Tag Archives: Jeffrey Friedman

Jeff Friedman

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How to Talk

Give up on drawing breath from your chest. Give up on bringing it up through your throat into your mouth. Give up on your tongue touching your teeth or the draw gate of your glottis opening and closing. It’s not about the lips either. The lips are for kissing if you can find someone to kiss. Forget about the sound of your voice speaking, how it rises and falls like birds flying against a strong wind. Forget about the soft voice you sometimes use to make an impression. The noise from others drowns it out. Imagine pronouncing a single phoneme, then another and now you have a word and more words. Imagine the words drumming into sentences. Let your mind raise its voice and shout sentence after sentence so those around you nod in agreement or smile their acceptance. And even if no one can actually hear you—now you’re talking.

Done Time

Done talking nonsense. Done with brittle tongues and bad brewers, with broods of chickens scratching the dirt. Done with the darkness at the center of darkness—it may be another kind of light. Done with drone mosquitoes buzzing at the windows—and the drones that unload exploding packages. Done with the birds delivering diseases, the doctors painting masterpieces—their floating deathbeds. Done with the wisdom of oracles whose disembodied heads bob up and down in the roiling river, singing their cliches like prophecies. Done waiting for justice to knock Humpty Dumpty off his wall, for his shell to be shattered—the yolk smashed. Done believing that there is a period at the end of a war.

What Her Hand Says

Her hand opens and closes: yes when she opens it, no when she closes it until the loose bulb of her fist bangs against air and collapses. When her hands fold together, she is saying “thank you.” When you touch your heart for her and lean over the bedrails, she touches your heart. The nurse dampens her lips with a sponge stick. Even the tiniest hint of food or water would choke her paralyzed throat. When you hold up the laminated alphabet, she struggles to tap the letters and you guess the wrong words again and again until she is almost smiling. She grips your hand and falls asleep in your silence.

Homeland

“You should visit Hungary,” my sister said. “It’s our homeland.” “How can it be my homeland?” I asked. “I’ve never been there.” “Everyone there has dad’s brown eyes and his rock of a chin.” Everyone looks like him and like us.” I peered into my sister’s face and saw my father’s face and then my own. I remembered how my father combed Wildroot into his black curly hair, huffing so forcefully he fogged up the bathroom mirror, how he whipped the comb away, flinging oily drops on the tile floor, how at dinner he inhaled the hot breath of Hungarian stew as though it were the air rising from the earth of his homeland. A country of our people, I thought, everyone looking like everyone else, everyone looking like us—every face a mirror of every face. “Scary, I said. “I’m not going.”

Jeff Friedman’s tenth collection, Ashes in Paradise, was recently published by Madhat Press. Friedman’s poems and prose pieces have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, Poetry International, Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Fiction International, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, The New Republic, and Best Microfiction 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards and prizes. His newest book is Broken Signals from Bamboo Dart Press.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 37)

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Welcome to Posit 37!

This issue showcases the generative energy of assemblage, juxtaposing a range of encounters with nature and culture, body and spirit, bringing humor and gravitas to bear on the human condition in a “world not long for this world” (Andrew Zawacki, “Droste Effect”).

On the literary side, we pursue our interest in the elasticity of poetic forms, including the prose poem, the cento, the sonnet, and a number of new approaches to the line and the field, while from the visual arts we bring together a text and photography amalgam, two radically disparate approaches to sculpture, and a set of drawings inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

These works revel in the “echo and bounce” of word and image (Karen Holman, “Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Marie”) to remind us how “the mote & motley” of our existence (Charles Byrne, “things could always be worse”) can “refreshen the void” (Mark DeCarteret, “The Year We Went Without Fables”). Enacting art’s capacity to descry “the fragrant invisible / at large / among the wheatfolds” (G.C. Waldrep, “Tye River”) these works turn “the power of the mind . . . that searches for links” (Susanne Dyckman, “&”) to the task of discovering how “the darkness at the center of darkness . . . may be another kind of light” (Jeff Friedman, “Done Time”).

Nancy Bowen’s sculptures recombine a range of organic, artificial, and cultural components to construct boundary-defying alternatives to our most basic assumptions. With wit and exuberance, Bowen’s totems juxtapose forms and materials, references and resonances that challenge the lines between abstract and representational, natural and crafted, ornamental and functional, sacred and profane. In organic constructions evocative of rocks and vines grafted onto utensils and shrines, Bowen generates an iconography rooted in the experiential qualities of the female body. Bowen’s incorporation of chairs and chains, beads and breasts, shells and glass ground the erudition and sensual energy of these assemblages, while her marriage of elements both ancient and modern, functional and sybaritic generate a uniquely synthetic vision.

Charles Byrne’s beautifully synced and variegated language draws on remembered poems, axioms, and slang, fascinating the reader with magnificent turns of thought and story, as if “borne aloft single-scruffed, limbs shimmering in wriggles, / a confusion of neuronal launches as from a McDonald’s / single-handled fry funnel to pentagonal prism packet.” Both philosophy and wit combine in ways we all might find familiar: “i would have given the shirt | off my back | had i ever been asked | but in truth | in fact | have i ever really | done anything for anyone?” Yet Byrne’s work, dense in imagery and meaning, encompasses an ironic honesty that reflects our human tenderness and vulnerability: “my body reacts in apocalyptic fashion to the loss of sense, as does my self. my efforts to anatomize leave only scatterings of atoms, akin to how my toothbrush simply breaks into bittier and bittier indivisible parts in the pacific garbage patch.” Still, the empathy and linguistic variety of this poet’s work helps to alleviate the despair it so vividly evokes.

Like the monumental inflatable sculptures for which she is renowned, Nancy Davidson’s new drawings pulsate with a vibrant simplicity that is manifoldly evocative and impossible to pin down. Pared down to essential biomorphic abstractions yet gesturally dynamic, these bilateral, braced, and weighted forms bring to mind inanimate figures like knots, balls and chains, and balloons, as well as cultural references such as the spread legs of cowgirls or ancient female idols. But above all, these works evoke the body: bringing to mind legs and heads, fallopian tubes and ovaries, testicles, nipples, and other erogenous knobs. As such, they evoke our life force: at once vulnerable and resilient, vibrant and comical, yet tinged with a whiff of the grotesque, as befits their inspiration by Beckett’s Happy Days. These energetic drawings speak not only to Davidson’s ground-breaking body of work, but to the absurd and valiant determination with which Winnie grasps at the fleeting imprisonment in a sinking body that is her only reprieve from the abyss.

Mark DeCarteret’s prose poem series featured here addresses “doing without” in a flurry of contexts, both personal and planetary — engaging retrospect, loss, deprivation, and necessity to identify what is essential and what is not. Like “a monster sun though not big on details” committed to “getting it right,” these irreverently witty meditations on a world in which “mighty oaths from little acrimonies grow” rant in staccato, rat-a-tat rhythms laden with an irony as thick as “dense winter fog.” Lyrical interludes (“colors slow-heated, steeping like tea, or cooled off and foolishly seen for themselves, charmed back to earth”) bring out the rhythmic zing of DeCarteret’s barbed insights into “this mess we’ve recreated” in which “there’s more than enough room for no one. What fun. O what fun.”

Sharon Dolin’s cento-sonnets are at once artful tributes and worthy heirs to the artistry of their source poets, offering all that those writers could hope for in these marvelously recombined fragments of their own voices. Dolin captures the spirit of each, and adds the fertile imagination of her own poetically “green green hands.” From Ruth Stone’s grief-tinged “ too much salt, burned edges” to a dangerous Plath, “Let there be snakes / rayed round a candle flame,” these poems brim with unforgettable images and lyric energy, offering a series of wondrous gifts in sonnet boxes like “some angel-shape worth wearing / with one tin eye.”

In Susanne Dyckman’s delightfully intelligent poems from After Affects, “the power and weight of the mind” resounds “as the joy of a forgotten treasure,” and, paradoxically, as “a study in weightlessness.” With the flexible, patterned, and weightless strength of a dancer, the poet wants to “push back the curtains and lay down embarrassed by so many dead flowers.” Repetitions abound — fascinating footwork that prepares us for italicized language fragments leaping across the bottom of the page — “left on the skin       the trick     of nature       I can almost hear.” While engaging head-on with the elemental — time, memory, nature, and the possibility of transformation — these poems, like our thoughts upon waking, are hushed and circular. Dyckman reminds us that limitation is also part and parcel with strength — “the mind that can change too little on its own, that cannot alter stone.”

Jeff Friedman’s prose poems conjure worlds in single paragraphs and individual characters in sentences. In these precisely observed and recounted micro-moments of an examined life, the physical detail conveys volumes. Enlisting defamiliarization to power perception and the manifest to reveal what lies beneath, Friedman casts his closely focused, unhurried gaze on the granularities of our deepest drive, to “let your mind raise its voice.” In their plain-spoken clarity, these poems are “done talking nonsense” and “done with the darkness at the center of darkness,” casting their lucid gaze on the ephemeral physicality of communication and what it means to lose it.

In his text and image series, Doug Hall yokes together meditations on time and memory with black and white photographs of the winter oaks of Olompali Valley. From “among the oaks,” Hall conjures the collapsing universe; the DNA of slugs, bananas, honeybees; the difference between “melodic memory” and “studied memory;” and our most distant star, Earendel. Hall has created a series of juxtaposing diptychs, each block of text chiming with the shape of the photographs. Framed centrally and filling the image with a single tree’s distinctive intricate branchings — some reaching for the sky, others heavily skimming the earth — the photographs dramatically accentuate each oak’s individuality. In his pairings, Hall suggests that the oaks have a way of approaching existence akin and parallel to our own. Hasn’t each tree responded to the forces of time and memory in an ongoing relationship to sky, sun, water, insects, nutrients? How else could the oaks persist, uniquely present in a changing landscape?

In Jeffrey Hecker’s Monopoly series, America, or perhaps its self-image, is reflected in a fun-house mirror warped by the quaintness of the game’s iconography as it dovetails with the harsh — and often comical — realities of 21st century America. Drawing upon the game’s association with wholesome American family bonds as well as its unfiltered capitalistic values, these poems render the absurd contradictions at the core of the American experiment, juxtaposing daycares and unemployment offices, luxury spas and homeless shelters, Truman Capote and Linda Ronstadt, Dodge Durangos and dust devils to drily comical effect. One poem even reminds us of the Ur-American utopianism of social experiments such as an “experimental village” in which an “empathy hierarchy” replaces those based on the materialistic metric at the foundation of the iconic game.

Karen Holman’s expert ear for sound — brief, abrupt, dazzling, and fulfillingly descriptive, excites the mind and invites the heart. In “Invoking the Inconsolable Divine,” she defines the divine as, among other things, the “ninety-nine named / and galaxy crowned / vaped, empty-bottle, recycled, / wretched, fetching, festering, / quotidian, misquoted and doting” as well as, wittily, the “crapshoot / radiant radical / sporadic and random / specific, fixer and fix.” In “Constellations,” she imagines the questions of our existence tangent to the stars: “chartreuse-new / seven sisters, veiled / in their own breath / opened and blinked / beating like my fist-wings / with a treasure in it.” The textures of earth are also invoked: “sleep is houndstooth / sky-forsythia / cemetery pinwheel flowers / animated, again / by air like us.” In Holman’s image-charged poems, the ineffable abides with the quotidian, the divine with the earthly, as if suspended together in our memories and dreams.

Marie de Quatrebarbes’ prose poems from The Vitals, translated by Aiden Farrell, interrogate language and its fraught relationship to the referents that we consider reality: the “fiction to which we can only respond with a nod when a vague idea, a very vague idea, vaporous even, comes to snatch it away.” These cerebral notes-to-self are like a diary written in radioactive ink, aiming their x-ray vision right through daily life to discover “The Vitals” — or expose what we assume them to be (“the afternoon, the children…”) as “a sort of ecstasy, delusion of ownership.” These linguistically packed and provocative poems favor disruption, applying the chosen uncertainty of their magic to put “on a drama of the abst. incompletion of a certain img” in order to “provoke uncert. fate.”

Judith Roitman’s spare, bold, and sometimes unnerving poems cut to the point immediately, asking without hesitation what we might hesitate to probe. Do you feel this? How can you not? Proceeding from the mysterious and somehow accurate description of birth, when we are “expelled from the body / like donuts / like trees,” Roitman asks, in the eerie “Shimmy:” “Do you come here often / Do you shimmy in darkness / Do you feed them,” capturing both a real and surreal human experience. Her brilliant response to an oft-asked question: “I asked poetry: what are you / and it slapped me in the face,” generates both more poetry and more questions for the reader. In “Language,” a view from a plane shows “midden upon midden below us,” and demands an important, perhaps profound, answer from us: “A whale is on the beach. / A crab reaches its destiny / Two dead seals on the sand — can you see this? / What language do you speak?”

Elise Siegel’s haunting sculptures evoke both airy modern portraits and heroic busts from an ancient culture, eroded by the rain and wind of centuries, as if rediscovered, but with no clue as to where they originated. These faces have the immediacy of selfies, but the psychological complexity of ritual masks, or the inner presence of oracles. Using clay as her material (perhaps the most historical of mediums) the artist imbues these gestural sculptures with individual lives and expressions even as we imagine a process of erosion gradually and minutely continuing the process of destruction. In these sculptures, we see our friends as well as our ancestors. It is as if these women are icons whose names are forgotten in history, but like a fleeting glimpse of a stranger’s smile on the street, or the felt dignity of a statue of a Jomon goddess, they have a timeless quality. Siegel’s powerful work compels us to believe that there is a life force particular to women’s spirit that survives the ages.

In these poems from Lost in Translation, Alison Stone has married the cento form with an iterated translation procedure to make collages not from others’ excerpted lines but from their repeatedly re-translated progeny. The resulting poems trouble and broaden our notions of authorship, reminding us of the range of choices it entails, even while offering a collectivized notion of creation that encompasses, with the poet’s use of Google Translate, more than human agency. At the same time, Stone’s aesthetics and sensibility unite these poems, permeating them with her sharp insight (“There are two types of disasters: women and men”), elegiac lyricism (“The world is your widow and she is still crying”), and warnings of our threat to our own planet: “The tide wave has opened, and everywhere.” As she drily observes, now that “the wind has been unhinged lately. / Alarm, and fire approaching. / When it comes, the landscape will listen” and “Twitter viewers swallow the sky.”

In these exquisitely worded poems, a powerful and invisible something is always behind, within, and surrounding the object of G. C. Waldrep’s nature-focused lens; a force made almost visible in “the pollen’s spark hidden in the air’s tongue” which is “anterior to the presence that commands begin” a force outside of us, but “not unobtainable.” In “Tye River,” the river reveals variants of its true nature, sometimes tragic; “a held motion” that “succors / debt’s visible passage / shoaled with all / the organs of mourning” but encompassing, pulsing, alive and beautiful, as “enlaced with hoarfrost / the zodiac glides / to your filament-feet.” This force also animates “the quince at dusk / expressing / its hitherto, its after—” and in “its brief for change” the bitter fruit may hold the “affirmation” or more subtly, and mysteriously, the “shadow” of affirmation, of a power that we sense, even if we cannot entirely grasp.

In these grave and erudite prose poems from These Late Eclipses, Andrew Zawacki considers the ways eclipses — that is, “figurations wherein a trace conceals, or cancels out, the whole” — characterize the threatened state of the nesting-doll-like layers of reality in which we live. From Vegas to Verkhoyansk, from family intimacies to the theoretical cloud of celestial bodies surrounding our solar system, Zawacki catalogues the iterated signs of distress everywhere in evidence, not least to our psyches, when “under a hematoma sun, everyone I know’s been broken down, like a cardboard box.” These brilliant poems urge us to recognize the grave danger in which we find ourselves, this 11th hour in which “dark is swooning in” to a “world not long for this world.”

We hope you love these as much as we do.

Thank you for being here!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Barbara Tomash