We asked poet Heather Dobbins to share some thoughts on the creative process that went into “River Mouth,” a poem we’re concurrently featuring at The Lascaux Review.

Poems, as opposed to historical or academic literature, have the ability to reach diverse audiences, and better share the communal loves, struggles, and losses of history—those feelings being what make history less distant. Two guiding quotations have remained my touchstones in this theory. One is from Muriel Rukeyser’s The Fear of Poetry: “Poetry is written from these depths; in great poetry you feel a source speaking to another source. And it is deep at these levels that the questions lie. They come up again and again during these years, when under all the surface shouting, there is silence about those things we need to hear.” The other is from Mark Doty’s lecture “Tide of Voices: Why Poetry Matters Now”: “Poetry’s work is to make people real to us through the agency of the voice. ‘Poetry is the human voice,’ I tell them, ‘and we are of interest to one another. Are we not?’”

While defining “elegy” in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Philip Sacks wrote that the Greeks believed us unable to inherit without mourning. Perhaps the most ancient of realization for poets is this: Time and time again, after the lasting loss of death, the talk between poets remains the only significant solace. The biggest lesson I have learned as a poet is that poets make offerings of tribute and reward with their own poems. I love how steeped we are in tradition, so much so that our metaphors are shared like mourning is shared.

I was doing the finishing touches on my first book, In the Low Houses, in which I was primarily interested in the slipping dialectics between dead/living, student/teacher, silence/ars poetica, safety/loss, human body/body of work, and how time and timing dictate my own personal relationships. Focused on and wrapping up my last semester at Bennington’s Graduate Writing Seminars, I had no idea what my next project was, and wasn’t rushing to find it. I was simultaneously teaching full-time and working on my MFA; the prospect of a break was welcome.

But then the Mississippi River had its way with me (and continues to do so). I began River Mouth when Memphis flooded in 2011. Some friends were rushing to protect their school from the Mississippi with sandbags, and I kept wondering why we hadn’t advanced to some other protective mechanism.

I turned to our newspaper, The Memphis Commercial Appeal, to do some research on that very question. I was born in Memphis, and should have known more about the river than I did. My research revealed, sadly, that I was by no means alone: The history was becoming lost. So, I began to seek out those whose lives were governed by the Lower Mississippi River from 1880-1930, the time of my great grandparents (the ones I know only in story). There were only sentences here and there about individuals, but I felt an urgency to heed their words, the ones that needed to be said between the lines of the research.

There, in the stacks in the main library, were broken families most of us no longer consider. They wanted me to know them, having perspective on the river and life that I lacked. I am no historian, and surely sacrifice some facts in service of the music of poetry. Articles and books provided details of settings, superstitions, job specifics, weather conditions, and fires, but the stories and familial connections are fictional. River Mouth is organized into families: deckhand, sharecropper, female ghosts, shanty preacher, and river pilot. It is a body of narrative persona poems. The first ones I wrote were, of course, elegiac, but then the characters wanted to stir mess up. I combined research with my own family stories (my people were sharecroppers before they were farmers; my brother and I are the first generation not to be raised on a farm in Shelby County) to provide the details and language of river life.

Like most, I had taken my Memphis accent for granted; it so often takes me leaving Tennessee to see how wonderful our state is—our tradition and inherent musicality. I am very grateful for audiences and their support of the voice of these poems. This warm interest and connection has been demonstrated at the readings I’ve given for In the Low Houses and River Mouth in California, New York, Ohio, and Missouri. Initially, I had been worried the dialect and location would prove too specific to our region, too distinctive or exclusionary. I could not have been more wrong.

I’ve now heard so many river stories—none of those rivers are as mighty as the Mississippi—but the power and intrigue of these rivers have overlapped. The themes seem to resonate with everyone because, after all, the river is its own life—one that troubles and aids us. It is like a god we plead to, beg, and thank. Above all, the Mississippi is beyond our control. It takes care of us but also takes who we care for away from us.

Poems and poetry reviews by Heather Dobbins have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, CutBank, Raleigh Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology, The Rumpus, and TriQuarterly, among others. Her debut poetry collection, In the Low Houses, was published in March 2014 by Kelsay Press.

It is one of the twentieth century’s most memorable lines of poetry: “We must love one another or die” wrote W.H. Auden in the eighth stanza of “September 1, 1939,” his echo, on the eve of World War II, of “Easter, 1916” by W.B. Yeats.

E.M. Forster said of Auden, “Because he once wrote ‘We must love one another or die’ he can command me to follow him.” The lines were frequently repeated, sometimes in truncated form, in the days following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. They were even taken in vain by Lyndon Johnson during his 1964 presidential campaign against Republican Senator Barry Goldwater. Johnson’s infamous “Daisy” commercial depicts a young girl picking petals from a daisy; she is slowly replaced by the image of a nuclear explosion over which Johnson’s voice is heard saying “We must love each other, or we must die,” an unpoetic rendering of the line that was inserted into a Johnson speech by an unidentified speechwriter.

And yet when the poem was reprinted, four years after it first appeared in The New Republic, Auden chose to delete in its entirety the stanza in which the lines appear. In 1957 he wrote to the critic Laurence Lerner, “Between you and me, I loathe that poem,” and he resolved to omit it from his further collections. The poem was, he thought, too flattering to himself and his friends, with whom he sat “in one of the dives [o]n Fifty-Second Street” as the poem opens.

Finally after a decade he allowed Oscar Williams to include it complete in The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse with the line changed to read “We must love one another and die.” He subsequently allowed the poem to be reprinted only once, in an anthology printed a quarter of a century after it originally appeared in print, with a note stating that he considered it and four other poems “to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.”

There has probably never been a greater disjuncture between a poet and seven words he’d written. What was it that so disturbed Auden about the line after it had flowed from his pen to paper? The thought that by loving each other we could avoid a sort of death in life? Perhaps; since Hitler and the gas chambers followed the “low dishonest decade” that ended as America went to war, it must have struck Auden in retrospect as youthful naiveté to think that love alone was enough to counteract evil.

His revision—“We must love one another and die”—surely states a fact, or at least a probability; everyone will die, and most will know love—merely physical or all-engulfing—before they do so. Still, Auden considered it trash, too easy a formulation. Between the nights of love and death, there is always the tedium and homely stuff of everyday life—a dog scratching its “innocent behind on a tree,” as Auden observed in Musee des Beaux Arts. Love and death, while central themes of Western literature, leave great gaping holes to be filled by long periods of work and sleep and boredom—and poetry.

Con Chapman is the author of The Year of the Gerbil, a history of the 1978 Yankees-Red Sox pennant race, and two novels, Making Partner and CannaCorn. His articles and humor have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, Salon, and elsewhere. He is a frequent contributor to The Boston Herald.

Easy Street was borne of the desire to host discourse, news, and debate about literature and culture in a casual environment. We hope you’ll enjoy what we have in store for you:

To celebrate our launch month, we’re hosting The Great American Sentence Contest. Enter up to 5 sentences and get rich! 5 dollars per word. 10 dollars per word if you give us a shout out in social media. Interested? Click here.

Every Friday we’ll bring you all the literary news we deem fit to print. Our Town Crier collects everything you meant to read and a bunch more you didn’t.

A short work and short interview make up our Take Five feature, a monthly portrait of a poet or writer. This month, we’re excited to host Kathy Fish, most recently the author of Together We Can Bury It.

Wendy Russ is all about that algorithm in her Open Letter to Amazon.

Selfies and poetry? Isabella David McCaffrey uses words and music to pull it all together in “Paul Celan & the Language of the Selfie.”

Stephen Parrish kicks off his column Ritten Werds, invoking a little Herman Wouk.

Camille Griep bitches about Salon’s latest writer-with-a-disconnect piece on “Sponsorship” in her new column Get a Griep.

Not sure what Mercury in Retrograde means for you? Check out our monthly Writer Horoscopes: the only astrological guide a writer needs.

Come for the writing. Stay for the donuts. Or, hey, just come for the donuts. Regardless, we hope your weekly reading will continue to include us here at Easy Street. Because that’s where we’re gonna be.

Or $10 a word, if the contestant includes a link to a social media post promoting the contest.

—James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

*

Submit up to five sentences to easysubmissions@gmail.com, by midnight EST 28 February. They must be your own work. Paste all sentences into the body of the email. Include a link to at least one of your social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, a personal blog, etc.), one that shares the contest by linking to this post. A contestant who includes such a link will be eligible for $10 a word, if she wins. A contestant who doesn’t will be eligible for $5 a word. Then wait patiently while we read the entries. Dream of that trip to Branson.

—Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

*

Does the sentence have to be the first sentence of an actual book?

No, you can just make one up. In fact, if you’re smart, you’ll make another one up, and another, and finish the book, and thank us in the acknowledgements.

What if I write a sentence that goes on and on? Won’t you owe me a lot of money?

Yes, because you’ll certainly win with a run-on sentence. Remember how much your high school creative writing teacher loved them?

Why do we have to do the social media thing? Aren’t we marketing on your behalf?

Indeed. It’s the entire purpose of the contest—to promote our new journal. However, if you’d rather pay a submission fee . . .

No!

Didn’t think so.

Let me get this straight. All we have to do, to be eligible for $10 a word (I like how you always make that bold), is say something like “Hey, check out this Great American Sentence contest!”

Exactly, and thank you for clarifying how simple it is.

I’m not on social media. Whatever shall I do? I put it to you.

Ask a friend to promote it for you. And do something about that tic.

—J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Thank you for your recent email suggesting I purchase my own book The League for the Suppression of Celery.

In the letter you say, “Based on your recent visit, we thought you might be interested in these items.” Indeed, I AM interested in a book I’ve written and you’ve probably astutely deduced this because I go to your site a dozen times a day to see what my Amazon ranking is and then depending on how big or small the number is I either brag to my friends about it or singlehandedly eat a large crab and artichoke pizza with extra cheese while watching re-runs of Desperate Housewives.

I mean, the book is good, yeah, but I’ve already read it. I wrote it. I wrote it and then I rewrote it something like twelve times because I wanted to make sure it was really great.

One of those rewrites was a “redraft,” a process that an author friend of mine suggested I try. “It will be really helpful,” he said. “It will give you a fresh perspective on the work,” he said. Both of those statements were true, but he didn’t mention it would also give me a raging case of carpel tunnel syndrome in one hand and introduce a plethora of new typos that I would have to diligently search out and destroy in subsequent editing sessions.

Unfortunately, I failed to catch one of those typos and it appeared in a few copies of the printed book which made it look like I don’t know the difference between “wear” and “where.” Which I totally do as illustrated by the sentence, “Where is the scarf I want to wear when I accept my Nobel Prize for Literature?” But I’m hoping, like misprinted stamps, those copies will eventually be worth a lot to collectors and sell on eBay for thousands of dollars.

Anyway, after a dozen and a half edits, the book was published! And after it was published I even bought a copy for myself because I wanted to make sure the experience from the consumer side was really good. Because, you know… customer service. I even read THAT copy. Which was cool because when you are on a bus and people ask you what you are reading they are totally impressed when they find out you’re reading a book you’ve authored.

Except they also tell you they’ve “always wanted to be a writer too” and you have to deal with one of these inevitable scenarios: 1) They want you to co-author a book with them loosely based on a memoir they wrote in high school; 2) They want you to write a book about an interesting thing that happened to them that they not only tell you about in agonizing detail, but also swear “it will make a great movie;” or a personal favorite 3) They’ve always wanted to write, but just haven’t found the time.

That last one always gets me because I have a full time job and I’m raising two kids and I volunteer in several local civic organizations. I wrote my novel on an old laptop balanced on a wobbly TV tray that was so tiny there was no room for the mouse, which I balanced on the arm of the sofa. All this took place in the living room with the TV blaring endless hours of SpongeBob Square Pants re-runs so my kids wouldn’t notice and immediately ask me to cook them something which is what usually happens the minute I sit down to write.

(By the way, one of my favorite episodes is the one in which SpongeBob gets all fan-boy over his jellyfishing idol Kevin and stalks him at a jellyfishing convention. For a week my youngest son and I would imitate SpongeBob’s starry-eyed greeting (“Hiiiii, Kevin…”) so frequently that finally he begged me to please stop calling him Kevin. It was a good joke while it lasted, though.)

So, yes Amazon, you are right… I am really interested in this particular book, but sending me the same invitation to purchase it five times in two months is a bit excessive. The first time, I thought it was cute and funny. But after this fifth time it made me start wondering exactly what is going on over there.

Is the problem the mathematicians? Because when it comes to purchasing my own book, I’m really not your target market. I realize they are math people, not marketing specialists, but even I know enough to understand there is probably some kind of magical thing they could do to the algorithm in math-speak to say “if this lady has purchased this book before, don’t send her mail to purchase it again because she probably won’t.” I know they can’t word it exactly like that and the line of code would have a lot of crazy symbols in it and probably an equal sign and/or something in binary maybe? But you get the idea, right?

I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful in this regard, but my experience with mathematics is limited to dating a guy who was a math minor in college and really clever with numbers. Not nearly as clever with relationships, though. Also, his cat would only drink water out of the tap from the bathroom sink and it drove me crazy, because did you know that 783 million people do not have access to clean and safe water?

Thank you for recommending my book to me. I hope you will also consider recommending it to other customers who will undoubtedly be delighted by a “smart, funny and entertaining read” that is “hard to put down at night” according to one of its many Amazon 5-star reviews.

Sincerely,

Wendy Russ

PS. Tell the mathematicians the same customers might also enjoy Spongebob Squarepants.

Wendy Russ is the editor of Easy Street.

A few weeks ago I was having lunch with my friend Fozzy when our conversation turned to the connection between poetry and lyrics. Fozzy—aka professional baritone Matthew Worth—wondered if I, having recently won a poetry prize, would take a stab at writing some song lyrics. Though Fozzy earned his nickname with his dedication to rotten jokes, this was a serious request, one both intriguing and intimidating.

On the way to visit him in West Hartford, I’d in fact been reading about novelist Michael Chabon’s collaborations with musician Mark Ronson. The print piece featured a scrawled-over lyric sheet from their collaboration — a fascinating artifact of narrative-driven writing conforming to the demands of pop music.

I told Fozzy I would think about the idea, and for inspiration he suggested I listen to the works of a young composer named Matthew Aucoin, a “genius” he’d met recently. His recommendation would turn out to be very fortuitous.

One of the first projects Google lists under a search of Aucoin’s name is his Celan Fragments, a musical interpretation of the later poems of the Paul Celan—who is, coincidentally, my favorite poet. Celan’s difficult, beautiful works are filled with cryptic, impenetrable images, and I couldn’t wait to hear how Aucoin would translate the poet’s opaque imagery.

***

“Poetry is impossible after Auschwitz,” is one of those famous misquotes nobody said like, “Play it again, Sam.” Or, “We don’t need no stinking badges.” In this case, the German theorist Theodor Adorno’s words were mangled so often, he eventually clarified, noting, “It may be wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living.”

Paul Celan struggled with the same question, eventually writing “Todesfugue,” an excruciatingly exquisite poem about the death camps. In the end, poetry couldn’t heal Celan, but he did try, as his biographers put it so poetically, “to weave the shawl” and “answer loss with language.” Having evaded the Nazis by chance, eventually Celan could no longer go on, despite attempting, through language, to restore all he had lost: his parents, his son, respect for his work.

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commands us strike up for the dance

Celan’s pain must certainly have been exacerbated by the conflict of writing poetry in the language of his persecutors, not to mention in an already out-of-vogue German Romantic style that his mother had taught him. With these influences, he created an inimitable landscape, challenging for the reader and critic, alike.

I’m no fan of pretentious, incomprehensible poems and, at times, Celan’s work approaches this territory. Even the poet’s editor accused him of being too hermetic—airtight and impenetrable—with overly personal allusions. But Celan vehemently denied the charge. “Absolutely not hermetic,” he testily wrote to a translator he mistrusted.

***

Celan was not the first nor the last poet to be accused of navel-gazing. And within our selfie-obsessed culture, his work is probably more relevant than ever. Celan uniquely showcases the allure of the selfie—a great artist’s capability to make himself his own exclusive subject.

I was introduced to “Todesfuge” as a junior at the University of Virginia. (We UVA “Wahoos” call this a “third year” in our own snobby (and very hermetic) parlance.) My lit theory professor was a tiny, German woman wound as tight as her tiny curls. Celan once described his approach to art using the old German word Enge which translates to: “With art, go into your very self-most straits.” But those self-most straits were not a requirement for my lit theory class at UVA.

The professor disliked me on sight, as if my straits were somehow leaking onto her classroom floor. She presented the poem on a worksheet, tendering its analysis as a simple literary exercise. I don’t remember her Xeroxing other poems, or why we read Celan specifically. I don’t even remember us reading a lot of actual poetry. Instead, we read a lot of work about poems, essays by Barthes and Derida and even Eagleton.

What I recall most about reading “Todesfugue” for the first time was my own embarrassingly sentimental reaction. As Celan described the despised dark-haired “Shulamith,” I couldn’t help but envision the anguish of my own unknown German-speaking Jewish cousins, lost in the mass graves of history. The professor was irritated—preferring her theory, as well as her students, to be served chilled, not room temperature and certainly not with hot tears. She intended for us to deliver a droll, Barthesian unpacking, not spontaneous emotion.

***

It took me years of lit theory recovery to come back to and appreciate Celan, And it was at this second introduction I learned that the complicated “Todesfuge” had been one of his more accessible poems. Taking Celan at his word, he didn’t mean for us to feel excluded. But his intentions aside Still, the most brutal question remains, how are we supposed to personally reconcile his impossible poems? And, is it worth the effort?

At owl’s flight, here,
the conversation, day-grey,
of the water-level traces.

With an interpreter like Aucoin to guide us, I think it’s a country worth visiting, a place of great and memorable beauty. The composer shows us a different way to approach the journey. To be honest, I kind of prefer Aucoin’s version of Celan’s fragments. I have always had trouble embracing these later poems. It’s his earlier, more accessible work that drew me to him in the first place.

Aucoin solves the obfuscation of words by omitting language entirely, in favor of interpretation by piano and violin. The odd, and equally haunting melody—in a near-tonal score—captures the difficulty of Celan’s prose and translates its ineffability, too.

The composer’s interpretation proves that while Celan’s poems are difficult, they are not hermetic per se. Aucoin’s music invokes the shy words, demonstrating their interpretive worth. But without the helpful translation by a musical “genius”, can they be approached on a personal level or should they be ignored in favor of the more lyrical, easily digestible poems? Is it worth the work to see the world Celan’s way?

I think so.

***

Though the complexity of Celan’s poems can be exhausting for a reader, it is worth the extra effort required to unearth his rich polysemy — the many ways he plays with words. If we leave our sensibilities behind, we experience poetic pain so finely wrought his tears become exquisite syllables, clear, hard, and refractory as diamonds. Falling into the cadence of his voice, eventually the rewards are incomparable. Quiet and close sings a haunted voice from a lost world, a lost people — a voice whose humiliation is compounded by having to express itself in the language of those who sought its destruction.

Unlike so many poems where the reader can superimpose oneself like a “choose your own adventure” book, Celan demands the spotlight, writing defiantly about the Shoah in the inadequate language of his persecutors. The reader cannot remain impervious to Celan’s presence within his poems and still receive the import of his painful messages.

Readers are invited inside his anguished selfie, to see the world through his wounded eyes — a terrain in which “milk is black, death is the all-encompassing reality.”

***

If Celan’s poetry was to be an act of healing old wounds, he likely hadn’t counted on suffering new and substantial injuries. His art soon came under the worst kind of scrutiny.

Many think “Todesfugue” uncomfortably resembles Immanuel Weissglas’s “ER.” Weissglas, a concentration camp survivor and Celan’s classmate, never published the work. And while ”ER” undoubtedly contains similar imagery, the tone of the two poems are antithetic. Rose Auslander, the first poet to use the oxymoronic “black milk,” said she was gratified a greater poet made use of it. So, too, Weissglass dismissed the uproar as “jackal-sniffing.”

Regardless of making these images anew — and with the gracious blessings of the others who shared them — those accusations of plagiarism hounded Celan throughout his life. Eventually he abandoned his earlier style, adventuring into even riskier realms of expression, littering poems with made up words and personal references– riddles for the reader to hunt down. In his later poems like “Wolfsbohne,” he revealed how terrible the wound of his parents’ death in interment camps remained for him – a place so personal very few of us could empathize.

Perhaps nothing could have healed Celan’s own wounds. Language couldn’t — can’t — do the impossible. It could not go through “the terrifying silence” as he claimed in his Bremen Prize speech, “[resurfacing], enriched by it all.” That expectation is a heavy burden to saddle language with, but, ultimately, I think his attempt, besides being beautiful, was courageous.

My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one:
we look at each other,
we exchange dark words,
we love each other like poppy and recollection,
we sleep like wine in the conches,
like the sea in the moon’s blood ray.

I can understand now what I couldn’t back in my lit theory course, why my professor would take her distant stance, shielding herself in the name of objectivity. There’s a risk to Celan’s journey as he asks us to envision his very dark spaces.

Unlike the generic pop music of today, where lyrics allow us to insert our own selves, interchanging banal selfies in places we’ve never been, Celan insists we remain the observer. As readers, we will never place ourselves in his shoes. He forces us to look upon his straits—finely wrought creations brought into the world by a magical fusion of disparate generations and traditions crafted into a singular likeness.

Celan reacted to tragedy with love, art, and desperate hope instead of easy hate and destruction. As we listen to Aucoin’s translation, we hear how this artist, this musician magically captures the sense of eerie dislocation in a beautiful other. As readers, we return to our world of selfies, having been shown there are still spaces we cannot go, but instead must listen and hold our breath. Celan’s work does not allow us to forget, but also shines light over the savagery of the 20^th Century and in some measure, too, narrows that gaping grave left there in the clouds.

Isabella David McCaffrey’s work has appeared in Best of Black Heart Magazine, The Lascaux Review, Adbusters, Slippery Elm, Every Day Fiction, and elsewhere. She was longlisted for the Venture Award and is the winner of Tampa Review’s 2014 Danahy Fiction Prize.