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SPEAKER 1: This is a production of Cornell University.
ERNESTO QUINONEZ: We'd like to thank the Barbara and David Zalaznick for their generous gifts of making this reading happen, as well as the Freund Foundation. Please turn your cell phones off if you haven't done so already. Helena [? Viramontes ?] is right there. If you get her mad, she turns green and she gets her clothes ripped. She becomes this thing, I don't know. So please, turn your cell phones off so they don't ring.
There are times when the establishment misunderstands a writer, and they feel that a writer who is of a certain age, or of a certain gender, a certain sexual preference, or a certain cultural background or color is swimming in waters that are off limits to that particular writer. Herman Carrillo writes like no other writer, and he definitely writes like no other writer that happens to be or comes from Latin American origins. His sentences are these labyrinthian, twisting, turning tunnels that lead you all over the place, but always brings you back where you started, never letting you get lost.
His novel, Losing My Spanish is this wonderful Joycean novel in its time frame. It is one lesson, just one lesson, the last lesson in a professor who's about to retire. In that one lesson, we see an entire not just life, but an entire world. And we see influence from Jose Lizama Lima, influences of Alejo Carpintier, influences, of course, Joyce, and I'm sure others. And they're all tied together by the genius of Herman Carrillo. I really believe that sooner or later the establishment will see the brilliance of Herman. And to quote Langston, "They will see how beautiful he is and they will be ashamed." It is with great honor for me to present to you the elegance and the eloquence of Herman Carrillo.
[APPLAUSE]
HERMAN CARRILLO: Thank you very much, and I guess welcome to the show.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
I want to thank everyone and the establishment actually for putting this together, for the invitation, and for thinking about me. I'm going to be reading from a brand new novel that's called Twilight of the Small Havanas. And it's a novel, oddly enough, you remind me, that takes place in one evening, and it happens to be an evening in which it's announced probably for the 1,110th time that Fidel Castro is dead, and it's told by four characters.
And the character I'm going to introduce this evening, this is her introduction to the novel. I don't really know what her birth name is. I have no idea what her mother named her, because when she immigrated from the island to the United States, she changed her name to Nancy Sinatra.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
"[SPEAKING IN SPANISH] is tattooed in Gothic letters across the boy's shoulders. A blue, green, purple and yellow snake slithers through the A's and the O's, wraps its body around the peaks of the M's, and the S's, and coils its tail around his left bicep. The rattle tips upward in such a way that at first she thinks the deafening of cicadas to be searing from the shock of black fur coming out of his armpit rather than from the opposite side of the pool.
The black is thrown off by the water, lit him as he walked around the concrete lip of the pool, slowly unwrapping the cummerbund from around his waist, folding it and placing it at the end of the shallow end. His shoes, his socks, his shirt, and he steps naked out of his trousers and makes his way around to the back to the foot of the diving board. And the head of the snake on his arms seems to want to twist to look at her, its eyes and mouth wide, fangs poised as it hisses out the Cuban flag.
She strains her eyes and shakes her head, makes sure that she isn't dreaming. Her entire body cries out in rebellion as she lifts herself out of the bed and is confronted with her reflection of herself in the mirror above the fireplace in her bedroom. Too old to be so blond, too thin to be so tanned, hair flattened on one side where she slept, Nancy Sinatra was more surprised to see the woman standing in front of her in her bare feet and full slip rather than the one that she thought herself to be earlier that afternoon at lunch.
By their third or fourth cocktail, the years seemed to melt away, and the man who had once been her lover somehow resuscitated the bloody loss they shared to see the dictator dead, viscerated and real as they had often planned it, they'd done it themselves. And she'd lost count of the number of drinks he had ordered around the time she started to calling him Solorzano. And a giggle she hadn't heard giggling in decades kept erupting from her lips no matter how hard she tried to control it.
He must have helped her out of her car, and she remembers calling him Tuti something she can't remember calling him for years. Everyone called him Tuti back then. But she realizes she's gotten used to telling him what to do without ever saying his name. He picks her up. He fetches her drinks, remembers her birthday, sits outside of dressing rooms, all without her asking.
He either guided her or carried her up to her bedroom. His handiwork is all around her. The jacket she'd been wearing earlier at lunch folded precisely in half and smooth flat on the day bed with the skirt that matched it. He was dependable like that, loyal like that, and possibly vulgar and repulsive like that. And when they still slept together, he fought just like that.
And it's the common fresh and cannibal, the taste of bile of Manhattan's in the back of her throat that she's barely able to keep down when she suddenly hears a spring of the diving board and turns to the window down in the garden just to see the naked boy fly below her. Scrawny, pale, she can't tell if it's that he whoever he is, has gotten past security, or if it seems that he's so comfortable, welcome, floating on his back in her pool that causes her to bite the edges of her tongue raw. Nancy Sinatra looks down to see her hands and frantic flight, and she rushes to her bed table and grabs a carafe sitting on the top by its neck. Sending the stopper flying, she gulps directly from the open mouth.
And as much as the burn comes with the three or four swallows soothes, her neck and scalp crawl, not because of the lipstick stain she sees as she sets it back down, but because the vanity that she bothers to have vodka decanted into carafes. And she reaches for the bottle, unsure if she's intending to empty it or smash it, or both. She hears the boy coughing.
A gentle gust of wet, warm air comes through the [INAUDIBLE] and rides across the bare shoulders, making her feel suddenly immodest, and sending her to choose her white marabou wrap over the pink or blue one. And something insists that she reapply lipstick until her mouth is turned into a red hard gash instead of her signature petal pink. And for a moment, she steps back and looks, plans to order the boy out of her pool and off her property, threaten to sick dogs she doesn't have on him and call the security team, which consists of two retired policemen at the front gate. And yet, she finds herself swallowed by half wishes of wonder, if she still has the ability to lure him upstairs just to tell them that she doesn't want him.
No time for ice, she spills some vodka into her glass and takes the stairs two at a time. On her way, she imagines herself standing at the far of the pool throwing her hair back and looking her nose down at him while allowing the wrap to fall open, revealing what she believes she still has that makes any man want her as much as fear her, revealing what it takes to make the boy naked in her pool want to run from her with a painfully hard erection.
Though, crossing the line, she stopped by one wet foot, and though hesitant to look, she realizes that as she stepped out of the grass onto the patio, she's wearing one of the heels that she's worn earlier, and one yellow marabou covered mule. She's nearly ready to turn back and correct her mistake, refill the half empty glass when the boy floating on his back pushes an amber fountain of piss, the crest nearly four feet above before splattering back into her pool. She drains the glass and drops it on the grounds. Before what washes over--" I am missing page six.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
I'll catch you up.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
She has a desire to-- she begins to collect his clothes. She collects his shoes. She collects his pants in which she finds two wallets, and a wad of cash. And she takes the cash out, and she stuffs them into the cups of the bra cups of the false slip that she's wearing, and she throws the wallet away. And she finds the cummerbund. She finds the shirt, and she resists the urge to smell the shirt, because one of the things that she's kind of committed to is that ever since she was a little girl, she's figured out that to have a man, you had to take them by surprise. Otherwise, you were theirs. And this was long before the differences between little boys and little girls, at least the fundamental ones were forced upon her.
"And then she finds his jacket. She nearly holds her breath with excitement as she steals her way to the shallow end of the pool where she finds that he's hung his jacket, the one to the [? tucks ?] on the rail that leads into the water. He is facing the diving board. She watches the back of his head.
And as the idea to drop the jacket in the water with him crawls over her scalp, she nearly screams with anticipation that tastes ancient. As she chokes it back down, she's surprised how heavy the jacket is. She first checks the breast pocket, where she finds yet another billfold. She doesn't bother to go through it, and tosses it when the revolver falls out and scatters on the pavement.
She knows what she's supposed to do. She's had years of training, nearly 30 years of what to do in the event of an intruder. She's been waiting for just this moment. She should barricade herself in the room, call security, call Solorzano, and wait, wait for men. Yet, the boy rocks in the small wake she's created in the pool that threatens to push him up again and spit him onto the lawn.
As he turns face upward, ribbons of blood twist and bloom as if unfurling themselves into an enormous pair of giant wings strong enough to lift him up straight into the sky, broad enough to hover as canopy over her. Kept afloat by the flutter of one hand at his side, the other does not seem to move, seems trapped in a helix of a fat, red serpent, because she can't see it, she assumes it to be the one that was on his back and has crawled off in the water. And Nancy Sinatra tries to look for its head, its fangs, its tail. And the boy says, 'Don't do that no more.'
'What?' She asked. 'Don't do what?' The boy gulps in the pink water as if gathering purchase, he says, 'Don't do that no more.' Pricks, as if she's being dragged headlong through fields of nettles run up her fingers, across her arms, her shoulders, and flush her raw through the scalp. Her elbows jerk over and over as if the gun was still firing in her hands '[SPEAKING SPANISH]' she prays," though, not loudly enough to hear the harsh whisper, "Are you the missing [SPEAKING SPANISH]?" Nancy Sinatra opens and closes her hand around the butt of the ground as it clicks empty, empty, empty in the air, '[SPEAKING SPANISH]' she whispers." Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ALICE FULTON: I want to remind everybody that there are books for sale in the outer part of the auditorium, and books by all of these authors. So please take advantage of that and buy the books. Also, there's a reception after the reading upstairs on the second floor. I can't remember the room number, but you will find it. Just follow the crowd. And there's a chance to talk with the readers. And I think we usually have some kind of food and drink up there, at least drink, something to drink. So yeah, the reception, please attend. Please, everybody is invited afterwards.
OK. So it's my honor and pleasure to introduce two world-class poets who happen to be graduates of our MFA program. The first to read is Sally Wen Mao. And I had the hardest time writing these introductions. I've written a lot of introduction, but these were hard, because there's so much I want to say about them.
Sally graduated in 2012, and her debut collection, Mad Honey Symposium, which was essentially her MFA thesis, was published by Alice James in 2014. Sally's work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, Best American Poetry 2013, and many other marvelous places. She's held fellowships at [? Condamine, ?] Hedgebrook, [? Bread ?] [? Loaf, ?] and she recently received a 2017 Pushcart Prize for her poem, "Anna May Wong Blows Out 16 Candles."
[APPLAUSE]
Yeah, yeah, it's great. Amazing what people do. They blow me away. Her second book, Oculus, begun during her time at Cornell has been accepted by Graywolf, which is fabulous, and is forthcoming in 2019. Last year, she was an international writer in residence at the National University of Singapore. And she's currently a [? Cullman ?] Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, which is a dream honor. All they ask you to do is to be present and to write, so it's kind of a dream for any writer.
Now, to tell you just a little bit about Sally's work, she writes with a breathtaking assurance and linguistic brio. She's a poet whose innovations seem effortless because they arise from her character and passions. The textual surprises are generated by an obsessive engagement with language, a fresh intelligence, and a heartfelt commitment to her subjects. Her first book, Mad Honey Symposium, is a fierce and delightful work.
After I finished reading it, my head was spinning. I felt barely grounded by gravity. Reading it was like taking hits of pure oxygen. The language is that dazzling, and this linguistic fervor exists to suggest a content that is always rich, complex, and important. She's one of the very few poets I've known who combines an original language with a conscience made amply evident in the poem's content.
I was continually amazed by the passion, the energy that Sally brought to her work. Again and again, I was struck by her imagination, her insatiable appetite for words, and her ability to apply those strengths to explorations of complex ethical subjects. The charged surfaces of her poems are matched by their feral depths. Rather than shy away from complications of content, Sally Mao embraces the possibilities without sacrificing the music or beauty of her work.
Her Chinese-American identity and heritage are central to her poetics, and she also explores powerful conflation of animate and inanimate entities, as well as other surprising portmanteaus. Her poems, often narrative, and sometimes beautifully oblique in their lyricism, are crafted with a formal elegance that owes more to free verse traditions than to traditional prosody. In addition to her imaginative skills, Sally is a disciplined writer, firmly committed to the demands of her craft. I can think of few writers who manage to be so prolific while consistently crafting polished, audacious poems.
I guess what I'm trying to say is Sally Men Wao is a force. And I think I just mispronounced her name, Sally Wen Mao, she's a force. Her wildness, her witness are original. Her gift is blazing. I prize both her daring and her meticulous control, the mind, and the nerve, and the love that make her poems the amazing things they are, passionate and cerebral, touching and funny. Her poems surprise and electrify with their high voltage moves. So listen and be energized. Sally.
[APPLAUSE]
SALLY WEN MAO: Oh my gosh. Thank you, Alice, for that introduction. Wow, now, I'm-- I don't know what to say. Thank you, Cornell, for welcoming me back. It's only been two years, but it feels like a lifetime.
I owe a lot to Cornell, and including the writing of this book. And I figured I would start with the first poem from Mad Honey Symposium. "Valentine For A Fly Trap, You are a hairy painting. I belong to your jaw. Nothing slakes you, no fruit fly, no cricket, not even tarantula. You are the caryatid I want to duel duet in tongues.
Luxurious spider bed, blooming from the ossuaries of peat moss, I love how you swindle the moth. This is why you were named for a goddess, not Botticelli's Venus, not any soft waif. There's voltage in your flowers, molt skins, armory for cunning loves. Your mouth pins every sticky body, swallowing iridescence, digesting light. Venus, let me swim in your solarium. Venus, take me in your summer gown.
So I'm going to read a poem that I wrote here. It was very cold here. So this poem is called "Haibun for Thawing." I long for an immigrant in my bed, one who is unafraid of knots, one who will arrive with hail in his eyelash, one whose memories are muddy as mine, one who guesses the words of his own father's dialects, one whose skin leaps to touch mine, one who follows the floodlights north, one who discovers a hideaway crouching with his palm above his throat where it's warmest, one who trespasses arboretums soaked and manic light.
I long to measure his body by its immateriality, its ability to seep through borders, someone formed from a womb of passage. Together, we will incubate one sleep, one tick, one uncombed head. Too far from winter, the distance to each face grows. "Quiet," said my wish.
OK. I will read a section from this poem called "The Pickpocket." And so this is based on a story of a school, a mythical school outside Bogota in Colombia that's a university for pickpockets. And yeah, anyway.
Lesson six, pick the lock before the pocket so any prison they build for you will lead you to another corridor dank with spillage from imagined cargo. If it's cold, do not shiver. If it's hot, do not sweat. Pick the boy whose backpack is light. Pick the boy with the sooty fingers and the slippery jacket. When you take from him, leave the morsels, leave the picked over bones. Pickle the food you don't eat, and store it in a metal box for your future self [INAUDIBLE], because your future self will always be hungry.
I'm going to read a few poems from my new forthcoming collection called Oculus. And one of the central projects, series within this collection is based on the story of a-- where is it? Do I have it-- Is based on the story of Anna May Wong, who's an actress from the golden age of Hollywood. And so she was born in 1905, and her heyday was probably the '20s and '30s. And she was the daughter of a laundryman, and she was born in LA. If I can find it. Maybe I don't have it.
OK. Well, I'll read the first one then. This one is called, "The Toll of the Sea." And this is based on the first film that she starred in. And the only thing you need to know is that it's the first technicolor film with two colors, red and green, and it's a retelling of Madame Butterfly.
Green means go, so run now. Green, the color of the siren sea whose favors are a mortgage upon the soul. Red means stop before the cliff's jag downward. Red, the color of the shore that welcomes. White, the color of the man washed ashore from his shirt, to his pants, to his brittle shoes. White, the color of the screen before technicolor. White, the color of the master narrative. Green, the color of the ocean so kind not leaving a stain on the white shirt.
Green, the color of the girl so kind, but why? She speaks. Alone in my garden, I heard the cry of wind and wave. In the green girl's garden, the stranger clamps her, asks, "How would you like to go to America?" A lie soaked in the red of the choke cherries that turn brown in the heat. Red, the color of the roses that spy. Red, the color of their fake marriage. White, the color of the white man's frown.
She asks, "Is it great lark or great sparrow you call those good times in America?" Green, the color of his departure. White, the color of the counterfeit letters she sends to herself. White, the color of their son. White, the color of erasure. Red, the color of the lost footage. Red, the sea that swallows our stories.
Red, the color of the girl who believed the roses. Red, the color of the ocean that drowns the girl. Red, the color of the final restoration.
In every story, there is a technicolor screen, black, white, red, green. In every story, there is a chance to restore the color. If we recover the flotsam, can we rewrite the script? Alone in a stranger's garden, I run. I forge a desert with my own arms.
Blue, the color of the recovered narrative. Blue, the color of the siren see which refuses to keep a white shirt spotless. Blue, the color of our reclaimed Pacific. Blue, the ocean that drowns the liar's. Blue, the shore where the girl keeps living. There, she rises in the opposite shore. There, she awakens prismatic, childless, and free, shorn of the story that keeps her kneeling. Blue is the opposite of sacrifice.
I think-- OK, well, I think the poem I was looking-- Oh, here I got it. Here it is. OK. So this poem is called "Anna May Wong Blows Out 16 Candles." And oh, the premise of my Anna May Wong poems, their personal poems with the exception of the one I just read. And basically, my experiment was like, what if she had a time machine and she could travel into the future of Hollywood and cinema? And I mean, she died in 1961.
So OK, "Anna May Wong Blows Out 16 Candles." When I was 16, I modeled fur coats for a furrier. White men gaze down my neck like wolves, but my mink collar protected me. When I was 16, I was an extra in a tale of two worlds. If I didn't pour someone's tea, then I was someone's wife.
Every brother, father, or husband of mine was nefarious. They held me at knifepoint, my neck in a chokehold. If they didn't murder me, I died of an opium overdose.
Now, it's 1984 and another white girl awaits her sweet 16. It's 1984, and another white girl angsts about a jock who kisses her at the end of the film. Now, it's 1984, and long duck dong the white girl's houseguest. He dances drunk agog with gong sounds. All around the nation, teens still taunt us. Hallways bloat with sweaters' slurs.
When I was eight, the boy who sat behind me brought pins to class. "Do Asians feel pain the way we do?" He'd ask. He'd stick the needles to the back of my neck until I winced. I wore six wool coats so I wouldn't feel the sting.
It's 1984, so cast me in a new role already. Cast me as a pothead, an heiress, a gymnast, a queen. Cast me as a cast away in a city without shores. Cast me as that girl who rivets centerstage, or cast me away into the blue where my lips don't touch or say. If I take my time machine back to 16, or 20, or eight, I blow out all my candles.
16 wishes extinguish and burn. The boy will never kiss me at the end of the movie. The boy will only touch me with his needles.
[APPLAUSE]
So I have a few more, one more anime, one poem. So this one is called "Anna May Wong Makes Cameos." OK. Romeo Must Die, 2000, I'm Aaliyah's sassy friend. I give her tough love and good advice. Kiss Jet Li. I tell her. The director cuts their kissing scene, replaces it with a hug, rendering my scene pointless so they cut me from the film.
Kill Bill, 2003, I'm Gogo Yubari's grieving twin sister. In my nightmares, Chiaki Kuriyama swings her iron balls over my futon. The noise maddens me. To avenge her, I Lunge with a steak knife at Uma's white veil. I die as my bones crunch under her heels.
The Last Samurai, 2003, I'm Tom Cruise's love interest's younger cousin. I cry at the sound of a twig falling down. In the end, I am sacrificed so they can shed tears and take comfort in each other as my spine goes limp.
Hollaback Girl, 2004, I'm Gwen Stefani's arch nemesis, the cute Asian girl who dissed her behind the school bleachers. Once, I was her backup minion, now, no more. I've gone rogue. Pharell is the other cameo. Together, we conspire to take her down. There are claws. There is glore. In the end, the showdown is cut in favor of Gwen's cheerleading routine.
Memoirs of a Geisha, 2005, I'm Gong Li's evil apprentice geisha. I trip young Sayuri with my silk sash. I set her kimono on fire. The rival, [? Okiya, ?] crackles and burns. As the beams fall down in ashes, lightning whips the howling door. Dew drips down my forehead, my jewels. In the confusion, I perish, of course.
OK. Just two more. So this first poem is my Pokemon poem. Like, I wrote it like a year ago. But there's a town in Pokemon called Lavender Town. And there are a lot of urban legends surrounding this.
It's a level on the original video game. And it's where all the ghost, dead Pokemon are buried. And there are all kinds of weird like urban legends, including like hundreds of Japanese schoolchildren once they reach that level, they have been found like walking confused on the road, and like, and yeah, lots of weird urban legends, like, dark ones too. They like kill themselves in some of these.
Anyway, "Lavender Town," Don't let the sour flowers fool you, child. This town is a dead town. The tower tolls to your [? troe, ?] your heartbeat, inaudible to everyone except you. You listen. You hear ghost notes. Discordant leaves clutter the Earth, tin and rustle, a lachrymose bird cries. A graveyard glistens.
When you climb the stairway, don't shield your eyes from the pixel's 30 Hertz heat. Don't shield your awe from the ghosts of pretty prey, the ones you catch when you're alone and afraid. Lavender town, noble, purple town, plumed, perfumed, dream of violet fields. Can you hear the killing machine sing?
What secrets hide? Why run? Why hold on? You walk by the side of the road biting an apple. As you wave your thumb, blood [? sickles ?] down. A rebel you are, a hitchhiker, a tiny savant.
When you grow up and the screen lights up all your blind spots and you replace the dead green cartridge with a blank one of your making, you'll arrive at last at the final battle. Maybe then you'll find that the game you're playing is a hack. You thought you were invincible. And just like that, the bus KOs you. And other times, you're astonished at your own breath. Other times, you thought you were dead, but your body was eternal all along.
And just one more. So this poem is inspired by a piece called "1,000 Bolts" by Yayoi Kusama, the artist. And I read her biography this winter, and she said that she has this death fear. She's really afraid of this thing. And you'll kind of get it from the poem.
"1,000 Boats," summer 2013 at the [? Stedelijk ?] Museum the boat overflows with handmade penises. In 1963, the artist sewed thousands of these despite her abject fear of dick. Revulsion transforms into a burial, a ritual of obliteration.
In her autobiography, Kusama wrote, "It was only by doing this that I gradually turned the horror into something familiar." Imagine having a penis phobia, then stitching 1,000 phalluses together, gluing them to the hull of a ship. Imagine the nightmares, a choppy sea, a monster gust, icy rain, and tumbling oars, a bed of black mambas swarming the only lifeboat in sight.
I imagine rowing that boat to a place far away from any flesh and blood I know. Far away, the world bursts into infinite colors, wisteria, gunpowder, smells long extinct, returning to the senses like phantoms. Sail through this fear beyond its dirty haze. Every penis is a liminal space.
I surrender, cure my blood lust, cure my penis envy, no, my phallic frenzy with the spell of red flowers and a dragnet for fools. I venture into the orgiastic summer. And though my fear is never cured, I dream harder, adventure deeper, obliteration. Turn your everyday horrors into what's familiar. Obliterate doom, obliterate time, obliterate enemies. Go where you don't recognize the flora or fauna. In a dazzled forest, crown yourself with your fears. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ERNESTO QUINONEZ: Adam Price was a student of mine, but I take no credit for his development as a writer. His sensibilities, his style, his voice were long established before he met me. What I appreciated about Adam was that his stories were always ambitious. They were always full of range. They were always full of scope. He was always looking to hit a home run.
Never did Adam submit a five or six-pager saying that this is all he had, or that he was a slow writer, or that a story that he had already submitted the semester before with slight changes, which is basically the same story. Or never did he wrote a Twilight Zone episode, some story with some cheap punch line and predictable ending. His stories were always a notch below or way above the story that he had gotten into this program with.
Adam Price always was looking for the home run. And when he struck out, he struck out big. And that was all right, because that is what he was getting paid to do. To read us from his bottom of the ninth, three men on, two men out, 0 and 2 count, game seven, down by three, shot heard around the world, Adam, The Grand Tour Price.
[APPLAUSE]
ADAM O'FALLON PRICE: Hello. Wow, what an intro. These intros are-- this should really be the intro reading, I think. The intros are great. Also, every penis is a liminal space, I think I'm going to put on my tombstone.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
So [INAUDIBLE] to read the first few pages of this book, because doing so requires no contextual explanation. If it doesn't make sense, then it just doesn't make sense, I guess. And I think this is around 10 minutes.
Oh, I wanted to say first, and I was filled with terror when I saw Emily's written remarks, because I realized I hadn't done that. But at lunch, [? Ache ?] said something that resonated with me, which was, he said, I don't know if you said these were the best four years of your writing life, or your life, but that really rang true for me.
I think the four years I spent here were maybe the best years of my life, honestly. And so it was really, a great honor to be invited back for this and see so many familiar faces. It really is meaningful. So thank you very much for allowing me to do this.
OK, chapter one, October 2005. "Sir?" No. "Sir?" Someone shook him awake. A blond woman blurred into view. He looked up at her momentarily, uncomprehending and depersoned. She was bent close over him gripping his shoulders with painted fingers, engulfing him in her cloying perfume, a mist of candied strawberry.
"Yes," he said, feigning full consciousness. "You have to leave, yes. You have to leave, sir." The hostile corporate courtesy in that "sir" brought him closer to his senses. She wanted him to leave, but leave what? As his vision cleared, his first clue was provided by the blue tunic she wore with a winged insignia over the breast.
Another clue quickly following the first was the row of seats behind her, telescoping forward to a point where his bad eyes couldn't focus. It all came back to him in roughly the form of a second person haiku. Your name is Richard Lazar and you were on the first stop of your book tour, and you took too much Ambien.
"Where is everyone?" He asked, grappling futilely with the thin airplane blanket twisted around his arms like a straight jacket. "They already disembarked." I've been trying to wake you for a while. I thought you might have-- that you were-- no, apparently not." In one violent motion, he wrested the blanket away from himself and rose to his feet, nearly falling sideways into the flight attendant in the process. She stepped back with her hands in front of her, palms up, as though giving plenty of space to a person having some sort of a fit.
He steadied himself, unwedged his suitcase from the overhead compartment, and lumbered down the aisle, jouncing side to side on dead legs. A friend of his back in Phoenix had given him some pills to take to make the flight easier. "Well, they had done that," he thought. Combined with the pint of vodka he had polished off in the plane's bathroom, they'd made the flight very, very easy. The only problem was actually getting off the plane.
He Frankensteined it through the cabin, and up the long jet bridge, and emerged into the fluorescence of the shabbiest boarding gate he'd ever seen. He hadn't seen many, the result of a lifelong fear of flying coupled with a general disinclination to go anywhere, but this was certainly the shabbiest. Several ceiling panels were half rotten with brown water stains, and one was missing entirely, providing a nice view of the filth caked girders above.
A darkened McDonald's brooded to itself across the empty room. A tall kid wearing glasses, a backpack, and the famous ghost of a beard stood alone holding a sign, "R.M. Lazar" it said in big block letters, each of which seemed to have been laboriously filled in with a Sharpie. He rolled his suitcase up, and the kid held the sign to his chest as though to protect himself from a blow.
His fine brown hair was swept in a delicate fringe across a high worried forehead. Richard assumed the hairstyle was an attempt on the kid's part to hide what looked like a palimpsest of acne. "Mr. Lazar," the kid said, "Richard, you're Lance?" "Vance Allerby." Vance lowered the sign and extended his hand with the look of such dignified grave ceremony that Richard had to fake a coughing spell in order to disguise very real laughter.
"Wow," he said, "Excuse me." As they shook, the kid took a breath and launched into what was clearly a rehearsed speech how on behalf of the university how happy they were, how if there was anything they could do, and so on. He concluded, "And as the founding member and president of your regional fan club, The [? Warlocks, ?] I just wanted to say that on a personal level, this is a real honor for me."
"On behalf of the what?" Richard disengaged his hand. "The Washington Area Richard Lazar Auxiliary." It took him a few seconds with Vance looking at him expectantly, but he finally got it, the Warlocks. "Jesus Christ, how many other warlocks are there?"
"At present?" "Yes, at present." Vance blinked at him, "Well, right now, it's just me, but I'm hoping to expand the operation." Richard teetered on his rubbery legs, resisting the urge to look around and see if he was being fucked with. He was struck by a feeling that had become common, almost unremarkable over the last year, that without realizing exactly when or how it had happened, he had been transported to an alternate dimension. This dimension was similar to the one in which he had lived his whole life, but at certain moments, such as this one, it became transparently outlandish and fetched.
Recently, for instance, a man who signed his missives, "Sergeant Ricky," had obtained Richard's address and begun sending him maps of Vietnam with certain cities crossed out. It was nice to have fans. Too bad none of them was sane or female.
"Well," he said, "It's an honor to be here. Which way is out?" "Oh, sorry." The kid grabbed the suitcase handle and led Richard through the ambitiously named main concourse, a whitish hallway that featured a shuttered newsstand, a shoeshine operation on indefinite break, and a moribund subway. A lone TSA agent leaned against the wall and mumbled jargon into a walkie talkie held sideways.
"How was your flight?" Asked Vance over his shoulder. "I have no idea." "Have you ever been to Spillman before?" "Like so many things in my life, somehow it never happened." Richard gazed fondly at a small bank of rental kiosks they passed, thinking that maybe it wasn't too late to call off the student escort, but they were already pushing outside into chilly, damp air, climbing onto a moving sidewalk.
Vance walked ahead, but Richard stopped and caught his breath. The overcast sky looked like a dirty sheet pulled over the horizon, the sun, a dim flashlight behind it. Everything in the vicinity seemed to be painted gray by the drizzling mist. The sidewalk deposited him in the hourly parking lot where Vance was already loading a battered Ford Explorer.
Its rusty trunk was a patchwork of bumper stickers, Carrie Edwards 2004, of course, but also Coexist, Subvert the Dominant Paradigm, Issue Obfuscation, Bluegrass Players Do It Cleaner, and a decal of the USS Enterprise. Vance opened the passenger door and Richard awkwardly hoisted himself up and in.
He looked at the hand-lettered sign in the back seat and imagined Vance bent over it, pen in hand and tongue in the corner of his mouth. The image produced in him a surge of unwelcome affection for the kid. They drove in silence on the highway for several minutes during which time Richard could feel Vance glancing over at him, working up his nerve to say something.
The kid took a deep breath and said, "I love your books." "Thanks." "Without Leave is probably my favorite, but I've read them all." "Well, as President of the Warlocks, you'd have to, right?" Vance seemed to be considering the question. "That's true, I guess." He said.
Then after another moment, "I'm a writer too, you know?" "No, I didn't know that." Maybe, he thought, he could quietly undo his seat belt, crack the door, and do one of those stunt rolls down the sloping adjacent hill that overlooks the town. Maybe he'd wind up at his hotel.
"I mean, not like you. I've lived here all my life." Vance gestured out at the landscape, which mostly consisted of aging '70s strip malls interspersed with pine trees. "You've done things. I like stuff that has the force of experience behind it. You can tell." Earnest intensity radiated from the kid like heat off blacktop, and Richard had to resist the urge to disabuse him of all the ways he was wrong.
They drove in silence for another quiet minute during which time he sensed Vance drawing another extraordinarily deep breath. Finally, the kid said, "Actually, I recently finished something. If you have time, maybe you wouldn't mind taking a look at it?" "Sure," Richard lied, guessing he would probably mind it a lot.
Keeping his eyes on the road, Vance leaned back and felt around on the back seat and produced a copy box from Kinko's which he laid on Richard's lap. "No rush," he said, "But I'd love to know what you think about it." "I'll try and take a look soon," Richard lied again, with deep regret at having said yes to a student escort.
Why did he always make the wrong decision? Why? Why on Earth had he agreed to this? Well, he allowed, because he liked the idea of someone picking him up at an airport with a sign. That was why. Because it sounded like the royal treatment and not a royal pain in the ass. Also, because he'd planned on having a few drinks to celebrate his first night on tour, and he liked the idea of having a driver. Pride is ever going before a fall, live and never live-- or excuse me-- live and never learn. That was his credo.
The road they were on curved up a hill in the city such as it was stretched out in the valley beneath them. The buildings were meek and low, mostly constructed from beige brick. And the overall effect was a kind of apologia, as though the city fathers had tried to create as close to the impression of a kind of non- city as was possible, while still in fact, having a city. The inoffensiveness of it offended him.
Phoenix, enormous, desiccated, crime-ridden, meth infested, golfing community that it was, at least didn't worry about hurting anyone's feelings. "That's the college," said Vance, pointing to the left side of the vista, where there were more trees and more beige buildings. That's where you'll be speaking tonight. "What is that?"
"Joel Whitaker Auditorium," said Vance grandly. "I see." "Do you want a tour of campus, or I could show you downtown?" "I thought I heard something about a hotel." "Oh yeah, you're staying at a Comfort Suites." "A Comfort Suites by Marriott?" Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ALICE FULTON: So now, it's my pleasure to introduce Emily Rosko. Emily entered our MFA program with the Javits Fellowship. And while still a student, she won the prestigious and competitive Ruth Lilly award from Poetry Magazine. She was pretty much an acclaimed poet from the minute she got here.
A few months later, she received a Stegner Fellowship to Stanford. And her first book, Raw Goods Inventory, which was essentially her MFA thesis, won the Iowa Poetry Prize, and it was published by University of Iowa. And it also received the 2007 Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. While Emily was here in the program, I noticed that she never let any of these honors go to her head. She is one of the most grounded, compassionate, generous, empathetic, and modest poets I've ever known.
After Stanford, she completed a PhD in creative writing at the University of Missouri. She edited an essay collection, A Broken Thing: Poets On The Line, which was published by University of Iowa press. Her second collection, "Prop Rockery," won the Akron Poetry Prize, and was published by the University of Akron press in 2012.
Emily also is a dedicated educator whose teaching was honored with the Spencer Prize at Cornell and the Donald K. Anderson award at University of Missouri. She's currently Associate Professor at the College of Charleston. And she also is Poetry Editor of Crazy Horse Magazine. Emily's first book, Raw Goods Inventory, is a beautifully crafted work composed with attention to formal aspects, but yet, it's never inhibited by them.
Her poetry is gorgeously made, but it also retains enough fragmentary edginess to earn the adjective, "raw." Her poems are exquisitely honed, yet, they feel alive rather than studied. There's a powerful emotive and cerebral undertow to her meditations, and always something at stake.
Materialism, the substance of things and bodies is one of her subjects. And Raw Goods Inventory is a book of objects that memorialize emotions and temporalities that can't be objectified. Rosko also is a poet of things half finished, or undone, of process and dissolution. She is moreover a writer who confronts the largest ethical dilemmas while still retaining the reticence and complexity necessary to poetry.
Her second book, Prop Rockery, is composed of sonnets and longer poems that take their titles from lines in Shakespeare's plays, and are voiced by beggars, actors, buffoons, and all that tribe as an epigraph from Horace suggests. These unstable monologues and playful re-stagings often are concerned with the location of power in language and psyche.
The rocks of a theater set are given voice in the title poem, a meditation on the antithesis of dominion, on ground rather than figure, ambiguous, complex, and beautifully made. Such poems gesture toward the performative while avoiding drama or literalism. "The Fractured," dense, heady, continually emergent poems that riff on scenes and themes from the plays with a free wheeling of elusiveness, and they remake platitudes with Shakespearean flair.
In other poems, Emily manages to reimagine the tradition of nature poetry within a contemporary context of eco-poetics, wind, the stuff of lyric poetry, the force that strummed the lyre is one focus of these honed meditations whose language is at once gravid with substance and fibrillating with space. This wide-ranging, inventive body of work makes Emily Rosko one of the most thrilling poets writing today. Her brilliant work and really, to her way of being in the world have always made me want to read and write. And I think that's the highest compliment and praise that one writer can give another. Listen, and be mind blown.
[APPLAUSE]
EMILY ROSKO: So first, thank you to the creative writing program, to the faculty for this amazing gift of this Alumni Award, and for bringing me back to Cornell's campus yet again. So nice to be here hearing other fellow readers. And thanks, everyone, for being here.
I just want to say, it's been 13 years since I finished my MFA here. And between then and now, I've been other places, parts of other workshops, and I've studied with other poet professors. But as more time passes, I've really sharply come to understand how formative these really quick two years at Cornell were.
All these years the critics that have stuck in my brain are my Cornell teachers. When I write, I hear Alice Fulton say, maybe that ending could be different, or they need more of the good strange in my lines. When I write, I try to imagine earning Ken [? McLean's ?] radiant smile, and if I'm lucky, make him jump up out of his seat a little bit.
I write to make Phyllis [? Janowitz ?] laugh, and to have Deborah [? Tov ?] remind me that sometimes-- excuse me-- the most important thing in a poem is what can't be said. Sorry, I'm getting emotional. So I still write with their presences and these lessons in mind, and I'm so grateful for their influence.
I have seven poems for you, so you can count them as I go. You'll know when we're getting toward the end. And I'm going to just run through the chronology of my work. I'm going to start with one poem from Raw Goods Inventory.
"Even Before Your Elbow Knocked Over The Glass." First, there were the broken pieces. You said, "Don't you think I know what I'm doing?" To which I replied, "Don't you feel most alone when we're in this together."
Under the eave, wasps are constructing a nest, gray paper out of spit. So much of the body is in their work. See how the legs move, bending and praying. You said, "Don't you think when you're trying to change the subject?" I could make a building out of my despair. We could acquire a nice piece of land and sit on it.
There are 1,000 blades of grass, each one waiting to be claimed. "As I always say," you said, "If you commit one sin, you commit them all." To which I said, "How many absolutes do we have proof of? The sky has never looked bluer. What is the significance of that? It means I might walk out on you yet."
"What?" you asked, "Nothing," I said. "I said nothing. What is there to say anyway, except in the sunlight, I could see the glass fall even before your elbow knocked it over. This is always how it happens certain ideas are never fully formed." "This is some mess," you said. To which I said, "There are lives that go on this way." Then we went down on our knees, and in that manner we began.
Two poems that I read from Prop Rockery, and just as a whole, this book is invested in persona and voicing the underdog who are the sort of outlier characters. And then two that I'll read are ones that take a line from a Shakespeare play as their title. And just in case you're taking notes, this first one is from Titus Andronicus.
In thy dumb action will I be as perfect. It all became wait, tolerate the conditions, the too and the much. It was a drippy mix of sensations, a blood for beans mentality from the start. We were bustled up with pomp, the flashing of rhetoric, the proper rites carried out to a T.
I was bottom feeder. . I was bunk. I delivered the surefooted their forecasts, doctored to their sure footed forecasting needs, A win-win for the disingenuous, a sore for the mow at ease. What mattered that the high heavens spoke law, that reason relied on the flimsiness of appeal. We applauded it, glassy eyed with doting. In turn, we were shaven, truncated, unadorned.
I went bad, shot-to-mouth elemental assault. I was a long line of example, not first to be put to show. Stone set time of the tilling fields, row of sharps and picks, the insweep, the overfill, that which plucks the fowls that stirred the dust. Sing shifty Earth, the dirt reminds me of the evil I am.
This title comes from Othello, "Let Me Be Thought Too Busy In My Fears." So it fell out like this, went to the edge of daybreak, a golden gulf wracked with fog. There, the Earth grew older. There, the birds tweeped their little riches from the brambly crisscross of hawthorn.
It was a jaspered moment, a mutt formation, an incremental hue upon hue. I fit myself inward, a spleen wracked mind to be better, a knack for staging the upsets, the empire. I turned my innocent side out in Avery's plain face and fessed up to my brothers. They were sap-filled to the heart, because love's its own embargo, a charterd unknown, self-painted in self-same colors, because fear flung, they squander.
I made a mock hobby of the elect. I played to their heel. I planted the itch. They sat pups to my lips, welped by their rule of seize and plunder. Then night turned out day. And in short, there was an Earth crash, a backlash. And now, I'm chained as a liar, a flinty streak with no fire.
The next two poems come from a third book, Weather Inventions, which is out circulating the world right now. And this is a book that relies on the history of the development of the sciences. And it sort of looks a lot at different evolutionary inventions that organisms have undergone, or technological inventions of science that are often used for war.
The first one, "Arrow," is actually an anagram poem, comes from Hamlet's, "To suffer the slings and arrows," titled "Arrow." A war, or a slain row of sirs, gents, grandsons, now garlands. Again, the liar's snow, a snarl of wording, low in the grassland suffering. A frost, the awns sharpen. Furlongs drawn to rift the first on gruffness, a ruth torn stringer. Oh, this word sings the narrows raw or inward snags organs whole, worse, laws, the songster, al to swan. I ungreen this tree with thorn, rough run the hunt, drawl in tear and air.
Fern, even as inside as you are, you are not yet inly enough. I know you with your folding in, the start of the fern frond, snail tight curl, the whisk and horse tail which unrolls a quick scaled green forming. On coils, its scroll work of fiddlehead, shepherd's crook, which seeks the ground no seed or flower to concentrate on, even as in shade and poor soil it thrives. Only you go the other way. Tighter knot, false part of unfurling, sink to dirt a deeper bed those roots, my love.
Two more for you. Doing all right up there? OK. I just thought I'd ask. I know it's a long reading. This comes after Larkin's "High Windows," "Marriage." And this is pretty brand new work.
When I've got nothing to say to you and you've got nothing to say to me then I know we've reached a perfection we've been dreaming of all our televised lives. It's a white blank field of no dreams down on knees this pew requires as I contemplate the hows and whys of martyrdom, and the saintly vows to Christ our Lord, shepherding our wolfish urges to skulk and stalk the price wears this fine green, bright day of rest. We are one long fall in tandem, you and me, glossing the heavens with our small cries of we and woe. I am cautious mostly, you too. We've gone deep in this pasture of what lies ahead. We've scrutinized every blueness, sky, wave crest, diamond, shard, a comprehensive glass through which we face one another, partial, self seen.
So we live in Charleston, South Carolina now. I've been there seven years, and I still very much feel like a tourist. And a lot of it's just because of the presence of all the history and recent events that have happened there. So I'm trying to find ways to write about it. And the best way I can do that is to sort of enter it sideways a little.
So here's one Charleston poem that I think is successful, "The Feed Game." The antiquated stench of the town, horse piss, salt marsh, rotting shoes and wood, and upward our noses turn. Ballast packed streets, the ships unloading wares to market, handled and nameless.
We've got our science minds on tonight. We sit inside a clapboard house playing Solve For Mouse in hospital gloves at the dinner table. It's a subpar game, so we tweak the rules to monopolize the dice. Each possible portion is over-studied, the bends and crooks, the ivories severely bright. Silk drapes torched indigo by shadows the firebrands. Something muddyish was dragged across the rug. If we find the answer, we will serve it on silver to the one cat we love. Thank you, everyone.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 2: Oh, it's always such a delight and such a pleasure to have our own students return, because they were our students, and then now they're published writers. The creative writing program offers lectureships paid for in part by the generosity of Philip Freund, Cornell class of 1929, whose will provided our program with an endowment intended to benefit creative writing graduate students. Since 2011, the Philip Freund Creative Writing Fund has enabled us to offer the second year of lectureships to our MFA students.
But his generosity doesn't stop there. The endowment has also made it possible for us to celebrate our students, now published writers. The endowment allows us to fly the alumni in and recognize their dedication and hard work by awarding them certificates and a $5,000 stipend each. Our Philip Freund Prize Alumni Readers are H.G. Carrillo, por favor.
OK. No, you don't leave now. Sally Wen Mao, here you go. Wait, hold your hold your applause. Hold your applause. You're good. Adam O'Fallon Price, aqui, and of course, Emily Rosko. Please, let's all give him a great hand.
[APPLAUSE]
Remember, the books are out there. Please buy them. The English department lounge 258 for reception, drinks, and food, and you get to talk to these wonderful people. Thank you so much. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 3: This has been a production of Cornell University on the web at cornell.edu.
The Cornell Zalaznick Reading Series presents the Creative Writing Program's annual alumni reading Sept. 29, 2016, featuring fiction writer H.G. Carrillo '07, poet Sally Wen Mao '12, fiction writer Adam O’Fallon Price '14, and poet Emily Rosko '03.
