Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 8/8/1965
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://alicejamesbooks.org/authors/lynch-alessandra/ * https://blogs.butler.edu/butlermfa/2017/01/20/lynch/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2002025562
LC classification: PS3612.Y54
Personal name heading:
Lynch, Alessandra, 1965-
Found in: Lynch, Alessandra. Sails the wind left behind, c2002: ECIP
t.p. (Alessandra Lynch) data sheet (b. Aug. 8, 1965)
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born August 8, 1965; married Chris Forhan (a writer); children: Milo, Oliver.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet and writing instructor. Butler University, Indianapolis, IN, writing instructor. Yaddo fellow; MacDowell Colony fellow.
AWARDS:New York/ New England Award, Alice James Books, 2002, for Sails the Wind Left Behind; Lena-Miles Wever Todd Award, 2008, for It Was a Terrible Cloud at Twilight.
WRITINGS
Contributor of poetry to a number of journals, including the American Poetry Review, Blackbird, the Cortland Review, Crazyhorse, the Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and Volt.
SIDELIGHTS
Alessandra Lynch is a poet and writing instructor. She has held fellowships with Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Lynch has contributed poetry to a number of journals, including the American Poetry Review, Blackbird, the Cortland Review, Crazyhorse, the Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and Volt.
In an interview in the Indianapolis Review, Lynch talked with Natalie Solmer about some of the best writing advice she has ever received. Lynch recalled that Tom Lux was her “first teacher at Sarah Lawrence. I think that Tom, his first piece of advice was just: read, read, read everything and anything. That was really his biggest piece of advice that I took to heart. And Gerry, Gerald Stern once said to me, “You have all this lightning and you need to find a way to ground it.” And I think I’ve spent my whole life as a poet trying to figure out how to ground myself.” She added: “It’s beautiful. I think that over the years, every time I think of that, I think it means something different, or I take it in a different way. When I was younger, I thought that it meant I needed to write more narratively, but then I realized that lyricism is really my heart.”
Sails the Wind Left Behind and It Was a Terrible Cloud at Twilight
Sails the Wind Left Behind is Lynch’s first published collection of poetry. The poems alternate between symbolism and realism and being lyric and narrative. Writing in Ploughshares, Susan Conley observed that the poems in this collection “operate at dizzying heights,” adding that “Lynch is so good she convinces the reader to climb just as high.”
Lynch published her second poetry collection, It Was a Terrible Cloud at Twilight, in 2008. The poems largely relate how various causes of loss and misfortune serve as the impetus for forcing children to need to grow up too quickly. Reviewing the collection in Rattle, Kristina Marie Darling commented that the poems in this collection “often retain a redemptive quality, in which such tragedy within and around the narrator gives way to self-knowledge and discovery. As with other themes in the collection, Lynch often conveys these realizations by projecting them onto the speaker’s surroundings, gracefully merging interior and exterior.” Darling also opined that many of the poems offer “a multifaceted vision of loss, youth, and maturity, proving “shimmering” and “sublime” throughout.” Darling “highly recommended” the book, reasoning that, “all points considered, Alessandra Lynch’s It Was a Terrible Cloud at Twilight is a finely crafted and meditative read.”
Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment
In 2017 Lynch published Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment, her third collection of poetry. The collection is largely inspired by Lynch’s coping in the aftermath of rape. In an interview in the Indianapolis Review, Lynch discussed her book’s dedication to other survivors. “I guess we all want our poems to reach people, to enrich them, to move, to help, and for this particular book…. I just want this book to be able to help someone; that’s my biggest hope for the book. It feels very important to me that it helps someone else.”
A contributor to Publishers Weekly noted that as the author “guides readers through these painful episodes, she retakes ownership of her body, sense of intimacy, and ability to bear witness.” In a review in Library Journal, Barbara Hoffert pointed out that the poet “learns that she cannot control and cannot forget but attains a half-peace.” Hoffert “highly recommended” Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment. Reviewing the collection in Ploughshares, Sarah Ehrich concluded: “Read as poetry of witness,” Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment “is illuminating, for trauma survivors and for those willing to behold its aftermath. Not judged by accuracy of memory, of factual truth, poetry becomes the empowered speaker that can offer testimony unwelcomed in important settings: in courtrooms and doctor’s offices; even in kitchens and living rooms. A poem can be uncertain, lyrical, or brute; it can use metaphor and music and line breaks to name its subject. Lynch uses all of these poetic modes.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Indianapolis Review, accessed February 7, 2018, Natalie Solmer, “Featured Poet: Alessandra Lynch.”
Library Journal, February 15, 2017, Barbara Hoffert, “Five Women Poets: Strong New Works for Language Lovers Everywhere,” p. 93.
Ploughshares, March 22, 2003, Susan Conley, review of Sails the Wind Left Behind, p. 205; accessed February 7, 2018, Sarah Ehrich, review of Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment.
Publishers Weekly, May 15, 2017, review of Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment, p. 34.
ONLINE
Alessandra Lynch Website, http://www.alessandralynch.com (February 7, 2018).
Arts Council of Indianapolis Website, https://indyarts.org/ (February 7, 2018), “Alessandra Lynch.”
Blogalicious, http://dianelockward.blogspot.com/ (July 21, 2014), “The Poet on the Poem: Alessandra Lynch.”
Butler University Website, https://www.butler.edu/ (February 7, 2018), author profile.
Rattle, https://www.rattle.com/ (May 30, 2009), review of It Was a Terrible Cloud at Twilight.
FEATURED POET: ALESSANDRA LYNCH
By-Natalie Solmer
I spoke with the poet Alessandra Lynch on a rainy, October Sunday. We were hoping to conduct our interview at one of the many wild spaces in Indianapolis, as both of us feel more at home in nature. We had our hearts set on the 100 Acres Art and Nature Park at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (a favorite for us both), but the skies had other plans.
Instead, we had our conversation on her screened in back porch–rustic and wooden, full of collected natural objects, books, and paintings by Alessandra, as well as artwork created by her two boys. We spoke over lemon-ginger tea and the sound of rainfall, interspersed with interruptions from our children: each of us have two boys; they are ages 5, 6, 7 and 8, and create quite the wild rumpus whenever we get together! In fact, during much of this interview they were running around outside in the rain with sticks and plastic weapons, and came inside soaked to the bone by the time we were through.
Full disclosure: our children are close, as we are close. I met Alessandra in 2009 when I was a poetry MFA grad student at Butler University. She would later become my thesis advisor, and after graduation, our friendship grew into something life sustaining for me. Beyond Alessandra’s supreme talent with words, she is also known to be something of a counselor and empathic mentor to many in our poetic community.
But that supreme talent of hers is what I was there to discuss, though I knew her wisdom pertaining to life and relationships would also come through. And it did.
A graduate of Sarah Lawrence and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Alessandra grew up in New York but now lives in Indianapolis with her husband and teaches poetry at Butler University. She has published three collections of poetry: Sails the Wind Left Behind (winner of the New York/ New England Award from Alice James Books, 2002), It was a terrible cloud at twilight (winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Award, Pleaides/LSU Press, 2008) and most recently, Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment (Alice James Books).
Though Daylily centers around extreme trauma–an experience of sexual assault–the book follows an arc from erasure of self to emergence of self in the physical, as well as psychic world. The book itself, 101 pages, is an artifact meticulously honed and imbued with Alessandra’s fantastical music. She dedicates the book to “survivors” and has said that it is not for survivors of physical assault alone, but survivors of any emotional or physical trauma. Indeed, anyone alive on this mess of an Earth is surviving something and can find resonance in Alessandra’s words.
I attended a September reading of hers at Indy Reads Books, where her husband, the writer Chris Forhan, introduced her and stated that “each of these poems has been through their own dark night of the soul.” I thought that description particularly apt and furiously took notes through her reading, jotting down gorgeous fragments from her poems that one after the other struck me like little bolts of her signature lightning:
“It was air that had forced me down,
pinned me, heaved till I
became little of a self”
“Knife-I-am-ready-
to-pull, are you ready
to gleam”
“Fox in the woods today, an emblem
of female. Bee flew past a puddle–”
“following the unseen, sniffing for evidence
that it had been”
“Rape felt stripped. And spare. Brute.”
“Shame is her orientation”
“can’t find the body that belongs to my voice”
“you have to be a god to get away with it
and the women always turning
into something else: bull-flower, frog, that laurel tree she asked to be
I don’t need a god to tell me to turn into a fox”
“Daylily called it a dangerous moment. It teetered”
“I walked through myself, holding
with tenderness her wilted headdress.”
These are just some of Alessandra’s brilliant lines, but you will find that Daylily is full of brilliance to its brim: open any page to confirm it. If you don’t own her book already, I hope you will give it a try. And at the very least, I hope you will read our conversation and glean something from it. We open with Alessandra’s epic retelling of the “creation myth” of how Daylily came into being:
Natalie: At your recent poetry reading at Indy Reads Books, Chris (Forhan) mentioned that you were “married to these poems before you were married to him.” How far back do some of the poems in Daylily go? When did you begin working on them?
Alessandra: OK. I will now proceed to tell you the Creation Myth, or really the Creation Story of the book. I never set down to write on this subject, never thought to do it consciously; that ‘s not how I work anyway. I tend to have a phrase come into my head and I follow that phrase. It’s more just this intuitive thing; it’s more just a discovery of my subject as opposed to starting with my idea or subject in mind, and I think a lot of poets have this. This is how we make things. If you don’t, you know, you’re not surprising yourself if you’re not discovering anything. And for me, especially, there’s no song in my work if I’m thinking of an idea to write about. It just kind of flattens the language out, which feels horrible.
N: Yes. Exactly.
A: I was fortunate enough to have a fellowship at Yaddo in 2005. It was two months long, which is just an incredible amount of time and space and it was a very generous gift and thrilling. I brought my old IBM typewriter, which is blue and bulky and named Gertrude, after the famous Gertrude Stein.
N: hahaha
A: And every morning I had a little routine. I would have a couple of sips of coffee and I would run for about 5 miles on the trails through the woods into Saratoga. Then I would come back and I would have a little breakfast and then go to my studio and it occurred to me that I wanted write meditations. I just loved the feeling of the word meditations.
N: Mmm-hmmm
A: I typed the word “meditation” at the top of the page, and I’ll never forget that very first day being there, I was typing, and a poem just fell out. And it was very short and lyrical and I was really excited and I still felt that “poetic light” that C. D. Wright talks about; I felt that I was in that right space in my head and body. So, I typed “meditation 2” under it and I wrote another and then I wrote another and another.
And I spent two months doing that. It was very thrilling and unprecedented. I had never had that kind of experience writing before; then again I had never had that kind of time and space for writing before. But sometimes even with the time and space, some elements don’t come together or coalesce to create that poetic light or sustaining quality of mind.
So anyway, summer of 2005 I left with about 100 meditations, these small, lyrical poems that seemed that they were wrestling with the idea of having a body, and having a body that desired. They were kind of like lyrical love poems in a way with a bunch of yearning in them. I showed them to a friend and she said, “Oh it’s a book!” But I myself felt that I don’t care whatever happens to these poems because I had this sort of mystical experience writing them. I didn’t care whether or not I published them; I just wanted to stay in that experience more.
However, these poems weren’t as alive as poems need to be alive to make up a book. They were kind of striking the same note. There wasn’t enough dynamism in the collection as a book itself. I’ m still very fond of them, and a number of them turned up here in Daylily! Those were the first poems in the book.
N: Oh, do you remember which ones?
A: I do! Can I look at my book here?
N: hahaha Yes!
A: So, the poems that used to be meditations: “pond & flies,” “adios,” “I lose the street to the street to the street,” “When the yellow bird dropped,” “Fox in the woods today, an emblem,” “When the body revoked itself,” “ I was flat as pool water,” ” I tear the questions into little squares,” “I beg to turn back,” “Can thinking wend a way,” and actually all the poems in section VII are from the meditation poems. So, that was 2005.
Now, let’s just fly swiftly and surely into the future to 2007, when I had another two month stint at Yaddo. I was in a very different place psychically, of course, as we all are when two years have passed, but no less grateful to be at Yaddo. I was going through a time in my life that made me feel very restless, more restless than usual, very kind of agitated, and I was thinking back very fondly to my previous time at Yaddo, and I started writing “agitations.” I started out as kind of having a joke with myself, but it turned out that I started writing about the assault. Initially they were kind of oblique and more suggestive. I remember there were days when I said to myself that I’ve gotta confront this because it does seem to be an important thing; it’s starting to surface. Maybe I was kind of hiding, even. It was startling to me because I had not allowed myself to think about it at all. And the assault happened when I was 25.
N: And to give the reader some sense of time. . .
A: This was about 20 years after it happened. . . I just wrote and wrote these “agitations” and I thought I had this second book. So, I had these two manuscripts and about five years later, I realized that these needed to be together. But anyway, it was a slow process to put them together and then to sequence them. It took me another three years to figure out that there was a burgeoning narrative in the book; that the arc of the book could be a narrative. The whole process of the book was very slow.
N: And in the meantime, you got married and had kids. . .
A: Yes! In the meantime: 2008 I got married; 2009 I had a kid; 2010 I had another kid.
N: Can we tell everyone that you met your husband at Yaddo?
A: Yes, I met Chris Forhan, poet and memoirist, at Yaddo while I was working on my “agitations” and I even shared some of them with him, and he found them quite strong and gave me a lot of great critique for them and helped me immeasurably in terms of sequencing them. I think we all need help a lot of help in shaping and sequencing our books and making them beautiful and crafted. We all need those extra eyes, and he has very, very fine eyes for this type of work. So, I am very grateful for him and for my times at Yaddo, which helped me write these poems. I know I needed to write these poems; there was an urgency in writing these and an inevitability about these poems happening.
So then I did what everyone does: I sent the manuscript to various contests and publishers, and I got lots and lots of warm, positive attention. The book was a finalist and semifinalist at various contests, etc, which was good because I realized people were understanding that this was a book that was worthy of being published, but I was frustrated because no one was saying what was missing from it. So I started thinking more about the subject matter more of the book; I had been tentative about it. I wasn’t really thinking about the subject matter so much until one editor suggested moving a particular poem to the front, and then I realized, “Whoa. That poem has been hiding. I have been hiding.” A lot of the process of writing the poems and sequencing for the book had to do with concealing and revealing. And we know that every poem does that anyway, there is a level of disclosure . . . the trick is understanding the balance in that, so that we still feel what is inexpressible through words can be felt through space and juxtapositions of things. Also, when are we burying the heart? When are we like, presenting the heart as a complex, faceted thing? All of that was kind of difficult and challenging and rewarding, but I have to say that as I kept revealing and uncovering the narrative, I started to feel more vulnerable, and I started really second guessing the poems and myself and everything and I started to be able to . . . feel.
N: Yeah, so one of my other questions is related to that, but I guess we need to go back and wrap up the creation story-
A: -because it’s still not done! (laughter) So, on to the last part of the creation story: Alice James took the book and I was so happy; I adore Carey Salerno. She has an amazing vision and the Alice James books are getting better and better because of her shrewdness and wisdom and support and tenderness.
And after the book was accepted, I had a two week fellowship at MacDowell and there I was, puttering along on my typewriter, and I started writing about the assault and I was wondering, What is this doing here? I thought I was done writing about this! So, what do I do? I followed the pull of the language, and I ended up writing this long poem that actually ended up being a central, important poem in the book: the “P. S. Assault” poem. And I showed the poem to Carey and asked her if she thought we should include it in the book, and she said “Absolutely.” And that was such a gift, and also what a gift it was to have that time and space, that she wasn’t publishing the book immediately. What’s most compelling to me about my own creation story is the fact of time.
Poets are still civilians and we rush around and we have jobs and responsibilities, but you cannot rush the things are that most beautiful and valuable. We need to spend more time and honor ourselves and others by spending more time writing and reading. It’s just incredible that I had all these opportunities and eventually-
N: -things just came together. So, one of the things that poets talk about is that in order to write quality poetry, we must ‘risk’ something, whether it be style or substance, but how much of a factor do you feel risk is in creating good poetry? What is risk to you?
A: That’s such a great question-
N: It’s very hard to define.
A: It is! It is. I often say that to my students, you know, “take an emotional risk. . . ”
N: I think when I was in school, I always heard that, but I had no idea what it meant. I think I kind of do now, now that I feel I am taking some risk in my work, but it is still very hard to define.
A: Yes, we’re not going to be able to come up with a precise definition, but let’s come up with a working definition right now. I think risk has something to do with authenticity, with allowing yourself to be absolutely committed to your own vision and your own voice. I think of the Robert Bly quote about opening your body to your own grief. Just being open, open, open and receptive, receptive, receptive and willing, willing, willing to face those things that flood through without judging them or shrinking from them.
When I have taken a risk emotionally or stylistically, I can feel it in my body. I feel wide open. The phrases feel alive and alert, almost like animals and birds and it feels like they came through me, like I wasn’t in charge of anything, really.
N: That’s a really good definition!
A: It’s a beginning of a definition. It’s really hard to teach that, though. How do we cultivate a mind space and an environmental space which permits us or helps us ease into this? And that’s tricky too, because there is no formula for these things.
But I know when I was at Yaddo, I had this whole community of artists around me, all intent on creating something authentic, true, beautiful, etc. And I think even the reverberations of that community are like a womb. It’s like a real protective place to take those kinds of risks.
N: And I think that being drawn to write about something that scares me, it can come out poorly at first. I don’t know how to write about this new stuff, whereas maybe I knew how to write the old way. I know how to write a formula for this certain type of poem that I know I can publish, but writing about something new; it might not come easily, but you still need to do that thing that is drawing you, that is more alive. . . Also, in thinking about writing about certain subject matters, sometimes I really worry about the audience and how it’s going to be received because I just don’t know what I’m doing, and it’s very difficult subject matter!
A: You just have to sink deeply in yourself and it has to be coming from your experience, coming from your vision, because if you start thinking about other people, then it’s no longer your poem.
The other thing about the “agitations” story is that I was pacing while I wrote those. I would type a little bit on the laptop, type a little on Gertrude, scribble a little in my journal. It didn’t just all come out peacefully like the meditations, everything was jagged. . .
N: That’s something that is important for people to hear: that it doesn’t always come out in a beautiful, peaceful process. I know there are many poems that I’ve written, that are stronger poems, where I was just crying and a mess while I was writing them. In fact, I’ve written things that have sort of triggered me or sent me into some sort of spiral because they revealed things that I was trying to hide from myself that were painful and upsetting. Sometimes you unearth things that you are subconsciously burying. And unfortunately, often times those poems feel more powerful, or people resonate more with those.
A: Yes, but in terms of crafting the poem, ultimately there’s gotta be a certain objective feeling about it. But initially, we when we are writing our first drafts, we laugh, we cry, we yodel, we bark, I don’t know. . .
But yeah, the risk thing. It almost feels like for me that it’s not gonna be a real poem to me anymore, it’s not gonna be my poem if I’m not feeling that edge in it, that surprise in it. And I can tell, I mean, I’m writing new poems now, and I say “Well, “that’s a perfectly fine poem”, but if it doesn’t have life in it, I say “Where’s the blood here?”
N: It’s like certain poems have a shorter life span. Like I can write a poem that feels like a ‘perfectly fine poem’ but then when I go back to read it later after a couple of days, I think, “Oh, that’s kind of boring,” and I don’t feel like working on it or tinkering with it. The ones that have a lot of life in them, you constantly want to be working on.
A: Yes, the poems that have a lot of energy and risk in them, I literally carry them around in my pockets to continuously work on because I am so excited about them. And those other poems that we were talking about, those ‘perfectly fine poems,’ they help us exercise line making, and music making and image making, but they just don’t have the psychic weight; they’re not full-blooded things.
N: What do you make of the 10,000 hour theory popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, that after we put in 10,000 hours of practice, that we will be experts or we will have mastered our art?
A: Oh, my goodness. I always innately distrust when people say, “You’ve gotta do this thing to get that thing.” I also think that some people just level out, which is a shame because you always want writers to keep evolving and growing. I also think that our bodies change,and if we’re not changing with our bodies, than that means that we’re not changing along with our art.
N: Well, I was just reading about this because of teaching composition classes, and a lot of Gladwell’s readings are taught in these classes, and I was watching videos of Gladwell, and I was just thinking that there is certainly truth in it, that you definitely have to practice, but I don’t know that it’s a formula that you put in a certain number of hours and then you become a genius! haha
A: haha. . . Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice, but I don’t know that I’d want to be a genius.
N: And like you said, even if someone produces a book or work of art that is at a genius level, we all know that they can have a decrease in quality or quit evolving or-
A: -they can come complacent. I guess the point is that writing is a process and it’s a practice, but what if you’re not engaged, and you’re just sitting down and doing your writing every day like-
N: -like a robot!
(laughter)
N: OK, so what’s the best piece of advice that you’ve gotten from a mentor, since you are my mentor. . .
A: Aww . . .
N: I know you studied with Gerald Stern and-
A: -Tom Lux, my beloved Tom Lux. Tom was first teacher at Sarah Lawrence. I think that Tom, his first piece of advice was just: read, read, read everything and anything. That was really his biggest piece of advice that I took to heart. And Gerry, Gerald Stern once said to me, “You have all this lightning and you need to find a way to ground it.” And I think I’ve spent my whole life as a poet trying to figure out how to ground myself.
N: Wow! That’s such an interesting piece of advice and such a powerful metaphor!
A: It is, isn’t it? It’s beautiful. I think that over the years, every time I think of that, I think it means something different, or I take it in a different way. When I was younger, I thought that it meant I needed to write more narratively, but then I realized that lyricism is really my heart. And my first poems, when I was a child, were walking through the woods and making up songs, and that’s really what I’m all about. But now I feel that grounding the lightning has more to do with what we were talking about in terms of taking risks.
N: How important to you think it is for poets to have mentors?
A: Well, I think if we are readers, we all have mentors. I am thinking about Emily Dickenson, and her mentors were the people she read. But we all want to be loved, right? And a good mentor, in part, reaffirms us, and helps us nurture ourselves as artists.
N: And I should say too, that maybe not just having mentors, but having relationships with peers and other poets who are friends . . .
A: Yeah, I think we are all having conversations all the time with other poets through our books and also in person with those who are still alive who we can have lemon-ginger tea with. It all depends on the artist as to how important a physical mentor is to them. Plus, some of us aren’t lucky enough to have a good mentor. Or our friends are our mentors. Or our children are our mentors. Or our cats are our mentors.
I think that just by virtue of writing a poem, even if you live in a cave in a hill, you are still part of the poetic discussion and you are still receiving mentorship from the people you read and you’re are still a part of the community or communion with other writers.
It’s an intimate act. I’m thinking of Ocean Vuong. He was visiting Butler recently, and talked about how he started writing poems as postcards to friends, and he said that writing poems is an intimate act between writer and reader.
N: I was going to ask you about revision because I don’t really like revising, and I always want to just write new poems. . .
A: Well, I am going to say three things in response to that: one is that if you’re feeling that, you’re probably not ready to revise those poems and another is that the writing of the new poems is the revision and lastly, you’re rushing it.
N: What is your revision process like?
A: It’s a mess! When I want to have communion with words, when I want to write, I have about five different folders, and for no other reason than that all the things I have won’t fit into one. So, I just rummage through the things and look around and find something that catches fire for me, and if I find something that I want to work on, it’s a physical feeling in my body. And then I’ll go back in, and it can be really great or frustrating because I might have misperceived that I’m ready to do it, and if I start doing bad stuff to it, I just stop. It’s a very intuitive process for me. Nearly every aspect of writing poetry has a large degree of intuition involved.
N: From what I know about you, you could just look in your book Daylily right now, and start revising. . .
A: Yeah, yeah. Mostly, it’s just taking words out.
N: Well, we’ve been talking for awhile, and I just a have a couple questions left. Is there a question that you wish someone would ask you about your book?
A: You have really great questions! That’s a good question.
N: Well, I stole that. I don’t remember from who. I think it was from Kaveh (Akbar)!
A: Well, I guess we all want our poems to reach people, to enrich them, to move, to help, and for this particular book-
N: You have a lovely dedication in this book “For the survivors.”
A: Yes, I just want this book to be able to help someone; that’s my biggest hope for the book. It feels very important to me that it helps someone else.
N: Yes. I’m sure that it is helping people right now who are reading it.
OK, now we have to go to my kind-of silly questions. You were raised in New York, but you’ve lived Indianapolis for 9 years. Do you feel like an Indianapolis resident?
A: Well, since I wasn’t raised here, I don’t know what that means. And also, aren’t there different kinds of Indianapolis residents? We’re near Broad Ripple, which feels like-
N: Do you feel Broad-Ripple-ian?
A: Well, even when I lived in New York, I didn’t feel like a New Yorker. I just feel that wherever I live, I don’t feel like I belong to a place. Sometimes the New Yorker seeps out, and I feel myself exhibiting that stereotypical New Yorker, like what people see on TV. So sometimes I feel like more of a New Yorker since living here.
I always feel I’m more like milkweed, rather than being defined by a state or a place.
N: I just wondered if you feel grounded to this place? Has your lightning grounded itself in Indianapolis? Because I’ve been here for like 13 years and especially since I’ve had kids, I just feel like this is my place now, I feel more connected here, like Indianapolis is my city.
A: Yes, because of the children. I think the children help me root to this place, and also my gardening, as well as trees and birds-a lot of the Indianapolis birds help me to root to this place. Let me tell you a story-
The other day, I was on Butler campus; it was about 6 o’clock and I heard an owl. So I just stood there and looked up into the tree and I heard the owls calling back and forth with another owl and then I heard this little bird skittering away, and then this enormous owl opened it’s gorgeous wings, and chased the little bird right in front of me. And speaking of electricity, my whole body felt electric.
N: Wow. I almost feel like you conjured that experience by having that owl poem as the last poem in your book-
A: Yes! And the story doesn’t end there. I was having workshop the other night, and I was telling my students about the owl story and I was making the owl noise- hoo-hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo-hoo. And then one of my students said, “Look!” And right outside the window was a hawk. And he was looking at me, thinking, “You’re no owl.” And the whole class was transfixed.
Maybe this is a good place to end this interview. Maybe the next book will have a hawk in it!
N: Thank you so much!
A: Thank you so much. I just feel that what you’re doing for the poetry world in Indianapolis and the greater poetry world, and your own work is so gorgeous and you’re just being an excellent poetry citizen. . .
N: Thank you so much. You are too kind!
Monday, July 21, 2014
The Poet on the Poem: Alessandra Lynch
I am pleased to feature Alessandra Lynch in The Poet on the Poem. I found her poem, "Magnolia," in 32 Poems and was immediately captivated by it. I then tracked down the poet and she generously agreed to participate in the following Q&A.
Alessandra Lynch is the author of two collections of poetry: Sails the Wind Left Behind, winner of Alice James Books’ New York/New England prize, and It was a terrible cloud at twilight, winner of Pleiades Press’ Lena-Miles Wever Todd Award, judged by James Richardson. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell, and she was a recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous poetry journals, including The American Poetry Review, Blackbird, The Cortland Review, Crazyhorse, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Volt. She teaches in the undergraduate and MFA programs at Butler University and lives near an Indianapolisian canal with her husband poet, Chris Forhan, and their two sons, Milo and Oliver.
Alessandra's most recent poetry book is It was a terrible cloud at twilight.
http://www.amazon.com/Terrible-Twilight-Lena-Miles-Poetry-Series/dp/0807133469/ref=pd_rhf_dp_p_d_2
Click Cover for Amazon
Magnolia
A wedding broke out in the magnolia—
fever of white gloves, distressed wind.
The bells hung upside down. They’d choked
on their own tongues.
Hung too, on unspeaking terms
with the air, I acknowledged the impasse--
I wore a dress of paralysis.
Then all her little white dresses lifted as one—
as though on signal—a four year old
girl tilting up her own dress in the living room, opening up
like an umbrella to her mother’s lover, her face, god I can’t
even imagine it, sweet and cold, methodical, desperate,
trying to woo him—.
Maybe I don’t want
a voice at all. All this mouthing in the magnolia--
thin cries
—too delicate
to tend.
I think of a sea and its glistening foams and cascades hundreds of miles off
and its whales’ limbic thudding through water, their intelligent eyes
bright with salt.
Rushed wind…
White rushing petals…
the ransacked
air.
DS: What ignited this poem? How did you get from the tree to the opening metaphor?
AL: When I write poetry, I work associatively (and swiftly)—through image and sound. I never know what will arise from my tapping into language and tinkering with images. I read every draft obsessively to heed the music. I never analyze what I’m doing until the very “last” drafts, or until someone asks me to analyze my work (a la Blogalicious!—I’ve learned much about my own poem through your questions). In this way, I feel I can trust that what appears on the page is coming from a deeper, more surprising place—the realm of poetry—than what my conscious mind alone might conjure.
Living just outside my bedroom window, there is a magnolia tree that blooms yearly—roughly five days’ worth of luminous white blossoms (at times they appear to be floating on air, detached from the branches). It grows so close to my window that it seems to be pressing into the room. Its leaves are dark green and shiny. I have had intimate views of yellow finches among its branches. One year, a robin built her nest in it, and I watched her fledglings hatch there. Magnolias have been around since the time of the dinosaurs and zillions of years before bees!
This magnolia is a tree I adore, a tree I turn to when I am despondent, a tree I marvel over for its leaves’ depth of glossy green, its supple blossoms’ ghostly glow. One day, I began marveling over how the blossoms looked like thin white gloves, the whole tree like a wedding party or a bride of sorts—hence, the “wedding” metaphor in the poem. I felt distress in the tree, too, for a number of possible reasons: the wind was harrying them, magnolia blossoms last briefly, and my associations with “wedding” are based mainly on my experience as a child of my parents’ harrowing divorce.
The verb “broke out” and the “fever of white gloves” suggest contagion and agitation. The bells image furthers the wedding motif, and bells “hung upside down” echoes the shape of blossoms; but these are bells that can’t express themselves, muted by their own nature. The magnolia has no voice or mode of “self-expression,” other than the quick change of blossoms to leaves to stark branches. The bells “choking on their tongues” could lead associatively to the speaker’s poor relationship with life or air—the essential element in the world that keeps us alive and enables us to speak. “The impasse” then has to do with lack of communication or blocked communication as in the bells and the speaker. This “impasse” is further embodied by the sibilant sequence—it underscores the “impasse” by keeping the reader stuck in that one hissing sound (perhaps spawned by the word “unspeaking”).
I think now of Robert Lowell’s marriage poem “Man and Wife” (pointing directly to problems in a marriage) and Gerald Stern’s “Magnolia,” in which there is a rather makeshift wedding depicted (“two tin buckets / of blossoms waiting for us”). I don’t know if those other poets’ poems rose through my blood on that day of looking, or maybe the magnolia tree inherently inspires such a connection to weddings or marriages—the blast of rich, voluptuous white, the heartbreakingly short-lived blossoms.
DL: I’m intrigued by your metaphor, “I wore a dress of paralysis.” Tell us about this metaphor and the surprising shift from the dress to the four-year-old girl and then to the whales.
AL: Perhaps “dress of paralysis” arose from the initial wedding metaphor—with its “white gloves,” but it also embodies the speaker’s inability to express, to break out of the “impasse” and to move words and/or life forth…. Still, it is a dress, and the implication could be that there is a vital, active life/female body encased by that dress. Perhaps this type of dress is a protective one. Don your “dress of paralysis” and you don’t have to speak and make yourself vulnerable. I believe that often we remain silent out of some kind of terror. I also think of how immobile trees can appear to be—almost paralyzed—when actually they are constantly in motion.
“All her little white dresses lifted as one” could bespeak magnolia petals upwardly blowing, opening a space or door into memory, expressing some kind of vulnerability—I feel the line as mysterious and ghostly. This line might have been triggered by “I wore a dress of paralysis” not only through the dress-image association but also through the psychological effect of an insight opening a door. This part of the poem becomes rather “chunky” typographically as there is an “opening up” or confessional quality to the language. That scene of the little girl flirting with her mother’s lover (the earlier “distressed wind” being part of the wedding could connect to this scene), and the various, complicated expressions on her face in the doing, ignite the speaker’s own desperation about voicing herself, which possibly opens her up to pain. Vulnerability is intrinsic to self-expression. The girl’s “tilting up her own dress” is a voiceless communication, a plea borne of a complex situation having to do with need and confusion…
The statement of not wanting “a voice at all” feels as though it solidifies a nascent theme of disconnection in this poem. Another nascent theme is surrender—surrender both as giving up and as releasing (uttering). “All this mouthing in the magnolia” could allude to the various metaphors speaking throughout the poem, as well as the blossoms and leaves of the tree which, to this writer, are some of the tree’s “mouths.”
The shift in the poem to the sea and its “glistening foams and cascades” is the speaker’s way of contending with the enormous responsibility and ensuing futility expressed in “too delicate to tend.” Thus, the speaker-poet adjusts her focus to the sea—a new association she has with the magnolia blossoms: the foams and cascades—the realm of whales? The speaker (and reader?) might find respite and comfort at this point in the poem in the beauty and power and distance of the sea and the whales. The enormous undersea beauty might counteract the speaker’s feelings of fracture, might wash away painful memories, but—alas!—the wind lives everywhere—land and sea—and a “rushed wind” makes not only the “foams and cascades” of the sea but also those of the magnolia tree; and here it disrupts this lulling sea-rhapsody, returning the speaker and the poem to the tree and its “fever of white gloves.”
DL: The sounds in your poem are lovely and subtle. For example, in stanza 2, you have “hung” and its repetition, “tongues,” and “unspeaking.” In stanza 3, you have “impasse,” “dress,” and “paralysis.” How deliberate was your use of assonance and consonance?
AL: My first drafts tend to be rife with imagery and music—it’s how my mind works, it’s how I’ve always invoked my poems. There’s nothing particularly deliberate about it—all of it’s unbidden. The music in language is visceral and mysterious and the truest mode of expression I know. All those sound sequences arose as I wrote the initial draft and remained throughout the drafting process. I probably had many other moments of music that weren’t as charged or intrinsic to the piece that I left behind on the cutting room floor (after doffing my hat to the work those lyrical passages helped me do). The music in language leads my mind, and I try my best to follow it and to recognize when the music is intrinsic to the image and to the emotional root of the poem versus when the music is decorative or just music for music’s sake (though, at times, poems need moments of the latter too).
DL: What is the function of your poem’s form? At what point in the drafting did you incorporate the indentations?
AL: Fairly early in the drafting (possibly the second draft), I began indenting (without consciously thinking about why or how—it just helped me feel a certain energy or life on the page). Now I see that I was probably following the feeling of agitation and augmenting the motif of air through the spaces. The indentations could also embody the expansion and contraction of breath in a distressed state or the structure or design of how magnolia blossoms appear on each branch. In earlier drafts, the indentation was more erratic and perhaps a bit melodramatic.
DL: In the closing stanza, with its three quick images, you return to the wind of the first stanza. Why that circling back? What made you decide to put the word “air” on its own line flush to the left margin?
AL: I guess that, ultimately, the speaker-poet did want to tend to the magnolia’s thin cries—on some level, I might have wanted to keep the magnolia and all that it represents alive to the reader. And, in so doing, I continued to give voice to those tongue-choked bells, that speaker in her dress of paralysis, the child who lacked language for all she was experiencing. Maybe the speaker-poet was compelled (however unwittingly) to continue facing the manifestations of her current distress, inasmuch as she swerved off to marvel over the whales. “Their intelligent eyes” could see what she was doing by swerving away from the magnolia! But in swerving, she dropped into the sea, realm of the unconscious, realm of deep inner truths. Maybe those eyes were the catalyst for her to return and confront her own pain and bewilderment again for a truer catharsis.
In terms of the last few breaths of the poem, I kept fiddling with the placement of “air” before deciding to keep it flush to the left margin. I wanted the feeling of “ransacking” to reverberate with all the other elements of the poem before settling on “air”—also, rhythmically, it felt too abrupt to have “air” on the same line as “ransacking”—and there was a sort of abandoned or neglected or stifled feeling I think I conveyed by isolating “air” in its own corner.
Ultimately, my writing process—including decisions about spacing and line breaks—is guided by intuition, certainly not a whole lot of consciousness or deliberation (those I reserve for writing other than poetry). These answers to your questions record notions that either came to me after the fact of writing or half-consciously guided me in the making of “Magnolia.” As Theodore Roethke says, “We think by feeling. What is there to know?”
Readers, please enjoy this recording of Alessandra Lynch reading her poem, "Magnolia."
Posted by Diane Lockward at 7:23 PM
Alessandra Lynch
Round 9
Literature
Lynch, Alessandra
“During my fellowship, every time I wrote, I was surprised by how fluidly and completely the words appeared on the page. It became clear that I had processed much over the decades and that, indeed, this was the right time for me to write this piece.”
Poet Alessandra Lynch’s renewal process was focused on a book she had been writing, tentatively titled Thinning, about the effects of anorexia on her life. The fellowship provided time to draft and research and to see just how much she’d already processed about her personal battle with anorexia. She also traveled to New York City in November of 2015 to interview the psychologist she credits with saving her life nearly three decades ago. Of this experience Lynch says, “She knew how to speak my language and reach through the complex mesh of the psyche, through dream analysis, to find me—someone who seemed all bones then but was somewhat whole after all.”
A painful facet of the process emerged when a friend whose sister died of lifelong anorexia sent Lynch a box of the woman’s journals. “I couldn't bring myself to open the box for several weeks, but when I did I was reminded viscerally of how lonely the life of an anorexic is, how removed. I also gained some insight into why she might have died and why it was I might have survived.” Lynch saw how much of anorexia is the removed sense of self, and “this woman’s absence on the page was chilling.” Yet, in drafting her new manuscript, Lynch found words appeared fluidly, helping her see just how ready she had been to complete this manuscript.
In addition to the book, Lynch created a collaborative dance piece with a Butler University student choreographer with music by a student musician that incorporated her poetry. She noted, “Working with dancers was illuminating and sobering. Many dancers are underweight; many engage in harmful behavior to keep their bodies so. Their relationship with their physical selves is fraught. To witness this firsthand while working on my book has deepened my sense of the importance of this project.” Altogether, the fellowship gave Lynch the catharsis she needed.
Alessandra Lynch is the author of three collections of poetry: Sails the Wind Left Behind (winner of the New York/New England Award from Alice James Books, 2002), It was a terrible cloud at twilight (winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Award, Pleaides/LSU Press, 2008), and Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment (Alice James Books, 2017). She has received fellowships from The Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center, and she has been the recipient of a Barbara Deming Award and a Creative Renewal Fellowship for the Arts from the Indianapolis Council for the Arts. For Stream/Lines, an Indianapolis Waterways Project, Alessandra has served as one of the three poet/curators through Poets’ House. Currently, Alessandra teaches poetry in the undergraduate and graduate programs at Butler University.
Alessandra Lynch is also the author of Sails the Wind Left Behind and It was a terrible cloud at twilight. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, The Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and other literary journals. Alessandra was born on the East River and now lives with her husband and sons by a stony creek, two hackberry trees, and a magnolia trio. She teaches in Butler University’s undergraduate and MFA programs.
Alessandra Lynch
ajlynch1@butler.edu
317-940-9500
Alessandra Lynch is the author of three books of poetry: Daylily Called it a Dangerous Moment (Alice James Books, 2017), Sails the Wind Left Behind (Alice James Books, 2002), and It Was a Terrible Cloud at Twilight (Pleiades/LSU Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, jubilat, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares and The Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. She has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony for the Arts and Yaddo. She teaches at Butler University and lives near an Indianapolisian canal.
Publications
It Was a Terrible Cloud at Twilight, LSU Press
Sails the Wind Left Behind, Alice James Books
Poetry in The American Poetry Review
Poetry in The Virginia Quarterly Review
Poetry in The Cortland Review
Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment
264.20 (May 15, 2017): p34+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment
Alessandra Lynch. Alice James, $15.95 trade paper (100p) ISBN 978-1-938584-65-7
In her harrowing third collection. Lynch (It Was a Terrible Cloud at Twilight) exhibits a steely bravery as she teases out the workings of the ecosystem of trauma. "The way to steady what unsteadied me/ was transformation:/ gash to star, wound to window," Lynch writes, noting how for victims of sexual assault the crime scenes are their own bodies. Such an experience remains a part of them: "It hangs and hangs and hangs--/ not bell, not noose.// A case of walking paralysis." Lynch writes, "There is a way the body weds memory--/ a marriage like that of a planet to light." In several poems she describes a desire to unburden a body of its imprinted experience by willing the self to become "a vanished thing" or "aftersmoke--the eke of light in the marrow." She also records an incident of post-trauma disembodiment: "the girl it happened to crawled out// of my body/ straight into the grass that bordered the lot/ where she lay face-up, a cloth/ doll." As Lynch guides readers through these painful episodes, she retakes ownership of her body, sense of intimacy, and ability to bear witness: "It was not until the body/ floated off, incandescent, weak with want,/ that I thought to move towards it." (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment." Publishers Weekly, 15 May 2017, p. 34+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492435601/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8b92e94a. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492435601
Five women poets: strong new works for language lovers everywhere
Barbara Hoffert
142.3 (Feb. 15, 2017): p93.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Duhamel, Denise. Scald. Univ. of Pittsburgh. (Pitt Poetry). Feb. 2017. 112p. ISBN 9780822964506. pap. $15.95. POETRY
In a spill of language and emotion often contained in the traditional form of the villanelle and pantoum, National Book Critics Circle finalist Duhamel (Blowout) explores women's place in the world as part of nature, history, and culture and forever at sword's edge with men. The first poem in the book's opening section, dedicated to Shulamith Firestone, takes a steely-eyed look at feminism as legacy and inevitability ('"having it both ways,'/ a phrase I hate/ as men always have it both ways"). Later, in a poem on evolution, the line "A woman's real ancestors, not divine but animal" sums up the spirit throughout as we see the animal in the "stellar explosion" of desire, the frank discussion of fornicating (or not), and one fabulous, juicy poem titled "Porn Poem (With Andrea Dworkin)." VERDICT Duhamel's deceptively informational, almost deadpan voice might at first puzzle but soon becomes incantatory, even obsessive. Engaging for a wide range of readers.
Lynch, Alessandra. Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment. Alice James. Jun. 2016. 100p. ISBN 9781938584657. pap. $15.95. POETRY
In hushed language that's forthright, luminous, and never sensational, Lynch (Sails the Wind Left Behind) makes us feel the shock and enduring aftermath of her rape, that awful, violent moment with "mr. anonymous/ who coaxes & spends you & swings you by another name." She revisits that moment again and again, ever freshly, revealing herself as a "moonlit horse," harnessed or with "a knife pressed into her flank," as a wall and shelves as that knife sharply screws. Afterward, she's the "absent-me," with "Memory: like air/1 walk through and/ disappear," finding the most mundane things taking on dark new meaning (panties are "frillishly dizzy" but also a "bandage or wing"), though the world can be a beautiful place, it's rimmed with danger ("bleeding berries on the nettle-hill"). In the end, Lynch learns that she cannot control and cannot forget but attains a half-peace, some redemption. VERDICT Highly recommended.
Matthews, Airea D. Simulacra. Yale Univ. (Younger Poets). Mar. 2017.104p. ISBN 9780300223972. $45; pap. ISBN 9780300223965. $20. POETRY
"Desire is spacious/ Want's in the DNA." And want, which dominates Rona Jaffe winner Matthews's first collection, chosen by Carl Phillips for the "Yale Series of Younger Poets," is a bred-in-the-bone burden that both torments and enlightens. "You are the water and you are very, very thirsty," says one poem tellingly; another proclaims, "Welcome, Dark-Light" as owls screech. But all is not gloomy, for there's manic, witty energy throughout and delight in the play of form and language. The poems range widely, from numerous examples of Anne Sexton texting ("Turn, my hungers," says the first one) to fables about a dentist's wife who offers up her teeth, a mine owner's wife nightly ritualized dinner with her husband, and Want itself coming on as a bad-mannered accoster. The opening poem is titled "Rebel Prelude," and upset-the-apple-cart intentions reverberate throughout. VERDICT Matthews takes risks here and sometimes gets out of line, but this imaginative work will attract anyone who reads poetry seriously.
Parker, Morgan. There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce. Tin House. Feb. 2017.80p. ISBN 9781941040539. pap. $14.95; ebk. ISBN 9781941040546. POETRY
Cheeky and luscious yet ever aching, this collection from Pushcart Prize winner Parker (Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night) uses a tough vernacular to unfold the story of a black woman. She's sybaritic with a reason ("When I drink anything/ out of a martini glass/I feel untouched by/ professional and sexual/rejection"), battles anguish her way ("I could die any minute of depression/I just want to have sex most of the time"), and sees the world measuring her harshly even as she measures herself ("I'm not woman enough for these days"). In her quest, Beyonce serves as touchstone, both dream icon and arguing point (see the title), and it's refreshing to see her entertain possibilities ("Today your open eyes are two fresh buds/ anything could be waiting") as she tiptoes through the "garden of soiled panties." VERDICT Passionate and engaged, honest yet not earnest, this work has the occasional stretched phrase but is highly recommended.
White, Allison Benis. Please Bury Me in This. Four Way. Mar. 2017.72p. ISBN 9781935536833. pap. $15.95. POETRY
Like White's Small Porcelain Head, an ethereal but tough-minded exploration of a friend's suicide that was an LJ Best Poetry Book, this new work confronts mortality in the lucid, meditative strings of sentences that are the hallmark of this excellent writer. In fact, the work is dedicated to her late father and to the four women she knew who took their lives. "I am writing you this letter," she explains, and throughout there's a sense of her trying to understand ("I can only imagine ... death as not thinking"), acknowledging her inadequacy to the task ("these words, their spectacular lack"), yet needing to persist in the face of death's opacity and her own solitude ("we must make meaning to survive"). There is meaning here, even as the poet concedes, "I talk to emptiness"; throughout, one senses the transformative power of writing. VERDICT Poetry has always wrestled with death as both dark lure and terrifying unknown, and White's contribution is heartfelt and true, both deeply personal and embracing.
Barbara Hoffert is Editor, Prepub Alert, LJ
Caption: Batting for the best in baseball; reviving du Maurier's legacy; the diversity of Chinese religious life
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hoffert, Barbara. "Five women poets: strong new works for language lovers everywhere." Library Journal, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 93. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A481649134/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f06f3dd5. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481649134
Sails the Wind Left Behind
Susan Conley
29.1 (Spring 2003): p205.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 Ploughshares, Inc.
http://www.pshares.org/
Sails the Wind Left Behind, poems by Alessandra Lynch (Alice James): These poems do the remarkable job of making contemporary American poetry feel new again. Lynch takes risks at every turn, trying out new shapes in the mouth, flirting with narrative. A story of longing and desire gets told, but entirely on Lynch's terms--shrouded in mystery and the surreal: "I ate the coal-fault and splurged on split diamonds; // I swallowed thick pride--the lion's mane still twitching ..." Lynch's success lies in how inviting these poems are, even as they disrupt the balance between lyric and narrative, symbolism and realism: "hoarse flash / sooted satin // of crows, she is aiming to be // the brownest throat of forsythia ..." One of the many wonders of this book is how it simultaneously transcends the everyday and also grounds us. At their best, these poems invite us inside and entrance with breathtaking flights of imagination. The poems operate at dizzying heights, and Lynch is so good she convinces the reader to climb just as high.
Conley, Susan
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Conley, Susan. "Sails the Wind Left Behind." Ploughshares, vol. 29, no. 1, 2003, p. 205. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A101261235/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=77f2858e. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A101261235
May 30, 2009
IT WAS A TERRIBLE CLOUD AT TWILIGHT by Alessandra Lynch
Review by Kristina Marie Darling
IT WAS A TERRIBLE CLOUD AT TWILIGHT
by Alessandra Lynch
LSU Press
Building 3005
8000 GSRI Road
Baton Rouge, LA 70820
ISBN 978-0-8071-3346-0
2008, 73pp., $16.95
www.lsu.edu/lsupress
In her second book of poems, It was a terrible cloud at twilight, Alessandra Lynch offers readers a complex understanding of childhood, in which misfortune and loss often prompt a premature transition to adulthood. Filled with barren landscapes and abandoned playgrounds, the works in this collection frequently reframe narratives like fairy tales from a mature perspective, suggesting that even the most innocent phases in one’s life can become riddled with tragedy. Eloquently conveyed through her pairing of the philosophical with the everyday, Lynch’s poetry raises fascinating questions about the place of grief in everyday life, “brooding” and “glittering” all the while.
Throughout the book, Lynch continually revisits the transition from youth to adulthood, in which she depicts a burgeoning consciousness of the possibility of loss. Frequently conveying this theme through imagery of the natural world, Lynch gracefully mirrors her speakers’ internal conflicts and realizations in descriptions of the landscapes that surround them. By situating disenchanted narrators in desolate fields and dim houses, the poems in this collection create fascinating tensions between interior and exterior, a theme that recurs as the book unfolds. These ideas are exemplified by a poem in the collection entitled “Nostalgia,” in which an adult speaker’s idealized vision of youth is conveyed through descriptions of her surroundings. Lynch writes, for example, in this poem:
The dark kicks up
its shimmer. Remember
when catch & fish
was a sentence,
glimmer took precedence
over lake
& burnish defied
the dull
skull, surpassing sheer bone? (23)
In this passage, the adult speaker expresses nostalgia for a more innocent time in her life, and, in doing so, renders the landscape she inhabited in a similarly wistful fashion. While recalling a time when “burnish defied/the dull/skull, surpassing sheer bone,” and tragedy remained a distant prospect, her surroundings take on a similarly picturesque quality. Particularly apparent in phrases like “glimmer took precedence/over lake” and “dark kicks up/its shimmer,” Lynch depicts both the scenery and the character’s psyche as being yet untouched by life, a quality that her speaker tries and fails to recapture. “Nostalgia,” like many other poems in the collection, depicts maturation from childhood to adulthood in an uncompromising and lyric manner, which often lends it itself to multiple readings.
Along these lines, Lynch renders children’s stories and fairy tales in a similar way, often reframing such narratives to mirror the changes in her speaker’s worldview, particularly those that have taken place since early youth. In doing so, the poems in It was a terrible cloud at twilight reveal such childhood memories as being riddled with incipient sorrow and looming tragedies. Particularly apparent in a piece entitled “Hanged Doll,” Lynch frequently suggests that although surrounded by dark omens, one often fails to recognize them, especially in the innocent mindset of early life. She writes, for example, in the piece:
…Memory working
this way—a sun-masked cloud, a night bird, then the sky rising
through black dawn in mist. You yours elf hung over
the white bed where you could glimpse
her human hair, the yellow stitch of mouth propped
in smile, the brown eyes jammed open, perpetually
almost pleading… (15)
As in other poems within the collection, the poem invokes landscape as a means by which to convey its speaker’s more mature worldview, in which she looks back on childhood as a state of blissful oblivion to the misfortunes inherent in adult life. Particularly apparent in her description of the children playing amidst the imposing “black dawn in mist” and an ominous “sun-masked cloud,” Lynch creates tension between the children’s idealistic outlook and the threatening environment that surrounds them. By doing so, “Hanged Doll” presents a dark and particularly complex picture of childhood, in which grief looms like a “night bird” above one’s idyllic present-day life.
In conveying these themes, the poems in It was a terrible cloud at twilight often retain a redemptive quality, in which such tragedy within and around the narrator gives way to self-knowledge and discovery. As with other themes in the collection, Lynch often conveys these realizations by projecting them onto the speaker’s surroundings, gracefully merging interior and exterior. Especially noteworthy in such poems as “Envoy,” the final work in the collection, Lynch gracefully uses everyday imagery to convey profound moments in its speaker’s inner lives. She writes, for example, in this piece:
…You were predisposed to silence then
and climbed its sheer side and walked through the gravel, through
the glass door where the dark room waited
and all the errors in your life finally curled
around you, at your feet, their bristles flat,
their eyes gold with forgiveness. (71)
By including such passages in this collection, Alessandra Lynch suggests that although a loss of innocence is often inherent in gaining maturity and wisdom, these qualities often give way to a greater understanding of one’s self and surroundings. In “Envoy,” the poet conveys this change in worldview through the “eyes gold with forgiveness” in the otherwise dark room, suggesting that even in this tragic landscape, redemption remains an ever-present possibility. As in many other poems in Lynch’s debut, this work presents a multifaceted vision of loss, youth, and maturity, proving “shimmering” and “sublime” throughout.
All points considered, Alessandra Lynch’s It was a terrible cloud at twilight is a finely crafted and meditative read. Highly recommended.
Review: DAYLILY CALLED IT A DANGEROUS MOMENT by Alessandra Lynch
Author: Guest Reviewer | Posted in Book Reviews, Poetry
Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment
Alessandra Lynch
Alice James Books; June 13, 2017
100 pp; $15.95
Buy: paperback
Reviewed by Sarah Ehrich
When the body wishes to speak, she will…
—Linda Hogan, “When the Body”
Alessandra Lynch’s third poetry collection, Daylily Called it a Dangerous Moment, opens with three imperatives: “Close, door. Close, petal. Human eye, you close too.” At first, this gesture reads like an ending. Subsequent poems, however, reveal these closings as a response to trauma. Following this line is the central dialectic of Lynch’s powerful book: “What more to wrestle? What else to woo?”
Pretty soon, we learn the speaker was raped in the parking lot of a bar. The image of human eyes closing suggests a desire to shut out the aftermath of fear, doubt, shame; to forget. But forgetfulness appears in the introductory lyric as “leav[ing] doors and windows open” through which pollen-druff and beetle husks, and “more gorgeous telegrams” enter. Not to mention, “The dead bits fighting in the wind drift in.” The survivor doesn’t have control over her own memory and forgetfulness—telegrams arrive, the memory persists, but it is also diffuse and thus seems impossible to pin down.
Lynch’s radiant lyricism throughout the collection expresses the post-traumatic tension of persistent remembering and forgetting. The diffuse, dead bits circulate between words through the correspondences of their sounds: us and dust, druff and husk; mud and blood, skin and him. Another: “worlds without hunting, only haunting.” So many resonant poems in this book come at angle: “Like air: memory/ Memory: like air/ I walk through and/ disappear.”
Arranged in eight sections beginning with “Excavation,” it is clear early on, that though alluring, forgetting impedes recovery. An initial, resonant image is a bone: “Let it dry—let it dry in the ditch—/ a roadside bone—innocuous./ Still, hard to reckon with.” The mesmerizing slant rhymes at once lull and discomfit—as ignoring trauma might. Hard to reckon with, the assault reappears in everyday objects—a wall is “flat as a hand pressed over a mouth” and “the gleaming nail in the door is his unseeing eye.” The open eyes see trauma everywhere. The body wishes to speak, and she will.
Still, while Lynch speaks in this collection, often explicitly about the rape, many of her poems deal with a survivor’s struggle to tell the story:
I gave voice
to what deadened the fieldwhat ended its green
said the word assault, prettier than r___.
And later in the same section:
How had he gotten me down? Had he seized
my arm or waist… I don’t remember the least.
The difficulty of remembering and the desire to use “prettier” words raises important realities about how rape victims bear witness. More than one poem comments on the internal struggle around naming: “Rape felt stripped. And spare. Brute.” As much or even more than the speaker doesn’t want to utter the word, it is easy to imagine many listeners don’t want to hear it. The most direct poems in the book are, indeed, brute. In a section titled “Another Country,” in which Lynch alludes to broader violence suffered by women and girls, the poem “clit” begins: “Someone got her clit cut/ Someone blindered her/ led her into the pit/ to keep her clit unlit.” In another poem from that section, “frida says (a translation),” Lynch writes:
you have said you won’t love me without
my woman power—what protects—my veil
i say: my burden—what strangles—dead tendrils
of pleasingpleasingappeasing.
Read as poetry of witness, the collection is illuminating, for trauma survivors and for those willing to behold its aftermath. Not judged by accuracy of memory, of factual truth, poetry becomes the empowered speaker that can offer testimony unwelcomed in important settings: in courtrooms and doctor’s offices; even in kitchens and living rooms. A poem can be uncertain, lyrical, or brute; it can use metaphor and music and line breaks to name its subject. Lynch uses all of these poetic modes.
In the beginning of the middle section, the speaker finds a branch that “has lost its trunk, leaving a leafy wake.” She drags it in circles, “nearly convincing [herself] recursiveness is flight.” The poems read exactly like this image: circular and obsessive. Yet, their lack of flight makes them powerful. Approached as witness, the poems do not transcend trauma, but “transmember” it. As Carolyn Forché describes this process: “one is always attending to the metamorphoses: the nausea and psychic ruin of trauma moving into wisdom and strength, again and again.”
Again and again, Lynch opens her eyes, and ours. Ultimately, she depicts rape not as something recovered from, but something that is transformed and lived with. In the final image of the book, she describes a quiet owl:
…It is a signal—
wanting me to know that it has never left, will
never leave—not when I step into other rooms, not
when I edge closer, not even when it vanishes.