Tag Archives: John Brantingham

Vital Signs by Deborah P. Kolodji (Cuttlefish Books)

Posted on September 4, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Vital Signs by Deborah P. Kolodji (Cuttlefish Books)

Deborah P. Kolodji’s Vital Signs is possibly one of the most moving collections of haiku I have ever read. I love the way haiku moves, how it sees the world through slices, through moments between moments. I like the way that it acknowledges that life is both beautiful and temporary as it looks at seasonal markers that are temporary in a cycle of the earth that is also temporary but often seems permanent to us through our imperfect lenses. Kolodji’s haiku do all of these things, but add another layer, that of her own mortality and temporality as she deals with cancer. Kolodji just recently passed away from this cancer, but she was able to use the experience to give herself a different way to see and understand the universe. The poems in this collection mark time and the small moments that are both human and normal but odd in a way that one might not see unless they had the vision that comes with such an event. 

     Perhaps, in this collection, Kolodji’s appreciation and understanding of nature extends beyond the world to larger parts of the universe. It is as though her awareness of the here and now is filtered through a universal consciousness. My favorite is this one:

unresolved issues

the black hole in the center

of our galaxy (52).

She is making connections that extend far and wide, seeing connections that must be informed by a perspective that is seeing the universal. In another, she writes: “CT scan journey to Mars” (31). Later, she writes: “wheelchairs those Martian rovers” (39). Little moments come within the context of something larger than most of us see.

     Where the collection truly shines, however, is in the discussion of the moments when she is dealing with her illness. She must be frustrated and afraid. That would only be normal. However, she is also compassionate and grateful. Haiku like:

            fluid infusion

            at the day hospital

            the garden outside (27)

and 

            ice chips

            by my bedside

            another thick book (22)

deal with the long moments of dealing with the illness in the hospital. These are moments that she notes and understands, but without being maudlin. She even finds ways to appreciate where she is. There might be some regret here, but there is also the garden and the book. There are the good things. What she truly expresses gratitude for, however, are the people with her who help her and are just there for her.

embarrassing moment

the nurse acts as if

he’s seen it before (33)

alone

the nurse covers me

with a warmed blanket (20).

These small moments of kindness and compassion show the humanity that exists around her and show how much she appreciates the people who are there for her. There are many such moments in her collection, and the result for me was that I left feeling hope rather than dread, which I almost expected given the subject matter.

     Deborah P. Kolodji’s Vital Signs is exceptional, and I cannot recommend it more. I never like sitting around talking about illness with others even when it’s mine. Doing so quickly becomes morbid and uninteresting. Kolodji’s focus, however, is not on pain but on hope. She shows us what dignity is and gives us a path for facing this kind of pain, which is in all of our futures.

John Brantingham 4th September 2024

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Bright-Eyed by Sarah Sarai (Poets Wear Prada)

Posted on May 26, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Bright-Eyed by Sarah Sarai (Poets Wear Prada)

There is something about Sarah Sarai’s newest poetry collection Bright-Eyed that reveals that what we see as normal, family, travel, being alive in this world, has a spiritual and even mystical significance. It is also true that the best poets often allow us to understand what should be obvious, but we miss. Sarai shows us the importance of the moment in a number of ways. What struck me most is the poems that dealt with the importance of her family. She writes about those moments with nieces, nephews, brothers, sisters, and her mother as powerfully emotional, and I contrasted them with the bad romantic relationships she describes. She also describes the relationships that work, same sex relationships based on mutual respect and tenderness. This idea of love and tenderness works throughout the collection.

     Sarai is able to delve into the everyday meaning of existence, highlighting that it matters that we are not only alive but awake to the moment and ourselves. In ‘Hummingbird Feeder’ she writes: 

The self? Destroy it.

Step outside.

Top off the hummingbird feeder.

Less time to be terrible.

Less time to judge.

Them, us, yourself (36).

The present moment matters, she tells us. Living in that moment kills the kind of rumination that can destroy a person, and it is the focus on the ego rather than the moment that tends to create moments of pain. Even a little chore can break that cycle. Being aware of any moment can do that, especially sex when done with respect and tenderness.

            Sex with women, floral

            in the night and leathery.

            The moral here:

            Our bodies are soft foothills

            in spring. The sun sends

            its warmth to grass greening

            on soft foothills in spring (23).

She is giving us directions for joy, and I do not think that she would tell us that it’s important to have only same-sex relationships, only that we should act in a certain way and be aware of our own moments. When we make those connections that matter, being awake to the moment and not stuck in our minds helps us to feel their significance.

     As important or possibly more important are the connections that we make with family. These moments are seen throughout the collection, and to me are the most important parts of the collection. She comes back again and again to her niece and nephew as in “O You of the Cotton Pajamas.” The title itself with the more classic use of “O” as opposed to “Oh” brings us to a sense of her relationship as being timeless. The celebration of that relationship feels mythic to me.

            O you of the cotton pajamas

            and frayed bits of life

            in your hair every AM!

            O niece and nephew,

            digging black plastic

            picks from Thrifty’s 

            in your do’s.

            A meteor caromed into

            my nephew’s sleep.

            . . . 

            I settled us one in each bed to

            thrash out theology,

            creator’s peculiar affections

            for us all (7)

There is the sense of something being more than just profoundly right about this relationship but actually created in rhythm with the gods. It is not just that they are in the right place in their world, but in line with the meteors in outer space and with whatever creator there is. Her nephew might have bought his hair pick at Thrifty’s (a discount pharmacy chain in the United States), but that doesn’t mean he is not extraordinary. What she is showing us is the way that we should regard other people in our lives, especially those that are related to us. It is easy to understand these relationships as commonplace, but they are not. Through her eyes, we see them for what they are. This sense is strengthened by the fact that they are of a mixed-race family. The family represents both what the United States is and what it should be.

     Bright-Eyed represents a departure and growth in Sarai’s work. She is reminding me of the way that I should be aware of the world, what I should see and how I should see it. This is not to suggest that she is being preachy or pedantic in any way. She is just opening a new view of the universe and I am fortunate enough to see it.

John Brantingham 26th May 2024

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My Dead by John Brantingham Etymphrastic Art by Jane Edberg (Kelsay Books)

Posted on March 26, 2024 by tearsinthefence
My Dead by John Brantingham Etymphrastic Art by Jane Edberg (Kelsay Books)

The first thing a reader sees is the cover: yellow, black, brown, green, and red; an eye is turned toward a figure in silhouette—etymphrastic art by Jane Edberg. Each poem is complemented by a vibrant illustration.  The poems are set in the Midwest United States, Ohio, where trains are common in both rural and semi-urban towns.  It’s a developed region, not far from a big airport, closer to Cleveland than to the small towns in the fiction of Sherwood Anderson and the poems of James Wright. One poem ‘Euclid Avenue’ suggests Cleveland.  Like the eye on the cover, the speaker in the poems is observant. The poems are other-directed, and quiet, with settings that delineate the distance between the speaker and other people.

  The poems are other-directed, and that other is someone seen for only a moment. In the first poem, ‘4:30 AM.’ the speaker notices someone has spread a blanket over his car, ‘with its busted headlight.’  He says, ‘I wonder where they are now/ that they do not need their blanket.’ In ‘Sunday Morning’ a man is sweeping a street.  ‘The way he moves/ I think he has become/ his meditation.’  In ‘Blackbirds’ birds perch on a pole that runs along the side of a train car. ‘When it jerks to a start,/ they flock into the eucalyptus.’  In ‘Tanker’ a man appears to be waiting to cross train tracks, but when the train stops ‘he climbs the ladder/ of a tanker car/ and tags it/ with white spray paint.’  In ‘Just After Sunset’ the speaker, walking his dog, observes a commuter.

          The man is staring

          up the long street

          for the bus

          that is not yet here.

          He’s unaware of Lizzy

          and her need

          for touch.

   The poems are quiet.  The speaker is thinking of his dead.  ‘I can hear them almost/ telling me things/ that probably matter.’ In ‘Grandfather’ he sees a driver, a man, not staying in his own lane, but swerving into his lane.  He speculates that the man is tired, having come off a long plane flight that landed at the close-by airport, from ‘A trip back home maybe,/ where everything he once knew/ has been lost.’  The poem concludes:

          My grandfather, 

          a man who died five years

          before I was born,

          whispers to me

          that the man found out

          he will move on

          to that next place much too early.

In ‘Euclid Avenue’ the speaker hears the dead ‘under the traffic noise/ of an early commute.’  He concludes, ‘I think they are trying/ to remind me of careless/ moments in my past./ Maybe they’re telling me of theirs.’

   Lastly, the poems’ settings delineate the distance between the speaker and other people, and things such as, in ‘his Dawn,’ ‘the train/ that runs 100 feet/ from my front door.’ The poem ‘Light’ begins ‘I can walk from here to the library.’ Further into ‘Light’ the speaker says, 

           From the glass entrance door,

           I cannot see the books.

           A man who lives next to it

           is watching me from his front door,

           making sure that I don’t break in.

           I wave to him, and he waves back

Of a palm tree hidden in ‘the canopy/of a sycamore’ he says, ‘I’m staring at it/ when my neighbor comes out/ to go to work and deadeyes me.’  Readers note the pun.  In ‘Murmuration’ he watches a train engineer watching a flock of birds that have alighted ‘over the parking lot/ between my house/ and the trainyard.’ In ‘This Civility’ a hawk is ‘being chased by mockingbirds.’ ‘If I squint,/ I can see my dead/ flying about with them.’ 

    In My Dead the landscape of the past coincides with the landscape of the present.  Intimacy characterizes these spare, contemplative poems and their counterparts, Jane Edberg’s striking visuals.  Each poem is its own world.  It’s to the poet’s credit that he tells readers all they need to know and fills the silence with significance.  John Brantinham’s My Dead is pure poetry.

Peter Mladinic 26th March 2024

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Hearts Forged In Resistance by Chella Courington (Finishing Line Press)

Posted on August 21, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Hearts Forged In Resistance by Chella Courington (Finishing Line Press)

Chella Courington’s chapbook, Hearts Forged in Resistance, is available for preorder now from Finishing Line Press, and I highly recommend ordering it. I have long been a fan of Courington’s work for the power of its language and imagery. This collection does not disappoint. It was written in reaction to the war in Ukraine. When I contacted her, I asked her about the relationship of her title and her work’s theme, and she wrote, ‘At the time of entitling the collection, I was thinking about Ukraine and the heartfelt, strong way in which Ukrainians met life-threatening adversity. How they forged their passion for freedom and for their citizens into resistance where friction transforms feeling.’ This idea runs through the work; however, her work goes beyond this as she meditates on how resistance in people’s personal lives creates richness in their perspectives and humanity. 

     The title of the collection comes from a line from her poem, ‘Strength,’ and that is where the theme of the work grows out of:

7000 miles away         tanks roll across Ukrainian borders

trying to wipe them off the map

grandmothers  aunts    fathers sons

throw their bodies against bully armor

hearts forged   in resistance

The poet takes to heart the courage of those people she sees in the news not giving into Putin or his forces. This is a powerful moment for her and all of us who have watched the war. Many of course assumed that Russia would simply be too powerful, and it is surprising to see the strength of the resistance including in Zelensky’s response. She writes in another poem, ‘Zelensky takes off his suit         puts on battle fatigues / stands in the streets        talks with his troops.’ As the title suggests, it is the courage in resistance that creates character in the poet’s eyes.

     However, this collection is not simply about the war in Ukraine; it leads her to a larger meditation about the idea of dignity put to the test with pressure, how it has affected many of the people she has known and loved. In ‘Grief,’ she develops a vision of her father. This once powerful man who worked in steel plants is now old and weakened, and he misses his wife who has passed away.

. . . [His shoulders] began to sag after my mom fell

no moon out    and died while he slept           My dad saved the hair

from her brush            wrapped in Kleenex    stored in a wooden box

beside their bed           Every night he rubs strands against his cheek.

Through his loss of power and the loss of his wife, he has transformed from someone who once was merely strong to someone with a complex emotional life with compassion and love at its root. Throughout the collection we are given examples of how people react to the worst kind of pain. We are shown strength in its various ways.

     Hearts Forged in Resistance is a necessary book as we face new challenges. Of course, to be alive means facing pain and difficulties. Courington’s collection reminds me of Viktor Frankl’s idea of what it means to be worthy of one’s pain. Pain, if confronted correctly, can help us to see the more noble elements of our humanity. It can clarify what is beautiful inside of us.

John Brantingham 21st August 2023

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California Roadkill by GenXCore (Mystic Boxing Commission)

Posted on June 20, 2023 by tearsinthefence
California Roadkill by GenXCore (Mystic Boxing Commission)

I wrote a couple of emails to GenXCore after I read California Roadkill. Something in it felt familiar, and I guessed that he had studied, as I once did, at California State University, Long Beach. I went to Cal State, Long Beach in the 1990s soon after Charles Bukowski, who always loomed large there because he lived nearby and would visit, had passed away. His influence on the students and faculty was large and a lot of people were writing what you might call bad Bukowski, work that was a pale imitation, where the writer pretended at the lifestyle and attitudes Bukowski had. Others took the lessons of his work, that it should be true to who you are, and were influenced by him. They didn’t write bad Bukowski but good and honest work of their own.

            When I started to read California Roadkill, I was worried that it would be bad Bukowski, which is often pointlessly jaded and simply unkind, but what GenXCore is doing in it is allowing himself to be influenced and to learn from writers like Bukowski but taking those lessons to create something new. California Roadkill is in part about recovery from drug abuse. We have seen a lot of that kind of work and much of it is great. This novel is too, but its focus is something that I have not really seen. It follows Jimmy, a punk rocker and adjunct English professor, who has been in recovery for a long time. The idea of following someone through his day-to-day struggles years after he has become clean distinguishes this novel for me from anything I have seen. Certainly, Bukowski didn’t write about that, but had he been through this experience, he might have. We are not given the saccharine story of someone who swore off drugs and whose life is now eternally better. What we are shown is how difficult the day to day life of an addict is, and how it can be impossibly hard some days. What we are shown is that in California, life can be exceptionally difficult, and money and work are hard to obtain.

GenXCore’s description of adjunct life is more realistic than any I have ever seen. I was an adjunct English Professor for 5 years and a full-time faculty member for 20, and one of the dirty secrets of the profession is that most of the people who work there are treated as though they are disposable. They make little money, they have few benefits, and they are abandoned when it is expedient to do so. They can be driven out of their profession by a department chair who doesn’t like them or is just forgetful through under-employment. To be clear, that does not usually happen. The chairs I worked with were generally good people, but that fact hangs over every adjunct teaching today even though such behavior is illegal. On top of that, the large bureaucratic machinery that controls how people in education act and how little they are able to effect change makes it difficult to treat adjunct professors with the compassion they are due. In California Roadkill, one of Jimmy’s students has attacked him, slashing his face with a knife. The response from the university is predictably underwhelming, and now Jimmy, understandably, does not feel comfortable going back to the classroom. Where does that leave him? It leaves him where so many educators who want to teach in college in the United States are. He has the expertise and the desire to do work that he is good at, but he isn’t able to do any longer. He is underemployed and living in a city where his job would not pay him enough to afford a stable rent in any case. He is a professional who is unhoused and food insecure.

California Roadkill is powerful in these places, talking about addiction and the educational system and California in general because GenXCore permits himself to write about the actual experience of these things. They are hard and often painful, but they are real. I have a personal bias against movies that applaud the idea that teachers are heroic when they sacrifice their happiness and health for their work. Teaching should not contain the false dilemma that if teachers are good then they must be sacrificial lambs, but that idea is built into the educational system. This portrayal is accurate to so many educators I know, especially those who are unable to get one of the rare full-time positions that actually have decent pay and security. It is accurate to the way that many of the unhoused live, in that he is not always sleeping outside but living a life of chaos trying to stay in different places as often as he can. 

            California Roadkill is the kind of novel I would hope to write if I were to write about the problems that I see in California, especially among those who live on the fringes of the city and the academic world. It is a beautiful novel that asks us to reconsider preconceptions, and to think about the ways the world has changed in the last decade. It is not the only book to understand these problems, not the only legitimate point-of-view, but it is a point-of-view that I have not seen represented yet, and it is a book that should be read, discussed, and thought about. 

John Brantingham 20th June 2023

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An Interview with Sara Lippmann

Posted on May 13, 2023 by tearsinthefence
An Interview with Sara Lippmann

I discovered Sara Lippmann’s work when I attended a reading for the New Voices Project online. The New Voices Project includes a book (New Voices from Vallentine and Mitchell) and a series of events where current writers and poets write ekphrasis to images from the Holocaust. The idea is that it is important that we not only hear what the thinkers of the past wrote about the Holocaust but that we keep learning from it and update our understanding of it as we progress as a civilization.

         Lippmann certainly does that in her story ‘Good Girls,’ which is about two Jewish children being rounded up in Vichy France at the Velodrome by nationalistic governmental agents, so they can be sent to the concentration camps. She’s also the author of the recently released novel, Lech, which focuses on people in the Catskills. It is not about the pandemic, but it seems to me that this is a book inspired by it, as it talks about ideas of the dehumanizing effects of isolation. This dehumanization also figures highly in her discussion of the Holocaust, how separating people can lead to the kinds of horrors witnessed there.

John Brantingham: ‘Good Girls,’ the title of the story in New Voices, seems to me to have some level of irony. I was wondering if what you meant was that there is some level of danger in training young girls to be good in a traditional sense?

It’s loaded. What does it mean to be a good girl? Keep her mouth shut. Do as she’s told. Never step out of line, never beat to her own drummer, never resist. It’s self-erasure. Whenever an authority figure levies such an expectation, we better run. In the case of the story, however, it is precisely that self-erasure that is desired. If they keep quiet. If they don’t make a fuss. If they put up with every indignity, every act of violence, if if if – they might squeak through to survival. They might go undetected. 

John Brantingham: That’s interesting then. So the narrative given to us by authority figures is a bluff. If we keep quiet, then we will survive, but that convention is really just a way of causing harm to those who would be obedient. And it seems to me that the potential dangers of following convention is one of the themes that is often in your work. Were you discussing that in Lech in any way?

Not to wade too deeply into politics, or thorny cultural critique, but we can see this pattern manifest, play out and backfire time and again throughout Jewish history: Jews trying to align themselves with the dominant power, as if that might enable them to ‘pass,’ only to be outed and othered, anyway. I touch this gently in the flash piece, but certainly, we saw this with the nationalism of German Jews and the push for assimilation, the cultural antagonism between those who “fit” in vs. those (eastern European) who stand out. And of course, we also see this with the Kushner Jews et.al. aligning themselves with evangelical politics and the right wing agenda as if that might somehow “save” them, ignoring the rampant anti-semitisim within their own party.

I agree that one of the common themes of all my work – short stories, the novel – is the false comfort of convention. I look a lot at illusions of safety – whether it’s all the disturbing crap that springs from the suburbs, the truth behind every staged picture, and so on. It’s almost become knee jerk for me to confront the box, the container, the convention, whatever the purported package is – and more, the person/power/system that is trying to fit us into that package.   

John Brantingham:          So then convention is a trap, or maybe a place from where someone or some group might hide to spring a trap. I think in Lech perhaps my favorite character is Tzvi, who seems so human and at the same time seems like a cluster of contradictions. He isn’t contradictory at all, but he doesn’t conform to societal norms. I’m wondering if I’m getting this right about him, if this is what you meant.

The cloak of conformity may have its uses, but not when it suffocates the soul. So yes, this becomes Tzvi’s struggle. I’m so happy to hear you connected with him, as he is such a tender, wounded character — perhaps the only character that doesn’t use humor as a coping or defense mechanism, because he’s been sheltered by the insular Satmar community for so long he hasn’t built up any skin. Born into a world where everything is preordained, where laws dictate, from what you study to what you wear, how you eat, who you marry, how you love, etc, his whole self has been erased by the collective, by ritual. His “going forth” is one of self discovery and acceptance, which takes great courage and inward looking. Who doesn’t want to belong? And yet, at what individual price such belonging?

John Brantingham: The communities represented, both the Jewish community from the city and the non-Jewish residents seem to be insular to some degree. Of course, that’s the nature of community. What strikes me though is that many of those people who have moved from the city for this time seem to have little desire for connection with their neighbors and many of the people from the Catskills don’t especially want to mingle with those from the city. This tendency seems like the danger you are warning us of, and Tsvi seems in some ways to be the character who grows the most and finds what he needs the most. I don’t think you mean to be lecturing the reader on the dangers of this kind of attitude. I think you have just drawn a realistic portrayal of cause and effect in the same way as there is a cause and effect to the girls’ relationship to the community in ‘Good Girls.’ Would you agree with that?

I never write with any set agenda, and I’m certainly not here to proselytize. But I would agree that my characters are looking for connection. And sure, isolationism of any kind breeds distrust and suspicion. We see this playing out in our political arena, in the news, where people seek out echo chambers and surround themselves with like-minded people. And of course, we see this throughout history, religious, cultural, racial and otherwise. Maybe I’m being naive to hope for greater fluidity. As social beings, humans naturally form communities. But the ugly underbelly can be exclusion. If we don’t sit at the table together, we’ll never break down those prejudices and begin to understand each other.

John Brantingham 13th May 2023

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Rich Soos and Cholla Needles Press Interview by John Brantingham

Posted on September 10, 2021 by tearsinthefence
Rich Soos and Cholla Needles Press Interview by John Brantingham

Just outside Joshua Tree National Park is the city of Joshua Tree, which has drawn artists and writers to itself forming a community of creative people in the Mojave Desert. Within this community is Rich Soos and Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, which have created a space for these folks to share their creativity. He publishes a monthly literary magazine and hosts readings to celebrate each new issue. He also makes sure Cholla Needles is involved with other local events including the Big Read put on each year by the Arts Connection of San Bernardino County.  In 2021 the Big Read featured the U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo.

       What I find particularly fascinating however, is Cholla Needles’ publishing project. Soos publishes a wide range of work, but his series of books of poets who are also visual artists is stunning. These are often about forty pages and include full color art. They often feature desert themes and capture the spirit of the Joshua Tree’s arts community well with authors and artists like Kendall Johnson, Cynthia Anderson, Susan Abbott, Zara Kand, and Cindy Rinne, serious writers who take their art just as seriously. The effect is a body of work that is the best of what ekphrasis does, where the art and words work in unison to make new connections, to create new ideas, that the art or words alone could not do. These are not just exceptional books. This is an exceptional series.

      I wanted to understand the collaborative process between him and his writer/artists, so I talked to him about the project.

John:   Would it be fair to say that you are deeply involved in a collaborative process that is not just you printing the work, but helping the artists/writers to draw out ideas that they might not have necessarily found on their own?

Rich:   Well, a lot depends on the author. I am always involved in the collaborations, obviously. How deeply depends on the other parties involved. There are some poets/artists that I spend lots and lots of time with attempting to craft a final product that works. There are others who are excellent at self-editing, and describing their vision well, so I’m largely the old guy in the background making sure the technology matches their vision. 

John:   Did you self-consciously decide to develop this art/poetry project? Do you even see it as a project or is it just something that naturally built itself?

Rich:   I walked into pie for the people in Joshua Tree for some pizza and saw artwork on the walls that knocked me over. I discovered an artist who had placed my deepest dreams and poetry onto canvas and was fascinated. I found my heart pouring out words that had been waiting for these images and created two proofs – one called Interiors, and one called Exteriors. I created the proofs before talking to the artist because I did not have the language to explain the vision I had for these publications. The cover of both was the same, the titles were different. When I took the proofs to the artist we immediately bonded and collaborated to help make the vision I had a mutual vision. This experience started the series of art/poetry books and is solely the fault of Zara Kand. Without her art speaking directly to me this would never have started. I’m not sure the word “project” is the correct term, I just know it was something I had to do to satisfy my own need to see poetry and art that moved my soul become a single unit. I do like your description, “naturally built itself”.

     Many of these art books have come together the same way. A vision in my head that I can only express through the printing process. As an example, Cindy Rinne submitted a book of poetry that she wanted me to publish Called Moon of Many Pebbles. I loved the words, and was willing to publish them in the same way as most of our books – black words on white paper. As I read through the words I kept seeing her art, so using the same format, I decided to try the art/poetry approach to add a vivid dimension to the reading experience. Again, I was unable to use words to explain the vision, so I made up a proof version and shared it with Cindy. She was very happy with the presentation, and from that first proof we were able to collaborate to make the vision a mutual one.

      Now, of course, folks have seen quite a few of these books and are able to send me material to create these art/poetry books using their vision. For example here, I had published work by Cynthia Anderson and Susan Abbott. Cynthia saw Susan’s work and wanted to have her words enhanced by including full color pieces with her words. And that beautiful collaboration became Now Voyager. We have over 25 of these books by many folks available now, and I am proud of the series. Each book is unique, and meets a specific creative desire within me. I love the technical challenge of turning the vision in my head into a work of art others want to hold in their hands. 

John:   Would it be fair to say that you are deeply involved in a collaborative process that is not just you printing the work, but helping the artists/writers to draw out ideas that they might not have necessarily found on their own?

Rich:   Well, a lot depends on the author. I am always involved in the collaborations, obviously. How deeply depends on the other parties involved. There are some poets/artists that I spend lots and lots of time with attempting to craft a final product that works. There are others who are excellent at self-editing, and describing their vision well, so I’m largely the old guy in the background making sure the technology matches their vision. 

John:   I’m wondering about your placement in the Mojave desert and if that’s influenced the way you’ve developed as a press.

Rich:   My “placement” in the Mojave desert was simply a result of the big real estate crash of 2008. I had always wanted to move here since my first visit in 1972, and by 2008 I was very close to “retirement”.  We had honestly given up on ever being able to return to California to live because of the ridiculous costs of homes. In 2008 real estate prices were slashed to 25% of what they were in previous years, and we immediately bought our retirement home because we knew that was a once every 20-30 years opportunity. The entire country has experienced the doubling and tripling of real estate prices in the past few years, so I made a good decision. There’s no way we could afford to move here now.

We had come to Joshua Tree every summer and I can’t deny it’s influenced me as a writer and artist – and probably as an editor. I have a deep love for work that is sparse and carries deep meaning below the surface, and I’m sure that comes from my walks in the desert. Also, our motto here at Cholla Needles is from a poem I wrote 40 years ago when I learned the hard way the strength of those little needles. The motto basically says that I look for work that slices through the surface, and leaves a healthy scar long afterwards. Poetry should bear repeated readings, and stay deep within us long after we’ve turned the page.

The development of the Cholla Needles phenomena happened quickly once we started. My initial desire was simply to have a monthly magazine. I started receiving full length manuscripts almost immediately, and when I’m presented with work I know others should be reading, I can’t help but desire to print it. In five years we’ve published 60 monthly issues and over 120 books.   

John:   Speaking of the monthly magazine, you’ve told me that you draw many of the people you publish from Cholla Needles Magazine. This involves both art and writing as well. Was one of your impulses for book publishing to get a more complete vision of individual artists?

Rich:   Cholla Needles magazine is presented as what I call 10 mini-chapbooks between two covers. This was on purpose – to give readers a real good flavor of each writer and artist. And you are correct, this mini-chapbook is a mere taste of what they are capable of, and the books offer much more depth into the authors. I did plan that specific requirement – that an author or artist appear in Cholla Needles prior to being considered for a book – for a reason. My sanity. I always feel obligated to read material that comes across my threshold. I’m sure no one would be surprised how many people have book manuscripts ready to be read. Any editor will tell you – it is very easy to become overwhelmed. By making sure authors/artists first appear in the magazine before I read their full book manuscript, I save a lot of time. I do believe the best books come from mutual respect and a willingness to work together. If we can work together to get their work prepared for the mini-chapbook, we have a much better chance of some real success with a 120 page book. 

John:   Do you have any plans or dreams for the future of the press or do you plan for it just to develop organically?

Rich:   Oh yes, we have dreams, big dreams! However, our plan at this point is simple – to survive the pandemic, and to build back to where we were pre-pandemic. 

            Understandably people’s financial situations have been in havoc the past sixteen months and their ability and desire to support magazines like ours has almost disappeared.

            Our three dreams remain the same, the same dreams we have included in our non-profit by-laws. 

            First, we’d love to pay our authors and artists. Our plan pre-pandemic was to change from a single copy to several copies as payment starting 2022, with the continued dream of being able to pay in greenbacks as we grow. 

            The second dream is to move our library from the garage into a site that would double as a poetry bookstore/art gallery. The dream is to sell new poetry from around the world, and maintain our library for the classic books of poetry that are no longer available for sale. We have several thousand books in the library already, and it continues to grow. Many writers donate their own books to the library, as well as books they’ve collected that they no longer have room for. 

            And finally, the biggest dream was practical pre-pandemic, but since real estate prices have tripled in the past 16 months it feels impractical. That said, a dream can still be a dream, and we want to have a Cholla Needles retreat where poets can reserve a place to come from anywhere in the world to be inspired by our beautiful landscape to either start a new book, or find the peace to complete a project they are working on. The dream is to have this space available to writers at no cost and underwritten by donations from patrons of the arts. There are folks who still do that and we simply wait for the right ones who love Cholla Needles and love our area and love writers. The perfect trifecta.

            In the meantime, as these dreams continue to motivate and inspire our board members we will continue to develop organically. Last year for example, a single board member pointed out since I was answering emails 10-12 hours a day seven days a week that I didn’t have time for my own writing. I hadn’t stopped to consider that, but it was true, so I asked the simple question – how do we change that? She suggested “guest editors.” Such a simple, organic solution, and yes, we have had four issues by guest editors in the past year, and it’s been so successful we will continue to keep that new tradition alive.

    We’ve been blessed to be able to continue publishing during these days when folks are more focused on survival than poetry. Maintaining our schedule has proven to be inspirational to our readers, and their monthly notes of thanks and praise help us tremendously. Mutual love and respect. Good times!!!

John Brantingham 10th September 2021

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Chaos and Ash by Kendall Johnson (Pelekinesis Press)

Posted on January 2, 2021 by tearsinthefence
Chaos and Ash by Kendall Johnson (Pelekinesis Press)

In a world where movies and books often treat trauma casually and even glibly, Kendall Johnson’s Chaos and Ash from Pelekinesis Press gives us an inside view of what it truly is and what treatment actually looks like. Johnson is someone who understands trauma. He is a Vietnam combat veteran and a former firefighter who rushed into the chaos of wildland fires in California. He later became a trauma psychotherapist and consultant specializing in big events. He was a second responder to 9/11, the Rodney King uprising in Los Angeles, wildfires across the United States, and the Northridge earthquake. He is someone who has spent a lifetime dealing with his trauma and others’, and where other books I have read treat the concept as an aside, Johnson’s book gives it the weight it deserves.

     That Chaos and Ash is a fictionalized memoir in flash and a few other forms is appropriate to the way he helps us to understand what trauma is. It is fictionalized to some degree to protect those he worked with. He does not describe the real events of his patients, but creates out of a lifetime of therapy. It is flash vignette because there is no clear throughline, nothing easy that we can find. There is not one simple thesis statement that can help us to understand the concept. Instead, what he deals with are fragments and moments that often do not make a logical kind of sense on top of which, he has not fully recovered all of the memories that he is trying to work through in this book. Much of what happened in Vietnam is coming back to him, and while a half-remembered event in most memoirs would not work for me, in this collection, that half-memory is the point. What we are getting is what it is to be inside the mind of someone suffering from this pain, and it is not easy, and it is certainly not clear.

     Beyond the flash, Johnson uses a few other forms as well to open up what he is talking about through the way he says it. He is also an abstract expressionist painter, and a number of his pieces are scattered through the book, giving us another path into his experience. He has poetry here and there. Later, he includes open letters to the NRA and Congress, one to parents and teachers, and a third to incident commanders. These take his artistic expressions that might be interpreted in multiple ways and add a more direct argument as to what he sees as the problems with the way society is working, how it throws us off balance. These multiple approaches help us to understand what he is talking about in a number of ways.

     This is not a pornography of violence and trauma. Johnson is not simply laying out his and other people’s pain so that we might gain a kind of vicarious experience. He is creating a fiction based on his life so that others might see what moving forward means. He is making the point that this is not something to be cured through a couple of sessions of therapy. In fact, he is showing us that the concept of being cured is absurd. There is no such thing as leaving it behind but rather he is looking for ways to move forward through this kind of pain. 

     The main character who like Johnson is a trauma psychotherapist who has been to Vietnam himself is in therapy himself, and his psychologist helps him to deal with both the pain he lived and the secondary trauma of those who work with trauma survivors. He speaks to his therapist about the role he is expected to play and how he gets through it:

“I’m expected to project an attitude of ‘I’ve seen it all and know just what to do.’ That’s half the magic.” I felt myself going on the defensive a little. “And when I’m not OK, when I’m scared of the situation and don’t know what to do, I fake it. I guess I manage to selectively dissociate, to take note of my feelings, and then put them in a closet somewhere and get on with it.” 

“You certainly got good at that in Vietnam. And paid a price for it—you’ve been disconnected for years. Amnesia. Our work would have gone more quickly if you hadn’t been dragging around a pretty big sack of leftovers.” 

I took a breath and let it out slowly. “It may not be perfect, but I guess I get by.”

Over the years, I have enjoyed popular nonfiction psychology books, but none of them have shown me what real pain looks like as this fictional account does. Those books are often neat and their discussions give observations that are meant to be definitive. This is a discussion of how messy psychological pain is, how his experiences in the past are rubbing up against the way he is trying to help people in the present in his practice. Psychologists have often presented themselves as godlike, able to clearly and easily point to this or that and solve or at least identify the problem immediately. Johnson lets us know that such an attempt does not make a lot of sense because problems are layered upon other problems and the psychologist is just a human being trying to see the patient through the foggy lens of his past.

     For me, Chaos and Ash was refreshing. It is nice to have someone speak truth about something that should be taken seriously and so often is not.

John Brantingham 3rd January 2020

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Life, Orange to Pear by John Brantingham (Bamboo Dart Press)

Posted on November 11, 2020 by tearsinthefence
Life, Orange to Pear by John Brantingham (Bamboo Dart Press)

John Brantingham’s newest book, Life, Orange to Pear, begins and ends with fruit.

I’m not spoiling anything for you. It’s right there in the title. It’s also, surprise, about life–how it begins, ends, and everything in between. The simple act of eating fruit in the opening and closing scenes of this book poses the idea that we can find comfort in the simplest moments so long as we choose to look for it. This book proposes that we must appreciate simplicity while we, at the same time, grapple with complexity and existential terror.

Written in a casual, second-person voice, Orange to Pear follows the life and fatherhood of a very flawed but well-meaning part-time college professor and father who also happens to be a functioning alcoholic. Using this voice, this book argues that there are no easy solutions. Instead of groping for answers to the Problem of Evil, or whether we’re defined by our flaws, or how much we doom our children to repeat our lives, this story offers something else–an unadulterated, almost Christ-like empathy.

It also, however, demonstrates how even human beings with the best intentions can be ineffective, destructive, and self-sabotaging. How sometimes people will use any excuse to enact the destructive behaviors at their core. How passivity, over-intellectualizing, and destructive behavior masquerading as self-care can be paralyzing. That certain patterns of living leave a person completely adrift, wondering and hoping instead of acting. The narrator (and by extension the reader) is often left not knowing if he’s done his best. The story reaches a conclusion on this, and it’s carefully crafted, but I won’t summarize it. I can’t. Like many of the things that matter in this world, it can’t be retold, only experienced. One of the gifts of this book is that it revels in uncertainty while also being clear, direct, and brief. Brantingham captures what life is like moment-to-flawed-moment as we scrape (often unsuccessfully) for meaning, importance, and decency–and how painful, divine, and silly these moments can be.

The narrative centers around the flawed narrator’s connection to his daughter, Cyndi. As the story evolves, the uncertainty this man faces as his daughter, despite his every attempt to slow her down, grows up and then eventually outgrows him. This is the archetypal coming-of-age story from the unusual perspective of a broken parent–a man who drinks through breakfast, seems only marginally employed, and who never, ever, refers to his wife by her name. He makes mistakes in pursuit of what he thinks is right–and what he believes is right coincidentally serves to allow him to indulge himself.

At one point, he makes an indirect, not very collected attempt at confronting an acquaintance (who is proudly showing him the taxidermized foot of an elephant that has been made into furniture) about wealth inequality, gleefully burning an important social bridge for his wife:

And as you walk out your daughter beams at you for the first time in a long time and it makes you want to storm out, which you do, as well as anyone can storm and also stop off by the bar for one more glass of the good stuff.

He’s done the right thing. Maybe. He’s done it to earn the pride of his daughter, who finds the man abhorrent, but one can’t help but notice that he’s also getting another drink out of it. He’s–in the true mindset of an addict–earning another drink.

These characters have the simultaneously empathetic and pathetic qualities of Kurt Vonnegut characters. They’re whole, flawed, and alive in a way that lets us one feels their own aliveness. By the time you’ve reached the end of this book you hate the narrator. And you love him. You regret all of his mistakes and realize why they were so important. You wouldn’t undo them even if you could because you’ve found something divine in them.

Bamboo Dart Press are also publishing Dennis Callaci, Stephanie Barbé Hammer and Meg Pokrass in their fiction series.

Scott Noon Creley 11th November 2020

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John Brantingham’s The Green of Sunset

Posted on December 13, 2013 by tearsinthefence
John Brantingham’s The Green of Sunset

Regular Tears in the Fence contributor, John Brantingham has followed up his crime novel, Mann of War (Dark Oak Mysteries 2013) and collection of short stories Let Us All Now Pray To Our Own Strange Gods (World Parade Books 2013) with a collection of poetry, The Green of Sunset from Moon Tide Press.

 

The Green of Sunset consists of two sequences of prose poems that show the strengths of simplicity and lightness of touch and pitch in creating a memorable collection. They are comparable to Lee Harwood in their clarity and delicacy. Indeed the title poem addressed to an unborn child reminded me of Harwood’s ‘Salt Water’ on the loss of his child. Whereas Harwood deploys an extraordinary restraint and control through his line breaks and hiatuses, Brantingham has no line breaks, speaks directly to the unborn, is restrained, and looks to the simple nourishing things of life as a source of renewal.

 

These unsentimental prose poems draw upon childhood memories, travels to London, Canada, New York, the Sequoia National Park Trail to Bearpaw Meadow in 1978, 1985 and 2005, the streets and freeways of Los Angeles, and his engagement with the life and poetry of Wilfred Owen to embrace what matters most in life. It is in the broadest sense a work of spiritual resonance with a big American heart. This self-deprecating poet of Los Angeles has a wide reach straddling his ancestral family roots in Yorkshire, the God of Lindisfarne, mountain climbing in California, the impact of seeing Chaucer’s grave or a satellite crossing Orion, praise poems for dogs and insects, all marked and dated with the spit of suggestion and the ‘time and mildew’ that pulls apart.

 

The Dog, Autumn 1979

 

Eight days after the operation, I’m walking home by myself when a dog starts to bark at me from behind his gate. I must have heard a dog before then. I must have. But the sharpness of his yelling fills my ears, and he stops me, and I cannot move from the place I’m standing until someone comes out and finds me staring at him and weeping.

 

The book has a foreword by Donna Hilbert and a cover design by Ann Brantingham. I think that many readers will return to this supple, entertaining and moving collection.

 

David Caddy

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