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Fletcher Williams III
December 15, 2011
Salita Bryant
Bryant discusses poetry and why people misunderstand it. She also recites “Strawberry Time,” a poem about 12 year old Hannah Ocuish who was executed for the murder of 6 year old Eunice Bolles, who had told on Hannah for stealing berries. Read her poems here: Rain on a Strange Roof and Strawberry Times. You can also read the interview.
November 16, 2011
Q&A with poet Salita Bryant
November 16, 2011
1.What’s a poem?
I talked about this on the audio. I also saved this question for last because it is in some ways the hardest….so I am tempted to write: how much time do you have? There are longer answers and some of what I think is below, but I’ll just stick with Emerson and his idea that poets capture the language of the universe, the language that was written before time.
2.Why are people still pursuing MFAs in poetry?
Because their lives would not be complete without the time and space to write. It’s more about that really than the degree. If there is anything else you can do, do it instead. An MFA, in anything just about, is about time and one should really only do if they simply have to. like they have no other choice
3. Does your revision process change depending on the genre you’re working on?
No, not really.
4. How much of revising is improving what you’ve written and how much of it is rewriting because you’re bored with what you’ve been rereading?
I’m not sure I ever revise because I am bored with a piece. If a poem has been hanging around for a while and I am bored with it I can be pretty sure readers or listeners are going to be bored with it too. Those are the poems I really take a hatchet to. I usually try to decide what it is I originally wanted the reader to get out of the poem and then see if I am actually saying it. Sometimes I am skirting an issue I don’t want to write about so the poem falls flat because of its attempt to hide its humanness (or mine). Usually though, if I am bored with a poem it’s because it isn’t actually strong, but I won’t move forward with it or trash it because there are some lines or words I’m in love with. If that’s the case, I pull them out and toss the rest. Then I either store those images/lines, or I start something new with them that is truer. As Faulkner said about revision, “sometimes you have to kill your darlings.” I might be in love with a word, a line, or an image, but if it is not serving the poem, like it or not, I have to take the knife to it.
5. How do you know a poem is done?
I revise and revise, hone and hone until I can hear a poem sort of hum—then I know it’s done. Some take a lot, some take a little. Weird sort of thing, but a poem will generally let you know when it is either done or dead in the water. Revising is like kneading bread dough. Too little and bread falls flat to much and bread is too hard because you’ve broken it down too much, worked at it too long. When you have a poem you know will be really good if you can just figure out what it is you are trying to do, but you don’t, or can’t know yet what that is yet, one of the hardest things to do is to just leave it alone for a while.
6. What has reading William Faulkner’s fiction taught you about writing poetry?
Something about letting go, about fearlessness, that I’m not really sure I can articulate yet. He works on my mind in the same way Neruda and Rumi do.
7. How many times have you read As I Lay Dying?
Maybe 30 or so times. I want to reread it right now, but I have other things I have to read. Every time I read it, I find some subtly, some shading, I hadn’t seen before.
8. James Franco has been quoted as saying that he’s working on a film adaptation of As I Lay Dying. Is this possible?
Do you mean is it possible to shoot a film from a book where so much of the book’s narrative structure depends on the internal thoughts of 15 different (and generally unreliable) characters? Difficult, but possible. Or do you mean it is possible that James Franco is actually doing so? I had to look him up, so apparently yes, but I do not think it is actually in production. He has also tossed out the idea of adapting Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Child of God. Another novel I love, and another which would also be extremely hard to film.
9. Faulkner is known for his mastery for narrating in different vernaculars and yet sometimes we hear the author in the voice of his characters. One example is when Vardaman, a boy, narrates, “It is as though the dark resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components — snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, and is different from my is.”
How is it that Faulkner gets away with this without losing credibility or the reader?
I know what you mean about the authorial intrusion, but I’m not sure that is what is going on here. My personal belief is that what we are hearing is often the speaker themselves, but often, as in this case, we are hearing their non-conscious self. I think Faulkner gets away with putting such mature language and incisive insight into the head of a wildly traumatized 10-year-old because it is what Vardaman is thinking, but doesn’t know he is thinking—it is, I think, as psychoanalyst and philosopher Christopher Bollas would say, an “unthought known.” Vardaman himself is not even consciously privy to most of this information. I feel like Faulkner is managing to capture what the person feels like—in all its layered complexity—in a way a purely aware stream of conscious internal dialogue would never be able to do. It is one of the things I love about this novel. It is beautiful to be able to articulate feeling in this way—I think poetry does this too. I think on some level a poem that is humming in the way it should will resonate with the non-consciousness of a reader—they will feel something for which there is no direct or obvious cause. We feel this in the same way we feel someone looking at us before we see them, or how the hair stands up on our arms well before we consciously see the thing that frightens us.
10. In the preface to Addie Bundren is Dead you give brief backgrounds of the narrators in As I Lay Dying but go into detail when you describe Darl. Since Darl is the thread that holds the novel together, and the most objective of all the narrators, doesn’t this also make him the most contrived?
The most contrived for me or for Faulkner? I go into detail in the introduction about Darl 1) because is really the major “speaker” in the novel, 2) in order to give an example of the sort of relational and intersubjective analysis the poems attempt to do, and 3) because I like him best. I’m not sure if Darl is the most objective. Probably, I can’t decide. He is certainly the most human.
Kevin Carter made a successful transition to civil life after 18 years in behind the bars.
Kevin Carter went to prison in 1993 on a drug charge that he claims he was never responsible for. He served 235 months and came out in 2010 with a 5 year superior release, totaling 240 months of incarceration.
Carter says he spent his 18 years in prison preparing for his release. He read books on subjects ranging from law to real estate. He learned the art of making dentures and became exceptionally good at it. He now works for a dentistry corporation in Saratoga Springs.
Kevin is already planning on buying a truck, and eventually a house. Over the past year he has been collecting furniture and other material to build his nest and plans to eventually return to the dating scene. “This time I’m doing things right.”
He’s also a body builder, and before prison was a high school football coach. He says that exercising regularly and keeping a strict schedule keeps him focused and on track.
Raising the Bar for Inmates
November 15, 2011
Rudy Le Coadic
October 16, 2011
East, West, and Rajive in Between.
October 10, 2011 — 10 Comments
Rajive Anand, 2011
by John Paul Infante
Nabil and I met with visual artist and high school art teacher Rajive Sada Anand in his home in the Bronx. He lives in a three-bedroom apartment- one of these is a studio space for making artwork, but the whole place feels like an artwork. There are paintings on the wall, figurines on the dining room table, and sketches of his upcoming comic book Laserman. There are stacks of books on the ground, one topped with Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried. Once in the dining room I noticed “The Straight Path.” The painting is an explosion of colors, a reflection on Islam. Rajive worked on the piece as an MFA student at the Rutgers Mason Gross School of Art. When he showed the painting to classmates, the other artist thought it a meditation on the heterosexual lifestyle. Rajive tells the story without bitterness but rather a slight disappointment as if it was a misunderstanding between friends.
Rajive leads me and Nabil, editor and photojournalist for Pineapple and Milk, to the living room where there are bookshelves, sculptures and more paintings. There’s no urgency in his voice, a calm that comes off as a façade when he talks about subjects he cares for like comic book illustrator/writer Will Eisner.
He speeds up, “I met him when I was 13 or something.” He stands up and searches through a bookshelf. “I’m in awe. I don’t think that I could ever come close to what he’s done for comic books because he’s such a genius. But I want to. This is my goal.” Rajive continues searching until he finds an Eisner work.
Rajive grew up in the 1970s suburbs of New Jersey. He tells me, “There were no other Indian kids there. There were three Asian-American kids in my school and I was one of them.” He runs his fingers through his hair and lights a cigarette, “the other two kids were named Alex and Noah, so naturally I was acutely aware of my difference from a very young age because my name sounded foreign to the other kids.”
As Rajive speaks on his childhood I can’t help but think of William Khan- the protagonist of his Laserman comic book, who is also Indian-American. Although the creator doesn’t call it a graphic novel, its focus on issues like immigration, Eastern philosophy and attention to story with a multilayered narrative reminds us of the potential in the medium.
William Khan is a young genius with an interest in math and science, who interprets the world through an empirical lens. The plot’s inciting incident is a fire that kills William’s parents and his young brother, making him an orphan. This could be enough in other stories but Rajive complicates things for William and the reader as the fire’s cause exacerbates Khan’s trauma.
After a couple of minutes talking to Rajive, one notices a pattern. His interests and focus all revolve around the merging of east and west. He talks about disciplining students in the Bronx whose world is a “4 block radius.” Then shifts to speaking about teaching at a high school in Bhutan where a student’s poignant question was if he knew Biggie and 2pac. Rajive responded, “I know of them.”
Rajive reflects on the experience in a tone that’s neither frustrated nor inspired. He slows down and says he wasn’t abroad to talk about the east coast and west coast beef, but to expose the relationship between eastern and western cultures.
This same tone emerges when Rajive describes those two other East Asian classmates in 1970s New Jersey.
“Alex had an American father and Filipino mother. Noah had two Korean parents and he stayed by himself and fished all day. He was a recluse. I’m reclusive in certain ways yet very outgoing in other ways. I like to meet people and I’m social and so hiding away wasn’t an option for me it’s never been an option for me. I stand out. And people tend to look.”
Today, Rajive wears shades, hair slicked back, black blazer over a red shirt, blue jeans and shiny shoes. He’s tall and slim and looks to be in his mid twenties but is actually a decade older. He flicks the ashes and takes a drink of Guinness.
“That’s part of the reason I have all these tattoos. If people are going to look I might as well give them something to look at. I’m an image maker and the images that I project on my body are part of my whole… philosophy. Let’s put it that way.”
Rajive has sold his art works to buyers in the states and abroad but his present endeavor is Laserman. Rajive describes the protagonist, William Khan, as the “the first Indian-American Super hero.” He copyrighted the Laserman in 1985 at the age of 12, but in his in adolescence, the world wasn’t ready for a “brown-super hero.”
Rajive is a fan of Marvel and DC comics but is ambivalent about the Latino and Black Spiderman. Rajive hopes William Khan will have a broader audience than just the stereotypical, multicultural superhero.
“We need a new superhero that will not depend on the tropes of past heroes.”
Paintings
October 10, 2011 — 5 Comments
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Sentient Beings – 2009 – Rajive Sada Anand
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Temptation – 2010 – Rajive Sada Anand
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Alicia – 2010 – Rajive Sada Anand
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Meditation – 2007 – Rajive Sada Anand
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Dragon – 2010 – Rajive Sada Anand
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Scotland – 2008 – Rajive Sada Anand
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Fairy Tale – 2010 – Rajive Sada Anand
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LA GUERRA SUCIA – 2009 – Rajive Sada Anand
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Great Wave – 2009 – Rajive Sada Anand
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- Sentient Beings – 2009 – Rajive Sada Anand
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- Temptation – 2010 – Rajive Sada Anand
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- Alicia – 2010 – Rajive Sada Anand
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- Meditation – 2007 – Rajive Sada Anand
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- Dragon – 2010 – Rajive Sada Anand
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- Scotland – 2008 – Rajive Sada Anand
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- Fairy Tale – 2010 – Rajive Sada Anand
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- LA GUERRA SUCIA – 2009 – Rajive Sada Anand
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- Great Wave – 2009 – Rajive Sada Anand
Laserman – Rajive Anand
October 10, 2011 — 4 Comments
Interview with Rajive Sada Anand
October 10, 2011 — 7 Comments
John Paul: Considering your MFA background and the number of paintings you’ve sold, why a comic book?
Anand: I chose the path of fine art as my artistic career, but I cannot deny the importance and gravity of popular culture and popular images to be a catalyst for change in society. There are so many movies and television shows and images that affect us on a daily basis and sadly, it’s not fine art that does this. It is the popular culture. It is more immediate. It is more pervasive. It floods the universal consciousness with these images and these archetypes that have been reinvented. The superhero is the embodiment of our modern mythology.
So people don’t look for the same things anymore. They don’t look for the ancient symbols but they feel the ancient symbols through our modern interpretation.”
John Paul: They also don’t read the same way anymore. Can you see your comic books or works of art on a kindle or online?
Anand: I like holding a book in my hand but this is the 21st Century – Times are changing and people carry kindles and iPads. People don’t carry books around. It’s a different experience and I’m trying to navigate this new media and to bring the feeling of an original work of art to the masses in a digital form. And that is a real challenge today. I think it’s a major challenge that the fine artist faces.
I mean; you go to see a Picasso painting in a museum, and you know it’s a Picasso. It’s the one and only and it’s there’s something cool about that because it’s the only one. But the world has moved beyond Picasso. There has to be some kind of reincarnation; some kind of re-invigoration in the way we see things. And that’s what artists always try to do. We reinvent archetypes and reinvent ways of expressing the human condition; and that’s my goal. That’s my purpose in life.
John Paul: Is there a fear your work will only be appreciated by other MFA students?
Anand: Oh yeah; well- it’s a definite objective of mine to create something which is accessible. This is somewhat different from my pursuit as a fine artist in the sense that it’s popular art, it’s pop culture, it has to be accessible to people. I think that fine art should blur the line between popular art and high art. I’ve always seen this as a necessity, but a painting can’t do it as easily as a comic book can. And that’s the beauty in this medium, and that’s why I feel like I’ve come full circle- from the time when I was 12 years old until now. I wanted to be a comic book artist when I was a kid. I moved to fine art because I saw the possibility for pure freedom – freedom to create anything I wanted, without the pressure of others’ demands. I saw the freedom in it and that was extremely liberating for me because I could tell my own story. I wasn’t confined by a structure or a character I had not created -it was all mine and that was really important to me.
John Paul: What do you make of the growth and changes happening in India?
Anand: There is a cultural revolution happening there, and I’m not talking about Mao. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about… There’s something new happening and it’s really amazing. They just had the first Comic-Con in Delhi. I was in a hotel in Bangkok and I was just sitting back, watching television. They showed the Comic-Con that was happening. I’ve read Indian comic books and there’s something to behold, there’s something new happening there.
Indian comics are not constrained to the same tropes. It’s like there are certain structures for storytelling, and these Indian comics are not confined by them. When we in America watch a Bollywood movie, it might seem strange to our Western eye. But it sometimes connects to our sensibility on certain levels because it is still a story about the human condition. All people in the world deal with the same emotions, trial and tribulations. And it’s my job to bridge the gap between that foreign mesh, that external thing and things that we’re familiar with. That’s why I do things like this. You can see this mask of Darth Vader that I have made. You are aware of him; you’re familiar with him. But at the same time, in my version, something different is happening. Something has changed about him. It’s like that song by Bob Dylan. There’s something going on here but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones? There’s Batman right there. It’s not a Batman you’ve ever seen but it’s still Batman. And he’s coming at you from a different angle; through a different lens. I have faith in your capability to see in this new way. And that’s my objective- to show you things that maybe you’ve already seen, just in a new way; from a different perspective.