"Axel: backstory"

Steam from a melting glacier

your profile hovering
there   Axel as if we'd lain prone at fifteen
on my attic bedroom floor   elbow to elbow reading
in Baltimorean August-
blotted air
		Axel I'm back to you
brother of strewn books   of late
hours drinking poetry scooped in both hands

Dreamt you into existence, did I, boy-
comrade who would love
		everything I loved

Without my eyelash glittering piercing
sidewise in your eye
where would you have begun, Axel   how
would the wheel-spoke have whirled
your mind?   What word
stirred in your mouth without my 
nipples' fierce erection?   our 
twixt-and-between

		Between us   yet
my part belonged to me
		and when we parted
I left no part behind   I knew
how to make poetry happen

Back to you Axel through the crackling heavy
salvaged telephone

I keep going back to poetry itself. Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we’re going to die. The most mysterious aspect of being alive might be that, and poetry knows that. So everybody we know is going to die and many of us will attend our beloved friends and family. So what each friend who has died has told me is, it’s going to happen to you too. You know, here I go, bye, you know? And every time that happens, it’s a new experience that I feel like I’ve been privileged to be near or close to the door when they’ve gone.

Listen to the whole interview here.

Q:Your new memoir, My Dyslexia, chronicles your discovery that you are dyslexic, something that you didn’t learn until well into your career as a poet. How did you come to realize you were dyslexic?

Philip Schultz:I found out when my son was diagnosed with it in the second grade, back in 2003. I was 58 years old and shocked to learn that all his symptoms were the same as mine, that there was a rational, medical, and scientific explanation for what I as well as others saw as my obdurate stupidity.

I had learned, over time, to segregate my perceptions of myself as a way of tolerating the bad and trying to appreciate the good: Yes, I could make up stories, and draw (I was a cartoonist in high school) and write poems, but I wasn’t smart in most academic subjects like math and science, and I was a painfully slow reader, someone who had to carefully select each book and avoided any unnecessary reading.  I was kicked out of Hebrew school in a week, and the Boy Scouts in two weeks (couldn’t follow instructions or read a map). I sat alone on field trips, which I mostly didn’t go on, though I could entertain my parents’ friends with funny stories and tolerate large amounts of time alone in my backyard, dreaming up adventures.

Q: You write about how much difficult you have reading. What made you want to pursue poetry despite that?

PS: If there’s any one reason it probably has to do with the emotions I was struggling with due to my dyslexia and bullying, which I could express more quickly and directly through poetry. I could encapsulate my ideas and feelings into tiny missiles that alleviated the pressure and stress of constant confrontation, and allowed me islands of peace and relief. I think poetry offered me a sanctuary from a prosaic world of struggle, which it still does, perhaps more often than I’d care to admit.  Poetry was respite and rescue, a cooling place in which to recoil and refine my sense of self; a place to heal. It still is.

Q: In a recent interview with Wired, Brock Eide mentions you as someone who shows one of the strengths of dyslexia—narrative reasoning. He says that dyslexics are better observers of narrative, and that they have a strong memory for stories. Do you think this strength influences your poetry?

PS: Yes, Brock Eide and his wife Fernette have written a valuable book in The Dyslexic Advantage. Their work has been invaluable to people like me, and I thank them. In his interview with Wired Eide highlights four particular strengths he finds dyslexics share, narrative reasoning being one of them. I found early on that that best way to manage, if not survive, many of my experiences in school was to invent a character, a stand-in for me, and then place him in a story similar to whatever ordeal I was struggling through, thereby allowing myself the luxury of creating my own ending. I was an only child in a house full of cantankerous immigrants loudly defying the various accumulated indignities of their fate, and this technique allowed me to not only not be swallowed up completely in the travails of their endless drama to survive, but to carve out an identity that both consoled and encouraged me during dark times. It encouraged further invention and characters until writing itself became a way not only to survive, but to thrive.

I should add, too, that another strength of dyslexia that Mr. Eide mentions is his idea of interconnected reasoning, which, if I understand it correctly, allows someone to see “the big-picture from multiple perspectives.” I can identify with this notion, too, because I’ve been doing some version of this in all my writing for a very long time. Seeing things from multiple points of view is a technique I also used as boy to fortify my own meager position in school and at home, creating entire gangs of imaginary friends who kept me company and shared my adventures. I would hold conversations out loud with several of them in my back yard or at the beach, and learned to balance and juggle a variety of narratives simultaneously. This skill allowed me to write the long poem in my poetry collection Failure, which won the Pulitzer in 2008. “The Wandering Wingless” is a 52 page poem with many characters and narratives and I doubt I would have won the award without it. In daily life my concentration must be focused on a single thing at a time in order to get anything accomplished. Sustaining shifting perspectives in my work allows me to relieve the anxiety that this single-mindedness creates. I use the same technique in shorter poems too, when possible.

Q: You’re also the founder and director of The Writers Studio, which offers classes and workshops for poets and fiction writers. Does your learning disability influence your teaching style? What advice do you give to other writers working with a learning disability?

PS: Although the vast majority of our students aren’t dyslexic, I’ve found that these same techniques help all writers of serious fiction and poetry. I didn’t know I was dyslexic when I discovered my method of writing, which I did by working with non-LD writers. In my first real teaching job, at Kalamazoo College back in the early 70’s I discovered that every student made the same mistake while writing fiction: they used the same I in their stories that they used to write letters and diaries, an I than was really a me.
Once I showed them the invented I’s of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, personages created to express an attitude and temperament, they became excited and started to experiment and move in the direction of fiction, and the imagination.

It took me the next thirty years to perfect and understand this approach, but it’s both mysterious and inspiring for me to realize that a technique that gave me the imaginative room in which to create my ideas and express my feelings, also helped others to do the same. I can’t think of another thing that provides me with more pleasure, and satisfaction.

I finally understand that the life of an artist is in many ways similar to the life of the dyslexic. Both are essentially dysfunctional systems that produce in each individual volumes of anxiety, perseverance, and rejection, as well as creative compensatory thinking. Each, by their very nature, makes a victim of its creator, turning him into an outsider and misfit. It’s true of all artists, I think, at every level of success, the more gifted, the greater and riskier the anxiety and struggle. Each must, without appeal, strive to tolerate its own forms of self-defamation, creative excitement, and lack of forgiveness.

My poetry, like my dyslexia, serves as a giant filter for my darkest feelings and ideas. Sooner or later everything of consequence passes through this filter. Everyone who suffers mild, or seriously debilitating, non-verbal or language-learning disabilities has trouble comprehending “the big picture.” Doubt is its silent partner, its secret sharer. There’s no little irony in the fact that the very things I couldn’t do have helped provide me with a profession and means of knowing myself; that I chose to master the very thing that once hindered and mastered me; to own what once owned me.

People often ask me when and how I knew I was a poet. There are several fancy responses and explanations but one certainly has to do with my longing for solitude. I can spend inordinate amounts of time alone in a room, living entirely in my thoughts and feelings.

I staved off boredom as a child by telling my grandma stories as my mother listened from the dining room, where she counted coins from my father’s vending machines. We’d sit on the tiny blue sofa in the living room, which she used as a bed, and my grandma would listen intently, smiling and nodding, as my dreamy stories took us far away from our unhappy house in Rochester’s inner city.

I can still see them in their peasant dresses surrounded by the drabness of the furniture and peeling wallpaper, and myself in their eyes, where to them I was more than what my performance in school described, more than what my teachers believed I was capable of, more than what I knew and didn’t know about the real world. They knew who I was from my stories. And from the love they felt for me. There are times, while giving a reading, when I will catch myself looking for their faces in the audience. I’m looking for the comfort and encouragement memory provides, and the nostalgia of reclamation. We are the stories we tell, the things we make up and invent, we are more than the answers we give to questions, more even than our limitations—we are the cantankerous, infinitely mysterious dreams we somehow find the courage to imagine and sometimes to tell others.

Writers are archaeologists of their own souls. We dig until we hit bottom only to find there is another bottom underneath and another after that. We are capable of great harm and great sacrifice, but the point of this struggle must have something to do with not giving up. For a long time I couldn’t imagine my life amounting to anything anyone else would view with respect and affection. I didn’t know there was something wrong or different about how my brain processed information and language; I believed there was something wrong with me. I still, on occasion, believe this. Perhaps I always will. But even when the entire world seemed to be ganging up on me, some persisting sense of myself argued on my behalf. I can’t say why exactly, though I’ve always believed what St. Augustine said to be true: “Everything that is, in so far as it is, is good.” And what is good is worthwhile and prevailing. No matter how rich or powerful or intelligent or wise we are, we are also small and inconsequential and of no worth at all. Everyone knows this. But we endure.

From “After a Death,” translated by Robert Bly:

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.

The full text of the poem appears here.

The twenty-fourth annual installment, edited by the poet Kevin Young, has just been released, and among the seventy-five poets selected are five Norton poets: Matthew Dickman, Major Jackson, James Longenbach, Gerald Stern, and Rosanna Warren. The whole book is worth seeking out, but here as a taste is Rosanna Warren’s featured poem, “The Latch,” which was included in her collection Ghost in a Red Hat:

The Latch

After scraping eighty-three-year-old paint from four screw heads
holding the latch in place on the studio door,
and, having steadied the door on one out-thrust
    hip and running
the pointed tip of a kitchen knife around the lockbox
    to break the seal

of paint, your neighbor patiently removed each screw with the
    right-size,
old-fashioned screwdriver he had brought and jiggled
    the lock free
so he could pry open its metal back and fish out 
    the broken spring,
the small, dark steel coil, and its detached tongue

which could be replaced, he thought, by an antiquarian locksmith
on the other side of town in la rue du Courreau--
though the latch will be too late to keep in or out
the man who abandoned this house, and the good and 
    ill spirits he courted here. 

Tonight, Matthew Dickman, whose second collection Mayakovsky’s Revolver will be published by Norton in 2012, reads with Matthew Zapruder as part of the Nothing Is Hidden reading series in San Francisco. The theme? Disaster Preparedness. The reading will be livestreamed starting at 10:30 EST. (via Poetry Foundation).

Alternatively, you can get ready with Ai‘s “The Strange Journey of Ulysses Paradeece After a Hurricane.”

from "The Strange Journey of Ulysses Paradeece After a Hurricane"

Lord have mercy, I'm still alive, I thought,
As I floated into the street beside the body of 
      someone familiar,
But I couldn't quite make out who
Then it came to me. It was the nurse's aide,
Now bloated and as dead as Mama Paradeece.
How long had I slept, I wondered,
Holding on to the life jacket,
As I bumped up against a tree whose branches 
      snagged my robe
And tore it off me,
But I held on to the life jacket anyway.
When I heard somebody call to me,
I couldn't open my mouth
And I couldn't let go of the tree either
So I just held on until it got stuck on something
And I broke free. 

You can find the whole poem in her book No Surrender.

“I grew up speaking two languages, both of them mangled, so I am quite at home mashing disparate languages, idioms, and vernaculars together. This is probably most evident in my second book, Dance Dance Revolution, where I tried to invent a Creole. Engine Empire is more disciplined, in that I tried to keep it to one colloquial per section. I love finding the most awkward or unpoetic forms of expression and turning them into high lyricism. I’m a magpie for weird words. It’s a good way to help ‘enlarge the English stock,’ as Hopkins once said.”

Read the rest of their conversation here.

Infernal Holofernes, illustrious king,
wild with wine raged and roared,
hollered and howled, unruly in carousing.
Far and wide the sons of man heard
his stalwart storming haughtily summoning
his warriors to raise their horns of wine.
The stern strewer of treasures drowned
his warriors in wine till they sank into stupor,
the wicked fiend plying them with drink
till they lay as in death, shedding their spirits.
Thus the king goaded his valiant warriors,
the children of man, late into darkness.
Steeped in evil, he ordered the maiden
with rings and bracelets brought to his bed.
And the shield-bearers did as their evil king bade,
entering the tent where Judith lingered,
wisest of women, and the warriors took
the most beautiful of maidens to where Holofernes,
despised by our Savior, rested at night.
A wondrous fly-nit, all of gold
covered the bed of the mighty king,
so he could look on every man
but no son of man could look on him,
unless the lord commanded him closer.
Swiftly they brought wise Judith to his bed
and went, stouthearted, to tell their lord 
the holy woman was now in his lair.
The resplendent ruler rejoiced in triumph
eager to stain the radiant maiden
with foul filth and terrible sin.
But our Celestial Judge, our Glorious Shepherd,
God our King, would not consent.
The lustful lord arrived with his warriors,
seeking in evil his bed of death.
A terrible end awaited the king,
toward which he had striven all his life
walking beneath the roof of clouds.
Senseless with drink he fell on his bed,
and the wine-sated warriors marched from the tent,
leaving the mighty false king-faithed king,
the tyrannical torturer, in his last place of rest.
Now our Great God's glorious maiden
resolved to destroy the filthy fiend
before he awoke in foul lust.
God's true servant with braided locks 
seized from its sheath a shining sword
sharpened in the clash of storming battles,
and called up the Great Guardian of Heaven,
naming His name, Lord of all
who dwell on earth, and uttered these works: 
"God of Creation, Spirit of Comfort,
All-Powerful Son, Triumphant Trinity,
I crave Your mercy in my hour of need.
Fiery flames rage in my heart
but my thoughts are heavy with grief and gloom.
Grant me, Great Lord, victory and faith,
that I may cut down this bringer of death,
Great Giver of Glory, avenge the evil
grieving my mind and burning my heart."
And our highest Judge filled her with courage,
as with all on earth who seek His help
praying in wise and humble faith.
Renewed with hope, her spirit soared,
and she seized the heathen by the hair
drawing him toward her to his shame,
skillfully placing the miserable man,
the fiendish foe, for her deadly deed.
Then Judith of the braided locks s
truck the ruthless robber, formidable foe,
with flashing sword, slicing his neck.
Senseless and stunned, wine-drunk and wounded,
he was not dead, not wholly lifeless,
so the unwavering woman struck again,
brought down her sword on the idolatrous dog
and his head went rolling over the ground.
The king's coarse carcass lay unstirring
as his spirit tumbled down death's sharp cliff,
hampered and humbled, tortured and tormented,
forever fettered in a tangle of serpents,
trapped in the eternal fires of Hell.

Some enemy took my life,
stripped me of my world strength,
doused me and drowned me in water,
then lifted me dry, set me in sun, 
where I swiftly lost what hair I had left.
A knife-edge cut me then hard,
scraped from me every remnant of what I was.
Fingers reached to fold me
and what was once a bird's fine delight
rained over me a trail of encouraging droplets.
Crossing often over the brown-rimmed inkhorn,
it drank from there a stream the color of treebark
then stepped back onto me
to mark once again its dark road. A her came
next to cover me with guardian boards of oakwood,
stretched over them soft hide,
adorned me with gold until I came to shine
bound in rich threads of filigreed wire.
Now these bright trappings, my red dye
and gleaming jewels, proclaim in all directions
the savior of nations, no longer my old foolish sorrows.
If the children of men use me well
they will be safer, assured of more victories,
more courageous, freer of heart, wiser in spirit.
They will find more friends, dear and familiar, 
good friends and true, faithful and helpful,
enlarging in honor and grace,
who will bring gifts and kindness, the firm clasp of love.
Ask who I am, useful to men, bringer of blessings.
My name is well-known, and itself is holy.

It is written in scriptures that this
creature appears plainly to us
when the hour calls,
while its singular power compels
and confounds our knowing. 
It seeks us out, one by one,
following its own way; fares on,
with its stranger's step, never
to no place; moves according
to its nature. It has no hands,
no feet, has never touched the ground,
no mouth to speak of,
nor mind. Scriptures say 
it is the least of anything made.
It has no soul, no life, but travels
widely among us in this world;
no blood nor bone, but
consoles all the children of men.
It hasn't reached heaven,
it won't touch hell, 
but takes instruction from
the king of glory. The whole story 
of its fate--limbless as it is,
animate--is too obscure to tell.
And yet all the words we find
to describe it are just and true.
If you can say it call it.
but its rightful name.

My throat's a torch, the rest of me rust
From head to haunch. I hotfoot it off,
Ready to rumble. That's my ruddy pelt
Bristling in streaks. Those spokes and sparks
Are my ears and eyes. I steal on my toes
Across the green downs. Dark will be the day
If the hellhound comes harrying here
Where I've gone to ground with my little ones.
The hot breath of the brute at our door
Unless I call on all my canny wiles
If he bulls into our hidden burrow
On his belly, baying for our bones,
It would be folly to fight him there
So with furious paws I'll forge a path
here's how a mother must make haste
Spirit them through a secret route
In the pitch-black peat, like a thing possessed.
Then I can face my foe with no fear
If the punk still wants a piece of me.
Bring it on: I'll double back
With fire in my belly, bolder than ever,
And terrible will be the turf-battle 
On the hill-crest under the earth-candle
When I turn this time with tooth and nail
On the fiend I'll flee no longer.

Hard-striving soul, greet the wayfaring stranger,
To the keen-sighted singer give welcoming words,
Question the questing one of all the worlds before,
Implore him to tell of incalculable creations,
The innate artful forces forever quickening
The day after day under God's dominion
Bring wonder laid baring to faring generations.
Day to day each makes its mark manifest
To one who with wisdom beholds the world whole
In the mind's clasp--the one who contemplates 
What other gave voice to long ago
IN thrumming rhythms and wide-reckoning songs:
Those kinsmen whose ken was strong, who with glee
And searching wit--with their bearing witness--
Drew forth common humankind's fullest measure,
Full mindful themselves of the weave of mysteries.

To love therefore a probing and emboldened life
One should fathom the world-trove's buried ends,
Should scribe into mind the word-hoards might and skill,
Make thought a strong march and meditate steadfastly
So the noble servant will never grow way-worn,
Tholling in wisdom through each earthly arrival.

School yourself in these sciences! Now let me sing 
Of the Given's glory, that like wind through sedge
Outstrips your art, though the heart grasps it
By staying steady--is your soul's heft stout enough?
It is not with human scales, inconsistent scud of dust,
That one weighs the portion his wit strains to grasp
Of the most-high work: the code of God's design.
For we shall thank the Chief of All, Unbounded, 
From always back to Nil so the everlasting King
May astonish with radiance, shearing off all want,
So that, knuckled-down, we may scale the high walls
Choosing as hand holds the heavenly King's word.

Take hold of what you are! Hear my song of marvels!
Listen! In the creation's quick the almighty Father,
The cosmic hoard's Keeper, authored heaven and earth,
The sea's breadth and depth, and everything one sees
That at this moment lifts up its thrum of praise,
The gathered consort held in the holiest Hands.

In this way, with the windward of this forethought,
God assembles all together, the whole ensemble--
Oarsmen tuned strictly to the Steersman's many measures--
So the realms bear up, bear onward through all becoming.

So through tome's tides the great Lord's noble throng
Carry across to the world His fulgent emanations, 
His works' eminence, his glory's dawn-mantle;
Steadfastly they mount the Master's endless Song
From thrones first fashioned by Heaven's utter Guardian.
With all they are they hold gladly the splendid course.
His rowing is might. It quickens the welkin's candles,
Begets the teeming oceans--with one gesture,
Prolific, He holds and calls and leads all life
Who harbors in his breast the abundant womb of All.

So never-ending He abides, Abound Splendor,
Of all judges most gentle, mercy's full measure,
Who forges life in us. And this lightsome shimmer
Moves morning to morning through night's misty slopes,
Passing over waters wondrously adorned,
And from dawn's east it hastens luminously west,
Brilliant and beguiling to each new generation.
For everything living it engenders its light,
Each one of us on earth given the eyes to see,
Being entrusted with sight by victory's true King.
Then together with its train the star's blinding brilliance
Dies away beyond the western door, exalted star
Whose sail skirts the ether like a shining shire,
Until with dim descent the gloaming summons night
From ocean's depths--as second shadowing
That holds in store the Master's adamant command,
So the wayfaring sun follows along God's course
And bends to the boson of the earth's embrace.

No one, therefore, with all mind's precious wisdom,
Can discern while they live the living Font from which 
This flow glories forth, from where the gold-reined sun
Fares forward beyond earth into darkening mists,
Descending deeper under waters' thronging waves,
Or who of those who dwell in light and on land
Call themselves content after it roams over the brim.

So therefore the One who known full well the way
To fix together daytime, nighttime, depth and height,
Sky-road and river, the waves and solid land,
Floodtides and fields, the fish and all their waters--
His works do not weaken. Upheld by healing Hands,
They stand steadfast, fastened unbreakably
By a net of bonds through the Bright Abounding
That leavens and sustains the heavens and the earth.
They are rife with blessedness who bide in that estate,
Those who crowd beside the hearth, the hallowed--
I am mute to say--those numberless angelic throngs.

What they see with their eyes is an everlasting feast,
Their King encompassing the circuit of their gaze
For in Him there is no scintilla of shadow
For they perceive plainly in sonorous resplendence 
The King of All Wonders. So ecstasy and peace
Befit the joyous in the plenty of time's Plenitude.

Everyone born should remember this therefore:
Keep earshot of the measure made deathless by the One,
Forget Life's idle longings, its lissome delights,
Let it draw you, striving to that utmost loving Bliss
One finds when one fares to the Excellent Kingdom;
Leave behind isolation, self-born suffering,
Forsake your harbored malice--let them all drift away.

A king must reign over his realm.
From a distance cities loom,
Built by giants, hewn from stone.
Wind is fleetest; thunder roars
When it is thunder's time of year.
 Chris's power is great;
 Strongest is Fate.
Winter is coldest. Spring brings rime
And stays chill for the longest time.
Summer is rich with the sun's heat;
Bounteous autumn pours forth fruit,
The harvest that God sends to men.
On truth do not at all depend.
Treasure is precious, costly gold;
The man who knows the most is old,
Schooled by years now in the past.
Grief clutches us and holds us fast.
Clouds roll on. A fledgling prince
Must learn two things from his good friends:
How to make war and how to share
Out his wealth. A warrior
Must have courage; a sword must seek
Battle, and clash against a helm.
The hawk, wild creature, has to learn
To perch on a glove. The wolf, alone,
Must lurk within a forest glade.
Safe in the strength his tusks provide,
The boar must dwell within the wood. 
A good man in his own land
Must win his honor. IN the hand
The javelin fits, spear rich with gold.
A gem on a ring stands bright and bold.
A river must flow into the sea;
On a ship a mast must stay
Upright. A sword in the lap must lie,
As in its barrow the dragon, sly,
Guarding its hoard. Fish must spawn.
In his high hall the king must share
Out rings to all. The aged bear
Must live on the heath, a thing to fear.
Gushing with foam, downhill the river
Must flow. Men must stick together, 
Each in the band a glory seeker.
To the truth the warrior must cleave,
Mortals to wisdom. Trees must bear leaves
And flowers. Green the hill must stand,
Firmly rooted in the land.
 Heaven is God's house
 Who judges us.
Every hall must have a door,
Mouth of the building. A shield must bear
A boss to keep the fingers safe.
A bird must freely fly aloft.
Deep in a pool salmon must swim, 
Glide with the trout. Wind stirs a storm
Out of the welkin down to earth.
The thief must walk in dirty weather.
In lonely mashes dwells the monster.
A maid must see her lover on the sly,
Lest people pay her dowry
With rings. Salt swells the roiling sea.
Everywhere might streams must flow
With tide and cloud and winds that blow.
Cattle must breed and multiply;
The star must shine bright in teh sky
As God ordained. Evil fights good;
Youth struggles with decrepitude;
Life against death, light against gloom,
One army against another one.
Enemy with enemy contends,
Struggling together over land,
Blaming each other for spilt blood.
On these wars a sage must brood.
The criminal must expiate his crime,
Hanged for the damage he has done.
Where do souls go? The Lord alone
Knows the destination
Of those who die and go to God,
Awaiting judgment's final word.
Of God's creation none can tell,
Where the conquering heroes dwell,
And God dwells too. No man comes back
To tell us here what Heaven's like.

Listen to John Niles read "Maxims II" 
in its original Old English