Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Dark Horse
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BIRTHDATE: 1985
WEBSITE: https://kristinamariedarling.com/about/
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PERSONAL
Born 1985, in Tulsa, OK.
EDUCATION:Washington University in St. Louis. B.A., 2007, M.A. (American Culture Studies), 2009; University of Missouri, St. Louis, M.A. (Philosophy), 2011; New York University, M.F.A., 2017; State University of New York at Buffalo, Ph.D., 2017.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, Department of English, visiting faculty, 2017–; Tupelo Press and Tupelo Quarterly, editor in chief, 2018–.
AWARDS:Yaddo residency; Visiting Artist Fellowship, American Academy in Rome; artist-in-residence fellowships, Ucross Foundation, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Ragdale Foundation; literary arts fellowships from Hawthornden Castle Retreat for Writers, B.A.U. Institute, and C.A.M.A.C.; grants from Kittredge Fund, Elizabeth George Foundation, University of Missouri, and University at Buffalo; Riverrun Foundation Research Fellowship; Dan Liberthson Prize, Academy of American Poets.
WRITINGS
Contributor to journals and periodicals, including Gettysburg Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, New Letters, and Publishers Weekly.
SIDELIGHTS
Kristina Marie Darling is an essayist, critic, and editor, but she is best known as a poet, frequently using nontraditional, imaginative structures.”My poems often take the form of footnotes, glossaries, and appendices that belong to absent, missing, or otherwise mislaid texts,” she told an online interviewer at Up the Staircase Quarterly. “I think of the imaginary text, the book that these bits of marginalia and tiny fragments belong to, as the ongoing work. So my poems continue to imagine, and orbit around, the same imaginary text. I don’t think that it will ever be fully imagined, or entirely realized.” To another interviewer, Mary Biddinger at the Barn Owl Review website, Darling explained her affinity for footnote poems. “Writing poems in footnotes is a completely different experience from writing in free verse, or even working with other prose forms,”she said.” I find that with the lyric, the ode, and even the prose poem, I spend a great deal of time building connections between images, ideas, and motifs. With footnote poems, the reader is invited to forge these connections, so it’s a very liberating experience for the writer.”
Requited
The poetry collection Requited chronicles a couple’s relationship from beginning to breakup. Thirteen prose poems make up the section called “The Story,” and it is followed by an epilogue using fragmentary bits of writing. Darling often places the couple in natural settings, such as gardens or forests, perhaps symbolizing new life, but she contrast these with images of mortality, such as when her protagonists encounter an injured deer on the road, She also explores the role of memory, with a line reading, “You’re beginning to miss the girls in another city, their parade of torn dresses,” as well as expectations and the challenge of living up to them, as when one of her characters says, “While I sleep, you’re documenting failure.”
Some critics thought Darling offered powerful themes and images in, Requited, making creative use of various literary forms to do so. “Darling tests our ability to transcend our arbitrary expectations and to find satisfaction in a text that is at once verse and prose, fragment and narrative, fiction and essay, developed scene and isolated image,” observed Georgia Kreiger in the online journal Split Lip. Her strategy lets readers “fully immerse ourselves in the sensory language and explorative prose that embodies Requited,” Kreiger continued. Fox Frazier-Foley, a blogger at the TheThe Poetry website, praised the book’s “ability to remind readers that it is human nature to crave to be what we are not.” Frazier-Foley added: “The self-referential nature of this text urges the truth to make itself known. It enables the use of poetry as a truth-telling device, and reminds the reader of fundamental truths.”
Scorched Altar
Scorched Altar: Selected Poems & Stories 2007-2014 provides an overview of Darling’s career. Drawing on a dozen of her books, it features poems and prose pieces that explore some of her signature themes, such as love, heartbreak, and the significance of objects, which often serve as metaphors for emotions. In “Noctuary (II),” for instance, she examines the functions of a jewelry box, and it becomes a symbol for the workings of relationships. Many of the poems in the collection are in the unconventional forms associated with Darling–footnotes, glossaries, series of sentence fragments. She offers unusual definitions for words, calling a nightingale “a harbinger of both despair and onslaught of winter.” She also incorporates the language of literary criticism; she writes of a man, “His appearance may be read as a culmination of several recurring motifs.”
Several reviewers welcomed Scorched Altar as a collection of Darling’s most important and representative work, which frequently challenges readers and forces them to adjust their perceptions and expectations. “Darling shifts diction and tone, a shifting that offers different speakers that speak from varying points of view, taking up the position of story narrator, literary critic, historian, and sometimes, from an unknown standpoint,” remarked Laura Madeline Wiseman at Up the Staircase Quarterly. The author explores a variety of means ways “to tell stories, to document love and affection, and to question story making devices,” Wiseman related, concluding: “Eloquently, provocatively, and strategically, Scorched Altar reimagines the book.” Anne Champion, writing online at American Micro Reviews, called the volume “a magical reading experience” that “reveals a poet who has created forms and mastered them in her heart wrenching exploration of themes that haunt us all.”
Ghost/Landscape
In Ghost/Landscape, a collaboration with John Gallaher, the speakers in the poems discuss what appear to be mundane subjects–the weather, house guests, everyday objects, and various relationship issues–in a fashion that imbues them with meaning, although the poems leave it up to the reader to determine just what the meaning is. The narrators ponder questions such as “What is a conversation but an attempt to make sense of objects, to dig them out from beneath their seemingly endless names?” and make observations including “We all think we’re having different lives when really there’s only one life and we’re sharing it.” Some poems address the collaborative process and in doing so make a comment on all human interactions: “Where are you now and how can I get there?”
The poems portray the things that haunt the landscapes we inhabit, evoking many thoughts and emotions in the reader, according to some critics. “Ghost/Landscape reveals how we maintain our emotional landscape every day, how we stammer to ghosts, desperate to connect,” reported Jennifer MacBain-Stephens on a Ploughshares blog. In the online journal Rumpus, Julie Marie Wade noted that the collection contains a “wealth of stunning-haunting moments.” She perceived that “both speakers are the ghost that haunts this volume, and both speakers are the haunted landscape,” and their text comes so alive that “when I’m not reading Ghost/Landscape, I have the sensation that the book is going on without me.” The collection, she said, “is designed to elicit ambiguous emotions (the most promising kind), forgotten anecdotes, and insights that both confound and clarify. This makes it my favorite kind of book.” The authors make even the most ordinary topics fascinating, commented a contributor to the Fjords website, explaining: “Two people talking about the weather has never been so insightful or enlightening.” This reviewer added: “The book moves like poetry while still functioning as prose, and integrates a narrative, suspense, and an unrequited love story into one wonderful whole.” Wade summed it up as “a superlative outcome” of the collaborators’ effort.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly. April 16, 2018, review of Dark Horse. p. 68.
ONLINE
American Micro Reviews, http://www.americanmicroreviews.com/ (August 29, 2018), Anne Champion, review of Scorched Altar: Selected Poems & Stories 2007-2014.
Barn Owl Review, http://www.barnowlreview.com/ (August 29, 2018) Mary Biddinger, interview with Kristina Marie Darling.
Fjords, http://www.fjordsreview.com/ (June 24, 2016), review of Ghost/Landscape.
Kristina Marie Darling website, https://kristinamariedarling.com (August 29, 2018).
Ploughshares blog, http://blog.pshares.org/ (August 29, 2018), Jennifer MacBain-Stephens, review of Ghost/Landscape.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (July 30, 2016), Julie Marie Wade, review of Ghost/Landscape.
Split Lip, http://www.splitlipmagazine.com/ (August 29, 2018), Georgia Kreiger, review of Requited.
TheThe Poetry, http://www.thethepoetry.com/ (September 29, 2014), review of Requited.
Up the Staircas Quarterly, https://www.upthestaircase.org/ (August 29, 2018), interview with Kristina Marie Darling; Laura Madeline Wiseman, review of Scorched Altar.
Writer’s Digest website, http://www.writersdigest.com/ (August 2, 2016), Robert Lee Brewer, interview with Kristina Marie Darling.
Kristina Marie Darling was born in 1985 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is a first-generation college student and an advocate for women in the arts, higher education and the professions.
Kristina is the author of thirty books, which include Look to Your Left: The Poetics of Spectacle (University of Akron Press, 2020); Je Suis L’Autre: Essays & Interrogations (C&R Press, 2017), which was named one of the “Best Books of 2017” by The Brooklyn Rail; and DARK HORSE: Poems (C&R Press, 2018), which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. She has also written in collaboration with Carol Guess, Professor of English at Western Washington University; John Gallaher, winner of the Levis Prize in Poetry; and novelist Chris Campanioni, who is the recipient of the Best First Book Distinction from the International Latino Book Awards. Kristina’s writing has been set to music, installed in gallery settings, utilized in fashion photography, and stitched onto kites by textile artists.
Her most recent poems appear in The Harvard Review, Poetry International, New American Writing, Nimrod, Passages North, The Mid-American Review,and on the Academy of American Poets’ website, Poets.org. Kristina has published essays in The Kenyon Review, Agni, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, and numerous other magazines.
Her work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry, both of which are endowed residencies awarded, by internal committee nomination only, to recognize outstanding contributions to the arts; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship to live and work in Spain; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; three residencies at the American Academy in Rome; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Morris Fellowship in the Arts; a Faber Residency in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among many other awards and honors.
A former Pabst Cultural Endowment Fellow at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the recipient of grants from Harvard University’s Kittredge Fund, Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Ora Lerman Trust, the Regional Arts Commission of Greater Saint Louis (on two occasions), and the Rockefeller Archive Center, Kristina also was named the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Fellowship, a cash grant in the amount of $4,000 designated to further her contributions to the arts.
An editor, critic, and publisher, she serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press and Tupelo Quarterly, an opinion columnist at The Los Angeles Review of Books, and a contributing writer at Publishers Weekly. Kristina has also held staff positions at Gulf Coast, The Best American Poetry, and Black Ocean, where she worked as book publicist and grants specialist.
She has lectured on contemporary literature, poetics, the publishing arts, and creative writing at San Diego State University; New York University, as well as NYU’s Summer Paris Writing Program; the Sorbonne Library in Paris; the MFA Program for Writers at Wichita State University; the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo; the University of Missouri at Columbia; the University of North Texas; Drake University; Buffalo State University; Florida International University; the Yale University Writers’ Conference; the University of Arizona; Western Washington University; and the Castle of Otranto in Italy.
Kristina is represented by Marilyn Allen of the Allen O’Shea Literary Agency for book-length nonfiction.
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Kristina Marie DarlingDepartment of English·Wichita State University·1845 Fairmount Street·Wichita, KS 67260Email:kristina.marie.darling@gmail.com ·Tel.: 636.399.7403·http://kristinamariedarling.comLiterary Agent: Marilyn Allen, The Allen O’Shea Literary Agency SELECTED EDUCATION___________________________________________________________________________________Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2017⋅Gender Institute Dissertation Fellowship, Presidential Fellowship, Teaching Assistantship, and Tuition Scholarship⋅Dissertation Title: "'An Imagist Turned Philosopher': Formal Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women's Poetry," advised by Steve McCaffery, Ewa Ziarek, and William SolomonMaster of Fine Arts in Creative Writing—Poetry, New York University, 2017Master of Arts in Philosophy, University of Missouri—St. Louis, 2011⋅Departmental Teaching Assistantship⋅Thesis Title: "Mourning, Melancholia, and the Possibility of Transformation: Comparing Julia Kristeva's Black Sunand Judith Butler's The Psychic Life of Power,"advised by Brit Brogaard, Anna Alexandrova, and David GriesedieckMaster of Arts in American Culture Studies, Washington University in St. Louis, 2009⋅Dean's Fellowship⋅Thesis Title: "H.D.'s Helen in Egypt: Myth, Symbol, and Subjectivity," advised by Heidi Aronson Kolk, Henry Schvey, and Erin M. FinneranBachelor of Science in English, Washington University in St. Louis, 2007⋅Dean's Fellowship, David Dale Willmore Undergraduate Scholarship, Women's Club Scholarship, Wednesday Club of St. Louis Scholarship⋅Graduated with honors, elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and selected to serve as Student Marshal at commencementCURRENT EMPLOYMENT___________________________________________________________________________________Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Pressand Tupelo Quarterly, 2018–Present VisitingFaculty, Wichita State UniversityM.F.A. Program, 2017–Present Contributing Writer, Publishers Weekly, 2017 –Present
BOOK PUBLICATIONS___________________________________________________________________________________POETRY COLLECTIONS⋅The Disappointment Acts. Winston-Salem: C &R Press, forthcoming 2018. ⋅Dark Horse. Winston-Salem: C & R Press, forthcoming 2017.⋅Scorched Altar: Selected Poems and Stories, 2007-2014. Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2014.⋅The Arctic Circle. Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2014.⋅Fortress. Knoxville:Sundress Publications, 2014.⋅The Sun & the Moon. Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2014.⋅Pharmakon (A Case History). Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2014. ⋅Requited. Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2014.⋅Vow. Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2013.⋅Brushes with. Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2013.⋅Correspondence. Sacramento: Scrambler Books, 2013.⋅Palimpsest. New York: Patasola Press, 2013.⋅Petrarchan. Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2013.⋅The Moon & Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph Cornell. Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2012.⋅The Body is a Little Gilded Cage: A Story in Letters & Fragments.Boston: Gold Wake Press, 2012.⋅Compendium. New York: Cow Heavy Books, 2011. Reissued by Scrambler Books, 2013.⋅Night Songs. Boston: Gold Wake Press, 2010. Reissued by GoldWake Press, 2013.POETRY CRITICISM⋅Look to Your Left: The Poetics of Spectacle. Akron: University of Akron Press, forthcoming in 2020. ⋅In the Room of Persistent Sorry: Essays. Winston-Salem: C & R Press, forthcoming in 2020.⋅Je Suis L’Autre: Essays and Interrogations. Winston-Salem: C & R Press, 2017.LYRIC ESSAY COLLECTIONS⋅Women and Ghosts. BlazeVOX [books], 2015.⋅Failure Lyric. Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2015.⋅Melancholia (An Essay). Spokane: Ravenna Press, 2012.SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS⋅Frances the Mute/The Bright Continent (A Diptych). Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2015.COLLABORATIONS⋅Instructions for Staging (co-written with Carol Guess). Frankfurt: Broadstone Books, 2017.⋅Ghost/ Landscape(co-written with John Gallaher). Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2016.⋅In love with the ghost (co-written with Max Avi Kaplan). Mobile: Negative Capability Press, 2016.⋅Music for another life (co-written with Max Avi Kaplan). Buffalo: BlazeVOX [books], 2013.⋅X Marks the Dress: A Registry (co-written with Carol Guess). Boston: Gold Wake Press, 2013.
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Kristina Marie DarlingAuthor Press Kit Brushes withPetrarchanPress KitKristina Marie Darling is the author of twenty collections of poetry and hybrid prose, which include Vow, Petrarchan, and FailureLyric,forthcoming from BlazeVOXBooks. Her writing has been described by literary critics as “haunting,” “mesmerizing,” and “complex.” Poet and Kenyon Revieweditor Zach Savich writes that her body of work is a “singularly graceful and stunningly incisive exploration of poetic insight, vision, and transformation.” Donald Revell writes of her Selected Poems, "Here is a new tradition, alive in bright air."Continued on page 2If Wolfgang Iser believed that within the gaps of a text lies meaning that the reader must create, then Darling’s collection Brushes Withis the film negative composed of those gaps. Therein lies the creative energy and genius of Darling’s work. As we enter the text, we begin to construct a narrative from interstices of information that comes in the form of gemlike footnote poems. These footnotes are deliciously loaded and sensual—whispers from a friend who just can’t tell you the whole story. The footnotes provide the type of glimpse we get into any relationship—spotted, occasional, fragmented, flawed. Darling is a prolific writer (a word rarely applied to a poet so young), a writer who has a multitude of material and approaches to her intelligent vision of what poetry can also be. She surprises us and proves time and again to be the real thing. Darling is a writer to watch.—Andrea Witzke Slot, author of To find a new believed that within the gaps of a text lies meaning that the reader must create, then Darling’s collection Brushes Withis the film negative composedof those gaps. Therein lies the creative energy and genius of Darling’s work. As we enter the text, we begin to construct a narrative from interstices of information that comes in the form of gemlike footnote poems. These footnotes are deliciously loaded and sensual—whispers from a friend who just can’t tell you the whole story.The footnotes provide the type of glimpse we get into any relationship—spotted, occasional, fragmented, flawed. Darling is a prolific writer (a word rarely applied to a poet so young), a writer who has a multitude of material and approaches to her intelligent vision of what poetry can also be. She surprises us and proves time and again to be the real thing. Darling is a writer to watch. —Andrea Witzke Slot, author of To find a new beautyPetrarchanis adazzling whirlwind ofbroken fragmentsand a historicallyrich text, blooming with a garden of metaphors. Darling astounds in her ability to take fragments and transform them into stunning lyricism. You read, and you enter her worlds: it’sa sort of hypnosis.—Ploughshares Magazine
2Kristina Marie DarlingPress KitPraisePraise for Night Songs:“From the very first page, Night Songsgives off a calculated humbleness....However, these facets, the non-threatening format and alacrity, are intentional parts of Darling’s strategy.They generate a seemingly placid surface, which she expertly ripples with moments of animation and irony until she begins disassembling the poems altogether.This assembly and disassembly of narrative, this diminuendo is one of the formidable accomplishments of Night Songs.”—Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.Praise for Compendium:“This is an interesting experiment by a writer with a genuine gift forbeautiful language.”—The Colorado Review.“Darling has assembled a purposefully incomplete history filled with desire, mystery, music, and silence.”—The Rumpus.Praise for The Body is a Little Gilded Cage:“In short: Kristina Marie Darling’s The Body is a Little Gilded Cageis the best book that Darling has written and the best book that Gold Wake Press has produced.”—PANKMagazine.“This is a curious, lovely collection of bits and pieces that are so light and clear, like crystal, that the quiet act of reading is all it takes to electrify them.”—The Prose-Poem Project. “Darling’s collection reads like an exploded novel; only the most elusive, beautiful fragments, the elegant contours, remain. The effect is of a story unearthed, the sands of unnecessary traditional structure and formality brushed away. The bones of H.D.’s story are laid bare, examined, and catalogued, giving us a glimpse into her elusive world.”—Hiram Poetry Review.“One of the most enjoyable and well laid out books I’ve read this year.” —HTML Giant.Within the past few years, her writing has been honored with a Yaddo residencyand a Visiting Artist Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome. She has also held artist-in-residence fellowshipsat the Ucross Foundation, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Santa Fe ArtInstitute, and the Ragdale Foundation. Kristina is the recipient of international literary arts fellowships from the Hawthornden Castle Retreat for Writers (Scotland), the B.A.U. Institute (Italy), and C.A.M.A.C. (France), as well as artist grants from the Kittredge Fund and the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her work has also been recognized with the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets and nominations for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award, the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award, and the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award.Kristina is active as a literary critic, with reviews and essays appearing in such magazines as The Gettysburg Review, The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, and New Letters. Her critical projects have been supported by grants from the University of Missouri and the University at Buffalo, as well as a Riverrun Foundation Research Fellowship to complete archival work at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Kristina holdsdegrees in English Literature and American Culture Studies from Washington University, aswellas an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Missouri. She is currently workingtoward a Ph.D. in Poetics at S.U.N.Y.-Buffalo, where shewas awarded a Presidential Fellowship.continuedAbout the Author
Kristina Marie Darling: Poet Interview
By: Robert Lee Brewer | August 2, 2016
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Believe it or not, it’s been more than a year since our last interview with Kristina Marie Darling, who I consider one of the hardest working poets in the world. For those who are new to her…
Kristina Marie Darling
Kristina Marie Darling
Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over 20 books of poetry, most recently Dark Horse (C&R Press, 2017). Her awards include two Yaddo residencies, a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, and a Visiting Artist Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, as well as grants from the Whiting Foundation and Harvard University’s Kittredge Fund.
Her work appears in The Gettysburg Review, Agni, New American Writing, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She is Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Quarterly and Grants Specialist at Black Ocean.
Here’s a poem from her collaborative work with John Gallaher, Ghost / Landscape:
A History of the Pastoral, by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher
The only difference now is that the trees are covered in ice.
One by one the branches seal themselves off, disappearing into their darkened rooms. Soon the foliage around our house is made of mirrors. Perhaps that’s what invited sadness into the yard to begin with. You noticed the flowers looking not quite “morning,” not quite “yellow.” Still I stutter and try to name them. The naturalist’s Latin dead weight on my tongue.
A frozen bird, a branch snapped in two. Bonjour tristesse, I say to the meadow. But the landscape no longer remembers me.
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From following you on Facebook, I know you’ve been crazy busy lately. What have you been up to recently, and what’s coming up?
First of all, thank you so much for following my work! For the past couple of years, I’ve been artist residency hopping. I apply for grants and residential fellowships ahead of time, and then, I travel to these art centers to work on my writing. This year, I attended artist residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, Caldera, and the American Academy in Rome, and I’m getting ready to head to the Helen R. Whiteley Center, the University of Washington’s research facility on San Juan Island.
This has been a wonderful opportunity that I’m so grateful for. These residencies provided the gift of time, space, and community when I needed it the most. My next poetry collection, DARK HORSE, is under contract with C & R Press, one of my favorite literary publishers. I’ve been working hard on this poetry manuscript during my time as artist-in-residence. Did I mention that the book has blackouts, daggers, and a female character who steals husbands? It’s my first venture into non-autobiographical persona poems, and it’s been tremendous fun. My first volume of literary criticism is also under contract with C & R Press, and the book gathers essays I’ve contributed to The Best American Poetry, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Agni, and Tupelo Quarterly. I hope you’ll check out both books when they’re published in 2017!
ghost_landscape_blazevox_darling_gallaherBlazeVOX [books] published your collection Ghost / Landscape, a collaborative effort with John Gallaher. How did you both go about collaborating on this collection? What was the process like?
It was such an honor to collaborate with John on this book, since he’s one of my all-time favorite writers. If you haven’t read The Little Book of Guesses, then you definitely should. To start with, I sent John a poem, then we simply took turns contributing whole poems to the manuscript. I will say the order in which the poems appear is not the order in which they were written. John had some brilliant ideas for structuring the manuscript. We moved the poems about the bank robbery and “the freezer we keep forgetting we keep in the basement” to the very beginning of the book. Looking back, I kind of wish we had written those poems first!
This is not your first collaborative work or collection, so I’m making the assumption you enjoy the process of collaborative poetry. Do you?
I love collaborating! It often pushes me in directions that I wouldn’t explore if I were working on a single-author collection. When I write by myself, I plan things out a bit too much. But there’s a spontaneity to collaboration that I find refreshing. With Ghost / Landscape, I couldn’t make a plan because honestly, I didn’t know what John would do next. Similarly, when working on X Marks the Dress with Carol Guess, we agreed early on that I’d write poems in the voice of the wife, and Carol would write in the voice of the husband. I didn’t expect the husband character to reveal midway through the manuscript that he was really a woman! The fact that collaborative writing is so wildly unpredictable makes the process feel less like work, and more like play.
You’ve recently taken on some editorial roles, in addition to the work you do as a poet. First question, how did you land these roles?
That’s a great question! Most people don’t know this, but I volunteered in the small press since I was an undergraduate in college. Even then, I knew that literary magazines, web journals, and chapbook presses were incredibly important – they place power in the hands of many, instead of allowing only a few people to decide what gets published. I was inspired (and am still inspired!) by how vibrant and diverse the literary landscape was becoming. In the very beginning, I interned, read the slush pile, proofread essays, and did things that few people wanted to do. But these experiences were incredibly valuable. I learned how publishing works, made valuable contacts, and most importantly, I realized that I was part of a community.
Now the editorial work that I get to do is even more fun and fulfilling. I’m the Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Quarterly and the Grants Specialist at Black Ocean, where I secure grant funding for literature in translation and other exciting book manuscripts, including a documentary project that focuses on contemporary visual artists of color. But the experiences I had volunteering early in my career are incredibly important to my approach as an editor. I look at literary journals and small presses as a forum for dialogue, a way of hosting a conversation between creative practitioners. I hope you’ll check out Black Ocean’s growing translation offerings, and the newest issue of Tupelo Quarterly, which will be released in October!
Second question, what has the process been like so far for these editorial roles?
It’s been an amazing experience! It’s a delight to work with such talented and creative people. Tupelo Quarterly recently welcomed a number of new editors, including Shane McCrae, Allison Benis White, Alex Lemon, Virginia Konchan, Zach Savich, Lisa Olstein, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Emma Bolden, and many more. It’s great to work with editors who represent so many different, though complimentary, aesthetics. Since editors at Tupelo Quarterly regularly invite poetry and fiction submissions, I’ve enjoyed discovering amazing writers through this solicitation process. When reading general submissions, it’s always thrilling to see what other writers are working on.
Working with the Black Ocean staff members and authors has been equally enjoyable. I have to say, it’s a privilege to see work from my favorite writers before it’s even available for pre-order. More than anything, seeing the wide range of beautiful work being written and published has shown me what’s possible within my own writing and thinking.
I know you travel a bit for your poetry. Do you have a favorite reading venue? Bookstore?
My all time favorite venue for poetry readings is Danny’s Tavern in Chicago. I read there with Kyle McCord a few years back. It was tremendous fun, and I met writers there who I’m still in touch with. That’s where I first met Carrie Olivia Adams, who’s now my fellow editor at Black Ocean, and Virginia Konchan, who’s now my colleague at Tupelo Quarterly. Larry Sawyer also hosts a terrific reading series in Chicago, which takes place at Myopic Books. Left Bank Books in St. Louis and Rust Belt Books in Buffalo are also terrific venues. Lastly, I once had the privilege of giving a reading on the rooftop of the Castle of Otranto, which was attended by sculptors, painters, arts administrators, and poetry enthusiasts, all of whom were outnumbered by the ghosts.
Who (or what) are you currently reading?
So many books, so little time! Right now I’m reading Karla Kelsey’s A Conjoined Book, Briane Teare’s The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, Lindsey Tigue’s System of Ghosts, Noah Warren’s Destroyer in the Glass, Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus, Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Solar Maximum, Emma Bolden’s The Sad Epistles, Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women, and many more.
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Robert Lee Brewer is the editor of Poet’s Market and author of Solving the World’s Problems. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Writing poems in footnotes is a completely different experience from writing in free verse, or even working with other prose forms,”she said.” I find that with the lyric, the ode, and even the prose poem, I spend a great deal of time building connections between images, ideas, and motifs. With footnote poems, the reader is invited to forge these connections, so it’s a very liberating experience for the writer.”
A Conversation with Kristina Marie Darling, author
of The Body is a Little Gilded Cage
by Mary Biddinger
When I opened The Body is a Little Gilded Cage: A Story in Letters & Fragments I was delighted to see the epigraph from H.D. In the notes we learn that the book’s relationship with H.D. actually reaches beyond the epigraph, including a use of her letters. What was your process in using this material in your poems?
I was initially drawn to H.D.'s poems and correspondence afterreading her biography. She led a fascinating life, traveling Europe, undergoing psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud, and even producing silent films. As I read and researched, though, I was surprised by the ways my relationship to these sources changed. At first, I saw myself as simply narrating scenes from her life. I was afraid to take liberties with the material, since I felt as though it wasn't my own.
After a couple of months, my relationship to H.D.'s letters and poems changed completely. As I mined text and images from the original sources, they became a vehicle for me to say things about my own experience that I would have never been able to say otherwise. In a way, I suppose that my autobiographical impulses took over the project.
A number of my graduate students are interested in writing collections that draw upon external sources for inspiration and research. What kind of advice would you have for them?
The best advice I can give is this: don't be afraid to edit, rewrite, and fictionalize these sources. Many contemporary poets find inspiration in historical subject matter, but they're hesitant to change the materials they find for their own purposes. They feel like they won't do justice to their chosen subject by rewriting history. I've definitely been guilty of these things myself. But this kind of mindset makes it extremely difficult for the writer to showcase their own voice, style, and vision in a research-based project.
As someone who often finds footnotes to be just as—if not more—compelling as the primary text on the page, I relished your footnote poems, such as “Footnotes to a History of the Corsage” and “Footnotes to a History of the Phonograph.” Can you tell me about the experience of writing these poems?
Writing poems in footnotes is a completely different experience from writing in free verse, or even working with other prose forms. I find that with the lyric, the ode, and even the prose poem, I spend a great deal of time building connections between images, ideas, and motifs. With footnote poems, the reader is invited to forge these connections, so it's a very liberating experience for the writer. One has the freedom to include fragmentary images and texts without a clearly defined idea of how they relate to other parts of the poem. Instead, numerous possibilities for interpretation can coexist within the same narrative space.
With that said, I do enjoy working with more traditional literary forms as well. I feel like I learn a great deal about myself by forging these connections between ideas, rather than leaving this work for the reader.
The Body is a Little Gilded Cage: A Story in Letters & Fragments has a fascinating narrative arc, while incorporating so many different types of poems. What is your approach to sequencing a book of poems? How did this particular collection fall into place?
Sequencing the poems was definitely a challenge. For this particular project, I found it helpful to group formally similar poems. I think that this strategy was useful because I was working with so many unusual literary forms, which ranged from prose vignettes, notes, erasures, footnotes, and glossaries to fragmented letters. I hoped that by presenting the work in formally distinct sections, I could avoid ending up with a manuscript that seemed chaotic or unruly.
I also looked at the types of images that appeared in the poems. I like to think of a poetry collection as a place where images appear and reappear, acquiring multiple (and often contradictory) possibilities for interpretation. For me, sequencing the poems in a book-length project is a crucial part of opening up these possibilities for the reader.
What are a few books you have enjoyed recently, both poetry and in other genres? Do any other art forms inspire you and influence your work?
When thinking of poetry books I've enjoyed recently, Laynie Brown's Pollen Memory and Srikanth Reddy's Voyager are at the top of my list. Kyle McCord and Jeannie Hoag also have a wonderful collaborative book, Informal Invitation to a Traveler, that was just released by Gold Wake Press. And Jena Osman's The Network is a must-read.
But as someone who's studied analytic philosophy for two years, I'd have to say that writers in this discipline have been a huge influence on my writing. Their interest in discovering and articulating formal systems is definitely a recurring theme in my recent poetry. Lately, I've been drawn to G.E.M. Anscombe's Intention especially.
Would you be so kind as to give me a poetry writing prompt that I can share with my students and use for my own poem, too?
I love writing prompts, so I'd be delighted. Here is one of my favorites:
Choose any scholarly discipline and give an account of its history. The account be of any length you wish, and it can take any form you see fit.
What is next for the poetry of Kristina Marie Darling? Are you currently at work on a new collection of poems? Where should we look for your forthcoming work?
I've been hard at work on a collection of prose writings called Melancholia (An Essay). The manuscript draws its inspiration from depictions of melancholy in Romantic literature. Excerpts are forthcoming in Rhino, Indefinite Space, Blossombones, Prick of the Spindle, and Rufous City Review. I hope you'll stop by my website for updates!
Kristina Marie Darling is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Night Songs (Gold Wake Press, 2010), Compendium (Cow Heavy Books, 2011), and The Body is a Little Gilded Cage: A Story in Letters & Fragments (Gold Wake Press, 2011). She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation, as well as grants from the Vermont Studio Center and the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her poems appear in Third Coast, Barn Owl Review, RHINO, Cider Press Review, Gargoyle, and many other journals.
Visit Kristina's website here.
Order your own copy of this gorgeous book here.
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Mary Biddinger is Co-Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of Barn Owl Review. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), Saint Monica (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), and O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming September 2012), and co-editor of one volume of criticism: The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (U Akron Press, 2011). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in numerous magazines, including Barrelhouse, Bat City Review, Blackbird, Devil’s Lake, diode, Forklift, Ohio, iO, Minnesota Review, Puerto del Sol, Redivider, Toad, Waccamaw, and South Dakota Review. She teaches literature and creative writing at The University of Akron, where she directs the NEOMFA program. She also edits the Akron Series in Poetry, and the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics.
Quoted in Sidelights: My poems often take the form of footnotes, glossaries, and appendices that belong to absent, missing, or otherwise mislaid texts,” she told an online interviewer at Up the Staircase Quarterly. “I think of the imaginary text, the book that these bits of marginalia and tiny fragments belong to, as the ongoing work. So my poems continue to imagine, and orbit around, the same imaginary text. I don’t think that it will ever be fully imagined, or entirely realized.”
Interview with Kristina Marie Darling
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Read a review of Kristina Marie Darling's Scorched Altar HERE.
Up the Staircase Quarterly: Thanks so much for joining me for this interview, Kristina! We are here to discuss your new book, Scorched Altar: Selected Poems & Stories 2007-2014.
The twelve sections of this book were originally published separately. However, there seems to be a common and seamless narrative, a story that continues, mirrors, elaborates, and grows throughout the book. Was it always your intention to bring these stories together into one collection? How did you select which pieces would make it into Scorched Altar?
Kristina Marie Darling: That's a great question. My poems often take the form of footnotes, glossaries, and appendices that belong to absent, missing, or otherwise mislaid texts. I think of the imaginary text, the book that these bits of marginalia and tiny fragments belong to, as the ongoing work. So my poems continue to imagine, and orbit around, the same imaginary text. I don't think that it will ever be fully imagined, or entirely realized. But it did seem fitting that the twelve related volumes were collected into one book, so as to offer a fuller picture of the world I have been imagining for the past few years.
UTSQ: Which writers, books, films, or music influenced your writing over the course of creating Scorched Altar?
KMD: There are too many to name, but for starters, Jenny Boully's The Body: An Essay showed me what is possible within the marginal spaces of a book. Also, Simone Muench's beautifully fractured prose poems helped me realize that poems can work against, undermine, and toy with readerly expectations of a given literary form. And I'm a huge Wes Anderson fan. The Royal Tenenbaums helped me appreciate dark humor, which is also a recurring theme in the footnotes. Lastly, classical music, and the material culture surrounding it (dimly lit concert halls, red velvet chairs, gloved hands...) provided a vocabulary of imagery as I filled the footnotes and glossaries with unexpected content.
UTSQ: I found an exciting symmetry in your writing. Along with a hypnotic repetition of lines, phrases, and images over the course of the book, you also demonstrated symmetry within each individual “chapter.” In your first section, from Night Songs, for example, I noticed you used the word “night” once and then subtly contrasted lightness and darkness in every poem except for the last one. A similar technique was used in from Requited. Every poem (except for the first and last one) asked a question without the use of a question mark. The effect was powerful. Elaborate on your use of the symmetry technique and its importance for Scorched Altar as a complete narrative.
KMD: I'm intrigued by both symmetry and asymmetry within a literary text. For me, symmetry offers a way of creating an expectation on the part of the reader that things will continue in exactly the same way that they began. What's great about this kind of preconceived expectation on the part of the reader is that it affords you the opportunity to surprise them. Just when the audience becomes comfortable within the various patterns I've created, I love to do something very strange to make them question their preconceived ideas about how the text will unfold. I like to think that my poems are an attempt to foster more open-minded reading practices, to show the reader that anything is possible within a poem, fiction, or essay.
UTSQ: Many everyday objects make repeat appearances throughout Scorched Altar: jewelry, a notebook, flowers, a button. However, you managed to make these objects tell a different story each time. Sometimes the objects would signify pain, sometimes confusion or even joy. The settings and scenes might change, but those same objects were always present, and the underlying thoughts of your characters often mirrored one another. What were you hoping your readers would take away from this experience?
KMD: I've always been intrigued by the emotional weight that we attached to the most commonplace objects. A dress, for example, seems ordinary, yet signifies so much: femininity, ornamentation, desire.... I try to call attention to the ways the meaning we attach to seemingly mundane things---a dress, a locket, a broken clasp---is constructed, and reveals less about the object than the person beholding it. I hope that the reader takes away at least some notion of subjectivity, as the emotional meaning we attached the various artifacts that surround us can change almost instantaneously.
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UTSQ: Your ability to deeply involve me as a reader was impressive. I felt that this was due to your unique deconstruction of a typical reading experience. I especially enjoyed your glossaries and witnessing familiar words being redefined to meet the needs of the story. How did the idea to use glossaries, subplots, footnotes, indexes, and large amounts of white space, come to you? Was it an idea that developed over time and with experimentation, or was it more of an immediate and calculated adaption?
KMD: Thank you for the kind words about my work. My interest in glossaries, footnotes, and indexes actually grew out of my life as a scholar. I'm currently working toward a Ph.D. in Poetics at SUNY-Buffalo, and research the ways that modernist women poets use form and technique to comment on the philosophical debates of their time period. But there are many problems with scholarly forms of writing, as they frequently operate on acts of exclusion. One can probably name many things that don't belong in an academic paper: autobiography, aestheticized language, and experimentation with received forms of discourse, to name just a few. As a woman working toward an academic degree, I have a particular investment in making these forms of writing more inclusive. My interest in presenting unexpected content within the familiar form of the footnote certainly developed out of my own experiences as a woman in academia.
UTSQ: I also found quite a few allusions to the concept of reality vs. the imaginary, particularly for your female characters. I viewed it as a complex symptom of grief. What were you hoping to convey by introducing this concept?
KMD: I'm very interested in where the distinction exists between the two. I believe that the boundaries between real and imagined are fluid and constantly in flux. In my opinion, grief is usually what blurs this boundary, as well as our ability to perceive exactly where the boundary lies. I'm also intrigued by the ways that the boundaries between reality and imagination are gendered, as madness is frequently coded as female. Most of my poems attempt to interrogate the ways that the cultural beliefs surrounding femininity invite this blurring of boundaries, and the extent to which women are conditioned to experience grief in such a way.
UTSQ: In from Compendium I ran across a fascinating line that I was hoping you could elaborate a little more on. “For the work to succeed, one must recognize the difference between life and art.” (37) How does this idea compare to your own personal philosophy on writing?
KMD: Thank you for your careful reading of Compendium. The passage you quoted certainly arises out of my personal philosophy on writing. It's crucial to remember the difference between life and art, because anything is possible within the realm of literature. Real life, not so much!
UTSQ: Now for a little about you! You have had a lot of successes in your writing career. How did it begin? What was your first significant literary encounter? How did this experience inspire you, or shape you, into the writer you have become?
KMD: I almost didn't become a writer at all. I was in love with a horrible male hipster poet who will remain unnamed. He constantly told me that my work was unimportant, and generally not worthwhile. Then he decided to apply to Yaddo, and said maybe I should come too, if I could get off the waiting list. So I applied the night before the deadline. Months passed. He was rejected (not even waitlisted!) and I was accepted with my first choice of dates and a small travel stipend. Still, I almost didn't get on the plane to go, because he wasn't going to be there.
Going to Yaddo was a life changing experience for me. The invitation showed me for the first time that my writing had value and showed promise. And actually going there, and meeting writers, artists, opera composers, and dramaturges really expanded my horizons and taught me to experiment even more within my poetry. It helped me to see how relevant other artistic disciplines are to creating literature. The uninterrupted time to write resulted in an entire book, and the writing process there helped me better understand how to structure a longer manuscript, which seemed unwieldy and unconquerable at the time.
UTSQ: What projects are you currently working on? What’s next for you?
KMD: I'm currently hard at work on a collaboration with visual artist, photographer, and costumer Max Avi Kaplan. The work is a feminist response to/reframing of/erasure of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. The fragmentary poems in this volume recast the famed novel from Lo's perspective. And Max's stunning photographs explore themes of (dis)embodiment within Lolita, as Nabokov frequently describes her in only fragments (a honey colored limb, a knobby knee...). It's scheduled for publication in 2015 by Negative Capability Press. I hope you'll check it out!
UTSQ: Finally, Kristina, if you could have a meal with anyone, dead or alive, real or imaginary, whom would it be, what would you talk about, and what on earth would the two of you eat?
KMD: I would love to hear about H.D.'s many romantic relationships with male Modernists over tea and French pastries. Now the question is what would I wear...?!
Kristina Marie Darling is the author of twenty books, which include Melancholia (An Essay) (Ravenna Press, 2012), Petrarchan (BlazeVOX Books, 2013), and Scorched Altar: Selected Poems and Stories 2007-2014 (BlazeVOX Books, 2014). Her awards include fellowships from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, as well as grants from the Kittredge Fund and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She was recently selected as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.
Dark Horse
Publishers Weekly. 265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p68.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Dark Horse
Kristina Marie Darling. C&R, $16 trade paper
(98p) ISBN 978-1-936196-66-1
Darling (Je Suis L'Autre), a PW contributor, transforms a crumbling marriage into a macabre and ethereal dreamscape in this artful series of cinematic vignettes. The fragmented prose text, bookended by blacked-out pages titled "Prologue" and "Epilogue," follows protagonist Jane Dark through a fantasy world created to express an otherworldly and almost inexpressible pain: "I tore the flowers, one by one, from the ground." A courtroom, a theater, and a seashore are among the backdrops in Darling's landscape of Beckettian symbolism. The work opens enigmatically due to Jane's fragmentary thoughts, but that resolves as she circles back to the same ideas, eliciting a sense of continual anticipation in the reader. Darling is occasionally sardonic ("I've never understood the difference between 'dying' and 'dead' ") and acerbically witty: "There are some things a husband shouldn't have to see. For example, the tiny red marks on the back of my arm." Crafted with surgical dexterity, the work's concentrated emotional imagery captures the ephemeral nature of memory: "Were we seeing a design in the narrative when all that was really there was the hand on the waist, the movement of a white dress in the middle distance." Surreal and elegant, Darling's exploration of indelible romantic loss is open-hearted and empowering. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Dark Horse." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 68. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532690/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=301e3c1d. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532690
Quoted in Sidelights: “Darling tests our ability to transcend our arbitrary expectations and to find satisfaction in a text that is at once verse and prose, fragment and narrative, fiction and essay, developed scene and isolated image,” observed Georgia Kreiger in the online journal Split Lip. Her strategy lets readers “fully immerse ourselves in the sensory language and explorative prose that embodies Requited,”
Book Review: Kristina Marie Darling's Requited
by Georgia Kreiger
In her characteristic style, Kristina Marie Darling blurs the already tenuous lines we draw between literary genres in her book Requited. Composed of a series of thirteen prose poems appended by an epilogue consisting of fragmented images, the book is defined by Darling as a work of fiction and includes the conventional disclaimer regarding coincidental resemblance to actual people and events. A concluding note reveals that lines are borrowed from two primary texts. These authorial remarks prompt us to search for a narrative progression in a book that is simultaneously poetry, prose, and fiction, and that, like an academic essay, includes synthesized material from primary sources.
Even the distinction between a question and a declaration dissolves as Darling formulates her prose poems, arranged under the heading “The Story,” as sets of five or six statements, several of them including a question punctuated with a period: What does it mean to cross a threshold. Why can so many things be mistaken for metaphor. These declarative questions themselves punctuate lines that include scene, a speaking persona, an implied addressee, and the overarching sense of a relationship threatened by, among other factors, vexed communication. “For days we send messages across a field of withered grass,” the speaker declares to an addressee who is “sorry for ‘needing time’.” Thus a story of sorts unfolds.
Beyond her conscious blending of elements we may designate as genre-specific, Darling offers us rich imagery that enlivens scenes from which the speaker examines the “many things that can go wrong in a conversation.” In “An Epilogue,” she distills words and phrases from the poems that comprise “The Story” in order to magnify singular vibrant images that each cling thinly to the upper margin of an otherwise blank page. With each we are directed to recall moments from “The Story,” such as:
Around us
a garden cracked from the cold
And the even starker:
An injured deer, a
threshold.
These images reprise and, by virtue of their abbreviated form, memorialize scenes from “The Story.”
Author of seventeen books and recipient of numerous awards including fellowships from Yaddo and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Darling tests our ability to transcend our arbitrary expectations and to find satisfaction in a text that is at once verse and prose, fragment and narrative, fiction and essay, developed scene and isolated image. Her deft dismissal of these theoretical distinctions allows us to fully immerse ourselves in the sensory language and explorative prose that embodies Requited.
Requited, the latest book by Kristina Marie Darling
Kristina Marie Darling doing her thing
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About the reviewer, Georgia Kreiger:
Georgia Kreiger lives in Michigan. She teaches creative writing at Concordia University-Ann Arbor, whose Kreft Arts Program hosts a variety of poets and writers. She is a member of A Gathering of Women Writers, a coalition devoted to supporting the work of Ann Arbor area women writers.
Quoted in Sidelights: “ability to remind readers that it is human nature to crave to be what we are not.” Frazier-Foley added: “The self-referential nature of this text urges the truth to make itself known. It enables the use of poetry as a truth-telling device, and reminds the reader of fundamental truths.”
The Infoxicated Corner: Lisa M. Cole Reviews Kristina Marie Darling’s ‘Requited’
Fox Frazier-Foley September 29, 2014
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Requited: Poetry as a Truth-Telling Mechanism
The effectiveness of Kristina Marie Darling’s book Requited lies in its ability to remind readers that it is human nature to crave to be what we are not. To crave what we don’t have. Darling treats poetry as a truth-telling mechanism. This is a book that is aware of itself, its truths, and how it wants to tell them. The self-referential nature of this text urges the truth to make itself known. It enables the use of poetry as a truth-telling device, and reminds the reader of fundamental truths.
The book is the chronicle of a couple’s relationship, and their eventual parting. We begin the story in a garden, which might be a nod toward to the Garden of Eden, and what it symbolizes for us: a clean slate; new beginnings; fresh starts. Gardens and forests are so richly associated in Western literature with emotional truths, and the unfettered psyche. This trope was a clever one to utilize for the story of a romantic relationship because this draw that humans have toward the new, the fresh, the undiscovered, is what makes new relationships so intoxicating, but it is also what makes the end of relationships so difficult, because in breaking up with someone we acknowledge that a part of our innocence has been irrevocably lost.
The couple’s travels through these landscapes seems to mirror the shifting of their own minds and bodies. I was especially moved by the image of the deer that the couple encounters at the beginning of the book:
“Near the road, an injured deer has been left to die. Its dark brown eyes seem to wonder why we’ve left the roses behind.”
Like the Garden of Eden, deer also have connections with innocence and purity, but the image of the deer accomplishes things that the garden does not. The deer is a much more starting and emotionally relevant image because the deer is a living, breathing entity in a way that the garden is not. The deer looking at the couple so plaintively— essentially asking them why they are leaving the garden—enforces the emotional magnitude of the situation: the couple’s separation, and the resulting loss of their innocence and purity.
The passage about the girl’s lips turning blue is similarly jarring and powerful:
“How many dead flowers would it take to cover a field. You’re beginning to miss the girls in another city, their parade of torn dresses. A disheveled skirt retains an odd charm. In shop windows, mannequins still cling to bouquets. Their starched petals. My cold blue lips.”
The girl here is becoming a part of the landscape she is moving away from. This might be an allusion to the feeling that we are leaving a part of ourselves behind when we leave a relationship, and our desire to hold on to what we are losing. When we enter into relationships with people our identities shift, merge, and blur with the identity of the other person.
The emotional center of the book—the passage which I think anchors the entire text is found a bit later in the book:
“While I sleep, you’re documenting failure. An experience gives rise to ‘narrative.’ A heroine counting ‘unfaithful stars.’ Why can so many things be mistaken for metaphor. Above us, the room is heaving its small oceans. Somehow you imagine an elegant universe.”
The self-referential quality in this book manifests through the litany of literary devices and tropes the narrator mentions here– the poem is reminding us that we are reading a poem, by talking about various aspects of poetry. Reading this, we see that poetry serves as a way to document and memorialize failure. Maybe metaphor is a way for us to make ourselves into something we are not.
The erasure that closes the book—which is, essentially, the first section of the book with sections expertly whited out—seems essential to the narrative of the couple. It allows the book to come full circle, and is a way for the couple to dialog with one another—maybe in real time, or in each individual mind. Or maybe the epilogue is a reimagining of the past. A way to re-do what we have done, to right wrongs, to reevaluate and revisit or lives. Darling’s work reminds us that poetry gives us permission to do this—reinvent our lives.
Press: BlazeVOX, 2014
Page length: 41 pages
Price: $12.00
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Lisa M. Cole is the author of the poetry collections Heart Full of Tinders and Dreams of the Living, and is a contributor to Wood Becomes Bone: A Mental Health Awareness Series, all three titles forthcoming from ELJ publications. Lisa has also written six chapbooks, most recently Negotiating with Objects (Sundress Publications) and The Bodyscape and Living in a Lonely House (Dancing Girl Press). She was a recipient of the Lois Nelson Award in Creative Non-Fiction in 2005 and a runner-up in SLAB’s Elizabeth R. Curry poetry contest earlier this year. Lisa teaches writing workshops in Tucson Arizona’s prisons as well as in various places within Tucson’s vibrant literary communities, including the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Casa Libre En La Solona. You can read her book reviews at http://moonglows-reviews.blogspot.com/. Find her on Facebook in both personal and professional capacities at https://www.facebook.com/lisa.cole.poet and https://www.facebook.com/lisa.marie.cole
Quoted in Sidelights: “a magical reading experience” that “reveals a poet who has created forms and mastered them in her heart wrenching exploration of themes that haunt us all.”
SCORCHED ALTAR: SELECTED POEMS AND STORIES
BY KRISTINA MARIE DARLING
BLAZEVOX BOOKS, 2014; 174 PP
REVIEWED BY ANNE CHAMPION
I’ve read all of the collections sampled from for Kristina Marie Darling’s selected collection, but she’s a hard poet to keep up with due to being stunningly prolific. To date, she’s published over 20 books in roughly 7 years. This collection samples poems from Night Songs, Compendium, The Body is a Little Gilded Cage, Melancholia (An Essay), Palimpsest, The Moon and Other Inventions, Correspondence, Brushes With, Vow, Requited, Fortress, and The Arctic Circle. Seeing some of her best work gathered together in one volume makes for a magical reading experience that allows the reader to witness how she uses her signature forms to explore love and loss in surprising ways and how she’s grown and pushed herself to new territory as a writer over time. If you’ve never opened up a Darling collection—this book is the perfect place to start.
Darling is certainly a poet who writes through poetic obsessions, and this book encapsulates her long held fascination with the destructive consequences of love. Each book explores the devastating aftermath of love gone awry, and she does this through a keen exploration of tokens and mementos that symbolize the love that once enticed and its fleeting, fragile nature. In “Noctuary (II)” the speaker considers a jewelry box:
“She wanted to understand the innermost workings of this strange machine. Their courtship was a system of pulleys, levers, and strings. Behind a little door, the gears were turning and turning.”
This quote seems to be a perfect encapsulation of the motives behind Darling’s work: she wants to understand how love and loss work; she meticulously examines every tiny intricate gear to garner a larger picture of how it all functions and how it all breaks down.
Darling also works within a series of forms that she created: footnotes, definitions, prose poems, erasures, indexes of illustrations, and glossary of terms. These forms make for a dynamic reading experience, in with the reader plays a vital role in imagining the narrative that lies within the white space on the page. I’m often stunned by her attention to miniscule details and the ways that attention takes on major significance. “Notes to A History of the Locket” seems to capture the philosophy behind this technique well:
“It was then she considered the array of miniatures. In all of them, a portrait. And each of these an ode.
Each small detail, each motif, each footnote or erasure seems to be a study of love through miniatures, and readers are invited to paint their own portrait with the miniature pieces given to them, all the while understanding that the pieces of wreckage presented to us is also an ode to a love affair. In “Footnotes to a History of Dress,” Darling presents us with “A broken chain. Every primrose torn from the ground.” And we cannot help but imagine the chain whole, a sentimental gift, the roses blooming in all their natural beauty and promise.
Darling’s Scorched Altar: Selected Poems and Stories reveals a poet who has created forms and mastered them in her heart wrenching exploration of themes that haunt us all.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Darling shifts diction and tone, a shifting that offers different speakers that speak from varying points of view, taking up the position of story narrator, literary critic, historian, and sometimes, from an unknown standpoint,” remarked Laura Madeline Wiseman at Up the Staircase Quarterly. The author explores a variety of means ways “to tell stories, to document love and affection, and to question story making devices,” Wiseman related, concluding: “Eloquently, provocatively, and strategically, Scorched Altar reimagines the book.”
Laura Madeline Wiseman reviews Scorched Altar: Selected Poems & Stories 2007-2014
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Scorched Altar by Kristina Marie Darling
Paperback: 178 pages
Publisher: BlazeVOX Books (2015)
Purchase: Available at BlazeVOX
“She wanted to understand the innermost workings of this elaborate machine”: Scorched Altar Review by Laura Madeline Wiseman
Rich with sensory details and scene, Kristina Marie Darling’s new book Scorched Altar collects work from twelve previous collections and invites readers to fragment their expectations of book structure, much as she fragments the structure of her sentences. She writes, “My cold blue lips” (134), “Fallen branches. A dead hummingbird” (124), “An uncanny brightness in every window” (105), and “The door to the gallery groaning on its hinges” (27). Indeed, Darling is positing a metaphorical loss and death of the book by opening it, an opening that suggests books are stuck in one manner of delivery. To accomplish this, Darling’s explores a book’s structural devices such as glossaries, diction and tone, notes and footnotes, time’s function within storytelling, and the theme of love and affection.
Darling troubles the stability of language by defining terms within a glossary. In “A History of Melancholia: Glossary of Terms” from The Body is a Little Gilded Cage, Darling defines a set of terms (e.g. locket, memento, nightingale) that are dependent on the text, rather than dependent on the dictionary, or a larger cultural context, positioning the reader of her text as not native to the English language, contemporary culture, or the romantic world within the story. She writes, “nightingale A harbinger of both despair and onslaught of winter. Its bright mornings and colorless evenings” (55). Darling explores themes of courtship and objects of affections, as well as the metaphor of wedded woman as caged bird within the poem, but from the position of outsider.
Darling also explores the use of tone and diction within books. The poem “Palimpsest” from Compendium gives shifts in diction, literary criticism, description, and story. In the second “Chapter One” description, she writes, “His appearance may be read as a culmination of several recurring motifs” (27), taking up the linguistic phrasing of scholarship. Likewise in the selection from Palimpsest, the “Chapter Two”’s move from storytime in one “Chapter Two,” to omniscient, critical narrator in another “Chapter Two” (64). In these examples and elsewhere in Scorched Altar, Darling shifts diction and tone, a shifting that offers different speakers that speak from varying points of view, taking up the position of story narrator, literary critic, historian, and sometimes, from an unknown standpoint, such as those from footnoted quotations without sources. These changes in tone are not signaled by structural devices, as they might be in another text that offered footnotes, author’s notes, advance praise, or appendices, but rather appear within the same structure that all tones are delivered. This diction strategy troubles story development, delivery expectation, and cultural significance placed on story as artifact and scholar as artifact’s critical investigator.
Darling also troubles the function of notes and footnotes. In the section from Palimpsest, Darling offers notes and footnotes on the history of a shoe, a locket, a dress, desire, and architecture, suggesting the importance of objects associated with women’s dress and simultaneously questioning the importance placed on areas of intellectual scrutiny and study. Such a selected sequence, both by the structural devices in the poems and the use of established book organizational devices, asks readers to question how books of literary criticism and literature are constructed and to resist readerly expectations of terminology and credibly. Her footnotes, given their displacement from a “real” text, displaces the reader and positions the readers at some distance from the text, a place in which they are unable to gain access to it. This displacement enables the reader to be situated as researcher, traveler, thinker, and speculator and invites the reader to resist the construction of books by the form in which the poems and stories are delivered in Scorched Altar.
Like Darling’s new book, The Sun & The Moon (BlazeVOX, 2014), Darling’s poems concern themselves with storytime. Time signals movement to action, a memory, or connection to others. In “‘I was lit from the inside” from Night Songs, she writes, “That was when the curtain fell” (13). Time signaling phrases like “that was when” move the plot of the poems from description to action. They are also a storytelling device that indicate a narrator outside of the sequence’s storytime. Elsewhere, time is signaled by memory in a reflection. The line “She recalled the thin wood railing from her last visit” (20) takes the story to a flashback of a similar musical encounter. Time also signals the movement of the self towards others. In “The Cello” Darling writes, “Before I knew it, you were there,” (14) connecting the speaker to the arrival of a companion. Likewise in “Ennui” she writes, “when I ask why the rooms buzz with damselflies, you merely nod your head” (18). Time here allows the reader to see the emotional disconnect between characters. Such concern with time signals an unfolding of events in the sequence that moves the narrative forward, develops the backstory, and creates the emotional pitch of the characters’ relationship. However, cataloging time calls attention to it and asks the reader to consider how and why time moves in a given way within a story and if time is necessary for action, memory, and connection.
An overarching theme in Darling’s Scorched Altar is love, but one permeated by a disconnect that evokes lack. Though Darling cautions in the sequence from Requited, “Why can so many things be mistaken for metaphor” (135), Darling’s characterization of love works as a trope to read her thinking about books. Darling’s persistent questioning of the book and the art of story structure suggests she, too, like her readers, adores the idea of story, but finds that it falls short of what it promises to deliver. Yet Darling’s resistance to its construction offers other ways to tell stories, to document love and affection, and to question story making devices. Eloquently, provocatively, and strategically, Scorched Altar reimagines the book.
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Laura Madeline Wiseman is the author of Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience (Lavender Ink, 2014), Queen of the Platform (Anaphora Literary Press, 2013), Sprung (San Francisco Bay Press, 2012), and the collaborative book Intimates and Fools (Les Femmes Folles Books, 2014) with artist Sally Deskins, as well as two letterpress books, and eight chapbooks, including Spindrift (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). She is the editor of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). Wiseman has a doctorate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has received an Academy of American Poets Award, the Wurlitzer Foundation Fellowship, and her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Margie, and Feminist Studies. Visit her website at www.lauramadelinewiseman.com
Quoted in Sidelights: “Ghost/Landscape reveals how we maintain our emotional landscape every day, how we stammer to ghosts, desperate to connect,”
Review: GHOST/LANDSCAPE by Kristina Marie Darling & John Gallaher
Author: Guest Reviewer | Posted In Book Reviews, Poetry
ghost landscape mainGhost/Landscape
Kristina Marie Darling & John Gallaher
Blaxevox, February 2016
102 pp; $16
Buy: paperback
Reviewed by Jennifer MacBain-Stephens
In the collaborative poetry collection Ghost/Landscape (Blazevox, 2016) by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher there is no beginning or end. The first poem is “Chapter Two.” So begins traversing a time loop of poems where the reader can really “begin” anywhere. What is a beginning and what is an ending? Is moving forward and looking behind you the same thing? A circle never ends. “Chapter Two,” begins like a bed time story:
“We must have known there was no going back…that morning, before our windows had been broken, you asked about the lock on the door. I realized it was only a matter of time before the alarm sounded, which always seemed out of place in the dead of winter.”
The reader is a happy prisoner in this manikin-like frieze: feelings are suppressed into the pages of Goethe novel. Timelines, like broken glasses, need to be glued back together. If the reader needs to assemble a puzzle to establish a linear map, one should look to the corners first. In Ghost/Landscape, the edges are gray and decrepit. The backbone seethes.
Darling and Gallaher use color to drip the poems in surprising apathy. In this illusion to the underworld, “Thermopolis as a concept” they paint this canvas:
“The scenery is used to being blamed for such things, red,
beige, and more red with some yellow. And blue and black
and white.
I’m busy looking at everything I’m looking at. It rises and falls as I sit and stand. It’s shadowy or bright or neither, really. Navys and grays. I expect great things from it.
A little jump and it’s leaping. There on the bluffs overlooking
the town I see it leap as I’m looking at it leaping.
If, late in summer, it’s late summer, then it’s late in summer.
That weird feeling of being cheated when the forecast of bad
things happening doesn’t come to pass…”
The outer world is constantly in flux, unforgiving, and ambivalent towards the humans who gaze upon it no matter if the grass is green or covered in snow. There is also an apt correlation: if the outer surroundings are corrected than inner relationships may heal. In the poem “Landscaping,”
“We’re looking out the kitchen window, and we have this opportunity to go back and undo our errors. But where do we start? We mowed poorly around the trees. We didn’t marry well or have pleasant children…”
The landscape reflects a sadness. There are repeated domestic objects noted throughout the collection: drinking glasses, the phone, a calendar, a television, torn photographs. The objects reflect how the speakers convey the passing of time: selling them, losing them, realizing something was stolen. The objects may change but our connection to them remain the same. We sell certain objects just to want them again. In another poem in the middle of the collection, also titled “Chapter Two,”
“Next thing you know, the whole house is a yard sale. Your bed is three feet under other things. Here, there’s still some room between it and where the bureau was, a kind of depression you can lie on…”
The succinct wordplay here illustrates a heavy woe: one can lay down on a bed and make a depression with one’s figure as well as succumb to an emotional albatross.
In addition to reflecting the passage of time (and also the idea that time is stagnant by repeating certain behaviors,) the objects symbolically converse with the outer landscape.
In “The Chapter on Regret”
“I tried to phone you, but the snow went on for miles. That was the beginning of the winter, a year of thin trees and that odd silence…”
As a small child, I had always imagined unhappiness would be easy. Now the windows on our street darken like a kiss goodnight…”
The “snow” in the first line of the above poem references actual snow outside—where nothing green grows—and also the snow or static of a poorly connected phone call. The entire garden is covered in snow: no connection from the earth to air breaks through the frost, like no words warm the wires between two people.
In “Gardening,” this repeated line builds tension:
“That night I tried to phone you after the house fire and you didn’t pick up. That night I tried to phone you after the house fire and you didn’t pick up. That night I tried to phone you after the house fire and you didn’t pick up…” The only line about gardening are the last two lines: “They look for their shovels. One by one, they begin to dig.” The speaker confesses “I never kept a single flower alive.”
The language of these prose poems make up small movie sets. Each poem-scape possesses its own set dressing whether the space is in a house or a garden. But like the cliché states, a house is not always a home. Other shelters are described: a bomb shelter, that “extra room,” a haunted mansion. But who is waiting inside? Someone leaves for the city, but also confesses “I still see you there, in the yard.” The sets are routinely dismantled, (the objects change,) and the speakers are left holding a phone with no one at the other end.
If anything, Ghost/Landscape reveals how we maintain our emotional landscape every day, how we stammer to ghosts, desperate to connect even if it’s through the sound of breaking glass or looking into a cracked mirror.
Jennifer MacBain-Stephens went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in the DC area. She is the author of two full length poetry collections (forthcoming.) Her chapbook “Clown Machine” just came out from Grey Book Press. Recent work can be seen or is forthcoming at Jet Fuel Review, Lime Hawk, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Inter/rupture, Poor Claudia, and decomP. Her poetry reviews have appeared at TheRumpus.net and The Infoxicated Corner. Visit: http://jennifermacbainstephens.wordpress.com/.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Two people talking about the weather has never been so insightful or enlightening.” This reviewer added: “The book moves like poetry while still functioning as prose, and integrates a narrative, suspense, and an unrequited love story into one wonderful whole.”
GHOST/ LANDSCAPE BY KRISTINA MARIE DARLING AND JOHN GALLAHER
Fjords Review, Ghost/ Landscape by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher
POETRY
GHOST/ LANDSCAPE
BY KRISTINA MARIE DARLING AND JOHN GALLAHER
BlazeVOX Books (Feb. 14, 2016)
102 pages
ISBN 978-1609642402
June 24, 2016
Two people talking about the weather has never been so insightful or enlightening. Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher’s astounding Ghost / Landscape’s show that talking about the weather doesn’t have to be awkward filler. The book moves like poetry while still functioning as prose, and integrates a narrative, suspense, and an unrequited love story into one wonderful whole.
Leaping around in time, the book is divided into chapters, beginning in the midst of things and ending at the beginning with chapter one. Even more intriguing are the chapters named after an emotion or event. Among these are “The Chapter On Regret,” “The Chapter On Museums,” and “The Chapter On Houseguests.” Surprisingly specific, these chapters name their subjects; call them out even, as it becomes clear that the book is obsessed with the weight of names and titles. The speaker asks, “What is a conversation but an attempt to make sense of objects, to dig them out from beneath their seemingly endless names?” and continues on, “How could you call that darkened room nostalgia, as though naming something isn’t a kind of violence?”
In a blunt tone, the speaker builds the world, word-by-word, bringing it into being. Both by naming objects and then dispelling their title, Ghost / Landscape depicts an image, a setting, a landscape and then destroys it all together, creating something new out of its dust. In this narrative world, shattered glass and phantom music are the background of many scenes, a murder does or doesn’t happen, a ghost can quickly become, or perhaps always was, a birthday cake, and a parking lot is renamed “something springy, because we don’t really like parking lots all that much.”
Darling and Gallaher prove that something can become anything. Words are used as a grounding device in reality and then given a rebirth as something else entirely. The poets’ voices blend together magically, where topics are seamlessly shuffled around mid-phrase and the two voices disappear under one consistent tone. Teaching readers how to read the book, the speaker explains, “I’ve always had a fondness for the absurd. Like playing two radio stations at once.” This duality between themes and authors creates an interesting tension throughout, where every thought, feeling, and chapter feels both supported by its surroundings and disputed by what precedes or follows.
The book functions under a sort of foggy consciousness which is perhaps what allows it to sustain such a hazy state. Uncertain movement between what happened and what never did becomes clear in moments such as “We’ve each killed someone, but it’s been so long ago we no longer remember the details, like what it was over or what we did with the body” and “the mind cannot tell the difference between what we see and what we remember.”
If naming something is indeed a violence, the speaker in Ghost / Landscape avoids this at all costs. Using the weather as a device, the speaker seems to be in conversation with themselves, with the you, or perhaps with us as they discuss the weather, in particular the snow, to describe the surrounding bleakness. The weather then becomes a way to interrupt the speaker from discussing the driving force behind the poems. (Namely, the you who never answers the phone and the murder that is mentioned in passing.) To find solace in this ambiguity, readers are given brilliant moments of lucidity, “Here the telephone wires, too, are haunted. What you didn’t know is that it was me, calling to warn you about the weather.”
In the electric prose poems, the landscape, speaker, and the you both are and aren’t haunted, both are and aren’t ghosts. The body is made to be a landscape, and the landscape in turn becomes visceral and sentient. “Bonjour tristesse, I say to the meadow. But the landscape no longer remembers me.” The repetition of one-liners throughout the work and within one piece, paired with the repetition of chapter titles, especially “Chapter Two,” keeps the poems in communication with one another, creating a forward movement if not a linear one. Repetition also lends to the dreamlike state the book finds itself in. A seemingly endless loop, it becomes impossible to orient oneself within the storyline but also comfortable to travel this way.
The only way to describe the journey is “The entire time you had been expecting something familiar, perhaps a landscape painting, but here, even the flowers have been made strange.” Darling and Gallaher create a synergy that absorbs you into their particular version of reality, one where you won’t mind being swept up in talk of the weather. So that “When you look up from the book, even the walls of (the) room were gone.”
Quoted in Sidelights: “wealth of stunning-haunting moments.” She perceived that “both speakers are the ghost that haunts this volume, and both speakers are the haunted landscape,” and their text comes so alive that “when I’m not reading Ghost/Landscape, I have the sensation that the book is going on without me.” The collection, she said, “is designed to elicit ambiguous emotions (the most promising kind), forgotten anecdotes, and insights that both confound and clarify. This makes it my favorite kind of book.”
" a superlative outcome”
GHOST/LANDSCAPE BY KRISTINA MARIE DARLING AND JOHN GALLAHER
REVIEWED BY JULIE MARIE WADE
July 30th, 2016
Picture it: a warm spring night in downtown Los Angeles. Two writers are meeting for the first time at the annual Association of Writers and Writing Conference. A few hours later, they will read together at an off-site event at Opulen Studios, sitting on matching stools, sharing the same music stand for their pages. And I will be in the audience that night, watching and listening intently.
The book they read from is an intriguing collection of prose poems called Ghost/Landscape.Two days prior, I purchased this volume at the conference book fair, intending to savor it on my long flight home, but Ghost/Landscape commanded my full and immediate attention. Now, when Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher begin to read, I follow along on pages already dog-eared, phrases already underlined. And all the while they are reading with such vigor and ease, I marvel that these two strangers have written this remarkable book together.
Even between close and long-time friends, collaborative writing continues to surprise and delight me, particularly when the voices do more than merely harmonize as an efficient duet. The best-case scenario for collaboration—the kind which Darling and Gallaher epitomize—is a resounding and self-reflective symphony, each participant playing more than one instrument at a time and both taking their turn conducting the band.
In reading Ghost/ Landscape, the reader gains a sense that both writers have been stretched beyond their singular capacities in order to produce this multi-valent, multi-vocal opus. How did they do it? The book contains, among many things, a threaded meditation on the collaborative process itself. This is a book that strings the Meta like a fiddle and plays it well. Consider this tune: “It’s a kind of shared consciousness, traveling like the strands of a spider’s web. If one of us thinks of winter, it’s not long before the trees grow heavy with ice.” And lo and behold, those icy trees begin to appear and disappear throughout the volume. The language of the book is never stagnant, and the seasons of the embedded story continue to change. We encounter this moment: “The only difference now is that the trees are covered in ice.” Awhile later, this one: “We just sat there with our coffee, wondering where all the iced-over trees had gone.”
Collaborations, in life as in art, are best powered by questions. Perhaps the quintessential question of collaboration is articulated here: “Where are you now and how can I get there?” Isn’t this what all friends and lovers, teachers and students, want to know—not to mention artists seeking to create master works together? And here is one possible answer to this question, rising up from Darling’s and Gallaher’s deep, presumably bottomless well of postulations: “we all think we’re having different lives when really there’s only one life and we’re sharing it.” In other words, both speakers are the ghost that haunts this volume, and both speakers are the haunted landscape. The title slash is not a line meant to separate title character from title setting, but a saloon door that swings forward and back between scenes in continuous and simultaneous progress. Time must necessarily move in swirls, ellipses, and recursive arrows across and around this book that opens with “Chapter Two” and concludes with “Chapter One” while “Chapter Three” appears somewhere near an arbitrary middle. In other words, when I’m not reading Ghost/Landscape, I have the sensation that the book is going on without me, under the sleek covers, “in the basement of the subtext,” and I want to get back to it now.
Between the numbered chapters are those named for regret, miracles, gardening, etiquette, museums, houseguests, and transcendence—and these are just the chapters that identify themselves as such—the meta-chapters, if you will. The three-page table of contents is an eloquent cacophony of titles that double as prompts, riddles, punchlines, cautionary tales, and assorted amusements. The contents can also be read as a cento-chapter all their own—out loud and with gusto. (I’ve tried it, and it works!) Go ahead, get a pen and some strips of paper, and write a few of these down. Then, toss them in a bowl and fish one out. Whatever you get, I guarantee you’ll be moved to write in response:
What Would You Have Me Say
I’m Kind Of Glad I Didn’t Know Then What I Know Now (x2)
At Least I’m Not as Sad As I Used to Be
The Minor Risks That People Worry Too Much About
So Let’s Talk About Your Intimacy Problems
Let’s Talk About Reading Social Cues
Next Time You Hear The Alarm, It is Not a Test
Word Came Too Late To Be Of Any Help But Thank You Anyway
The diction of this book is designed to elicit ambiguous emotions (the most promising kind), forgotten anecdotes, and insights that both confound and clarify. This makes it my favorite kind of book—a meta-book, if you will. Each poem reads like a tarot card, and you, the reader, are implicated in every fortune being told. Sometimes you feel like the medium lighting the candles and shuffling the deck. Sometimes you’re certain it’s your own palm being inspected, while the speaker(s) read between the fleshy nexus of your lines. Maybe Darling and Gallaher have written us toward the third tier of collaboration: when the people in the audience discover maracas under their seats, and bongos, and hand-bells, and a lost recorder from second grade, and hell, even a cowbell.
There’s a prose poem near the fulcrum of Ghost/Landscape that I want to call a lyric essay, that I brought into my Lyric Essay Class and read (out loud and with gusto) to the students assembled there. It’s called “List,” and I fancy myself friendly with lists. I have a hunch this list would be flattered to claim the name lyric essay because what’s more inductive and exploratory and contrary to binaries than a genre that wants to be, continuously and simultaneously, both an essay and a poem? The List is structured around twelve steps. The List is a rhetorical wonder. The List includes luminosities like “There are all these unforeseen consequences to generally good ideas” and “‘Only fools want to be great,’ the great tell us to keep us from trying too hard to be great.”
The List also instructs us, quite meta-tastically, to “Remember your steps” in the middle of taking them. After all, this book is as much about the process of making it as it is about the project being made. Diderot makes a cameo on the List, and a series of competing pangrams are assessed for their relative value. The winner emerges here: “‘Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx’ because it uses each letter of the alphabet once, if letter economy is also a goal.” The List interrupts itself early on to observe: “This is either right now the beginning of something or it’s not. End. Middle. Something else.” And that’s when one of my students, collaborating with fellow readers and fellow writers and the text itself, interrupted the text—Right there! That’s what a lyric essay is! The ‘something else’! I could not agree more.
Remember how I told you that Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher met for the first time at AWP 2016 in Los Angeles? That’s where I met the authors for the first time, too, and learned they had admired each other’s work from afar for years before deciding to write together from a distance. Did they know they would meet in person at the conference where their collaborative volume was finally released? No—but perhaps the book foretold of this meeting as well. Perhaps their collaboration somehow anticipated the final outcome through its séance of intersecting stories.
Reading Ghost/Landscape at the conference I kept discovering references to conferences—a whole narrative capturing and critiquing what conferences are like. I wondered, given the book’s shape-shifting nature, its dynamism, perhaps really its animism—this is not too strong a word—if I were to read this book at a ski resort, would snow-capped mountains and couples bickering on chair lifts begin to appear in the background? Or if I were to read this book on a Caribbean cruise, would all-inclusive meals, snorkeling side trips, and throngs of tourists soon arise to populate its pages?
Instead, lingering in meeting rooms at the LA Convention Center and surrounding hotels, I read:
The admonishments came slowly, the way a sheet of ice forms over a lake. According to the first panelist, you carried winter on your back, a little storm gathering outside the kitchen window. The moderator seemed to fixate on the incessant mention of gardens, the entire landscape gone white with waiting. Then the endless questions about the weather. Soon the audience could only murmur and nod.
The talks went on for days. Outside the conference hotel, the trees swallowed their tongues. The darkening auditorium, an empty foyer. The same expectant backdrop shuddering in the distance.
Later, I read and guffawed:
In another version of the story, we drove past the abandoned houses, watching for a particular type of sincerity. You needed examples for a conference presentation, which would inevitably culminate in a diagram.
Still later, I read and laughed and winced—sequentially, it seemed at the time, but somehow all at once:
Before the conference even started, we’d gotten into an argument. Because there are other things that were exciting about the dinner party. No, not your lengthy defense of the lyric, or your friend’s various opinions on enjambment. […] The breach of etiquette, the newly articulated boundaries. But when I turned to tell you, the lecture hall was empty, and you’d left your phone behind on the desk.
Despite the wealth of stunning-haunting moments in Ghost/Landscape and my multiple readings of it, I always come back to this line: “There are all these unforeseen consequences to generally good ideas.” I think the book at large riffs off its own insight here, for Ghost/Landscape is not—could never be—the offspring of a single idea. Forget high-concept, forget working-thesis. This book is Eliot’s “all is always now” as literary soundtrack. It is two DJs and eighty-two record-poems spinning at once. It’s too easy, though not untrue, to call the work “poetry in motion,” so I’ll call it poetry that sometimes glides into lyric essay, which is also sometimes known as “something else.”
And remember when people used to say, “That’s something else!” as the highest form of praise? Something beyond category or comparison? Well, that’s how I mean it here. I think Ghost/Landscape—its accordion of pages, its panharmonicon of possibilities—is truly something else—a superlative outcome of all these good consequences to generally unforeseen ideas. There is no telling what else Darling and Gallaher might do.