summer. I don’t have that network here. But that’s not really relevant.
Actually, I think it is pertinent to what we’re talking about, especially because I was really alone when I started a new chapter in my life four years ago. I had these friendships, many of them I’ve had for many years, but they weren’t as deep as they are now. When I did find myself suffering, I was mostly alone because I hadn’t taken the time to build those friendships up to what they are, what I’ve built them into now. I can relate to what you’re saying. The reason I wrote almost half my book in 9 months was because I didn’t have anyone that I wanted to talk to. There was nobody who could comfort me, so I wrote instead. I think that’s why I was so productive.
And friendship is something that you explore in the poems repeatedly. I’m thinking of “A Poem About Childhood,” which is paired with “Want." These are two of my favorite poems in the book, but that’s sort of a darker thing. I guess it’s not necessarily a friend, but—
Comradery.
Yeah, the comradery, but also the one-upsmanship that you find in there. Maybe we could talk about "Want," which is one of my favorite poems in the book, and it’s a way to pivot into talking about poems about animals. It’s this really short poem that’s doing what a lot of the book does, which is quietly marrying the natural world with the psychic ecosystem, and pushing up against the limitations of both in interesting ways. I’ve read that poem probably 200 times and sent it to a million people. I still kind of gasp at its last line.
That’s amazing that you say that.
Is that one of the older poems?
It is. When I was in graduate school, I took a class called "Ode and Elegy." My partner and I were still together then, but I was realizing that it was unlikely we'd stay together. In this class we were required to write five poems a week, which is a lot.
Yeah, that’s a lot.
Near the end of the semester, my instructor, Jim Moore said, "You can turn in a brand new manuscript if you want. I wouldn’t mind." And everyone laughed. We’d been writing five poems a week, who would turn in new work that he hadn’t seen? But a half-second before everybody laughed, I was like, "I’m going to do that." I wrote. It was one of the most productive periods of my entire life. I wrote forty pages of poems in two weeks. I had a lot to say and it was all about how this relationship was probably not going to work. I titled the manuscript with the first initials of the person I was with. "Want" was one of the poems I wrote during those two weeks. I was trying to look at my grief and disappointment from every single angle. I was trying to look for patterns that had emerged in my childhood in relation to wanting affection and comfort, and looking for that outside of myself. I remember doing that when I was little and wanting the macaw.
That’s beautiful.
I knew it wasn’t so good, but I wanted it anyway.
There’s a sort of backstory in the other poems in the book.
That used to be "Want II," there was "Want I," and that one was about horses.
About you wanting horses as a kid, too?
Yeah.
Oh, that’s cool. I want to see that poem.
I’ll show it to you.
"Painted Turtle" is another poem where you’re pushing psychic pain up against a sensitivity to the natural world. It feels like such an organic, clean piece. It’s not one where all the marionette strings are flashing in the light.
That poem is also from that two week manuscript.
Oh, really?
Yeah, and that did happen. I’m happy to hear that you can’t see the strings because I didn’t labor over that poem too much. The romantics talk about writing themselves into a fever, and I kind of did that because I was in an emotional free fall. I was looking for metaphors and I was using my figurative ones to try to put what I was feeling into some sort of container. Without it, I felt like I couldn’t survive. I wrote the poem a few days after it happened. You know, I honestly don’t remember much about writing that poem.
It was all in that sort of superfast fugue of writing.
Definitely. I really do feel like a lot of those poems were gift poems because I needed them so badly and they came, which doesn’t always happen.
The foil of that poem is the natural world and this familiarity with the of vernacular biology. You talk about the turtle’s heart beating once every ten minutes. Are you reading a lot of science texts? It reminds me of Aimee Nezhukumatathil, whose poems are super science-y and engaged with the natural world.
I grew up out in the woods and I lived there until I was ten. Then I moved into the suburbs and I could finally ride my bike on pavement, but I lost a lot. When I was little I wanted to be a wildlife rehabilitator. I spent all my time outside and learned everything I could about trees and animals and plants, and it’s always been something that’s important to me. It sounds more romantic than it was. I would find dead animals or rabid animals. There were plenty of things I was afraid of. It was also lonely sometimes because we didn’t have a neighborhood full of kids. It was just me and my sister most of the time. It wasn’t all sunshine, but it was a beautiful childhood and I felt connected to the natural cycles of the world. Those things still remain powerful to me, and they kind of became more like metaphors. That’s why they appear the way they do in the poems. Though I will say that I do remember looking up things about that turtle so I would know what to say. I’m a big researcher when I’m writing poetry. If I want to know what kind of flowers are purple that grow in Minnesota in August, I’ll look that up. I like being as specific as I can when I’m talking about the natural world.
The acuity of your observations are really remarkable throughout. Both when you’re talking about the natural world and when you’re talking about your psychic ecosystem, you have a very specific register of observation.
That’s such a compliment. Thank you.
I think it’s sort of particular to you and maybe that's what people pick up on. Another favorite poem is the one that’s based on the Auden poem.
“About Suffering”?
Yeah, but you have the line in there where you say, “the vowels of rage: 'E,' / sometimes "O." And I know the photograph you’re talking about. It’s a poem that’s answering the famous Auden line, “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters.” But you’re talking about this horrible photo from Gaza, where these men are carrying their dead children wrapped in shawls and there’s this big crowd behind them. It’s a really striking and horrible image. And you talk about the vowels of rage, 'E' and sometimes 'O,' and that’s so exactly right, the men in that picture are making those letters. And 'E' is such an angry vowel sound.
Yeah, you are showing your teeth.
It’s the most animal of the vowel sounds but I would never in a hundred years, thinking about anger, would I think to associate that. This is almost like Rimbaud's "Vowels," "A black, E white, I red," but yours is so much more tethered to our actual physiology.
I’m happy to have a chance to discuss that poem because I had someone ask me if it was meant to be a political poem, especially because of where it takes place. I wrote that poem during the summer of 2013, and our country had just gone through the shooting in Aurora, the Boston bombing, and the Sandy Hook shooting. I just remember feeling so overcome by all of this grief. I don’t watch the news, I have to be in control of the rate at which I’m getting information in a crisis.
I’m the same way.
I would read a lot about these things. I would see images of the people outside the theater, or the people behind the finish line. I was seeing their faces. And when I saw this image of these men with their children and it was the same feeling to me. This complete grief and bewilderment and anger. I felt angry, too. And I remembered that Auden poem and thought this is the perfect opportunity for me to sort of address it. To say that he’s wrong. It’s a political poem in that I’m angry that the vast majority of people on the planet want to lead good lives, and be fulfilled, and take care of their children and their friends, but then there are some really sad and confused and broken people who do terrible damaging things. I resent the insinuation that I can see a photograph like that on the other side of the world and just let it go. I don’t let it go. I can’t.
I was just talking to Phil Metres, who wrote Sand Opera, which is another recentish favorite book of mine. It's a book that is very politically engaged, but he talks about how he sees it as being about love, and how if you are writing about love, you have to be able to write about love for the self and love for the other.
I hope that when people read that poem they see that it’s more of a looking outward because at the time I was just a raging heart. I wrote a lot of poems around that time period, especially around the bombing in Boston. It was springtime. I remember sitting in a cafe and this woman came upt o me and asked if I could help her. She handed me this tiny hat and said,"My baby lost his hat."
She turned around and there was a baby on her back. This little boy looked at me with complete trust when I put the little hat on over his head, and I was thinking about Tamerlan Tsarnaev and how he was another boy that the world failed. And that wasn’t necessarily a popular viewpoint, especially a few days after the bombing, but it was a very honest one for me. So even though I was still so focused on my own situation, in my personal life and in my family, a lot of my work around that time was contiguous with external drama that was happening.
I feel like we could continue talking about so many of these things for another hour and still not scratch the surface. Do you want to say anything about what you’re working on now, what you’ve got moving forward?
Yeah. I’ve never actually been abroad, but I have this strange and sudden opportunity to go away. I’m leaving tomorrow to spend most of the summer in Europe. I’m bringing a new notebook because I think I’m starting a little bit of new territory already, and I feel that the poems I’m writing are still sort of sibling poems to what I was dealing with in May Day. A lot of what you and I have been discussing is still at the front of my mind. Just this sort of idea about how a person commits to living their life, how a person cultivates a relationship with the world that’s personal and profound. I re-read Bluets recently and I’ve been thinking about having what feels like erotic love for places, landscapes, and things. I feel like cultivating that is sort of essential to staying present and staying happy for a lot of people, myself included. Being that I’m going to be in a brand new place and having this adventure—an externally located adventure, but also an internal one—I think a lot more of what I think and feel about those things is going to come to light. That's my new territory.
That’s beautiful. That’s such an incredible journey that you’re embarking upon. I’m so excited for you and a little scared for you but mostly just excited.
Yeah, I feel that too. Thank you, Kaveh.
LC control no.: no2016064878
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2016064878
HEADING: Marquette, Gretchen
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372 __ |a Poetry |2 lcsh
374 __ |a Poets |2 lcsh
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670 __ |a May day, 2016: |b title page (Gretchen Marquette) unpaged author biography (received MFA from Hamline University in creative writing; lives in the Powderhorn neighborhood in south Minneapolis)
QUOTED: "As she explores longing and want, Marquette deftly navigates the infinite as well as the small and local."
May Day: Poems
263.20 (May 16, 2016): p31.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
May Day: Poems
Gretchen Marquette. Graywolf, $16 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-1-55597-739-9
In this precise first collection, Marquette writes around the subject of loss--of brothers, lovers, and selves--as a means to understand its parameters and reach. Many poems embody a composed stillness that can feel like an observation made in anticipation of a drawing or painting. Marquette nimbly fashions arresting imagery: across the chest of a beloved "burst a sash/ of gold chrysanthemum," while elsewhere the ventricles of an exposed doe heart suck a vivisectionist's fingers "like women// or infants." The poems' speakers often lie frozen in wait, but the world that Marquette conveys is alive with wild and domestic fauna, totems of the blood and warmth of humans' animal nature. Deer appear often, and memories of a familiar dog, trusting and unconditional, traverse the poems. Though the poems are narrative, the collection's timeline is shuffled, making time itself into something circular and winding; one minute a brother is present, and yet the next "He was already less ours." That nonlinearity can also be seen in a poem about the Andromeda Galaxy that shifts perspective from the sky to an open wound in the mouth: "The hole in my jaw has clotted/ with something from a star." As she explores longing and want, Marquette deftly navigates the infinite as well as the small and local. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"May Day: Poems." Publishers Weekly, 16 May 2016, p. 31. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453506747&it=r&asid=06a3608f4f516d080258e95bedbb35bb. Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453506747
QUOTED: "startlingly original debut."
"Marquette’s beautiful and macabre images have the feel of a classic fairy tale."
Review: 6 luminous, earthy and startlingly original poetry collections with a Minnesota connection
POETRY: These six collections by Minnesota writers and publishers examine life, love, parenthood and the world.
By ELIZABETH HOOVER Special to the Star Tribune
April 16, 2016 — 3:17pm
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“Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems,” By Connie Wanek. (University of Nebraska Press, 181 pages, $19.95.)
“Rival Gardens” brings together poems from Connie Wanek’s first three books and some 50 new pieces, giving readers a chance to marvel at this poet’s steadfast dedication to the lyric form.
Since her 1997 book, “Bonfire,” Wanek has rooted her compact lyrics in the visual landscape of rural Minnesota and the continuity of her life there. “A good life, near the children,/ near the graves.”
Wanek delights not with linguistic acrobatics, but with aptness of description. “Day opens and closes like a camera shutter”; “The catbird fanned his tail in May / the way a man strums his half-tuned guitar.”
Her new poems use the metaphor of the garden to meditate on mortality and reconsider the myth of Eden. For Wanek, Eden is her backyard and her poems always return home: “We are happiest in context, our feet / bare again in the summer garden.”
"Rival Gardens," by Connie Wanek
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"Rival Gardens," by Connie Wanek
Wanek will be with Charles Baxter at Literary Witnesses, 7 p.m. April 18, Plymouth Congregational Church, Mpls.
“Beautiful Wall,” By Ray Gonzalez. (BOA Edition, 120 pages, $16.)
In his 16th poetry collection, Ray Gonzalez asks: “Are you obsessed with the mud of yesterday?”
Gonzalez’s dense, surrealism-inflected poetry does seem obsessed with mud. But each time the image appears, it transforms. Mud becomes angels, walls and clay — metaphors for the survival of Mexican culture under colonialism. This culture transgresses “the violent border” between the United States and Mexico.
In Gonzalez’s poetry, the spiritual and the earthly coexist and history unfolds in present tense: “A poet said the past never happens because / it is always present.”
He writes about male artists who influenced him as if they were still alive. Jack Kerouac tours Mexico with his mother and Max Ernst atones for stealing Kachina dolls.
With long sentences and repeated phrases, his poems have an incantatory rhythm that take the reader on visionary journeys through a landscape saturated with history and myth.
“May Day,” By Gretchen Marquette. (Graywolf Press, 78 pages, $16.)
In her startlingly original debut, Gretchen Marquette describes dissecting deer hearts at school. Cut open, they reveal “pearls / of blood like blueberries.” Marquette’s beautiful and macabre images have the feel of a classic fairy tale.
She writes urgent poems, driven by a rapacious desire for love, despite a fear that “is alive and breathes in me and turns / three times attempting to lie down.”
The twin of love is heartbreak, which Marquette dubs “the second best thing that can happen to you.” Loss is a major theme of this collection, in raw poems about her brother, who she feared might be killed in the Iraq war.
Despite loss, the beauty of the natural world keeps calling these poems back to awe. When she sees a hawk clutching yellow leaves, she concludes: “I knew then, / somehow, that I would never take my own life.”
Marquette will be at the Uptown Church, 1219 W. 31st. St., Mpls., 7 p.m. May 7.
“The Falling Down Dance,” By Chris Martin. (Coffee House Press, 76 pages, $16.95.)
"May Day," by Gretchen Marquette
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"May Day," by Gretchen Marquette
The table of contents of Martin’s third full-length collection announces it will take on hefty themes like language, art and, most notably, time. (Half the poems in the collection are titled “Time.”)
Martin’s poems traverse expansive concepts while confined to the space of an apartment, where new parents in “the shipwreck / of fatherhood, of motherhood” are cloistered during a brutal winter.
With short lines and stark enjambment, Martin’s poems map slivers of the liminal: the time “halfway / between dream and day,” the sounds his son makes that are half-speech and half-song, and the “falling / down dance” of the boy learning to crawl.
These fragmented poems make leaps associated with experimental poetry, but are bound together by the tenderness of a new father who declares: “I fear not life and love / the living.”
Martin will read on June 18 at DuNord Craft Spirits, 2610 E. 32nd St., Mpls.
“The Genome Rhapsodies,” By Anna George Meek. (The Ashland Poetry Press, 88 pages, $15.95.)
Meek’s second full-length collection uses the science of genetics to explore the theme of inheritance. She writes, “I have been given / the shape of women I’ve never known.”
"The Genome Rhapsodies," by Anna George Meek
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"The Genome Rhapsodies," by Anna George Meek
There is a beauty in genetics, with chromosomes “like / dancers lashed at the middle.” But there is also the possibility of an “accident that writes the heart / valve as flapping open.” Meek’s collection is wide-ranging enough to take on both ends of that spectrum: “Just as my daughter is finding words, / my father is losing them.”
At times, Meek uses Bricolage, a poetic technique analogous to DNA replication. It involves knitting together language from pulled-apart documents and results in surprising images: “I dance with plastic laundry detergent bottles / in an imaginary palace that conserves me.”
Her complex syntax and clusters of sentence fragments invite readers to move at the pace of careful observation and wonder at the “mysterious / body.”
Meek will read at 7 p.m. April 20 at Sisyphus Brewing, 712 Ontario Av. W., Mpls.
“Borrowed Wave,” By Rachel Moritz. (Kore Press, 70 pages, $17.95.)
The elliptical and luminous poems in Moritz’s debut collection “radiate rather than tell.” Instead of coalescing into narrative, these poems drop moments around the blank spaces of memory. “You were drinking milk from her blue Delft tea-/cup”; “Our floor in wooden squares led backwards”; “Swans, riding a tourniquet of wind.”
“I’d believe the past is fragment,” she writes, and employs generous spacing to call attention to the gaps between the fragments. The layout makes her lines seem like half-finished gestures flung into the blank of the page.
"The Falling Down Dance," by Chris Martin
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"The Falling Down Dance," by Chris Martin
The poems are connected by images of water, which evoke the transience and fluidity of human experience. She writes of “the sea elastic with light” and the past becomes “decanted / into death.”
Then, a series of love poems surprise the reader into the present: “I made a mark in my soul where she and I might live.”