Amy Hassinger's Blog

One of the things that I love about literature is the way it is constantly drawing connections. This is what metaphor does, of course—connects two unlikely things in a flash of insight—but this is also what just plain good writing does. It illuminates the web of connections that underlies the world and even the universe, so that we might see our world as more whole and meaningful than we often experience it.

Drawing connections is what I’ve tried to do with this podcast—connections between writers and readers, between Midwesterners and their cultures and landscapes. It’s also exactly what Nina Mukerjee Furstenau is doing in her book Biting Through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America’s Heartland. Part memoir, part cookbook, Biting Through the Skin draws connections between the foods we eat, the cultures we hail from and are born into, and the communities we create.

I’m going to read a few paragraphs from the book’s opening pages, to give you a taste, as it were. Here it is, from Nina Mukerjee Furstenau’s Biting Through the Skin:

I am always combusting something.

I learned this from Joan Ruvinsky, a meditation teacher. If you throw wood into a fire, it burns; put food into your stomach, it does the same. For years, I did not notice that I was a version of larger elements. Blood runs through veins like rivers, through capillaries like lesser tributaries, some unseen under the skin, just as the earth’s circulatory system trundles along into its vast, pooling heart, the ocean. The planet’s fluidity mimics the watery element in my mouth that intimately creates taste. Sound itself reveals secrets and animates air. I stand in twilight, the wind blowing over the Missouri farm where my husband and I now live. Soft, turbulent, whispery and still by turns, the wind moans between trees down the drive, snaps near my ear as an owl skims past just out of sight, mimics breath. In and out, my earth expands and contracts with all the breathers everywhere: a rhythmic pulsing that vibrates the world. . . .

In my search for an indivisible future that works, I keep spiraling back to a connection between myself, the earth, and India. Ancient cultures have never abandoned this interconnectedness and now, at midlife, it keeps rising up to meet me, something writer and activist for ecology and culture Helena Norberg-Hodge once noted. I began by thinking that growing up Indian in Kansas was mine alone. I now see that all families are small pockets of culture that hand their rituals, personalities, and gifts, heritage and love down to the next generation through food rituals. Food holds memory. It holds story. It can represent who we are. . . .

If you are lucky, you see connections even in aromatic spices. Such tiny, brown bits of larger things are indeed Whitman’s “journey-work of the stars.” A recipe is the journey-work, the template, of culture and family, as well as tangible evidence of what we’re willing to share of both. I read a recipe and see great expanses of land, cultivars of grain and vegetable, stunning lengths of history, and I imagine someone who feeds me, the dance behind the routine of cooking, the pop of memory, and the sizzle of love. Making that leap, trusting that the people of my home state of Kansas, and later Missouri, could see the gift presented with each meal, was a long time coming. Food was my tether to heritage; it revealed my world and transformed me into someone willing to share that story with others.

Biting Through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America’s Heartland, by Nina Mukerjee Furstenau, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2013, and is available wherever books are sold.

And that marks the final episode of this podcast. I’ve learned so much over the past year, and have so enjoyed discovering and highlighting the work of so many wonderful Midwestern authors. There are so many more out there to be read and savored and shared! But it’s time for me to move on to other projects. So, let me close by saying, one last time . . .

Thanks for listening to The Literary Life. Please write with any comments or questions, you can find me at www.amyhassinger.com. Until we meet again, keep reading, keep writing, and keep leading The Literary Life.

I just finished a fun novel called Following Disasters, by Nancy McCabe, about a girl named Maggie-Kate, who inherits her aunt’s old house at a transitional time in her own life. The house seems to be haunted with the spirit of her aunt, a woman whose one ambition in life was to have children and raise a family, an ambition that was, sadly, thwarted by her illness—lupus, an autoimmune disease. Oddly enough, I read this novel on my way back from visiting Milledgeville, Georgia, the location of Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home. Flannery O’Connor—one of our great American writers—was also afflicted with lupus and died young. When you visit her family homestead, called Andalusia, you can see the interior of the house just as it was when she was alive—the small desk with her typewriter by her bed, her crutches balanced against an adjacent bureau. I kept thinking of those sad-looking crutches as I read this novel—of lives cut short and dreams thwarted by disease.

But Following Disasters is not a gloomy book—it covers a wide range of emotional territory, including humor. I want to read you a funny scene that comes toward the beginning of the novel. It’s Valentine’s Day, and Maggie-Kate and her friend Erin are in high school, complaining about boys and love.

Here it is, an excerpt from Following Disasters, by Nancy McCabe. Nancy grew up in Kansas, and has lived in Missouri and Nebraska.

Earlier today, when other girls had talked about their cards and flowers and Valentine’s dates, I’d had to douse my flicker of regret at breaking up with Richard. But now my regret had died away. I was secretly amazed at how Erin had insinuated herself into my life and taken it over. Her presence was like an unexpected gift that I hadn’t realized I wanted so much. But just as I was thinking this, Erin dropped the chocolate back into the bowl and started talking about the college biology major guy named Francis she’d been dating. He had confessed to having feelings for her.

“He’s not at all my type,” Erin said. “I need to figure out how to let him down gently.”

Dread twisted my stomach. A light in Erin’s eyes made me think she wasn’t entirely telling the truth, that maybe, for once, this was someone she was really interested in, and I was tired of her deserting me all the time. If she did it for random guys, what about when she had a serious boyfriend? My mother had always seemed to abandon me whenever she got involved with someone, at first preoccupied, later depressed.

Erin waited for me to say something, but I didn’t. I was afraid of sounding needy or accusing.

“He’s the kind of guy you’d go out with, actually,” Erin said.

“Boring?” I asked.

“With depth and wisdom and character.”

I sifted through the bowl of heart-shaped candies that tasted like sweetened chalk and said things like “Be Mine.”

“Love sucks.” I rained a fistful of Conversation Hearts into Erin’s outstretched hand.

“I feel so guilty,” Erin said. “How do I get rid of this guy? I’m afraid he’ll be devastated.” She smiled dreamily.

I flipped one of the hearts to its blank side. With a felt tip pen, I wrote, “Love sucks.”

Erin printed on another, “You jerk.”

We scribbled faster and faster, screaming with laughter as we shoved the hearts back and forth: “Drop dead,” “Go away,” “No way,” “Hate Your Guts,” “Eat Worms and Die,” “Not With U.”

Then Erin started writing two-parters. On the back of one that said, “Let’s fly,” she wrote, “Into the ground. To “Be My Queen,” she added, “—Anne Boleyn.”

“The great thing is that anyone who eats them will get sick from ink poisoning,” Erin said.

Nancy McCabe’s Following Disasters was published by Outpost 19 in 2016.

We all struggle with pain in various forms at some point in our lives. Some of us, like essayist Sonya Huber, struggle with it intensely and chronically. Sonya Huber has rheumatoid disease, an autoimmune disease in which the body’s immune system begins to attack its joints. Her symptoms came on at 38. She had a 5 year old who loved to run into her arms and wrestle, a thing her former self loved, but her new pain-haunted self winced at. Pain began to infuse all aspects of her life, and became something she had to adapt to and learn to live with.

In her new collection of essays, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System, Sonya writes about her relationship to pain. I’m going to read you a micro-essay from this book called “In the Grip of the Sky.” One of the things I admire about this essay is how Sonya connects her own experience of pain to the rest of the universe. Pain can be isolating, causing us to tunnel inside ourselves, but in this piece, it becomes the opposite—a bridge, a connector, a kind of fine-tuned internal barometer gauging the health of the self, society, and the planet.

Here it is, “In the Grip of the Sky,” by Sonya Huber:

The sky has its way with me. As clouds lower their shoulders against the horizon, a warm front’s humid body slides along my skin, lifting the hem of my dress to curl around my waist and stretch along my spine.

Closer still, the atmosphere enters me soundlessly. Barometric pressure squeezes my joints, each a tiny fishbowl of synovial fluid that cushions the space where two bones pivot and swing.

My immune system loves and defends me too diligently. I am one of the joint-diseased, we who have lupus and rheumatoid and psoriatic. If we could map our pain, the constellation of joints would glow on the map, lit to follow storm fronts and hurricanes. A joint-sick friend and I trade texts: Rain coming—Got bad at 2 p.m., now flat on the couch. You?

In this sky-grip I am one of many, and we are on fire.

I lie back, linked in pain with other bodies, in a kind of planetary transcendence. I watch the sky with closed eyes as an internal aurora borealis throbs, exquisite and strange. The rhythm and shifting whorls scrawl inside my flesh and bone in a patterned grammar I can almost pretend to decode. I have decided to listen to the air.

The inflamed atmosphere outside mirrors each tiny joint bubble inside me; the fates of both worlds have been permanently altered.

The heated sky skews and pitches, longing only for balance, hung with carbon-rich effluvia from the coal that launched Britain’s navies and the factories of London. Outer and inner protective layers become inflamed. My over-eager immune system works too well, devouring its host, while the planet’s protective atmosphere holds the dangerous heat that men have made.

The atmospheric and the arthritic trace tendrils of smoke from the industrial explosion. My disease is said to be a signal miscopied, genes or molecules scrambled by chemical by-products that trace our desire to be faster and stronger than nature. My flesh and bones retract against the heat of the world’s fever as the storms whip the planet’s surface.

I and this pain-shadow lie on the couch. We turn in tandem under a blanket as mare’s tail clouds loop above me against the icy blue. If every body seated around the table at our climate negotiations had to push against a pain-shadow to stand or reach for a glass of water, to raise a hand to cast a vote, might each voice be raised in strong support for change? If every human felt the sky inside, we might wince against each turn of a key in an ignition. The islands being swallowed by water might seem not so far away.

In some minutes I feel beaten by the sky. Bobbing down, my spirit fights for air. I have learned to push up into this pain storm out of curiosity and a need to understand. Each throb reminds me of my permeability. The gasses surrounding our planet follow every move I make, pushing at my nerves. I sometimes shake my fist at the sky, but I do not hate the clouds. I do not hate them even when they seem to deliver terrible blows. Their impact is a desperate appeal, intending to reach us, even as far as under the skin, to drag us to safety.

You can find “In the Grip of the Sky” in Sonya Huber’s new essay collection, Pain Woman Takes Your Key and Other Essays from a Nervous System, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2017.

This year is the 50th anniversary of a landmark court case that set a federal precedent against miscegenation laws. The case was brought by a couple from Virginia, Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Loving, of African-American and Native-American descent. The Lovings married legally in Washington, D.C., but home in Virginia, they were arrested, jailed, tried, found guilty, and sentenced. They could not live together in the state of Virginia—could not even be seen together—without risking arrest. Their case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in 1967, unanimously reversed Virginia’s court rulings. Finally, the Lovings could return home to Virginia and live together with their children as a family.

That was just fifty years ago. Not so very long ago at all.

Patricia Hruby Powell, who lives here in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, has just published a wonderful new “documentary novel” called Loving Vs. Virginia. It’s illustrated by Shadra Strickland and is aimed at children, but is truly a story for all ages. Patricia writes in two different voices—Mildred’s and Richard’s—beginning with their childhood in rural Virginia, through their courtship, and their eventual marriage. It’s a compulsively readable book.

Today I’m going to share an excerpt from early in the book, when Richard and Mildred are first dating. This section is in Mildred’s voice, but it begins with a quote from Richard. Garnet, you should know, is Mildred’s sister.

This beautiful spring day

he says, “After everyone goes to bed,

            sneak out of the house,

            come down the road,

            meet me at the oak tree—

            you know the one.

            I’ll be there at midnight

            waiting for you.”

I wait for Garnet to snore her

soft little snore.

Everyone else has been asleep for ages.

I stay awake counting my breaths.

I pull on my pants

tiptoe down the stairs

carrying my shoes,

avoiding the places I know squeak,

pass my parents’ room,

out the door

and I step into my shoes.

The stars sparkle.

The grass is wet.

I get to the road

and tear down it.

I hear an owl hoot

in the woods and

the flutter of leaves,

some squawks,

cackles,

the cry of some animal

who just lost

to another—

coming from the field

across the street.

The night belongs

to the animals.

It could be scary,

but any scariness

goes into my

running.

The dark of the night

is protecting me,

making magic.

I’m nearly at the oak when I hear

an owl hoot

right nearby.

I startle.

Richard comes

out of the woods.

Richard is the owl,

and now he’s

FLYING

alongside me.

We’re not laughing—

just breathing together.

He grabs my hand

and guides me to the car.

We get in

still don’t say a word—

just breathe.

He drives to another spot

further down the road

and pulls

right into the woods,

so the car is

hidden

from the road.

We get out

and pick our way

through the woods—

brambles and twigs

snagging

at our clothes.

Then we’re on a path

where Richard pushes

me ahead

and he trots behind.

You can hear

a million chirping

tree frogs,

the low moan

of a bullfrog.

Must be a creek nearby.

The night might belong to the animals

but it’s ours too—

Richard’s and mine.

I’ve never loved to run.

But TONIGHT

I could run all night long.

You can find Loving Vs. Virginia, by Patricia Hruby Powell, published by Chronicle Books wherever books are sold.

There’s a genre of memoir commonly called the spiritual memoir. One of the most famous examples would be Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, but there are many, many others: Kathleen Norris’ Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, Faith Adiele’s Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun, or Roger Kamenetz’s The Jew in the Lotus, to name just a few. This week I want to introduce you to a memoir in this genre by a writer named Andy Douglas. Born in Brazil to missionary parents, Andy spent much of his childhood in Iowa, where he returned later in his life to attend graduate school. In his early 20s, disillusioned by the conventional promises of his life, and having struggled with some depression, Andy traveled to Thailand, where he planned to stay with monks at an Ananda Marga yoga center: to meditate, help out at a school for poor children, and explore. It turned out to be the beginning of a journey that took him to India, Korea, and back to the U.S., as well as inward, to previously unexplored interior landscapes. The book is called The Curve of the World: Into the Spiritual Heart of Yoga.

This excerpt appears early in the book, when Andy first arrives in Bangkok:

The next day dawned clear and fair, and the Indian monk who’d welcomed me the previous night , all twinkling eyes and unruly beard, peered at me over the scattered remains of our Bangkok breakfast. An elfin young man with long black hair, clad in a saffron gown, he suggested a walk. Slipping his hand into mine, he led me out through the metal gate in front of the house. The heat and oily humid smells conjured some vague memory, perhaps of mowing lawns when I was a kid.

We strolled back and forth in the lane through the perpetual summer of Bangkok as cars and tuk-tuks whizzed by on the nearby thoroughfare.

“Tell about yourself.”

I told him I had come to Thailand to look into working at a school for poor kids. I didn’t tell him that I had also come because I couldn’t see beyond the black hole of my own self and that I had needed to get away from the States in order to clear my head. “Oh, Andy,” a friend who fancied herself a palm reader had murmured not long before, taking my hand and searching the patterns of my palm. Weighing my hand in hers, and nothing the plethora of tiny scratches from broken main lines, not deep and smooth, but full of false turns, fibrillations, breaks, cul-de-sacs, she looked up.

Pushing her hair out of her face, she sighed: “One rough ride.”

I couldn’t argue. In my late teens there were days when I’d imploded, couldn’t bear to be around other people, couldn’t throw a single spark of personality beyond the horizon of my depression. The default ways in which males in my culture were encouraged to become men—sex, drugs, wildness—had left me confused, though I had tried them on for size. I’d been traditionally churched among Presbyterians, but at a certain point this, too, had left me cold, and I found myself turning away from the faith of my fathers. There seemed to be no real rites of passage in my world, no means to understand what it was to become whole. At age 21, I was entering a life, as T.S. Eliot had put it, of being “distracted from distractions by distractions.”

The monk smiled at me. Perhaps he could read the general outlines of my dilemma in my face. “This life is not easy,” he said in his nasal, high-pitched voice. I stared at him.

“As a monk, I am surrendering everything for a higher purpose, giving up everything, for God. So, I am able to be . . .” he searched for the word . . . “concentrating completely on service, and on meditation.”

He turned his doe-eyes to me. “Do you think you could do like this?”

I gave a nervous laugh. It was something I hadn’t really considered. And besides, I had just gotten here. I wanted to explore and enjoy. I wanted to have some fun.

“Think about this,” he said. “You are inviting a friend to your house. Are you keeping the door closed? No, you are opening it.”

He laid his hand on my shoulder.

“Open yourself.”

Andy Douglas’ memoir, The Curve of the World: Into the Spiritual Heart of Yoga, was published by Bottom Dog Press in 2013.

I recently discovered the wonderful resource that is Shari Wagner’s website, “Through the Sycamores.” Shari Wagner is the poet laureate of Indiana—I featured her poem “These Rocks” on an earlier episode of this podcast. As part of her role as state poet, she keeps a website where she highlights the work of other Indiana poets, as well as provides writing prompts. This month’s prompt, for example, is to write a poem inspired by a river. Shari accompanies her prompt with a couple of examples for inspiration.

It was on “Through the Sycamores” that I discovered Stephen R. Roberts, another Indiana poet, whose work I’d like to share with you today. Steve was born and raised in Indiana, and spent his career in the insurance business—in the tradition of the great modern poet Wallace Stevens. But while Stevens was an executive who worked behind a desk, Steve Roberts worked as an insurance adjuster, traveling to people’s homes. “It acquainted me with all sorts of people,” he says, “many of them characters of one sort or another.” Good material, in other words.

This poem, “Down in Mechanicsburg,” gives us a quick glimpse of some of these characters, and also of the overlooked, underemployed town they inhabit. It’s a melancholy poem. I admire the way Steve chooses language that lingers in the territory of the mechanical. In the first stanza, for instance, he describes the smile of an imaginary mechanic as “jacked-up” and “smeared across his face”—unusual, striking choices that make the character spring to life.

Down in Mechanicsburg

by Steve Roberts

There are three Mechanicsburgs in Indiana.

But you'd be hard pressed to find anyone

in any of the three with a wrench in hand,

grease on his jeans, and a jacked-up smile

smeared across his face in a welcome mode.

Some of the men are slouched on barstools

in the six taverns between them, lights

down, smoked up, the spatter of bar-talk

grinding just under the slow country

sounds on the battered jukebox.

In any one of them now someone is saying,

Ain't no better way or place to spend

a morning than right here.

And another one's nodding, not really

taking the statement under consideration.

Just nodding his head, his mind elsewhere, down

at the plant where he was this time last year,

banding boxes, packing axles.  But not now,

not in these times with the factory down, the old

lady getting half days over at the dollar store.

There's good reason to be here in a bar

in any of the three Mechanicsburgs in Indiana,

credit due up to the chin with the next cold beer,

and a Bic lighter flickering in the dim light

off the deep end of the pool table.

You can find “Down in Mechanicsburg” on Shari Wagner’s website, Through the Sycamores. “Down in Mechanicsburg” was originally published in Big Muddy, Vol 11.1, Southeast Missouri State University. It also appears in Steve Roberts’ collection, Almost Music From Between Places, published by Chatter House Press.

Poetry and song are inextricable, going all the way back to Homer. Witness the recent awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan, folk balladeer, modern-day bard. There are mixed feelings about that decision in the literary world, but if nothing else, it’s a reminder to us of that basic link between song and the spoken word.

We tend to think of Dylan as a songwriter, as opposed to a poet. But there are poets, too, whose work crosses over into the territory of song. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is one such poet. An Indigenous writer, performer, and activist, Allison has lived all over the country, working in the fields as a child in North Carolina, Texas, and the Great Plains. While she teaches now at the University of California at Riverside, she lived for years in Nebraska, teaching at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, as well as in the University of Nebraska low-residency MFA in Writing Program. She also directs the Literary Sandhill Cranefest Retreat in the Platte Valley.

I’m so pleased to share with you her poem, “America, I Sing You Back.” In this poem, she speaks from that Indigenous perspective, as well as the perspective of a mother calling to her child, America, our shared country. She thinks of this poem as a kind of extension of Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” and Langston Hughes’ poem, “I, Too,” and she gives a nod to both these poets in her epigraph. Though Allison wrote this poem years ago, it is very much a poem for our time.

Here it is,

America, I Sing You Back

by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

for Phil Young and my father Robert Hedge Coke;

for Whitman and Hughes

America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in.

Sing back the moment you cherished breath.

Sing you home into yourself and back to reason.

Before America began to sing, I sung her to sleep,

held her cradleboard, wept her into day.

My song gave her creation, prepared her delivery,

held her severed cord beautifully beaded.

My song helped her stand, held her hand for first steps,

nourished her very being, fed her, placed her three sisters strong.

My song comforted her as she battled my reason

broke my long-held footing sure, as any child might do.

As she pushed herself away, forced me to remove myself,

as I cried this country, my song grew roses in each tear’s fall.

My blood-veined rivers, painted pipestone quarries

circled canyons, while she made herself maiden fine.

But here I am, here I am, here I remain high on each and every peak,

carefully rumbling her great underbelly, prepared to pour forth singing—

and sing again I will, as I have always done.

Never silenced unless in the company of strangers, singing

the stoic face, polite repose, polite while dancing deep inside, polite

Mother of her world. Sister of myself.

When my song sings aloud again. When I call her back to cradle.

Call her to peer into waters, to behold herself in dark and light,

day and night, call her to sing along, call her to mature, to envision—

then, she will quake herself over. My song will make it so.

When she grows far past her self-considered purpose,

I will sing her back, sing her back. I will sing. Oh I will—I do.

America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in.

You can find “America, I Sing You Back” in Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s collection, Streaming. “America, I Sing You Back" is used by permission from Streaming (Coffee House Press, 2014). Copyright © 2014 by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke.

It’s not often that a poet gets paid for her work, or featured in her hometown newspaper, but Champaign-Urbana’s Julie Price Pinkerton recently accomplished both achievements in one fell swoop. Julie’s poem, “Veins,” won the 2016 Rattle Poetry Prize, which earned her 10,000 big ones. Not bad for a single poem.

Of course, the sad truth is that most poets and most writers toil away for years, even decades, without earning squat for their troubles. That’s why so many of us have to work other jobs, too. In Julie’s case, she teaches here at the University of Illinois, where she’s won many awards for her teaching. She’s also come close to winning prizes for her writing before—she’s been nominated a couple of times for the coveted Pushcart Prize. But this prize from Rattle is her first real win.

If you want to read her prize-winning poem, you’ll have to buy a copy of Rattle, which you can find on their website at http://www.rattle.com/. Today I’m going to read you another poem, which beautifully captures her voice—ironic, witty, hopeful, wistful. The poem begins with the mundane, travels through hilarious fantasy, and finishes on a sober and deeply mournful note. It’s called “Why I Opted For The More Expensive Oil At Jiffy Lube” and first appeared in Rattle as well, back in 2014.

Here it is,

Why I Opted for the More Expensive Oil at Jiffy Lube

by Julie Price Pinkerton

This one is better for a car as old as yours, he says.
It won’t glob up, he says. And spring is almost here,
so of course you need a thicker oil.

And I say, So with this good oil my car will run better
and it’ll be washed and waxed every time I get in it?

Yes, he says. And you’ll never have to put another drop of gas in it.

And when I start the car, a big bag of money will appear in the back seat?

Yes, he says. And cash will shoot out your exhaust pipe
and people will be glad when they see you coming.

And will I look rested? Like I’ve gotten plenty of sleep every night?

That goes without saying, he says.

And when I roll over in bed and look at the man
who says he loves me, will I finally believe he loves me?

You, he says, won’t be able to believe anything else. Your heart
will soak up the goodness and you will smile and beam and sigh
like a pig in mud.

And what about my parents? I ask. Will this oil keep them from dying?
They’re very old.

Let’s call them and tell them the happy news, he says.

You can find “Why I Opted For The More Expensive Oil At Jiffy Lube” in Rattle #40, published in 2014. You can listen to Julie reading this poem herself on Rattle’s website at www.rattle.com. 

I want to share a poem with you today that hit me hard. It’s called “Real Simple (1)” by Steve Davenport, Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program here at the University of Illinois. Steve comes from the American Bottom, southern Illinois floodplain land, across the Mississippi from St. Louis. The Bottom, as he calls it, is the territory of his imagination, and he writes about it in many of his poems.

“Real Simple (1)” comes from Steve’s collection Overpass, which he wrote in part as a response to his friend’s struggle with Stage 4 breast cancer. In the book, she is Overpass Girl. Many of Steve’s poems are formal—they follow a pre-determined form, like a sonnet or a sestina. Writing formal poems is a terrifically fun challenge—akin to solving a mathematical proof, or balancing a chemical equation, for you STEM-minded souls out there—and Steve does formal poetry beautifully. But this poem is, as its title claims, simple. The form feels more intuitive, less regimented, but still deliberately and tightly shaped. It’s an alliterative meditation on the letter P and some of its powerful progeny: words like prayer, plosive, portacath—a device through which doctors thread a catheter into a vein, to deliver medicine intravenously—pilgrimage.  The final line just knocks me out.

Here it is, Steve Davenport’s “Real Simple (1)”:

Real Simple (1)

Prayer, the mind’s subcutaneous banquet,

letter P, hobo bundle, long-handled

net, tin cup; the body in paraphrase;

letter P, aspirated, plosive note

in a portacath, post-mastectomy;

letter P buried, a port like a coin,

a plea in a chemo tube, a prayer, Puh,

blown, Puh, into the subclavian vein;

Overpass Girl, mouth pursed, lips popping Puh,

hope’s pilgrimage, post-belief, pre-belief,

poor traveler, Please.

You can find Steve Davenport’s “Real Simple (1)” in his collection Overpass, published by Misty Publications in 2012.

Last month, I had the great pleasure of attending an Evening of Jazz and Poetry, put on by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. The gathering was a celebration of the release of poet Janice Harrington’s latest collection, entitled Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin. Harrington calls Primitive “a poetic reflection”—not exactly a biography, but instead, a series of poems inspired by Pippin’s life and work. Pippin was born in Pennsylvania in 1888 and served in World War I. After the war, despite a wounded and withered arm, Pippin painted. In 1940, art collector Albert C. Barnes heralded him as “the most important Negro painter to appear in America.” He also called Pippin’s work “primitive,” a descriptor that Harrington examines and critiques.

I’d like to share the first poem in the collection with you today. Titled “Picture of the Poet and Horace H. Pippin Before the Perigee,” the poem presents a kind of imaginative communion across time between Harrington and Pippin, poet and subject. This poem taught me the word “perigee,” which means the point at which a given object that’s orbiting the earth—say, a satellite, or the moon—is closest to the center of the earth. In contrast, apogee is the point at which it’s the farthest away. When the moon is in perigee, it looks bigger.

Janice Harrington teaches in the University of Illinois’ Creative Writing program, and she lives here in Champaign-Urbana.

Here it is, “Picture of the Poet and Horace H. Pippin Before the Perigee,” by Janice Harrington:

Under a sycamore’s bough

a bat folds and unfolds.

The black iris opens, black,

purple-black, a thing of night.

I go out, when it is dark enough,

to see the perigee.

                        Moon,

                        milk moon, clabber moon,

                        old woman’s saucer.

I see my shadow on the sidewalk, the night shadow

of a night-colored woman, and remember his words:

We went to bed in the dark

and got out in the dark only the moon showing.

At Meuse-Argonne,

before fields of black mud, he looked at the stars.

In darkness always the same question,

how to sway darkness?

Beside the magnolia, I watch the perigee:

sap welling from a milkweed’s stalk,

a Sunday pearl, an infant’s skull.

I think of you

and your long-ago answer, to look,

and look beyond: small and necessary acts.

You can find Janice Harrington’s “Picture of the Poet and Horace H. Pippin Before the Perigee” in her new collection, Primitive, published by BOA Editions in 2016.