Caesura Number Two: Spring 2020

caesura. a journal of literature

number two: spring 2020

The Poetics of Violence Embodiment and the Grotesque in the Inferno Silence in the Fall: Lu Guang’s Photography plus

an interview with poet Leanne Grabel

caesura: from Latin caesūra, “cutting, metrical pause” 1. in verse (Greek or Latin): a break between words within a metrical foot 2. in verse (modern): a pause near the middle of a line 3. in music: a pause or interruption in the normal tempo of a composition, typically indicated by “railroad tracks”, i.e., two diagonal slashes (//) 4. any interruption or break

Mission

Staff

As Stanford’s only undergraduate academic research journal focusing on the study of literature, caesura strives to consistently spotlight the most current and insightful research conducted at the undergraduate level. Each edition features scholarly and creative pieces that aim to provoke new ways of thinking about literature. In giving voice to a diverse range of perspectives, caesura provides an inclusive outlet for undergraduates to share their ideas and enrich the humanities community at Stanford.

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Emily Elott ’20 JH Wagner ’20

Special Thanks Stanford English Stanford Comparative Literature The Stanford Humanities Center This project is supported by the Office of the Vice President of the Arts.

COPY EDITORS Nicholas Welch ’23 EDITORS Roxy Bonafont ’21 Betty He ’22 Olivia Lamberti ’23 Layo Laniyan ’22 Helynna Lin ’22 Gracie Newman ’21 Lily Nilipour ’22 Alice Viera ’21 FINANCIAL OFFICER Betty He ’22 DESIGN Lily Nilipour ’22 JH Wagner ’20 FOUNDING EDITORS Emily Elott ’20 JH Wagner ’20 FACULTY ADVISOR Mark Greif

caesura. number two: spring 2020 printed 2021

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since 2019

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Contents

Cover art: Anemone

MELINA WALLING

NOW 6

The Viole(n)t Hour JH WAGNER & EMILY ELOTT Catastrophe is among us!

ESSAYS 8

The Poetics of Violence REGINA KONG Pain in Emily Dickinson and Ocean Vuong

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Embodiment and the Grotesque ZUYI ZHAO What does it mean to have a body?

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Silence in the Fall REGINA KONG Scars of environmental loss in Lu Guang’s photography

INTERVIEW 34

On Rockstars and Fragility with Leanne Grabel with JH Wagner and Emily Elott

FICTION 44

Gladys SHARON DU I was waiting for trains in the night

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The Best Writer of Wicker Park KHUYEN LE A dying bar and a fading literary scene

POETICS 64

KNOW THIS

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Dinner with an Old Friend

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Fantasy for a Hallmate SCOTT STEVENS

MARIKA TRON SCOTT STEVENS

number two spring 2020

Poem Ending with a Sentence by Heath Ledger Frank Bidart Each grinding flattened American vowel smashed to centerlessness, his glee that whatever long ago mutilated his mouth, he has mastered to mutilate you: the Joker’s voice, so unlike the bruised, withheld, wounded voice of Ennis Del Mar. Once I have the voice that’s the line and at the end of the line is a hook and attached to that is the soul.

The Viole(n)t Hour: Catastrophe is among us!

“Poetry makes nothing happen” —W.H. Auden “It is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless—about to be birthed, but already felt” —Audre Lorde

W

HAT CONNECTS THE VITAL

nerve endings and organic tissue of this issue is a deep attention and care to a peculiar fact about language: it has the entangled ability to characterize violence, enable violence, and heal violence.

The irony of language is that it is violence virtualized. It is a scaffolding of the real which, at its core, transforms into the devastating, violent revelation that a word is never the world. At its best, it tricks us, deceives us in its luxurious impossibility, but only until its very contradictions and incompletenesses rend its (and our) deepest hopes. Yet, we who use language are sustained by the tantalizing, yet childish belief that words mean. We are perpetually seduced by this incomplete opportunity for preservation, even as we are continually disappointed.

Given all of this, why do we at caesura still choose to cling to language as our preferred mode of expression? In a year of explosive protests across 1,000 American cities, an insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, and an uneven global pace of vaccine rollout, what can language hope to accomplish that action, protest, or any other form of speech cannot? In between its delusional belief that it can characterize the world and fear that it actually might, language constitutes a reality.

Everything is impossible until it actually happens. And language is one space in which

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stuff is always actually happening, cancelling, progressing.

In March 2020, we were happily ignorant of these contradictions that would engulf us.

We had solicited dozens of submissions from Stanford students, and were in the midst of the peer editing and review process. What happened next bears no repeating.

For a few months, as only a madman could have predicted, the world spun off its axis, and threatened (as in 2000, 2008, and many others) to evolve into something otherwise. But, here at caesura, being engulfed by the COVID-19 pandemic manifested itself as localized stress about our senior theses, the prospect of never seeing our college friends again, and the general malaise of the world.

As April turned into May and June, the world exploded for a second time, and amid a decades-long reckoning with American racial violence, we faced the prospect of unfettered adulthood—albeit from the vantage point of our childhood bedrooms (if we were so lucky).

Having lived through the bitter uncertainties of the past 16 months, our editors cannot agree what to make of it, if there is anything substantial that can be made of it. But we have to write something, tell ourselves something, if only to help us keep going. After all this time, it seems as if we are still at the beginning of the crisis, unable to do

anything at all as world-historical forces seize something within us. Reading became difficult, if not impossible, in these months. One of our editors hasn’t been able to finish any book they have started (and not for lack of trying!), while others are trapped by the invigorated tensions of new jobs and existential dreads.

What can a little journal do for us, now?

As you flip through this issue, you will see that the pieces here cannot be dutifully summarized in a few words. As our writers consider how exactly it is that language manifests as violence (perhaps even as the ultimate form of violence?!), they also respond to questions of rupture and displacement.

They wonder about environmental waste and torrid first loves. They curse the strangeness of consciousness and embodiment, while asking, in the spirit of W.E.B. DuBois, what it means to name and to be a name.

We saw that so much is, by necessity, left out of language. The various pieces in this journal, insightful and clever as they are, cannot hope to encapsulate totality, or even a lived experience. And yet, we chose to write and read, nonetheless. Why? What is actually contained within these pages? And what can be contained here? What moves us beyond apathy to some type of action, even in a form as seemingly futile as a few words put together?

As editors, one of our self-directed goals is to enable, rather than limit, writers. To allow them to chase the unstable warblings of their ideas, rather than shove their words down the throats of indeterminate categories.

Against our inner urges not to pigeonhole our writers into any single theme, a theme still emerged. The pieces we received constituted themselves around the dual pillars of language and violence.

Suffice to say: our task as a fledgling journal was not straightforward. However, we believed that a little journal is no small thing. The conditions under which writing

can occur, and under which a journal can emerge, are rare enough. And if we add to this putative journal the idea that it should seek to capture a moment of rupture and respond to it in full, the whole enterprise resembles a utopian dream, a far cry from any actionable possibility. Even as we hoped for our little journal, we keenly understood what it could never be, no matter how much we wished for it. Language, after all, has its limits.

Even before the chaos that takes the name 2020, we were an upstart concatenation of desire. Chiefly the desire that undergraduate writing, and literary criticism of all forms, should have a permanent and physical home at Stanford. We believed, and still believe, that such writing deserves a place in the world— and if not a home, a landing pad.

Too often our greatest ideas, hopes, and wishes lay dormant on a laptop harddrive, never to be seen by anyone beyond Ptolemaic professors and stressed grad students. But the fact of that writing, whether for self, class, or grade, the very opportunity to write in this way, is never assured. Our mandate, while self-imposed, is no Lilliputian dream.

We are sustained by the childish and bad belief that, if we could only write, read, live better, we would be able to save what simply cannot be otherwise preserved against the tides of loss. Time, memory, people, and— yes—words are made meaningful through their absences, what they simply cannot convey.

And, if what you hold in your hand is a remnant of the absences of the past year, we can rest easy, for absences make this world.

Welcome to caesura! // —JH Wagner ’20 & Emily Elott ’20 Please direct any conspiratorial agendas, submissions, and tidings to stanfordcaesura@ gmail.com.

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Pain and the Poetics of Violence: Emily Dickinson and Ocean Vuong Regina Kong

“I

F I FEEL PHYSICALLY AS IF THE TOP OF MY HEAD WERE TAKEN OFF,” WROTE EMILY

Dickinson, “I know that is poetry.” In this paper, I refer to the phenomenon of a poem’s violent, disruptive quality as poetic violence—the ruptures generated by language against the complexities of pain and human expression. Adapting Elaine Scarry’s views on the philological intricacies of pain, I examine the disruptive, violent quality of language in the comparison of two poems: Emily Dickinson’s 1863 “Poem 760” and Ocean Vuong’s 2015 “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong.” Despite their separation in time and space, by putting Dickinson in conversation with Vuong, I posit that these two voices intersect at a critical point.

In a 2018 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Vuong noted Dickinson’s impact on his own understanding of poetic craft: “She worshipped at the altar of language. To me, her work was about radicalizing that worship, turning the act itself into a gift.” Dickinson continually challenged the conventions and capabilities of poetry, creating a distinctly elliptical language that made the intangible real without compromising its impossibility. Vuong—a queer, Vietnamese-American poet—has often been compared to Dickinson for his courageous use of language documenting American violence, in all its manifestations. Tracking the creative processes and pressures that lead to this poetics of violence, I will begin by establishing a theoretical framework linking pain to poetic creation with particular regard to the poems of Dickinson and Vuong, which resist reductive readings. Responding to the pain of personal crisis, Dickinson and Vuong generate a form of poetic violence that, in addition to functioning as a mode of agency, illustrates the complexities of translating pain into language, ultimately making the act of poetry an assertion of survival.

Dickinson and Vuong write within a longstanding tradition of pain as poetic creation.

Deeming poetry an “instinct of human beings from childhood” (37), Aristotle in his foundational Poetics develops an inductive framework for examining poetry as mimesis—as representative of human actions rather than purely imitative. What makes the mimetic quality of poetry pleasurable, Aristotle explains, results from its derivation from inherently unpleasurable things: “A common occurrence indicates this: we enjoy contemplating the most precise images of things whose actual sight is painful to us, such as the forms of the vilest animals and of corpses” (37). For Aristotle, the reproduced image of a thing “whose actual sight is painful,” and not the actual thing itself, generates a sense of pleasure. In detaching pain from its source, the representation of that pain becomes more accessible, thereby translating—and dislocating— the puncture of emotion. Poems, in this way, honor things too painful to bear in person. We may “enjoy” poetic representations of things otherwise unbearable because they allow us to comprehend the pain as well as the beauty, to access the inherent poetry of existence. So long as it results in the “most precise” image, the translation of pain into language—into poetry—is

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an almost alchemical process. In transmuting the discomfort of the pain, the representation of that pain becomes pleasurable because it involves the cognitive act of understanding as well as experiencing an essentially human event.

Pain translated and transformed by poetry is not limited to Western traditions either.

Ānandavardhana in the Dhvanyāloka excavates the soul of poetry from its origins in human subjectivity. Referencing a legend in the Ramayana in which the first poem arose from the grief of a bird over its slain mate, Ānandavardhana locates the affective core of a poem: “Then, like the spilling over of a jar filled with liquid, like the pouring forth of one’s emotion into a cry of lament, this [grief now transformed into the rasa of compassion] found its final form in a verse cast into fixed form of meter and into appropriate words, for cries of lament and the like are suggestive of a state of mind without the need of semantic convention” (Dhvanyāloka 1.5K).

This passage, read in conjunction with Aristotle’s ideas on mimesis, indicates how the pain of the grief-stricken bird passes through the medium of poetic expression, changing shape.

Transformed into compassion, this pain blurs the boundary between pain as the subject and pain as the object—as a state of being with and without agency. Whereas grief is the subject of pain, compassion is the object of what Ānandavardhana deems the ultimate aim of poetry, or the “soul” of a poem. To Ānandavardhana, the rasa of compassion relates to the moral system of poetry, where emotions and literary forms are closely intertwined. Rather than an end in itself, rasa implies the process of relishing and enjoying, and it is that experience that makes it most valuable. As a source of poetic creation, pain evolves from a state that is both experienced and felt into a generative force; a poem, in this sense, is also a mode of understanding. Because pain resides in the personal and the private, poetry is a vital tool to communicate the interiority of pain to others outside of it, endowing the poet with the artistic agency to give voice to his or her inner emotions and how those emotions can be shared.

If empathy is pain familiar, then the nature of poetry counteracts pain’s frequent resistance to articulation; the phenomenology of pain and its destructive nature enact a violence against language itself. In writing that “Pain—has an Element of Blank—” (line 1), Dickinson notes an essential paradox of pain: It is a sensation at once concrete and abstract. Dickinson makes no distinction in “Poem 760” between physical and psychic pain, suggesting that linguistic categorization is irrelevant, that pain demands not so much that it be articulated as acknowledged. The result is something so totalizing that it “cannot recollect/When it begun—or if there were/A time when it was not” (lines 2-4). The blankness of pain, however, challenges the capabilities of language. For how does a poet write about a pain so engulfing that it is “Blank”?

Elaine Scarry posits that whatever “pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language” (4). Scarry proceeds to imagine a language of pain, including a vocabulary surrounding suffering that both constructs and deconstructs the connection between pain and human sentience. It is this verbal and material tension surrounding the expression of pain that leads Scarry to conclude that the “only state that is anomalous as pain is the imagination” (162). Here Scarry contrasts pain as a state without objects—the totalizing force that Dickinson imagines in “Poem 760”—with the imagination as a state composed of objects only. Yet, as much as pain may lack an object,

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The Poetics of Violence

it is possible to identify it as the object of the imagination. Pain becomes an intentional state through empathy. Once it is brought in relation to the “objectifying power of the imagination,” pain is transformed from a “wholly passive and helpless occurrence” into a “self-modifying and, when most successful, self-eliminating one” (Scarry 164). In building a relation between pain and imagining, Scarry addresses the inexpressibility of pain by advocating for imagination as a tool to frame pain through fiction. Imagination and poetic creation thus give form to pain and its function in the collective and individual experience.

Dickinson observes that “Pain—has an Element of Blank,” and Vuong, responding to legacies of historical and personal violence, writes about trauma in “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” to both abstract and represent that blankness. Written as an epistolary to a future self, Vuong begins with his name: “Ocean, don’t be afraid./The end of the road is so far ahead/it is already behind us” (lines 1-3). Vuong deals with the interiority of pain through his concretization of personal loss. Warping spatial boundaries, Vuong makes a metaphor out of an endless road, one that is both ahead and behind. The only way of conquering his fear, he implies, is to conceptualize it, “Like how the spine/won’t remember its wings” (lines 5-7). The enjambment in this phrase severs the images Vuong creates from the memories they evoke. The spine as a bodily pillar dissolves into its imaginary wings, juxtaposing embodiment with The poetic violence Vuong creates levity. With this duality, Vuong proposes the possibility of impossibilities: Imagining is one ultimately composed of bones with wings helps us to understand conflict—between imagistic renderings of pain, memory, and his pain as a multi-dimensional, lived experience that challenges memory and own attempts to reconcile with the its tenuous construction of reality. trauma of remembering his family’s Following these lines, Vuong returns back to the body as it is thrown war-torn history. onto pavement, a violence enacted against himself with the line “no matter how many times our knees kiss the pavement” (line 8). He ruptures the language of the poem with the word “kiss.” Gleams of similarly dissonant tenderness throughout the poem counteract and contradict themselves in lines such as “The most beautiful part/of your body is wherever/your mother’s shadow falls” (lines 9-12). Here again, Vuong deftly puts opposing elements in conversation and in tension with each other, locating tenderness in acts of violence, beauty in the pain of his mother’s memory. The poetic violence Vuong creates is one ultimately composed of conflict—between imagistic renderings of pain, memory, and his attempts to reconcile with the trauma of remembering his family’s war-torn history: “Don’t be afraid, the gunfire/is only the sound of people/trying to live a little longer” (lines 26-28). Violence is equated with survival, and Vuong implies that the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive—the act of struggle is also an act of endurance. Vuong suggests that poetry offers its own form of salvation by offering a way to denote the intangible value of suffering.

Pain additionally leads to the creation of a depersonalized poetic mode that facilitates

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Regina Kong

its movement into linguistic expression, displacing the self. While to “have great pain is to have certainty,” Scarry says, “to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt” (7). Not only does pain resist language—it creates tensions with perception. One’s own pain is certain; that of another is more tenuous a thing to believe. Throughout “Poem 760,” Dickinson never refers to herself in the first-person. Rather, her sense of self is embodied in the great capitalized “Pain” that becomes coterminous with her life. In “Its Infinite contain” (line 6), Dickinson turns the adjective of Infinite into a noun, cultivating a space for pain to live in beyond her own self. Capacious and godlike, Pain resides in infinitude, transcending Dickinson’s existence.

Impersonality functions as a coping mechanism for Dickinson as the poem’s speaker, but it also removes “Poem 760” from Dickinson’s life story. Although only Dickinson could have written this poem, by invoking the grandeur of pain, she makes it ultimately not about herself.

Poetry, in this sense, is essentially an act of self-destruction. Synthesizing T.S. Eliot’s notion of impersonality,1 along with Scarry’s theory of pain, leads to a reading of poetry as full of emotion—just not the poet’s personal emotion. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot concludes that poetry is “not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (58). Dickinson’s Vuong imbues his own name with poem lacks a sense of self to convey new significance, for he becomes the the violence of pain against the self. Her pain—or more precisely, the pain she protean sea for which he is named, writes of—is “enlightened” (line 7) on its delivering a powerful oceanic own terms. It has no sense of attachment; address to a deeply fractured being. in the act of being made into language, it gains some inhuman degree of wisdom. In the impersonality of Dickinson’s poem, pain escapes from its original unsharability through the intensity of the artistic process.

Whereas Dickinsonian impersonality constructs a separate self for pain, Vuong’s impersonality in “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” destabilizes time as well. Writing outside a teleological framework, Vuong asserts poetry as an act of existential survival. The poem evades any single identity, for Vuong converses with multiple selves in the poem, real and imagined.

For instance, there is “the house with childhood/whittled down to a single tripwire” (lines 12-13) that distills the violence of childhood into a scene of domesticity juxtaposed with “tripwire,” instruments of war, inflicted pain. Vuong’s language is as precise as it is incandescent, and his words seem to implode as they are read. “Don’t worry,” he continues telling his fictionalized self, “Just call it horizon/& you’ll never reach it” (lines 14-15). This devastating line asks what it means to escape teleological endpoints, where one’s aim is impossibly distant. Taking part in an

T.S. Eliot argues that the poet’s mind is a kind of catalytic chamber, a “receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together” (“Tradition and the Individual Talent” 55).

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The Poetics of Violence

exercise of linguistic acrobatics composed of backward and forward gazes, Vuong dramatically departs from temporality in the next lines: “Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not/a lifeboat” (lines 16-17). Just as Vuong brings the poem back to the present, he shatters the moment with the command to jump as he instructs his fictionalized self to vault into the lifeboat, gesturing to his family’s fraught journey from Vietnam to the United States as political refugees. With undercurrents of violence associated with the war and his past puncturing the poem, Vuong destabilizes workings of history and time, eroding his personal identity through the abstraction of these themes. Maneuvering between disparate spatial and temporal moments, Vuong generates a violence between poetic and personal identity. Just as Dickinson questions if “there was/A time” outside of pain (lines 3-4), Vuong transforms temporality into something that is embodied within language rather than experienced linearly, indistinguishable from the space around it.

Poetic imagination includes also the power of language to give voice to the intangible.

Manipulating the language in “Poem 760,” Dickinson warps temporal boundaries and generates a poetic violence against theological implications. Time functions on a circular level in this poem, particularly in “Its Infinite realms contain/Its Past—enlightened to perceive/New Periods—of Pain” (lines 6-8). With the theological “Infinite” of Pain, Dickinson assumes a critical gaze, examining whether suffering has an inherently spiritual purpose. Poised against human mortality, Pain is likened to its own belief system, one engaged with the conception of infinitude as self-perpetuating violence. Whereas God is not explicitly addressed as a source of salvation against Pain, Dickinson writes Pain as its own world—as its everything. Pain generates its own suffering and, more poignantly, its own salvation because it is its own God. Helen Vendler notes that, in contrast to Dickinson’s other poems, here Dickinson struggles to find any “mitigating excuse” for the existence of pain, instead accepting it for what it is (316). Vendler adds that Dickinson substitutes the “normal” present tense (“contains”) for the “unmarked” present tense (“contain”) in the poem as a verb more suited to the temporal continuum created in this aesthetic space (317). Beginning and ending with the word “Pain,” Dickinson creates a selfgenerative space within the poem; bracketed within this infinitude of pain that “has no Future— but itself” (line 5), the “Past” undergoes an endless “enlightenment” in which it perceives new periods of pain without the hope of relief. Enlightenment subsequently takes on an ironic tone, for when Dickinson’s speaker becomes enlightened to the realities of her pain, she also returns to the impetus for that enlightenment in the first place.

Dickinson and Vuong both mine their pain for themes of absence and displacement, examining the beauty in dislocation. Folding past, present, and future into the spherical Infinite, Dickinson hinges her poem on the word “Blank.” As much as she imagines a spherical Infinite summoned by her pain, the “Blank” of pain—its ineffability and resistance to language—renders the poem a reminder of the imperfection of human perception. Pain generates understanding rooted in uncertainty. Throughout the poem the “Blank” refuses to be dissected, remaining as inscrutable and mysterious as when it appears in the opening line. By aligning the Infinite with blankness, Dickinson creates a disruption within the epistemology upon which her language rests, using this linguistic violence as a way of reimagining the aesthetic powers of pain as

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Regina Kong

poetic creation. In a similar vein, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” is a poem whose gravity rests in personal crisis. Dead friends pass through Vuong’s speaker “like wind/through a wind chime” (lines 35-36). Like Dickinson’s “Blank,” the impenetrable “Ocean” of Vuong’s poem is what we remember. Vuong repeats his first name “Ocean” throughout his poem in multiple variations. From “Ocean,/are you listening?” (lines 8-9), he proceeds finally to “Ocean. Ocean,/ get up” (lines 28-29). The call seems to reverberate beyond the last line of the poem and points us back to the title, to the inevitable and incredible “Someday” Vuong promises himself. Vuong imbues his own name with new significance, for he becomes the protean sea for which he is named, delivering a powerful oceanic address to a deeply fractured being. Residing within and deepening these profound absences left by trauma and pain, Vuong attempts to uncover the beauty in the urgency of his own inability to understand it all. As in Dickinson’s “Poem 760,” however, there is something searing about this precariousness, a kind of poetic disturbance that compels, disrupts, and haunts the reader.

The resonances of pain and poetic violence allow the poems of Dickinson and Vuong to be viewed as redemptive acts of artistic creation. To convey the immensity of her truths, Dickinson famously advises in another poem that one must tell “all the truth but tell it slant.”

The inexpressibility of pain makes it a rich subject for the kind of slant-truth with which poetry deals. Dickinson distorts the world of pain generated by its “Element of Blank” (line 1) by writing her way into the poem as a mode of reconciliation, an assertion of survival. Vuong’s “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” is likewise a poem laced with a fraught awareness of its transitory beauty: Images like unnamed arms gesturing toward a departure (line 19), or a faint torch in the fading darkness (line 21) attempt to give shape and form to ineffable trauma. Reading these poems through the lens of the sublime in the Western tradition illuminates how certain poems transcend the human condition, deepening the mystery of the power of literary works.2 Great works transcend temporal boundaries, reverberating beyond the initial, immediate transaction between audience and language. Some critics have even defined the sublime within an aesthetic framework for distinguishing from the merely beautiful.3 At the heart of all literary criticism is the question of what makes a work of literature truly great. These ideas are embodied not only in the reading of Dickinson and Vuong’s poems, but also, notably, in their conception.

Dissonance in the poetry actually brings us closer. The violence circumscribed by the language of these poems—against pain, the self, and the very confines of language itself—function as an affirmative act. Survival, in other words, is a creative force.

In the Greek fragment Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime), Longinus puts forth his understanding of the aesthetic and philosophical framework in which one can imagine the literary sublime. Longinus claims that great works demonstrate a sense of timelessness, with consequences for both the individual as well as broader literary history: “For what is truly great bears repeated consideration; it is difficult, nay, impossible, to resist its effect; and the memory of it is stubborn and indelible” (179-181).

3 For instance, philosopher Edmund Burke locates the sublime in the liminal space between pain and beauty in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. According to Burke, pain, if artfully employed, can lead to a powerfully sublime work (34).

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The Poetics of Violence

Deeming poetry “a gift one cannot quantify,” Vuong in his interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books emphasizes the necessity of understanding poetic creation as a radical offering to humanity. In a world fraught with political crises and perpetual injustices, poetry offers its own form of survival, one rooted in language and its disruptive power. Poetic salvation, as the great Wallace Stevens observed, arises from a “violence from within that protects us from the violence from without.” In other words, poetry addresses the exterior from the interior through the privilege of artistic freedom and expression, responding to the tremors of collective trauma and pain from the epicenter of the individual. In tumultuous times, it is the imagination that is equipped best to withstand the pressures of reality, and the poet, in concretizing and abstracting that reality, creates a vision as powerful as it is redemptive. //

Works Cited Ānandavardhana, Daniel H. H. Ingalls, and Abhinavagupta. The Dhvanyāloka of Ānandavardhana

with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Harvard University Press, 1990.

Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics. Edited by Stephen Halliwell, and Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1998. Print.

Barylski, Alexandra. “Ocean Vuong: Poetry, Bodies, and Stillness. Alexandra Barylski Interviews

Ocean Vuong.” Marginalia: Los Angeles Review of Books—A Review of Books in History,

Religion & Culture, 21 Dec. 2018, marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/ocean-vuong-poetry bodies-and-stillness/.

Burke, Edmund, and Adam Phillips. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the

Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford University Press, 1990.

Dickinson, Emily. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. Edited by Helen Vendler, Harvard

University Press, 2010.

Dickinson, Emily. “Poem 760.” The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by R. W. Franklin, Belknap

Press, 1999.

Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism.

Methuen, 1960.

Longinus. Aristotle: the Poetics: Longinus: on the Sublime. Demetrius on Style. Edited by W. H. Fyfe,

Harvard University Press, 1953.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press, 1987.

Stevens, Wallace, and W. A. Dwiggins. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination.

Knopf, 1951.

Vuong, Ocean. “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong.” The New Yorker. April 27, 2016.

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William Blake, The Circle of the Thieves; Agnolo Brunelleschi Attacked by a Six-Footed Serpent, Inferno Canto XXV, 1827.

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Embodiment and the Grotesque in Dante’s Inferno Zuyi Zhao I. Introduction

T

HIS PAPER IS, IN GENERAL AND SOMEWHAT UNHELPFULLY GRANDIOSE TERMS,

concerned with two rather nebulous and vague concepts: embodiment and the grotesque. What I mean by “embodiment” is simply the state of existing as, or perhaps in, a body. “The grotesque” refers to something—or rather a set of things—that is slightly more complicated. Specifically, in this paper, I use “the grotesque” to refer to various disturbances of the body: The body in pain; the body distorted, transformed, or unmade; the incomplete body; the body as a corpse; and so on. But my usage of “the grotesque” here is not limited to the physically visible; it also refers to disturbances and distortions of the self, or soul—deviations that exist because of emotional devastation, moral failures, immoral desires, or sins of religious significance. Thus, “the grotesque” carries an evaluative dimension that goes beyond the physical.

The underlying question behind this paper is deceptively simple: What does it mean to have a body? There is an implicit assumption behind this question: The self is not entirely encompassed by the body it has, and therefore, it is external to the body. By asking what it means for a self to have a body, however, the question itself is asking how the body and the self are related, how they are intertwined with each other. Both embodiment and the grotesque entail insights into the relationship between the body and the soul. Dante Alighieri’s depiction of embodiment and the grotesque in his Inferno can function as a peculiar lens through which that relationship of the body and the soul can be observed and analyzed. Through triangulating the relationships between the body, the soul, and the grotesque, Dante’s Inferno attempts to render the body as an extension and representation of the soul, to depict a paradigm in which the body perfectly reflects the soul it embodies. In the Inferno, the grotesque soul suffers in Hell for eternity, embodied as and tormented by pain, disfiguration, transformation, and unmaking.

By examining the relationship between embodiment and the grotesque in the world of the living and in the realm of Hell as imagined in Dante’s Inferno, I hope to illuminate, compare, and discuss potential implications that reside in the poem. The narrative leans toward the desire, the want to believe that having a body—or being embodied per se—is a process of incarnation.

The soul’s characteristics could extend itself into and construct the body it inhabits, whether that be a human body or a tree. The key word is want. There is a certain hesitance, a certain anxiety present in Inferno. Although the Inferno presents figurations of the spiritually disfigured as physically disfigured for the souls of Hell, references to the living world within the poem reveal that people tend to fail to fully recognize, or recognize at all, the extent of the spiritual

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disfigurement in other people because their bodies obscure the truth.

The implications of the idea that the Inferno wants to believe, ethical and otherwise, are rather severe. For instance, rooted in this belief is the notion that physical disfigurement reflects spiritual—or moral—disfigurement. This notion of “disability as evil” can justify—and has justified— ableist attitudes and practices that villainize and dehumanize disabled individuals. In the making of, and even in the understanding of, the relationship between soul and body, embodiment and grotesquery, the axis of ableism—along with other axes of oppression—should not be disregarded. An association of sinfulness with deserved bodily grotesquery and, implicitly, an association of moral purity and bodily completeness are formed and emphasized in the Inferno.

A full discussion of the interaction between the rhetoric of ableism and Dante’s rendering of the relationship between body, soul, and grotesquery is outside of the scope of this paper, but I hope to raise points of concern alongside the following close examinations.

II. The Visibility of Sinfulness: The Soul Embodied in Dante’s Inferno In many languages, descriptions of the soul’s appearance—a beautiful soul, or a hideous soul—are evaluations of the soul’s moral constitution and social characteristics, which reveal degrees of kindness, charity, and so forth, concepts laden with ethical values. Of course, when most of us use these types of evaluations, we are speaking metaphorically. While a body is visible, the soul is not. An open wound or a scar can be seen on the body, but a soul that wounds cannot be immediately distinguished from a soul that has been wounded. The beauty or the ugliness of a soul cannot be seen literally, but once observed through the appropriate kinds of interaction, it can be evaluated in relationship to the soul’s body. For example, the statement “Good looks don’t matter if your soul is ugly” captures both an attention to the reality that a body does not necessarily manifest the evil of a soul, and a disavowal of the body’s physical beauty, which is rendered absent, by the soul’s ugliness. The metaphorical appearance of the soul figuratively supersedes the factual appearance of the body.

In Dante’s Inferno, however, the soul’s ugliness literally supersedes the factual appearance of its embodiment in a physical way, overpowering the body’s ability to be complete, intact, and human. Aside from the pilgrim himself, nearly all of the “bodies” that the narrative encounters are not literally bodies, but instead, are the souls of the sinful dead, embodied in human and non-human forms in the depths of Hell. Some of these souls are able to manifest as human bodies, particularly in the earlier circles, but as the pilgrim enters the lower levels of Hell, other souls are completely dehumanized—appearing as trees or flames—and still others appear as bodies disfigured, immobilized, or in transformation. The nature of the souls is made visible in their embodiment: the more severe their bodily grotesquery—appearing in the form of painful torture—the more severe their spiritual grotesquery. The Inferno is, in part, a narrative of souls bound to endless torture—but it is a torture that is both deserved and desired by the victim.

Thus, despite their pain, the souls described are embodied in the way that appropriately and

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accurately fits themselves.

In Canto XIII, Virgil and the pilgrim enter the second subcircle of the seventh circle, where those “violent against themselves” are tormented (Durling 199), having been transformed into trees that are “dark in color, not smooth ... but knotted and twisted ... [with] thorns with poison” (Inferno XIII:3-6). As trees, these souls are turned into the nests of “the ugly Harpies” (XIII:10), who “utter laments on [the souls]” (XIII:15) and “[feed] on [the souls’] leaves” (XIII:101). Literally dehumanized, the souls trapped in this circle are without the defining features of human agency. The souls are so convincingly dehumanized that the pilgrim, despite hearing “cries of woe on every side” could see “no person uttering them” (XIII:22-23). Rooted into the ground and without orifices unless broken by an external force, the soul-trees are deprived of both mobility and speech, and access to the latter faculty is always accompanied by pain, as “[w]ords and blood [come forth] together” from the stem that is broken (XIII:43-44).

After Virgil questions the first tree, the pilgrim learns that the soul who is “bound in these knots” of the dark wood of the seventh circle can never “[untie] himself from such limbs” (XIII:88-89). Because the soul harmed its own body and deprived itself of that body, the soul cannot justly return to it (XIII:104); instead, the soul’s corpse “will hang ... on the thornbush of the soul that harmed it” (XIII:107-108). The soul “uprooted itself” from its body at death (XIII:95), rejecting its own grounding in humanity, and in the seventh circle, grows from a sprout into “a woody plant” (XIII:100). Thus, in the picture of the Inferno, the person who commits suicide overrides his own existence as a human.

The act of seeking one’s own destruction runs so opposite to the human survival instinct and even the animal survival instinct that the embodiment of the soul can only be a tree, in which the desire for survival is unseen and unseeable, unvoiced and unvoiceable. The grotesqueness of the soul that commits violence against itself manifests in the knottedness of the tree and in the blood that must pour for it to speak. The desire to destroy and escape the soul’s former (human) body—the desire for the taking away of the human body from the soul—is both permanently accounted for and permanently disavowed in this new embodiment. Even on the Day of Judgment, these souls will not inhabit the bodies they cast aside, only carry them on their branches—but in carrying them, they are forever literally burdened with their human bodies. In committing self-murder, these souls effaced themselves from the living world, and in Hell, in growing into the trees that imprison and torment them, efface themselves from the human world. Therefore, the true nature of the self-murderer is revealed and actualized through its new embodiment in Hell.

Curiously, the poem describes the soul as something that “departs from the body,” seemingly implying a pronounced identification of the soul and the body as two distinct parts

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(XIII:94). Virgil refers to the soul-tree as an “imprisoned spirit” (XIII:87), assuming in his language that the soul is a separate entity contained by the tree. A soul that is sent to the seventh circle, however, will immediately grow into a new embodiment—the body of the tree, conversely implying that the embodiment of the soul is an extension of the soul, rather than an element that is freely distinct from it. Nonetheless, this type of tension creates a more nuanced picture of the relationship between the soul and the body, or embodiment as a general concept. Embodiment relates significantly to the nature of the soul, and the distinction that one might draw between the soul and the body must accommodate the fact that the body responds to the different valences of the soul, whether they be disfigurement or excellences.

In Canto XXV, Virgil and the pilgrim are within the seventh bolgia of the eighth circle, the circle of fraud, among the souls of thieves who are punished by forced metamorphoses, in which the souls are transformed and merged with the serpents that torment them. As Canto XXIV describes, the souls of thieves are stuck “amid [the] harsh and savage plenty” of “a terrible crowding of serpents” (XXIV:82-93), bound in various ways by snakes and serpents. The pilgrim witnesses one of the thieves being attacked by “a serpent with six feet” (XXV:49). The serpent wrapped itself around the thief “Agnel” (XXV:68), merging itself with the sinner’s soul until he became “neither two nor one” (XXV:69)—the body’s “former appearance ... was shattered,” the image of it “perverse,” seeming like “two and none” (XXV:76-77). As another soul turns into a slithering creature, a serpent simultaneously transforms into a human in front of the pilgrim.

The description of this endless, torturous transformation from human to serpent to human again provides a visceral glimpse into the tumultuous, grasping nature of these thieves. While the text itself is wholly vivid, I would like to refer to two of William Blake’s paintings of the Divine Comedy, namely, his two renderings of the specific scene in which a thieving sinner is transformed. In Blake’s two renderings of Agnello Brunelleschi amid transformation and mergence with the six-footed serpent, the head of Brunelleschi is contorted at a ninety-degree angle to his shoulders, his eyes widened in pain and shock (Blake, 78-79). In both plates, his

In having something that embodies them, whether it be the tree or the serpent, the souls of Hell are laid bare, their true natures revealed in order to torment them.

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hands are splayed open, unable to prevent what is happening to him at the whims of the serpent attacking and transforming him. The scales that were on the skin of the six-footed serpent in the first plate depicting Brunelleschi are present on his skin in the second plate, on his face, his chest, his arms and legs. His toes have grown claws. In the first plate, his neck is held at the ninety-degree angle by the mouth of the serpent, and his eyes are fixated on the sight of the monstrous creature. In the second plate, his eyes gaze blankly upwards, his neck contorted in that angle by his physical being.

The grotesquery of the thieves’ souls is thrust upon their bodily representations, manifesting as the visceral and repulsive transformations from human to serpent and serpent to human which the poem so proudly describes (XXV:97). As the snake overcomes the thief’s soul and renders him a snake himself, the thief’s sin is made painfully visible, and the process of his spiritual wrongdoing is also made visible. Each thief has the most important thing—his human “body” and identity—stolen from him by a serpent, an apt punishment. At the same time, the serpentine souls—perhaps now deprived of their conscious agency as men—are granted the fullest, most unending chance to steal the most important thing from another—the other’s body and identity. The fact that the thief’s embodiment transforms into the animalistic, incoherent serpent—both robbed of his identity and poised to regain it—is a manifestation of the soul’s sin, which leads it to steal and thus physically transform. The sinfulness of the self-murderers and the thieves is made incarnate by their distorted, inhuman bodies. Their verbal confessions to the pilgrim serve to reemphasize the extent of their sins. In having something that embodies them, whether it be the tree or the serpent, the souls of Hell are laid bare, their true natures revealed to torment them.

Even so, these scenes occur in the realm of God’s just punishments, in which the souls are rightly punished after they have already lived, to varying degrees, in sin. The visibility of the soul’s disfigurement is not a point of tension in any sense because it is the soul, in Hell, that is embodied most aptly. How does one consider embodiment in the world of the living? Does it, as Dante seems to depict it in Hell, really reveal the spiritual characteristics, especially the spiritual grotesqueries, of a person?

III. Harder to See: Sinfulness Obscured and the Soul Embodied in the Living World The Inferno, despite being set completely in the depths of Hell, concerns itself with the politics of the world of the living from which the pilgrim came. In Canto XXXIII, the pilgrim also learns, to his surprise, that there are people who are already dead spiritually: Their souls are in Hell but their bodies still walk the face of the Earth, as though alive, possessed by demons (XXXIII:130). Walking through the ninth circle of Hell, the circle of traitors, Virgil and the pilgrim discover the soul of Brother Alberigo, trapped in the “icy crust” with his eyes frozen shut (XXXIII:109). Alberigo describes, “as soon as the soul betrays as I did, its body is taken over by a demon ... the soul falls down into this cistern” (XXXIII:128-130). The disfigurement of the

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overwhelmingly traitorous soul is so grotesque, so severe that the body, in essence, rejects it— the soul falling to Hell as the vacancy is reoccupied by a demon, a suprahuman and evil being.

The pilgrim is unwilling to believe Alberigo’s suggestion that there are “[bodies that] still appear up there” whose souls are already in Hell. Instead, he wants to believe that his observations of the bodies in the living world, who “eat and drink and sleep and wear clothes” (XXXIII:140-141), can be trusted. Even if we are to doubt that Alberigo was telling the truth about Branca Doria’s death, Alberigo himself, who the pilgrim believed was still alive, is in Hell and has been for some time, enough for him to know that Branca Doria has been in Hell as well for “years” (XXXIII:137).

An important anxiety about the visibility of souls, about embodiment in the world of the living, manifests in the pilgrim’s refusal to believe that Branca Doria has long died—despite the presence of Doria’s soul in Hell—because he knows that Doria, or at least the body of Doria, is still animate in the world of the living. Implicit in this refusal is the belief that the physical body of a person can be trusted as an accurate representation of the person it embodies. The pilgrim’s interaction with Alberigo reflects an underlying assumption about discernment—the assumption that, as individuals of the living world, humans can discern the true nature of the souls of others. Even if the soul is not physically visible, the degree of its evil can be visible to us.

Its evil can be known by observing actions of the body which contains the soul. Yet Alberigo and Doria’s presence in Hell and the presence of their bodies in the living world undermine this assumption. This specific case involves the bodies of evil individuals being possessed by demons, which might ameliorate the strangeness of and horror at the inability to discern between the embodiment of a human soul and the embodiment of a demon.

In fact, however, this distinction reveals an inability to distinguish between, when in the living world, an embodied human and an embodied force of evil. In contrast to the visibility of sinfulness in the souls of Hell that the Inferno documents, the souls within living bodies are harder to see, harder to discern. This anxiety over the inability to accurately discern the disfiguration of a soul through its living embodiment entails the worry of wrongful discernment.

What does the soul really mean by the way it attempts to depict itself in the body?

At the end of Canto XXXII, Virgil and the pilgrim discover Count Ugolino devouring the head of Archbishop Ruggieri “as bread is eaten by the starving” (XXXII:127). The pilgrim requests that Ugolino deliver his identity and his story. Ugolino answers in Canto XXXIII, in which he describes the circumstances that led to his death.

Beginning his narration with a dream that represented himself and his children as a “wolf and his little cubs” (XXXIII:29), Ugolino provides the pilgrim with another picture of embodiment that entails an inhuman

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transformation. Having been trapped in a “horrible tower” with no food, Ugolino and his sons could only await their death through starvation (XXXIII:47). Witnessing his own sons “crying in their sleep and asking for bread” (XXXIII:38-39), Ugolino “[turns] to stone within”—his soul made more and more inhuman by the tortuous, impending deaths of his children. Compounding the petrification of his soul is the fact of his treason, which is ultimately the root cause of his and his children’s death-circumstances. In turning to stone within and “not weeping” (XXXIII:49), Ugolino, as a father, betrays his children who “were weeping” (XXXIII:50), who looked to him for a comfort he could not even attempt to give them and saw, instead, “such a look” that they could not understand (XXXIII:51).

Accompanying Ugolino’s internal petrification is an external, physical transformation, in that his facial expression had become unrecognizable and unemotional. The transformation that occurs, however, is unlike the type of transformation which engulfs the embodied soul of the self-murderer or the thief: It is incomplete, obfuscating, and difficult to understand.

That the soul-tree is misinterpreted at first by the pilgrim is the entire point—because the self-

In the case of Ugolino, his true nature—even as it seeps into his lived embodiment in the absence of tears, the strangeness of his face, the enraged biting of his hands—is misunderstood by his own sons. They see his rage as hunger, his petrifying grief as a withholding of help, which Ugolino has no way of truly giving. murderer is so removed from his self and his humanity, even as he weeps, that he cannot be seen as a person in the embodiment that reveals his true nature. In the case of Ugolino, his true nature—even as it seeps into his lived embodiment in the absence of tears, the strangeness of his face, the enraged biting of his hands—is misunderstood by his sons. They see his rage as hunger, his petrifying grief as a withholding of help, which Ugolino has no way of truly giving (XXXIII:61-69).

In the description of Ugolino’s final living moments, despite his rage leading him to bite at his hands, he is rendered seemingly emotionless with the absence of tears and the dissolution of his rage into hunger. Ugolino is deprived of his voice, and his mobility is limited by both his hunger and his entrapment in the tower. The petrification of his soul, like his dream of himself as a wolf, represents a striking dehumanization of Ugolino, even as he is experiencing one of the most painful human experiences: losing his children. The children’s misunderstanding and misinterpretation of Ugolino’s transformed embodiment not only pains them, but it also inspires and encourages them to ask their father to “eat of [them]” (XXXIII:62). Ugolino says nothing in response to their offering, but after his children perish from starvation, his “fasting [has] more

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power than [his] grief” (XXXIII:76), likely meaning that he died of starvation, too, rather than of grief and despair. It is possible, however, that the line carries a more sinister meaning—his hunger overcame his sorrow and led him to cannibalize the corpses of his children.

Regardless of the primary intended meaning, the fact remains that Ugolino eats of another’s body in Hell. On a surface level, considering that Ugolino and his victim are both souls of deceased humans, such an act almost certainly seems cannibalistic. After his death, however, Ugolino is embodied in Hell as frozen into the landscape, feasting upon the head of Ruggieri (like a “dog” or a wolf would devour its prey) as a mechanism of the Archbishop’s torture (XXXIII:78)—embodying his soul’s rage in a form that mimics that an animal’s. The twofold dehumanization of the two transformations that Ugolino undergoes—one into “stone” in the living world and one into wolf and dog in the worlds of dreams and of Hell—complicate and ultimately dissolves the identification of his emotions and motives as distinctly human.

Ugolino, in Hell, is no longer human: he is embedded into the landscape, and he is thoroughly animalistic in form and nature. Ugolino’s dark and conniving rage toward Ruggieri and his deep, unspeakable grief about his and his children’s fate—both deeply complex and shattering emotions—are increasingly simplified as he nears his death. His grief petrifies him, reducing him to a non-human state. Furthermore, the complex human rage behind the desire for revenge that Ugolino held toward Ruggieri is paralleled with, yet simultaneously reduced to, the savage hunger of the wolf or dog in his dream. At the same time, the savage hunger of the wolf is realized in Hell, where Ugolino is involved in the unending torture and punishment of Ruggieri.

Like the transformations of the self-murderers and the thieves, the description of Ugolino’s fate in Hell opens up the boundaries of the human body, marrying the imagination of the human body with the concepts of instability and fluidity.

This all builds into the complex anxiety about discernment and the living body that plagues Canto XXXIII manifests in both the last days of Ugolino’s life, as recounted by his soul in the ninth circle of Hell, and in the knowledge that Alberigo reveals to the pilgrim concerning the demonic possession of bodies that are already dead. Although the rest of the Inferno wants to advance a certain answer regarding the meaning of having a body, the tensions raised in the narratives surrounding Ugolino and Alberigo make such an answer difficult to generalize beyond the boundaries of a divine, after-death reflection of the soul.

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The soul and its embodiment are distinct objects, but at the same time, the soul extends itself into its embodiment, which in turn manifests the features of the extended soul. This formulation is the one which functions in the souls of Hell—but in the living world, the distinct body doesn’t fully reflect the soul, and the soul doesn’t fully earnestly extend itself. Instead, embodiment obscures and distorts, allowing the soul that is embodied to be misinterpreted and misrepresented. Although the realm of Hell is depicted as justly embodying each soul within it in the way they most deserve and most desire, Inferno itself, in these anxious moments in Canto XXXIII, seems to hesitate and doubt about such confidence in the accuracy of the living embodiment.

Again, to return to the common statement, “Good looks don’t matter if your soul is ugly”— although I had previously argued for an implicit, figurative overtaking of the body’s beauty by the soul’s ugliness, I would like to reiterate that in our language, the overtaking is figurative. The body itself is still beautiful, perceived as beautiful, even if it doesn’t matter to the people who know that the soul is ugly—there will be outsiders who cannot see the true face of the soul, should the soul desire to obscure it. Thus embodiment is more useful as a means of delivering judgment upon the soul by some higher hand, rather than something like an indicator of the soul’s character. Nonetheless, the embodied soul is vulnerable in the ways that its body is vulnerable; what its body desires will influence what the soul itself desires, and what pains its body will pain the soul.

Yet more deeply, the Inferno suggests that the demarcation between human embodiment and non-human or inhuman embodiment is, perhaps, wrong. The various souls of Dante’s Hell fluctuate and transform: From the soul-trees of the self-murderers to the snake-thieves, from the animalistic and petrified renderings of Ugolino to the still-living body of the dead Alberigo, they present a picture of the so-called human soul as an entity that struggles with and ultimately seems to reject stability. Certainly, the unstable identity, revealed by the grotesque, plagues the “human” soul, manifesting in its transition from animalistic to stonelike to animated—but what renders it so impermanent, and what else motivates the self to desire a semblance of permanence in the nature of the soul?

IV. Concluding thoughts: What does it mean to have a body?

Elaine Scarry, in her book The Body in Pain, provides a particularly astute examination of the architecture and power of overwhelming pain—that is, the power of pain is “annihilating” (Scarry 33). Within the context of torture, the power of pain is total, the person tortured “experiences an annihilating negation so hugely felt throughout his own body that it overflows” beyond the physical boundaries of his embodiment, and yet he is the only one who can feel it (36). The picture of the grotesque—as presented and represented in Dante’s Inferno—is in many ways married to the pain-without-foreseeable-end, the pain of a defined “eternity” (34), that characterizes torture. The grotesque is a tangible and visible form of the pain experienced by

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the tormented souls. Thus, it inherits the total destructive power of pain. The grotesque destroys the ability to demarcate the body as human—in that it engenders an acute awareness of the body’s fluidity by laying it bare, vulnerable, incomplete.

The grotesque decenters what is conventionally imagined as human: the differentiation between the human body and the non-human body is blurred and confused. How does one classify a body with its head on backward (XX:11-15), or a body with its intestines exposed (XXVIII:22-42), or a human body as it merges with the body of a snake, or a tree that bleeds and speaks and weeps? If the system of classification resembles something more like a spectrum, then the place in which the distinction is drawn is arbitrary. What makes the body amid a transformation a human or a snake? The image of the individual in Canto XXVIII with his intestines spilling out of his body and dangling “between his legs” (XXVIII:25) and the image of Ugolino digging his teeth like an animal into the scalp of Ruggieri, in their bodily violence and distortion, both challenge the conventional understanding of the human body and soul as easily classified, compartmentalized objects. In adhering to the framework of a spectrum between the human body and the non-human body, the difference between what is human and what is not is no longer conceived of as a difference of kind, but rather a difference of degree. Thus, as the grotesque manifests in the body that is “human,” the repulsiveness, the horror, and the pain of it drive the soul that it embodies to confront its own uncertainty, its own openness.

The question that I raised in the introduction to this paper remains difficult to answer, but through my examination of various sections of the Inferno, I hope to have identified some of the potential albeit hazy directions in which the narratives of the Inferno believe the answer lies. The having of a body entails an intimate relationship between that body and the soul, but it is a relationship that generates tension and uncertainty. One can never be sure about how the body manifests the soul, but there exists an urge to imagine the body as a reflection of the soul. Connected to this urge, but simultaneously beyond it, is a drive to move beyond the human body. In the Inferno, the embodiment of a soul need not take a human form for it to be a pure and true representation of that soul. To meaningfully have a body requires, perhaps, an awareness of the soul’s constant fluctuation, or an understanding of the impermanence of what we identify as the “human.”

From this notion that questions the boundaries of the human, one can question the boundaries of the human body—as the grotesque demonstrates, no truth underlies the way humans attempt to understand their bodies. Perhaps, as we move away from imagining human bodies as completely distinct from all other bodies, we can simultaneously move toward a conception of human bodies that is without arbitrary distinction between muscle and muscle, organ and organ—toward a conception of human bodies that sees beyond anatomy. //

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Works Cited Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno. Edited and translated by Robert M.

Durling, Notes by Ronald L. Martinez, Oxford University Press, 1996.

Blake, William. The Six-Footed Serpent Attacking Agnolo Brunelleschi. 1824–7. Blake’s Dante: The

Complete Illustrations to the Divine Comedy, by Klonksy, Milton, Harmony Books/New

York, 1980, p. 78.

Blake, William. Brunelleschi Half-Transformed by the Serpent. 1824–7. Blake’s Dante: The Complete

Illustrations to the Divine Comedy, by Klonksy, Milton, Harmony Books/New York,

1980, p. 79.

Blake, William. Count Ugolino and His Sons in Prison. 1826-7. De Santis, Silvia. “William Blake and

The Divine Comedy.” Digital Dante. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018. digitaldante.columbia.edu/image/desantis-blake/ Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. Oxford University Press, 1985.

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Figure 1. Lu Guang. “A sheepherder along the bank of the Yellow River. Shizuishan City, Ningxia, in 2006.” New York Times, 8 Dec. 2018.

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Silence in the Fall: The Surface Scars of Environmental Loss in Lu Guang’s Photography Regina Kong

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” —Diane Arbus

S

ILENCE UNDULATES IN THE STILLNESS OF THE DESOLATE LANDSCAPE, BUT THE

hand evokes the act of silencing itself. Weathered to the texture of the lost earth in the background, the hand is not quite human anymore. Lines etched in the worn flesh lead us to the thin band of metal on the ring finger, to the cracked nails and the heavy, half-lidded eyes weighed down by unspeakable devastation. Positioned on the margins of the frame, the man in this photograph by Lu Guang (Fig. 1) gazes at a point just beyond what we can visually perceive, blurring the distinction between object and subject. Such an expression of agony demands us to dwell within it—yet as much as we want to rest inside the man’s crumpled despair, we are also far away from him, and from the polluted waters of his lamentation. This is a hand that has seen the toils of labor, and there is nothing divine or godlike about how it covers its owner’s mouth, nothing that signifies anything but pain and earthliness—an awareness so profound as to warrant shame, an obscuring of the human body. To imagine masking such a tormented face is to recall depictions of the biblical Fall, of Masaccio’s Renaissance portrait of Adam and Eve expulsed from the Garden of Eden (Fig. 2). We can find Adam in the physicality of the man’s horrified guilt, and locate Eve’s low moan in the unreal drooping eyes. In invoking religious iconography, Lu Guang’s photograph illuminates the narrative value of such transcultural gestures, as well as the provocative nature of human experience. Are we onlookers to the ruin of this landscape or are we part of its destruction? If we are to chart the cartography of the etched ridges and valleys in the man’s flesh, where do we ultimately find ourselves?

Appearing in Robert Pledge’s December 2018 New York Times opinion piece “A Photographer Goes Missing in China,” this photograph belongs to a larger series by the Chinese activist and photojournalist Lu Guang. Lu’s series sought to chronicle the effects of coal mining on China’s environment and people, the catastrophic repercussions of which have been heavily censored by a regime wary of any negative publicity. In 2018 Lu disappeared in Xinjiang, China, five weeks before the article’s publication. (This essay was written before his release in 2019.) His photographs in the coal mining series span from 2005 to 2014, traversing central China and the far reaches of Inner Mongolia. Arresting and evocative, Lu’s images

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document the plight of some of the most marginalized and vulnerable people in Chinese society. These include child laborers in coal mines, workers poisoned by toxic materials, and countless rural families touched by disease, poverty, and desperation. Moreover, the images and their unflinching depiction of human suffering reveal the dark underbelly of industrialization and development in one of the world’s rising economic and political superpowers.

Pledge interplays text and image to situate Lu’s work and disappearance within a global rhetoric resting upon the politics of visibility—the power dynamics surrounding the representation or erasure of certain lives. Lu’s photographs read like elegies resonating with surface scars of loss, quoting across spatial and temporal boundaries to interrogate our relation to a world of catastrophic environmental violence and more importantly, to locate the tensions surrounding our ethical role within it.

Pledge calls upon an international community to grasp the critical urgency of Lu’s plight, appealing to readers’ inherent humanity to recognize the stakes of the situation. The subtitle of the article focuses on Lu’s photographs, describing how they have “shown the world China’s dark side.” Pledge’s choice of “the world” gestures toward a call to action that exists beyond any individual.

Lu was unjustly imprisoned by the dissent-crushing Chinese Communist Party, yet his article refuses to be reduced to a cause of concern for those solely invested in China, or even those already indignant at the flagrant Figure 2. Massacio, Expulsion, human rights abuses there. Pledge summons a global 1425. Brancacci Chapel, Santa understanding through another echo of that sweeping Maria del Carmine, Florence. phrase in the article’s first line: “For five weeks, the world has had no idea where Lu Guang is.” Pledge then goes on to use words like “international” and “universal” when describing Lu’s work and disappearance to instill a sense of collective responsibility. Pledge uses a vocabulary that calls out not just to those with means, but those who must care, because Lu’s art is a matter of universal human rights. In figuratively lifting Lu out of China’s censorship-dominated regime and sharing his activism with the rest of the world, Pledge makes a bold rhetorical move that gives his article a wide and far-reaching magnitude.

Following a series of images from Lu’s collection, Pledge suggests that Lu’s universally evocative images prove that there is truth in the specific, that a single photograph of life in rural China can demand both our eyes and hearts, distilling human compassion into images of people and the lands they inhabit.

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Figure 3. Lu Guang. “Rivers and ponds in Guiyu Town in Guangdong Province were severely polluted in 2005.” New York Times, 8 Dec. 2018.

By appealing to a large, transnational audience through the global language of the text, Pledge sets up the reader to view Lu’s photographs as part of a greater narrative of environmental significance. Leaping across disparate terrains and issues, some photographs feature people; others are simply the products of people and the costs of progress—of smokestacks erupting sulfur-colored clouds and thick pipes oozing blooms of toxic chemicals into rivers. We want to look away but we can’t: Within the images we are able to uncover signifiers of our own comforts, of realities behind our imported household goods and modernday conveniences. In one of the first photographs in the article, Lu depicts a woman perched at the edge of a half-submerged dock (Fig. 3). She overlooks a constellation of various fragments of plastics and trash—the refuse of a society in which existence is temporal, cheap and easily discarded. Her back is turned. She could be anyone, a mother or sister. Her expression is unknown to us, but that is part of the intrigue: What secrets does she hold in her mind? Who does she think of as she dips her hands in the murky water? Obscuring her face, Lu powerfully evokes a visual element of silencing to bring attention to those who have been erased from the public imagination. Half submerged in the center of the photograph is a Tide package, its bright coloring rhyming with the woman’s red sweater. The garish English lettering reminds the viewer that the issue of pollution and waste transcends linguistic and national boundaries, that one nation’s trash is the entire planet’s trash. Just as the viewer is reeling from this realization, Pledge reinforces how Lu’s images of China interrogate the individual allocation of responsibility for

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environmental degradation: “They mirror similar circumstances elsewhere in the world, and so they carry a broader universal significance.” The woman’s poverty places her in the shadowy realm populated by the most marginalized and forgotten people. Her reflection is literally invisible, yet reflected onto the photograph are the realities of globalization and its victims who must ultimately pay the price for that tenuous definition of progress. Placing this image of a lone figure at the beginning of the article, Pledge curates a political statement in response to a world which often seems to favor the collective over the individual, reacting to those who refuse to acknowledge the implications of its rapid growth while also experiencing some of its most catastrophic environmental consequences.

Lu’s photographs also transport us across time, illuminating resonances between past and present trauma. In one photograph, a young miner boy stands sideways, facing the camera with a soft smile forming on his talc-dusted lips (Fig. 4). Rather than the source of the environmental devastation that has forced this boy to move to the industrial district in search of work, Lu highlights the exigence of its effects. Something ineffable about the contrast between the boy’s small frame and the too-large gloves on his hands demands a sense of urgency, a desire to immediately lift him out of this apocalyptic quarry where the landscape has been lost to the ravages of mining. The photograph seems doused in a ghostlike aura, and even more so in its

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Figure 4. (Far left) Lu Guang. “Yang Xinrun, 15, photographed in 2005, came to work in the Heilonggui Industrial District with his parents after he finished second grade. He earned about 16 yuan a day.” New York Times, 8 Dec. 2018.

Figure 5. (Left) Lewis Hine, Trapper Boy, 1908. echoing of Lewis Hine’s stunning portrait of a young factory worker in the Industrial Revolution (Fig. 5). Lu’s invocation of transhistorical and transpolitical sources brings his subject into a more familiar visual canon—but most of all, he challenges the notion of historical exceptionalism. By calling into question whether anything has really changed at all, Lu invites us to consider what stops us and our governments from protecting the most defenseless people—those living within a landscape devastated beyond what our imaginations can even conceive of. What happens today has happened before and will continue to happen in the future unless these critical issues are recognized and acted upon. The people most impacted by industrialization and its impacts on the environment still remain unseen, and it is only the persistence of photojournalists such as Lu and Hine that allows them to gain visibility and thus legitimacy. The tension between exposure and silence grows tauter with the boy’s futuristic goggles, which both hide his eyes and magnify his unsettling smile. It is as if he holds a secret that we cannot begin to comprehend until we see him for his place within a greater narrative of history and a lineage of people who have been rendered invisible. The closer we bring ourselves to this photograph, the more questions arise. Where do we belong in relation to this boy? What can we do to effect any real change? Look upon me for what I stand for, the boy seems to whisper to us, the more you see the less you know.

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Regina Kong

Lu’s photographs certainly offer more questions than answers. One of the final photographs (Fig. 6) featured in The New York Times article is perhaps the most haunting, depicting total evacuation of the human body through a permeating sense of bodily and representational loss. The photograph’s caption describes a grassland in Inner Mongolia—yet there is no grass in sight, only dark sand erupting with waxy rubber gloves. If there is any human presence, it arises through the absence of any physical bodies—a duality that reflects the humanity that is lost as we consider the gloves as representations of sanitized, medicalized versions of ourselves. The gloves are both relics of human industry as well as sobering reminders that even some of the most remote corners of the world are touched by our waste, that we shape our landscape as much by what we do as by the unintended consequences of our actions. As we demand more and more of our planet, these gloves prompt us to meditate upon what we have sacrificed for the sake of advancing innovation.

They represent the bodies being erased as a result of environmental devastation, and, more importantly, they expose the ethics inscribing our perpetuation of the catastrophic consequences of that destruction. Perhaps our legacies will consist of nothing more than a sea of tattered and stained latex, leading us to question our belonging in this world that is better off without us. This New York Times article ultimately asserts Lu’s role as the source of the unflinching lens with which we desperately need to view the world. The absence of humans in this image mirrors the absence of Lu from his photographs, for he is felt most palpably through the critical gaze he employs as the presence behind the camera. In a tragic stroke of irony, Lu’s disappearance grants him visibility, and it is the added knowledge of the man behind the photographs that lends these images their somber gravity.

Rife with hauntings and shadows, the hidden scars and vastness of Lu’s images suggest that we have fallen from Eden and landed in a strange landscape where history lives in the present and human beings are half-buried beneath the refuse of their creation. Diving deep into the scarcely healed wounds of these photographs, we encounter a world that is unfamiliar because of what we have left behind. The photographs leave us with questions that force us to grapple with just how much—or how little—we know of these people and their landscapes. We are never quite sure where to orient ourselves because we are never fully submerged within the photographs, and so we look on, adrift and unmoored in a prophecy of our own making. Perhaps we must not think of ourselves as the victims but as the colonizers of this earth, eternally doomed to seek claim to a place that was never ours for the taking. No god or divine being is responsible for the ruin of the land. In the end, perhaps we are the cause of our own expulsion. //

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Silence in the Fall

Figure 6. Lu Guang. “Industrial waste and garbage that was dumped on Inner Mongolia grassland in 2012.” New York Times, 8 Dec. 2018.

Works Cited Pledge, Robert Y. “A Photographer Disappears.” The New York Times, 9 Dec. 2018, p. 6, www. nytimes.com/2018/12/08/opinion/sunday/lu-guang-photographer-missing-china.html.

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Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971.

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On Rockstars and Fragility with Leanne Grabel with JH Wagner and Emily Elott “Could you tell which face was your own / if you touched ten faces in the dark” writes Margaret Ross in her collection, A Timeshare. Over the past year in quarantine, human persons have spent countless hours staring at themselves, on screens, in mirrors, on mute laptop cases. But, what if we could not recognize ourselves, our own fragile senses of self diminished to the point where our inner lives did not correspond, in any meaningful way, to the physical world?

This slippery mode of existence is the point of departure for Portland poet Leanne Grabel (B.A. ’65), a poet, artist, educator, and graduate of Stanford University. In her multi-genre works, Grabel interweaves the mundane and traumatic tenor of her daily experiences into works of art. While listening to her work online, we could not help but identify a bombastic honesty at the heart of her most serious (and most jovial) work. The mixture of non-recognition, humor, and the deadly serious undergird Grabel’s unique sense of joy. In 2020, Grabel won the Bread & Roses prize for her contributions to women’s literature in the Pacific Northwest and contributed monthly illustrations to Another Chicago Magazine. At present, she’s hard at work on a one-woman show and spending time with her newest grandson Elliot—the spitting image of her father, which she assures us “will be very therapeutic for those father issues.”

While her work addresses its readers directly, unpretentiously, and firmly, its disclosure does not sacrifice real questions and actual depth. Last June, caesura editors called Grabel to talk about her life after college, the makings of poetic violence, and everything else that was in the air.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

JH Wagner (JHW): Tell us about yourself. How did you end up from going to Stanford University on a math scholarship to becoming a Pacific Northwest poetess?

Leanne Grabel (LG): I’m from Stockton, California and I was good at math in my high school in 1969. In that time, that was enough to stand out—I had a 4.0 GPA and stuff but the math skills are what got me into Stanford with a full scholarship. A scholarship, thankfully, which was not dependent on my major because the first day of school, I walked into a math class that was supposedly at my level (I might have been the only girl in the room) and I didn’t understand anything of what the professor was talking about. And that was the last day I went to a math class. I ended up majoring in many things, until my junior year had a professor, William Chace,

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Leanne Grabel

who really excited me. Stanford was disappointing to me. I thought it was going to be more interesting. I don’t know what I thought.

And then his TA really liked my writing and said maybe I should pursue that. And I never really thought of that, I was majoring in human biology at the time. And that’s it. But then, I had a completely false start. I thought that I was going to graduate and start sending out stories and they would immediately get published and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So of course, that didn’t happen.

I stayed in the Palo Alto area for one year after graduating, and then I moved up to Portland, almost on a whim. I went to an open mic with my freshman roommate from Stanford, and I fell in love with the whole thing. And I said, I’m doing this and I moved up here in two weeks. With a bad boyfriend, I might have even met the boyfriend in the two weeks before I did it. It was just someone from Stockton. You know, let’s go! Come with me. And he’s like, sure.

Emily Elott (EE): How did you end up starting the café?

LG: I moved up here in 1975. I got a poem published in this Portland anthology right away and I started going to the readings. I was more into performance back then, and thought readings were pretty boring.

And they are pretty boring.

I wanted to mix things up and began working with a percussionist and a saxophonist or dancers, people I knew who were entertainers. Five years later, I wasn’t making any money and I wasn’t a famous writer. I got practical and studied for a teaching degree at PSU. It took a year of evening classes, but I hated it. And we saw this bakery that was going to be for lease at a sweet corner spot on Hawthorne. It was like $200 a month rent, and it was all set up to be a restaurant and we thought it would be perfect. It did three meals a day, and we did readings. It was a decade, but it prompted me after three years to go back to school again and rejuvenate the teaching credential. I couldn’t stand waiting on particular poets. I couldn’t do it.

One interesting disaster was for a while next door to our café became this Blues Club run by these bikers. And they would have like these metal bands, and people would be reading poetry and our place in everything would be shaking, and you couldn’t hear anything. I remember I was just like, oh my god, they just ruined us. This is ruining us. But then they died after two years or something. Those were the days. I’m glad we’re not doing it anymore.

JHW: Your café embodied the sister arts of music and poetry—how do you see the relationship between the two forms?

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On Rockstars and Fragility

LG: I would say my work rests in between. When I do my poetry, I do it with a keyboard, usually with a beat. I want to be entertaining. I want my communication to be instant. Clear.

There was a moment at Stanford in a philosophy class my sophomore year. I wrote a paper that was bullshit. Total bullshit. And I knew it was bullshit. I wasn’t saying anything at all, but was using all the terminology from the course—all the right phrases. And my professor loved it.

And I had this crisis of faith of ‘Oh my god, THIS is all bullshit.’ And that turned me away from academia that minute, truthfully.

For me, I’m not sure. I don’t want to work hard to understand something that doesn’t interest me. I’m more active. I’m not a book-y person at all. So, to sit there and analyze references and poems before I can understand the poem bugs me. And I also know that being a performer lowers my status as a poet—I can be seen as just a performer. But then when academic poets happen to see me in a reading, I know they love it. I don’t think I’ve sacrificed lyrics for the music.

“Pleasure is not obligatory, pleasure is something we seek ... If a book is tedious to you, leave it, even if that book is Paradise Lost.” —Jorge Luis Borges EE: Who have been your poetic inspirations?

LG: I think the first person that inspired me was Nikki Giovanni. Someone gave me a book of her work a long time ago, and I just loved it; it was so rhythmic. I just loved that it was so rhythmic and clear. Now, I love her as a spirit of the world. Once I got into it, I really liked Eastern European writing. I loved Charles Simic a lot. I love sort of that dark humor, jabbing mix of comedy, and tragedies. I loved Bukowski, of course, for many years, and I never haven’t read him for 10 years, but I remember there was a period of my life when that was the only poetry that made me feel better when I felt like shit. When you come up to Oregon, you have to like William Stafford. That took me 10 years, but then I started to really like him too. Who else do I like? Women? I did illustrated books about Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and Dorothy Parker.

In this one period of my life, I did this big study on tragic, self destructive women poets, those three I call them the big three. And I did performance pieces about them and a little booklet about all this stuff, Anne Sexton was a Sexpot.

I’m recovering Aretha Franklin or something. I feel like I’m still trying to get famous in some kind of weird rockstar way. It’s kind of absurd. But trying to keep changing the illustrated work, a lot of it’s getting published, which is exciting.

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Leanne Grabel

JHW: What are some poems that you keep on returning to, that reward your efforts?

LG: For a year, I sent out a poem every Saturday to my entire email list. I’m not really attached to doing that much anymore. When I was teaching teenagers, I used to return to those personification poems by Stafford and this and that. I’m trying to force myself to have a little bit of positivity in my writing, which is a whole new tone for me. I would consider myself a dark comic poet, but I’m considering changing to be more inspirational or positive or something.

EE: I’m interested in how you spent your time as an educator and how you see teaching feeding into your own poetry. How has being an educator has impacted your sense of yourself as a poet?

LG: The biggest chunk and most impactful experience of my teaching was for Portland public schools and a lockdown treatment center for teenage girls. I was taking notes all the time, it changed everything about everything. It changed me quite a bit. And I did it for 11 years.

I felt like poetry was the way to get to them. Poetry was how they won me over, because the first day I ever walked into a classroom, they were reading these poems in front of the class.

These beautiful girls who had damaged messed up lives. But, over the years, I got an uptight principal, he thought that my students were revealing too much about themselves that might trigger somebody, and that I needed to stop reading Sylvia Plath because she glorifyies suicide and so on. It became this ugly thing, so, in a way, poetry also moved me out of teaching. It was weird because that is the way to get these kids that have been abused their whole lives and stuck in a cage or whatever, to get them to express themselves. Oh my God, that’s major.

EE: I want to ask you about the connection between writing and violence, especially because a lot of your work revolves around your own traumatic memories and experiences. Is there something violent about recreating these experiences in language?

LG: Every time I write about shit that happened to me and turn it into art, it diffuses it over and over again until all it is is art. That’s been my theory from the minute I was five years old. And maybe that’s how poets are: no boundaries, no secrets. When I was at Stanford, I got raped in Mexico on spring break. And so I immediately started talking about it. And I think people were horrified that it was so easy for me to talk about it. But then I wrote about all this stuff; it’s more like an autonomic response for me when something happens. I think you’re supposed to get it out of you. I just love that theory, that it makes it a step away from you. It no longer is on you.

When I write about it, it’s off me.

When I started writing the memoir about my rape, about 15 years ago, I would have these moments where sobs would come out, but I wouldn’t be feeling it. It was weird—it was all physical. It doesn’t scare me. I think people should be honest.

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Grabel and others performing at her poetry cafe, Cafe Lena, in the 1990s.

EE: I’m sorry to hear that that happened to you. What do you think about our ability to create something beautiful out of pain?

LG: I think it is beautiful in just that it’s honest, and beautiful just in that I tried to be a good writer. When I was reading from the book at various places, women always came up and said, “Oh, thank you, thank you, that gives me so much courage.” And, that reminds me of this quote, that I’ve never forgotten from Robert Stone: “writers make the world less lonely.” I love that, and I just love the idea of if people would just tell the truth, their truth, all the time and not hide it, then everybody would relax a little bit more [laughs]. I just get so bothered by people pretending when it’s so obvious when people are pretending [more laughing].

EE: So you talked about using metaphor as a way of channeling. It sounds like the restrictions of the principal forced the girls to write about their experiences in a more abstract way. I remember you using the example of scissors. What led to your realization that metaphor was this central thing? Because I think I agree with you: metaphor is a central piece of poetry and language.

LG: I remember showing up for the first day with a photographer, just to start this big project with those girls, and hearing Oh, no, they can’t show anything real. It almost came out of nowhere. And then I went home that night and started reading about metaphor and all these great theories about metaphor and how it really exercises your brain and how it really widens your audience if you can turn experience into an object, like a stapler or whatever.

And it’s hard. It was hard for them. They’re students, they were all high school aged. It’s hard for me to do it. I tried to do it with them, of course, and it’s hard to describe your entire essence in

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Leanne Grabel

metaphor. But, it was so exciting to have a photographer set up a little in-classroom studio and to be able to swing. It was cool—to photograph a stapler against black velvet or anything. That was an excellent project. It came to me out of nowhere, and there’s millions of great metaphors for poetry. I just love making people try to come up with just the best metaphors that have never been thought of before.

JHW: How can you want to be an optimist today? It seems politically irresponsible.

LG: Truthfully, since Donald Trump became president, I’ve been paralyzed in a certain way.

Some percentage of my being goes to outrage every single day, and I can’t get rid of it. And I wrote an outrage piece and, now, I’m illustrating for Another Chicago Magazine. I’ve detached a little bit, which I never thought would happen after three and a half years. But I do think it’s a poet’s duty to speak out. When 9/11 happened, I felt it was my duty to write something the next day about it. But I’m not like that anymore. I hope that something’s going to happen right now. I can’t believe America, but whatever. I do think the poet’s supposed to speak out, though.

EE: Do you think that the best form of the poet speaking out is in poetry?

I think you’re supposed to get it out of you. I just love that theory, that it makes it a step away from you. It no longer is on you. When I write about it, it’s off me.

LG: I hope it’s the best way because what else is there? I don’t know. For a poet. That’s like Lou Welch’s great line. I’m a poet. I’m not a plumber. A plumber’s not going to write my poetry. I ruined it, but it’s great. I have to hope that it matters. That’s the best thing I do.

EE: Virginia Woolf has this line, the world does not ask for poetry. I feel like in your experience as a writer, as you’ve described it, it’s been kind of a struggle to get the world to notice you.

What has kept you going despite not necessarily getting the recognition you wanted?

LG: It’s fun. And I do think that I’m sneaking poetry in when I do a performance to people that would never normally touch poetry. People just have such a horrible opinion about poetry, not everybody, of course. I don’t know why, but I just like it. I just like it and I’m motivated. That’s why I got into Stanford. And I’m joking but I’m not joking. I did this reading with this woman recently and I found out she went to Stanford, and I was like, she’ll be dependable. I just keep going because I love it. I’ve thought about what am I trying to say here? What I’m trying to say is just be honest. I want honesty—I want people to be honest. So it could be about anything, it doesn’t matter what it’s about, just be honest about it. Especially now, when lying is the new

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On Rockstars and Fragility

culture.

EE: What do you make of this kind of ... we call it virtue signaling where you would post something you didn’t necessarily believe in, because it was the mainstream thing to do? What do you think about being honest, when the opinion you have does not necessarily cohere with the mainstream view?

LG: It’s not easy, but I wanted to put something on Facebook, which I’m thinking now I’m just stopping.

I’ve been crying for years, and I do this regular thing every Saturday, blah, blah, blah. But I remember back about two months ago, I wanted to put something on, “Well, Biden will be okay if he has a strong A photograph of Grabel. posse of brilliant women around him.” And that’s all I wanted to put. But I knew that everybody was going to jump on my ass for saying anything positive about Biden, and I was afraid to put it on there. And I went through this whole thing. I said, Jesus. I did put it on there. I’ll just be quiet, if I’m chicken, but I’m not that chicken anymore. But I don’t go along, although I did the first week of Stanford, I’ll never forget the first week of Stanford, in Florence Moore and it was all girls, all ages. And we sat in a circle and everybody’s supposed to say their name and what they were into. And everybody was going, my name’s CC, and I’m a general rah rah. And I said I was a general robber. I didn’t even know what it was? And it was ridiculous. That moment to me, was ridiculous. But, I didn’t really find my people at Stanford. I should have been in the English Department, but I didn’t get it until junior year.

JHW: You’re saying earlier that you’re inspired by world historical events to write poetry. How do you make poetic choices? What goes into either what to write about, how you come across a metaphor, what form my poem will take, things like that?

LG: I end up writing about myself, it’s horrible. Everything I write is confessional, unless I’m in a class, which I never take, but I have occasionally. I’m just highly about writing about myself and my life. That’s the revealing thing. I have this desire to just keep revealing everything as if. I mean, I always have jokes in it. So I’m hoping that it will entertain as well.

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Leanne Grabel

I think I’m stuck in a rhythm in my head almost, although I’m in a group now and we’re critiquing, and I’m kind of losing the rhythm, but it’s just something that I’m not regular. I wish I were regular. I wish I was like staff and got up every day at 4am and wrote a poem, but I’m not doing that. But I do force myself to do something. So it’s just a moment, something that stands out, a thought that I like, I’ll write it down, and hopefully go back to it within a week and turn it into something. But lately, I’m just into short—as I say, “flash” everything. I’m in a short everything. I’m in a short entertainment. I think everything’s too long. How’s the pandemic been treating you? What have you guys been doing?

JHW: Is there sort of a thing you do when you want to think about writing a poem? Do you go for walks? Is there a spot in your house that you always return to?

LG: I wake up in the middle of the night a lot. And that’s kind of my favorite time, like three in the morning. A lot of times, I’ll just stay in my office, I have a bed in there, or downstairs on the couch. That’s usually when things happen for me. The days start at five in the morning. But now, the husband doesn’t get up till eight. So that’s a lot of time, that’s five hours right there. Now I have this puppy who follows me everywhere and wants to go outside. It’s usually me and then I don’t know why I’ve never written about other people or animals or nature. I’m very internal.

I’m just more interested in that. But I do as I say, I do try to be funny. I’m related to Jack Benny.

And I think I inherited it because it was kind of like this dry, quiet, very few words to his humor but it kind of worked. Physical gesture.

So, poetry. I don’t even know how it happened. It was that moment in that open mic, the Earth Tavern on Northwest 21st. It’s now Muu-Muus, right near Cinema 21. There was an open mic on a Tuesday night, they’re always on Tuesday nights. And I just loved it. And our emcee was revealing, he was dancing around the stage, reading great words. And I just loved it, click, I want to do that. And that was it. And I have never detached from the poetry scene, but when it became the slams, it bugged me. And that was right when we phased out the café when the slams started happening. I didn’t really didn’t like slam poetry too much.

JHW: I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the Portland poetry scene and how you see yourself in relation to other poets in the city.

LG: There’s groups. But it’s kind of interesting. There’s the academic poets, there’s the open mic poets, and then there’s the new young, more performance-y poets. And everybody should be together right now, I feel like in the Portland poetry scene, it’s like the old posts, and the young poets, and then never the twain shall meet. And that’s dumb. I just think that’s so dumb. It’s always been the same. The poetry scene, there’s always open mics, there’s always the groups, and there’s never any melding. And for a second, like, when we had the café, there was some national attention on poetry and people came into the café and took pictures and stuff, but

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On Rockstars and Fragility

it never really, poetry’s I just don’t think poetry is ever going to be anything but this sort of esoteric thing for a small group of people, actually. That’s why it’s so dumb for me to think I’m going to get famous. No, no, I don’t want to get famous. But I would like to get paid, like I’ve had a million things published. And you so rarely, as a poet get paid—that’s kind of the absurd thing, I think. But I guess that’s it. I mean, do you expect to have money for poetry?

EE: I don’t think it’s a particularly marketable form, no [laughing].

LG: That’s an interesting struggle, too, because as an American, where we don’t really value our art that much, especially not poetry, it’s hard to maintain confidence or belief in your art form—I’m talking for myself—all these years when money is what America values and poetry doesn’t bring in any money. So it’s hard to feel like you’re doing anything valuable sometimes, when you’re in a bad mood. So that’s been a constant struggle, because, I mean, I think I’m pretty prolific and doing a lot of stuff. But then you look at what you make each year, and then it doesn’t matter. So that’s kind of a struggle, I think poets. Well, some poets go through. Some poets don’t expect anything.

I kind of do expect more, because of all the time and energy I put into things. But I sort of feel it coming, and things have started to fall into my lap. So, that’s fine. I like a slow life. //

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Gladys Sharon Du

E

VERY FEW MONTHS, THE WEATHER WOULD BE PERFECT ENOUGH AND I WOULD

be drunk enough to dial her number from a public phone box, just to hear her voice saying her name. And after the beep, I would breathe into the silence. I would repeat this—dial, beep, breathe, click—until her voicemail announced it was full. It is only after this happens that I would feel certain she is gone.

It has been two years since Gladys blocked me on every piece of social media she owned, one year since our English teacher was arrested for statutory rape with another one of his students, and too many years since Gladys said, but did not say, to me—I am having sex with our English teacher. For the friends that Gladys and I still have in common, they say that she has never said my name after we parted. I was her best friend from high school, or, that girl I used to hang out with.

In the only photo I have seen since, her hair, once shaved to the skull, has grown long again, and she has a new tattoo, a Japanese crane on her left forearm. I don’t know what Japanese cranes mean to her, but in the photos that they have shown me, she is smiling.

// In the beginning, I loved her, and I suppose I still do, despite it all: Gladys with the freehand hair and the percussive cough, wiping something from her lips, rubbing her

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fingers onto her skirt, fingers that tasted like sand. Gladys, who walked to and from class alone, alternating her violin case from right to left to right, rhyming bruises on her legs that made my stomach churn. Gladys held a faintly crucified expression in her palms whenever our English teacher called on her, her eyes like sliced wildfires.

The first time, I can still remember. Once our schoolgirl carcasses—the green skirts we shortened with the same needle, the grey blouses with the jaundiced underarms, a question mark of laddered tights—were on the floor, I noticed the angry red stretch marks all over her thighs. It’s just how I grew up, Gladys said when I asked, and I almost believed her. Post-orgasm, her hands laid carefully at her sides, her fingertips softly puckered from where they had been inside of me. I waited a few inches away, my skin fizzing with pinprick prayers, terrified of her knifelike nudity and her impossible eyes. She was still looking elsewhere, like she had when she came—with a hard stare. Her hips flinching upward, as if she wanted to hurt me.

Just so you know, I don’t think we should do this again. She paused, considering. This was a mistake. It was good. But like, you know. She turned from me, not as if I disgusted her, but as if I wasn’t there.

// Her bedspread was pus yellow. Her bookshelf was filled with dust, plastic trophies from tuition centers, and SAT practice tests. A SAT practice test in a[n Australian] girl’s bookshelf is always an escape plan, she joked once, when I first pointed them out. There were windchimes her mother had hooked to the curtain rods, but I never learned what they sounded like because we never opened the windows. Her father was a real estate agent, and he was always trying to sell an apartment with no kitchen, trying to sell a house with no garden. Listening to her father beg in Vietnamese, we always sat there on the same bed, doing the same chemistry homework.

We sat above the bottles of alcohol Gladys kept under the bed, bottles that she had wrapped in chunky hiking socks, even though her parents never bothered to search her room.

She never threw those bottles out, and I never counted them. Instead, she would rewrap their carcasses in the same socks she had hidden them in, and so every afternoon I would go through each sock-covered bottle, shaking for one that was full, or at least not empty. By shaking them, I knew that Gladys drank a lot when she was alone. Still, I never said anything, I simply brought another bottle to her mouth when she asked. I rolled over like a dog when she touched me. When I think of what happened between us, I find myself living in the space at the bottom of an exhale, that dark and wordless hitch.

After we had sex for the first time, we did our chemistry homework. I remember that after a few minutes, she asked me a question about anabolism, and I answered it for her.

// It should have been easier than it was. We both had immigrant parents that gave us elderly white people names, names adorned with backyard pools and retirements which would never be ours. Melbourne was a place too quiet for audible divorce, replete with mothers who

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accused us of ruining their birthdays and fathers who never learned how to hug. Our lives bore the same creases before we ever laid on the same sheets—the same peeling doors and glow-inthe-dark stars, the same store-bought pasta and dead baby magpies. When Gladys felt anxious, she would slip her arm through mine, her fingers lighting and relighting on my arm like summer insects. At lunch, she ate beef pies with a plastic knife, hunched over legs that became streamers of wild gold. She stole reflexively—pots of La Mer face cream from private house parties, and once, an iridescent fishbowl that held a single Siamese fighting fish. It’s not good for the fish to be in a bowl. I read about it online. It gives them vertigo. It wasn’t vertigo. Three weeks later when I visited her, she had let the fish die in the bowl, because she couldn’t be bothered to buy the fish food.

As with people you haven’t seen for years and will never see again, my memory of her smudges like oil pastels when I try to lay a finger on her. What did she sound like? What did she look like? I can only sketch the corners—her ears cup handles, her hands lie flat-top mesas, her hair an afterthought. Sometimes, I still meet girls with the same lip curve, and they slam me back to the past with a smile. From the inside of an hourglass, Gladys is fourteen in a Methodist skirt, seventeen in a rented gown, and nineteen with pierced nipples. In the years before we touched each other, we had a routine. In winter, we would wait for the slow paralysis of rain in ramen shops with plastic menus; in summer, we’d lie on playground equipment until our bodies blushed and dented from the iron. We would walk home together along the street laced with rotten grapefruit, their dark juices sizzling on the concrete.

// In later years, she grew bored of her undressing, although I never did. Gladys became interested in compassion, meditation, and vegetarians who looked as though they could play the guitar but definitely couldn’t. They were always older, with spaniel-colored hair and names like Julia and Theodore, and I would dutifully befriend each of them for the month they lasted, in comfortable knowledge that they were never interested in her. In response to this disinterest, Gladys started reading reviews—Pitchfork and Stereogum and Sounds Good the Music Blog— because she was terrified of being wrong, even though no one knew what being wrong meant at the time. Her favorite director was David Lynch, and then it became Chen Kaige. Her favorite shirt was the color of a peach peel, and she lost this shirt at Brighton Beach, where we searched for hours under a lunchtime sky. She was furious with me when we didn’t find it. She walked back to the train station alone, in her yellow bikini top and her soaked blue jeans.

Knowing all this was a responsibility. Knowing her favorite director was a responsibility. Her cup-handle ears and peach-peel shirt and her dead baby magpies were a responsibility. Because how could I not know what was happening to her?

She never said anything. I keep groping through my memories for clues, squeezing the body for the tumor that will eventually kill us. Gladys says, I don’t get why people won’t buy that house [my father is selling]. Why would you buy a garden anyway? A garden is just a lot of dirt, and a lot of things that are gonna be dirt very quickly. Gladys says, Fuck off, I’m trying to do work, your

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hands smell like cabbage. Gladys says, After we graduate, we should take a year off. Let’s go hiking near Lake Barracoota; let’s go to the Great Barrier Reef before it dies.

// We never went hiking in Lake Barracoota, and we never went to the Great Barrier Reef after graduation. Last year, the National Geographic declared Half of the Great Barrier Reef is Dead.

// Over the years, our desire had made us furious with each other. We would argue about movies or masturbation until we had to take the last train home, and throw ourselves into seats next to each other, watching drunk businessmen on the opposite side of the carriage undo their ties, shoelaces, and shirts. She would make a pointed effort to ignore me at school for the next day, waiting for the minutes to chew through my pride. After that, I started giving her books and makeup, hoping she would love what I couldn’t. In response, she started stealing perfume testers from department stores, half-empty bottles of Guerlain Mitsouko and Jean Patou Joy, museum scents that made her neck taste like shit.

A few months later, Gladys began telling me things mid-step—in the doorway, leaning out of the car, one foot already pushing down on the bike pedal—as if she couldn’t bear to say anything to me unless she could leave right afterward. I copied your answer to question eight, so you might get suspended for plagiarism. I took $20 from your wallet; I’ll pay you back on Tuesday. I’m sorry I got Eliza’s phone number, I know you hate her—look: I’m not going to text her back. It was mid-step from the train carriage to the saffron lights of the station that she confessed to me, I’m in love with our English teacher. Our English teacher was a heavyset man with rosacea who had taken interest in my writing until he didn’t. She was in love, but she wasn’t happy. She was in love, so she wanted me to stay away.

Still, sometimes I would catch her mid-step. Still, sometimes she would turn back. Gladys became the first person I learned the heartbeat of, and her pain was as heavy as stars. She would do things that made me want to treat her better. She would cover her face with my hair when she slept because it made her feel safe. She would sob into my chest until I couldn’t hear words, only watercolors. But eventually, we’d just end up in bed, doing whatever was on the radio right then. It was during these months that she began making me the playlists that I didn’t listen to until long after the last time I saw her—in a Fitzroy nightclub, in pink laughter that would have splintered had she seen my face.

Just before graduation, I had found condoms in her bag, ripped packets that stunk of Joy. When she didn’t reply to my accusations, for days I couldn’t see a word without hearing how she would pronounce it. It seems a long time ago now, but once, when I questioned an inexplicable purple mark on her thigh, Gladys closed her eyes in hot tears and said, You know, it was going to be you, unless it was me. Gladys says, No, there’s nothing wrong. Gladys says, I can’t seem to make anyone happy, no matter what I do. Gladys says, I’m sorry I’m like this all the

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time. You should hate me. Gladys says, Let’s drop out of school and go hiking near Lake Barracoota.

No one says this to me. Not for another two years.

// Nothing seemed to matter anymore. It had been three weeks since graduation, and it had been three weeks since Gladys stopped replying to me. I had spent those weeks waking up in cold spiders of panic, in a sweat that smelled like hot metal. My friends who had seen her wanted to tell me that she was enrolled to study fashion, that she had shaved her head, that she let people at parties touch her head. But I didn’t really want to know. I wasn’t interested in the fragments, only that the glass had broken.

In the months that followed, I was waiting for trains in the night so I could cry in front of a kaleidoscope of strangers, betting with myself which ones would look away and which ones would stare. I was falling asleep in the backseat of my car in a parking lot, my boots squeaking against the window. There was the week I went without brushing my hair. There was the unconcerned concern of a woman holding plastic bags of grocery store box dye: “Honey, are you okay? Do you want me to call someone?” I was telling people I hadn’t spoken to in months that I was never speaking to them again, blocking their numbers in buses, trains, Ubers, and taxis. I was working department store hours that felt like surgery, waiting for the perfume testers to go missing even though they never did. I was waking up from alcohol poisoning in hospital, convinced I was going to die in a cold room with hot lights.

I was watching people mix new cement for old roads. I was watching the rain for five hours. I was watching my phone ring. It was my mother calling, but I couldn’t go home to a pillow that still smelled of Gladys’s scalp. It was my father calling: He hadn’t seen me in a month, and had made dinner—would I eat it? I was in an alleyway eating microwaved mincemeat with a plastic fork. I was at a college interview with a woman who had terrible dandruff, who said, “You know, someone someday is going to be so in love with you.” I was staring at myself in a public bathroom, in one of those scarred metal mirrors no one can destroy, watching myself get fucked from

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behind by a man whose name I had already forgotten. I was realizing weeks later that he had rosacea, just like our high school English teacher.

I was pausing outside because I saw a girl with frizzy hair and a green corduroy jacket. In front of the bar we used to go to, where hands would test our bodies like we were fruit at the supermarket. Behind the alleyway where we used to smoke, next to the weatherboard church with the neon sign. By the ice-cream shop with the greenhouse windows, where our ankles would touch at the basslines. In the park where we saw an old woman tanning in the nude, where you laughed at her sunset skin. I was pausing because I saw a girl with frizzy hair and a green corduroy jacket. But then I would remember that Gladys had shaved her head, and some hairdresser had swept all of her hair into the garbage, without knowing or caring for the hours my fingers had been in it, braided it, combed it, pushed it behind her ears.

// In all the years since then, I never learned exactly what happened between Gladys and our English teacher. To tell you the truth, a part of me does not want to know. There is a part of me that wants to keep us on her pus-yellow bedspread forever, next to the bookshelf with the SAT practice tests, under the windchimes that never sounded, her father’s Vietnamese still pleading in the background.

But from the friends we have kept in common, I know that Gladys and our English teacher were in a sexual relationship. I know that it was as “consensual” as it could be, for a sixteenyear-old high school student with failing grades and her forty-seven-year-old teacher. I know that it began during our junior year of high school, and that it lasted until a few months after graduation. I know that his wife divorced him when she found out about Gladys, although she did not report it to the school or the police. I know that despite all those years with him, Gladys said she wasn’t in love, but she wasn’t not in love either.

That is all I know.

// Since then, I have traded my high school years for a pristine college in the United States, replete with quick, water-saving showers and a dessicated lake. There, I go to lectures five minutes early so I can sit at the front and I enjoy the cashmere of Californian sunshine on my skin, during the seasons that we have it. My life retains the trappings of normalcy. Every weekend, an Uber takes me past the rising ribs of new homes in my college town. I go to sunny Palo Alto to see a beautiful therapist who wears coral-colored nail polish and patent leather shoes. The therapist likes to tell me I hear you, over and over again. She keeps fresh flowers on her desk that smell like nothing, and a photo of her hypoallergenic Labradoodles framed in silver, and she emails me every time there is a suicide on campus. She says that she is thinking of me, but I’ve never really felt her care.

In response, I have diligently gone to friends’ birthday parties, where I make conversation

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about summer internships, and after the conversation about summer internships, I make conversation about how we should live life more holistically, and not put so much pressure on ourselves. On Friday nights, I study the coup-proofing methods of autocratic governments while my roommate throws up into a plastic bag. She was so sorry—she didn’t think she had drunk as much alcohol as she had. I tell her it happens to everyone, and I hand her a recyclable paper towel from the bathroom, so she can wipe her mouth. After she falls asleep, I tie a knot on the top of the bag, and I throw the bag out into the trash. I have to walk down three flights of stairs to do this.

I never see Gladys again. Two days before I leave Melbourne for the United States, however, I see her father on the train. He is sleeping on the way home from work, his arms folded across his chest. He is wearing a brown coat, and the edges of his sleeves were a light cream, from where the fabric had worn through. On his lap, he has a grocery bag stacked full of takeaway containers. Through the plastic steam and the condensation, I can see duck swimming in hoisin sauce, stir-fried bok choy, a single prawn framed by a mosaic of brown fried rice. When the train arrives at Box Hill Station, the woman sitting next to him gently shakes him awake. The woman has pink lipstick on her chin, and is not Gladys’s mother. As she shakes him, her fingers disappear into the fabric of his coat, into the deep folds that form where his arm met his shoulder. He wakes with a start, and as he stands up, the grocery bag falls to the ground.

After checking the bag and the cartons for any leaks, he leaves through the sliding doors. As he walks away, I realize that I have just seen what Gladys will be eating for dinner. As the train doors close behind him, I notice that I have been holding my breath around him, just like I used to do when I was with her. //

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Edward Hopper, Automat, 1927.

54

The Best Writer of Wicker Park Khuyen Le

I

ALWAYS HAD TO WALK PAST THE BANK OF AMERICA ON NORTH MILWAUKEE AVENUE ON

my way to the bar. Since September, the wall facing the intersection with West North had been covered by a construction fence, and I remembered waiting with increasing concern about the eventual reveal. And just as I expected, following the trend of urban trompe l’oeil that had taken Chicago by storm, the unveiling of the new public artwork revealed a twenty-foot waterfall. The Bank of America also graciously painted the sidewalk with a river, complete with frothy, white bubbles, outcropping rocks, and carefully shaded boulders, providing a distraction for the long line of tourists waiting to take photos of themselves below the stationary, cascading stream. They would pose with their hands outstretched, pretending to catch the droplets bouncing off the cliffs, glittering and darkening in all the right places to emphasize the unnatural roundedness of painted water. Never mind the fact that the flat shadow on their faces betrayed the gloomy sunless November afternoon in Chicago.

Ever since a popular magazine rated Wicker Park as the most hipster spot in America and tourists started flocking to the neighborhood, Wicker Park had been shuffling through these artistic trends, becoming more and more anti-authority in the most stereotypical way possible.

The neighborhood forced itself into a skin too tight for its own identity—somehow the murals became neater, the music less organic, the parties more controlled. One could now hardly walk down North Milwaukee, which used to present a typical red-brick Midwest front to the rest of the city, without encountering artsy-but-orderly neon signs that advertised stand-up acts, improvisational theater, interactive multimedia art pieces at every step. You name it, Wicker Park had it—a Bed Bath and Beyond of art works. Thank God for literature and philosophy— those things had always been more difficult to sell. Maybe we heard so much about starving artists because they could afford to do so—the philosophers were always privileged because they could not. The bookstores remained small and dinky; you still paid the street poets voluntarily, even though five dollars was apparently the average and expected price for a poem made to order on a typewriter. That was how I could pretend that Wicker Park had not succumbed to capitalism.

The more one descended into the center of Wicker Park, the easier it was to maintain this pretension. So I walked past the flashy neon signs, the obnoxious swirling forms in the name of abstract art, the unpleasant experimental shapeless sculptures; I counted the number of intersections under my breath until I could reach the Infallible Wicker Park, a dive bar that used to be the meeting point for Chicago activists when I was in college. Back then, it was an honor to be invited to the group, which met every Monday evening. I could still recall the scenery: I would get a beer from the bar—it was the cheapest alcoholic beverage—and descend the stairs to the basement. I would step on the bare wood floor and inhale the musky scent of the room, look around at the printouts of political op-eds and calls-to-action and critical theory excerpts that plastered the walls. My eyes would rest on the ugly red and green argyle carpet that rested

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permanently below one of the couches, which David, the owner of the bar, claimed was a family heirloom and refused to remove, even though the dust accumulated in its thick fibers and accounted for the majority of asthma attacks the group had. As people filed in, we would proceed to clear the floor of condoms—artifacts from the hookups that inevitably happened in the basement of the dive bar—and spray the dusty couches and armchairs with fabric freshener.

And we would sit and talk about politics and philosophy and arts and literature, and anything at the intersection of the two. For those two hours, the world revolved around us—beer in hand, a charcuterie board in the middle of the circle, misty-basement dust draping over the reclining figures on the sofas like the fog that hung over Lake Michigan on cold November days.

The group dissolved as members graduated, but I maintained my friendship with some people, even as our conversations turned away from theory and toward jobs and careers and partners. But I only really met up with Walter these days. Mostly because he was the one who put the most effort into keeping in contact with people from the group, and even to this day, would send me long texts about the significance of a rising Chicago hip hop artist or the importance of reconstructing Marxism in the American consciousness. I ignored these messages when I had to do overtime at work, and frankly sometimes they annoyed me, but when they came at the right time, like during a weekend between exhibitions, they reminded me of the person I was in college—with a thirst for intellectual discussion and analysis—and I responded to him in equally lengthy texts. Walter was also my first editor, albeit unofficially, and I must admit I had a soft spot for the guy.

As I approached the bar, I could spot Walter from thirty feet away. Whether that was because we had known each other for such a long time or because he had a penchant for wearing statement clothing, I would never know. He was wearing his oversized red trench coat and black work boots, as usual, and the locks of his shoulder-length hair fluttered in the wind.

He was twenty-six, but one could mistake him for a man in his thirties, or even forties, with the way he carried himself: shoulders and arms perpetually folded forward and inward, neck crouched, brows in a constant frown that relaxed only with a substantial amount of alcohol.

After he graduated, he became an editor for a local publishing company that grew out of an anarchist bookstore in Hyde Park, specializing mostly in local leftist literature.

“Is the bar not open?” I said, approaching Walter.

He gestured to the sign on the window sill that said, “Property for rent or sale.”

I nodded, “It’s been happening. That karaoke parlor we used to hang out at is also on sale.

Hirsch is planning to move into it.” Hirsch was the name of the arts gallery I worked at. Before he asked, I added, “I couldn’t do anything about it. The owner really wanted to—and I quote— ‘get closer to the local arts scene.’”

“It shouldn’t happen to the Infallible Wicker Park. It was a historical place for Chicagoan activists. It needs to be preserved.”

Had it been any other conversation, I would have taken issue with the liberal way with which Walter was using “historical” and “activists.” I would guess he was referring to us, the Monday-night basement crowd—and we were neither of those things, in their strictest sense.

But I sensed that Walter would not feel like arguing about minute details.

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“Let me buy you a drink,” I said instead.

“I don’t want to see David right now,” he declined.

“Walter, look around. The Infallible Wicker Park is dead.”

“It doesn’t have to be. I’m hoping we could rally together to save the bar. I can contact other people from the Monday night group. Daeun and Sarah and Alex, for example.”

“What are we going to do? Hand out flyers?” I asked.

“Maybe, if that’s effective. But I was thinking we could start an op-ed campaign in the local papers. That’s how we get people to listen.”

“Sounds good. I could write something, I think.”

Walter hesitated. “I guess. I’m so sorry, but could we catch up some other time? I need to start calling people. Come to the bar next Monday evening?”

I watched as he walked away, his coat a flutter of red in the wind. Walter had always done what he wanted, and I was used to him changing plans at the last minute. I thought I might as well take advantage of the fifty-percent-off Moscow mule being advertised next to the “on sale” sign.

“I thought I saw Walter with you,” David said as I walked in. For eight o’clock in the evening, the bar was frighteningly empty. “He was upset about you selling the bar.”

“Moscow mule?” I nodded.

As David was preparing the drink behind the counter, I looked around and asked, “Why are you working the bar tonight?”

“We’ve been turning in little profit, so I had to lay most everyone off. Have you seen The Flaming Pony?”

“The carnival-themed bar on West North? It was difficult to miss.”

“They’ve been taking all the business.”

“Their drinks aren’t that good. The entire aesthetics is also a rip-off from the Unicorn in Seattle. And ponies and carnival don’t even make sense. I understand unicorns, but—” “The tourists eat it all up though. Do you think changing my drinks’ name to ‘Stinging Dickens Elixir’ and ‘Steinbeck on the Beach’ would help?”

“Would you be okay with turning part of the bar into an arts gallery? Hirsch has been looking for a new space. Perhaps that would help with the expenses,” I said.

“I appreciate that a lot. But it’s getting harder to make ends meet, with how gentrified Wicker Park is becoming. Dive bars are getting out of fashion.”

“They’ll come back soon. It’s always been like that—people get tired of the colors and the lights and they look for something somber to stand out from the crowd. Like how Neoclassicism followed Rococo.”

“Let’s drink to that,” David said, raising his own glass from behind the bar.

// The next time I passed by Bank of America, which was the following Monday evening, when I was heading to the Infallible Wicker Park, the trompe l’oeil had obtained an interactive

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element. Over the weekend, a projection of falling water had been installed onto the wall, complete with motion sensors that parted the water according to the movements of the tourists posing underneath it. It was a special promotion for a new type of savings account the bank was introducing. The line of tourists snaked along two blocks. I thought that the street poets oft stationed at the corner of North Milwaukee and West North must be drawing in the cash—and to no surprise, there were probably ten of them, double the number I usually saw, offering up tarot cards and made-to-order typewritten poems.

I could still feel the discomfort in my stomach when I walked through the door of the Infallible Wicker Park. David was behind the counter again, and he nodded towards the basement: “Walter’s already here.”

“Did he give you a hard time?”

“We talked. He asked if I would change my mind if he raised enough money.”

“What did you say?”

David sighed. “I said I don’t know how he could do that.”

“Me neither. I’ll get a beer after the meeting, okay?”

I found Walter in the basement setting up a charcuterie board. The air smelled of fabric freshener.

“That’s nice. How many people are we expecting?” I asked, gesturing at the abundance of processed meat and cheese and fresh fruits on the plate.

“I contacted about twenty people. Hopefully ten,” said Walter. He was being uncharacteristically terse, which usually meant he was nervous but did not want to show it.

Nine o’clock, our usual meeting time, rolled around. I picked at the grapes on the charcuterie board while Walter paced the floor, stopping from time to time to read the articles that filled the four walls like some very politically minded wallpaper. At ten, when it became obvious that no one else was going to join us, Walter cleared his throat and started: “Anyway, so—I thought we could do op-eds about how important this place is to the locals and the Chicagoan activist scene. The bad thing is, I can’t write worth a dime, and I know this isn’t what you usually write, is it?”

I nodded. Hirsch’s owner, even though he would not admit it, had a specific interest in arts that Walter would call universalist. Throughout my four years at the gallery, I wrote articles and write-ups that analyzed the composition, the aesthetics, the forms of the paintings and sculptures he acquired. The last time I wrote something that specifically referred to Chicago was probably during college.

“But the good thing is, I think I’ve found our solution. A new writer came in today, and I think he could do it.”

“That’s really high praise, especially from you,” I said. Walter had never liked any of the writers he worked with. He complained all the time about the work he received at the publishing company, about how they had been lackluster at best and derivative at worse, about the college graduates trying to publish their radical theses of political philosophy, about how Chicago did not seem to want to produce an author that would be critical to the contemporary sociopolitical scene that would galvanize the public. “What’s his name?”

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“Lewis. I’ll ask him if he wants to come to our next meeting. But here, I made you a copy of his writing that he brought in. Let me know what you think.”

I took the stack of paper he handed me and said, “I know I don’t write stuff like this anymore, but I could still write something.”

Walter looked at me, his face registering the same hesitation I saw the previous Friday afternoon during our short meeting. But finally he said, “Sure, let me know if you need any editing help.”

We stayed and made small talk for a few more minutes—then Walter excused himself. He had a meeting with Lewis the next morning, and wanted to read through his manuscript again before that. I climbed up the stairs behind him, and asked David to get me a shot of vodka at the bar instead of the beer that had been on my mind.

// An excerpt from Lewis Adams’ honors thesis, titled, What is To Be Done?

In the process of theorizing and conceptualizing “revolution,” one inadvertently comes to the two problems of 1) distinguishing the concept from previous ideas, and 2) potentially objectifying the people the concept is supposed to empower. The same arguments can be applied to any other concepts—any theories and any processes of theorizing risk running into these problems as well. A theory represents an attempt to be separated from other ideas, yet due to its historicity, is unable to do so. Additionally, a theory first functions as a mirror through which the theorist sees the world, and then becomes the very subject that sees the world, “subjecting” its objects (ideas, cultures, people) to the way it has conceptualized and structured itself.

Then what is to be done against this potentially self-defeating and oppressive characteristic of theories and theorizing? The solution is not to give up on theorizing, but to realize the objectifying potential of such action. Jameson’s process of cognitive mapping would be a useful framework, as the theorist puts themselves in the historicity of their ideas, and in the process realizes their own positionality and that of their theories. The theorist should be aware of the dialectical nature of theories—perhaps just as Mignolo argues how “coloniality [is] the darker side of modernity,” we could realize the colonial/objectifying implications as the darker side of “theorizing”.

Yet the solution is still not to reduce one’s theories to the most moderate form to alleviate its oppressive effects. A more charitable way to understand Lenin would be to focus on his historical position, and read his theories as an attempt to fulfill what he believed would be best for his society.

The theorist, then, should aim to understand the objectifying power of his theories, but still function as revolutionaries within this framework by building up an understanding and confidence in their theories such that they could confidently restructure the world with their theories—all while maintaining an understanding to other ways of structuring the world. We have long passed the time where we can revert the power that theories have on society. What we could only hope to do is harness the power of theories, and use the theoretical struggles of power to push our society forward, in the direction that we, confined by our historicity and positionality, believe that we should.

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// I called Walter at two o’clock in the morning. He had insomnia, so I knew that he would still be awake.

“I’m halfway through this Lewis guy’s manuscript.”

“Really? What do you think?” Walter said, his voice muffled. He was probably snuggled under a thick blanket at his desk. That was how he liked to work, even in college.

“He has interesting ideas. But—isn’t this the kind of writing you complain about all the time?

Generalized political philosophy fluff with no real-life anchor?”

“You think so? I think he could be trained to write the kind of writing we need. He is a very strong writer, stylistically. With some guidance, he would be one to watch.”

“Maybe, but—” I thought about telling him that anybody, even me, could also be trained to write whatever kind of writing he needed. I did not know how to make it sound as if I was taking it personally, though, so I let it go.

“I’ll introduce him to you next Monday. Once he knows about Wicker Park, he would be such a big asset in our fight.”

“Sure, Walter,” I said, and hung up.

// Thankfully the interactive projection at the waterfall trompe l’oeil had been cleared out by next Monday. The artificial glittering droplets of water falling down the wall had emanated a ghostly white light, neither befitting a waterfall or the warm glow of the street lights that decorated the block. It was such an aesthetic abomination that I almost felt happy seeing the original waterfall, such that I approached one of the poets and asked for a poem, giving a random abstract noun as the topic. I didn’t remember the topic, but it might have been “change.”

David was not at the bar when I entered. Instead, his wife, Mary, was behind the counter, and his three-year-old daughter was sitting at one of the booths, working on a colorful drawing.

“We couldn’t find a babysitter today,” sighed Mary, when she saw me looking at the girl. “I’m sorry. I’ll be back—I’ll get a beer after this meeting.”

When I stepped into the basement, Walter was deep in conversation with a person I did not recognize, but whom I assumed—correctly—was Lewis. They were sitting next to each other on the couch. I appraised the unfamiliar guy’s dirty blond hair, parted neatly on his head, his tucked-in light-blue dress shirt complete with a stiff collar, the dark brown belt with golden buckles, his pair of clean white sneakers. Walter was in his usual flannel and jeans and black work boots, his trench coat on the back of the couch.

“You’re here! This is Lewis,” Walter stood up and moved toward me.

“Hi, I’m—” I started.

“Nice to finally meet you. I actually saw you speak at the exhibition at Hirsch a few weeks ago. I didn’t know you and Walter are friends,” Lewis said and reached out his hand to shake mine.

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The Best Writer of Wicker Park

“Let’s start. I want to show Lewis around the neighborhood before it gets too late,” said Walter.

As Walter went on about his plans to contact different newspapers and begin the op-ed campaign, I found myself looking at Lewis, not at Walter. I thought I understood why Walter was so insistent on him being the next big writer on the activist scene. He had this quiet but incessant energy about him, and whenever he spoke, he had a charismatic pep in his voice that drew people in, which reminded me of Walter when he was in college. Whenever somebody else was speaking, he would stare at them, his gray eyes sparkling with interest, as if drinking in every word they said. At the end of the meeting, when I read them an excerpt from a short story that I had written, Lewis closed his eyes and furrowed his brows, his long fingers laced together on his lap in a prayer-like gesture. Walter stared at him as if he were the only person in the room. It was pretty obvious. The meeting ended early. I declined Walter’s invitation to join them as they walked around the neighborhood. I knew Wicker Park like the back of my hand.

Walter acted fast. From college, he had a network of contacts in local newspapers that he did not like to use because of their adjacency to big publishing conglomerates—but these were, as one would say, desperate times. By Thursday, Lewis’s first article went up on Chicago Sun-Times, shared by countless other local newspapers’ social media, and that Sunday it was republished with an addendum that read, “If you are interested in saving the Infallible Wicker Park, please come to our meeting next Monday at 9 p.m.”

I read Lewis’s article the moment it came out, of course. It was difficult not to—Walter sent me the link the moment the day turned. It was the same analytical prose from his manuscript that moved swiftly between abstract concepts, assuming a wide knowledge from the readers— but this time peppered with case studies and examples I knew Walter must have given him, which I knew because he referenced my first published article. In my junior year of college, after the street signs in front of the Infallible Wicker Park were covered with black tape, I wrote an op-ed arguing that the tape represented an “inverted physicalization of the censorial authoritarian dictation of identity onto grassroots personal expressions.” I had since moved on from that style of writing, avoiding the onslaught of concepts on top of one another. That article was published in a small newspaper and few people remembered it, except for Walter, who edited the piece.

The examples Lewis cited attempted to anchor the piece to Chicago and Wicker Park, but at the same time, they weighed the piece down. They pronounced themselves in Walter’s characteristic drawling voice, which stood out from Lewis’s relentless pace like a boomer in a crowd of Gen Zs. The article had the overall effectiveness of a clunky robot pieced from parts that did not move together. I told Walter this over the phone.

“Really? I’ve heard otherwise from other people.”

“You care about other people’s opinions now?”

“We’re trying to rally a community here. We can’t write about aesthetics or general philosophy anymore. We need to take a stance about moving forward, not analyze what had already happened,” Walter said pointedly.

“You know the guy’s stuff is not good.”

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Khuyen Le

“I, for one, actually think it is. I think he’s going to be the best writer Wicker Park has ever seen.”

I supposed somewhere in the development of our friendship I missed the memo of us adopting completely different literary tastes.

“Just come to the meeting on Monday. You’ll see the effect he has on people.”

// Five people turned up for the first “Save the Infallible” meeting—as christened by Walter; and as Walter was explaining what the bar meant to the Chicagoan activist scene, he sideeyed me, as if saying, “I told you so.” I valued our friendship enough to return the gesture—yet soon the number of people who came dwindled. The Chicago Sun-Times stopped publishing Lewis’s articles after his third. Walter complained about lobbying from the real estate businesses that had been trying to buy up Wicker Park. Nonetheless, Walter got him a column in a local newspaper that needed writers to fill up space. So Lewis’s works appeared next to reports of local high school students being accepted to elite colleges and classified ads for garage sales.

Walter said it was in the revolutionary spirit of being close to the proletariat.

Lewis had now started writing what he called documentary pieces, in which he interviewed the locals about their relationship with the Infallible Wicker Park. They were still well-written, but there was something about them that got uncomfortably under my skin, that I could not place my finger on. Perhaps it was the fact that while I knew all of the names he was mentioning, the characters presented in front of me were uncannily similar but different from how I knew them. I knew, for instance, that Brian, the saxophonist at The Ponies on nights they didn’t have outside acts, had this habit of turning every sentence into a negation. I knew Aunt Becky, the owner of the karaoke on West Ellen, threw in a Korean word for every five English ones, even though she spoke perfect English. Lewis turned everyone into an extension of himself—animated and efficient, with occasional sobering moments that I knew were inputs from Walter.

// One Monday evening in January saw us—Walter and me—alone in the basement. Lewis was visiting his grandparents in Michigan. Upstairs, the chairs and tables creaked across the floor as David closed up. The Infallible had begun closing two hours earlier than usual. You could usually tell what bar was going out of business by their willingness to close before midnight.

“We need more,” Walter said, pacing the floor. He was furiously smoking a cigarette, a habit he picked up from Lewis. They were basically attached at the hips these days. He could barely talk to me without mentioning something Lewis had said or written. “Something that really shocks people into action. We need to save the Infallible.”

“What more could we do?” I asked. I covered my mouth and nose with a sweater sleeve, trying not to inhale the nicotine and tar-infused air. I hated people who smoke.

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The Best Writer of Wicker Park

Walter stopped pacing the floor.

“This would be out of Lewis’s comfort zone, but … I think we need something readers can really relate to. The interview pieces were good, but they were too fragmented. We need a story, tied together, packaged nicely so that the message goes through.”

“Where would we publish a story, though? Would your publisher carry it?” I asked.

“That would not reach enough people. The newspapers, of course. I’ll reach out to my friends again. It has been a while since Sun-Times published something by us.”

“I don’t recall Sun-Times having a fiction section.”

“No, we would publish it as an op-ed. Or some other relevant section, depending on what Lewis’s story would be. Could even be news.”

“That’s fraud. If not, violation of journalistic integrity, or whatever they call it,” I said.

“Not if they don’t find out.”

“I thought you believed in objective morality?”

“I thought we believed in the power of the people, and taking back the means of production?” Walter said. He had stopped between me and the only source of light in the room. The tungsten yellow surrounded his head in a halo of light but cast deep shadows in the crevices of his face, rendering him temporarily unrecognizable to me. I felt the heat on my skin despite the wind wheezing through the crack underneath the window. We usually stuffed newspapers into the crack, but we had neglected to do so for this meeting. It was supposed to be short.

“Not in the way you do, I guess,” I said. My mouth suddenly felt dry and I desperately wanted a beer.

“You’re right. I was too hasty,” Walter sighed. “How about this—before we publish Lewis’s piece, we write a treatise about the necessity of using arts to establish truth. All that stuff you wrote for your thesis about literature and the arts as a method of doing philosophy. Get it published and circulating in the Chicagoan literary scene, to cover our bases if we ever get found out.”

“Why don’t you do it yourself?”

“You know it would be too obvious. People know I’m Lewis’s editor.”

And potentially partner. I supposed that would be pretty discriminating against whatever Walter wrote about Lewis’s work.

“I’ll only do it if I can write the story as well,” I said.

“Why are you being so difficult?”

“I’m not going to let my theories be used to defend somebody else’s work.” Especially when I could do that work, too. “Is that so unreasonable?”

“Look, this movement needs both you and Lewis. Lewis provides the story but you provide the critical framework to appreciate it. The job of the critic is to create fresh and new ideas—” “Why couldn’t Lewis write the critical framework instead? And I could write the story about the neighborhood. I have at least done creative writing, mind you.” I said. The heat on my face was burrowing deep inside, reaching the inner corners of my eyes, inducing tears of irritation. “Frankly, I’m pretty upset that you didn’t ask me.”

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Khuyen Le

“I didn’t ask because all I ever see you write about is aestheticism and Platonic forms and the Kantian subject! When was the last time you wrote something about Wicker Park? Damn it, about Chicago, even? At least Lewis cared enough about—”

// It was weird, sometimes, when I thought about all of the endings I had experienced. Some sneaked up on me, gradually and then all at once, like when I woke up in my college dorm bed and realized my girlfriend had not been in contact for over a month. Some came abruptly but left a haunting wake, like when my parents called to tell me that they were getting divorced, and that my younger sister was living with my mother, and that because I was over twentyone, I was free to do what I wanted. I wondered what kind of ending my relationship with Walter would eventually have.

I didn’t remember much about my departure from the Infallible—David was probably upset that I didn’t buy a drink as I had promised. I realized that despite the long time I had known him, I had never asked for his phone number. I wondered how I would contact him again. The Infallible did not have a website, but perhaps it had a phone directory. Before long, I found myself walking down North Milwaukee Avenue, surrounded by neon lights. I passed a coffee shop displaying the sign “closed for renovation,” a location I was familiar with because the week before the owner of Hirsch told me we might be moving into it to be more in touch with the exciting local arts scene.

Before I knew it, I was at the waterfall in front of Bank of America. The line of awaiting admirers of arts was significantly shorter today—January tended to have the effect of driving tourists from the streets. The sheen in the paint had started to wear off, and the droplets no longer glistened artificially, their dullness reflecting the dreary sky. There was only one poet at the corner today, bundled up in a thick coat and scarf. She was sipping from a Starbucks cup, her gloved hands covering the logo, but the white lid was recognizable anywhere. It took me a while to find a five-dollar note, tucked deep in the side pocket of my bag.

“What do you want your poem to be about?”

What should I ask for? A poem about art? About poetry itself? “How about alcohol?” She raised her white cup and winked at me.

I laughed. “That’s got to be illegal.”

“Not if they don’t find out.”

I looked at the feather in her hair. “How about one about a bird?”

“Certainly,” she smiled, and started typing. //

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65

KNOW THIS Marika Tron

When someone asks your name, tell them a color.

When someone offers to buy you a drink, accept. Watch them pour it. When you turn sixteen, lose your virginity.

When the sun is out where you can see it, wear shorts no shorter than your fingertips when you drop your arms by your side.

When your dog is dying, lay with him in the vet’s office and hum in his ear while the chemicals put him to sleep.

When you bake a cake, stick a toothpick in the center and if it comes out clean, the cake is done.

When you turn eighteen, get a tattoo. Alone.

When you get your first period at soccer practice, stay until the end, and deal with it at home.

When a condom breaks, say something.

When you see someone shoplift, don’t say a word.

When you tie your shoes, make one loop then tie it none of that bunny ear bullshit.

When you turn twenty-one, have a party. Tell your parents this is your first alcoholic drink.

When you dye your hair, always wash it with cold water in the shower. When someone tells you a secret, never keep it to yourself.

When you go to prom, bring your own flask. Fill it with rum.

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KNOW THIS

When the days start getting shorter, face the sun where you can find it, and say thank you.

When you order coffee, ask for warm cream, no sugar.

When making your bed, tuck the sides in first, then the bottom.

When your best friend sleeps with your boyfriend, wish them both well, and move to a different city.

When you spill wine on your dress, wash it with salt and hot water. The same goes for blood.

When your mother calls, answer the phone.

When your kitchen sink is leaking, ignore it.

When the economy crashes, smile.

When hailing a taxi, use your whole hand.

When the bills come, don’t pay them. When you have a daughter, name her.

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Ocean Cosmos II Melina Walling

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Dinner with an Old Friend Scott Stevens We pour each other plum wine as the mapo tofu steams away our fears. We’re retired. Except together we remember death of a mother, a brother, a lover. When we were young we’d plug our ears with Silly Putty so we could hear our own heads. Whatever you needed to paint, what I needed to write, we used to think we found it out on a balcony in Chengdu where we took in the river of people below crossing the Anshun Bridge reflected in the real river.

I didn’t know yet how light falls on objects. I am still trying.

In the doorway you turn to leave, reminding me of the woman who turned into a redwood.

Unlike the story, we are not chasing each other, but we are too old to pretend our eyes do not shift with acres of forests behind them.

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Fantasy for a Hallmate Scott Stevens A freshman in your doorway blocks the sound of you singing “My Sweet Lord.”

Just for this I keep mine open too, so that some night you may enter and I may open the freezer pull out the strawberries pass one across your lips before we walk out to the lakebed.

Here floodlights pierce through oaks and lift lines of living grass into view, black amidst the straw, like Sanskrit on a porcelain dish.

And above, a barn owl’s butcher-paper wings crumple, then unfurl.

Our shirts off, reeds prick your unknown back, scratch my triceps, and from the bowl

I pick the coldest berry.

I paint your neck with a ribbon of juice your pulse sends dribbling.

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Fantasy for a Hallmate

Why haven’t I done this before I wonder, watching you finally bite, While behind you in the cobalt night a coyote scampers to the lakebed’s bottom to sniff a poppy glowing red in November.

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Our Contributors Sharon Du is a junior studying international relations with a focus in Chinese history and politics. She is from Melbourne, Australia, and is both a fairy bread technician and a puppy-dog enthusiast.

Regina Kong studies comparative literature with a concentration in religious, environmental, and Asian-American literature. She is a rising junior (class of 2023) from Berkeley, California and a painter.

Khuyen Le is a senior double majoring in Comparative Literature and Symbolic Systems. With graduation approaching she’s been thinking about how she is really going to miss having a life that makes time for her to read philosophy and literature regularly. She recently started painting more frequently again and would highly recommend anyone in the Stanford area to visit the trompe l’oeil mural at the Stanford Shopping Center, which was one of the inspirations for her piece.

Scott Stevens (’20, English) enjoys good food, good books, good friends—and bad 80s French pop. In addition to writing his own poetry, he translates from Japanese to English. His most recent translation is of the poet and empress Eifuku Mon’in’s waka poetry.

He is currently translating a novella by Miyamoto Yuriko.

Marika Tron is a senior studying English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. Her favorite writers include Toni Morrison, Ali Smith, Willa Cather, and herself. She enjoys watching any movies produced by A24, making collages, and eating frozen bananas covered in chocolate. If she’s not reading or writing, she’s probably thinking about reading and writing. She believes being a cowgirl is an attitude, not a lifestyle.

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Melina Walling is a graduate student pursuing her M.A. in Earth Systems with an emphasis on multimedia journalism. As a member of the Stanford Class of 2020, she earned a B.A. in English with an interdisciplinary concentration in Photography and a minor in history. She has previously reported for the USA TODAY Network in the Eastern Pennsylvania region, produced podcasts for the Stanford Storytelling Project, and worked as an editorial intern at STANFORD Magazine.

Zuyi Zhao is a Religious Studies major with a focus on gender and embodiment in early Christianity, currently taking a gap year to write poems and to play video games about struggling in Hell. Zuyi lives in South Florida and enjoys baking macarons.

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Image Credits Page 8: Daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson, 1847.

Pages 20, 26-27: Detail (flames) from William Blake, The Sons of Los: Satan, Palambron, and Rintrah, 1818.

Pages 41, 43: Photos courtesy of Leanne Grabel.

Page 46: Detail (bottles) from Vincent Van Gogh, Still Life with Five Bottles, 1884.

Page 50: Detail (bed) from Vincent Van Gogh, Bedroom in Arles, third version, 1889.

Page 52-53: Detail (shoes) from Vincent Van Gogh, Three Pairs of Shoes, 1886.

Pages 54, 65: Edward Hopper, Automat, 1927.

Gustave Doré, In Search of Lost Reason, 1878.

C

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© Caesura Journal Number Two: Spring 2020 Please direct any submissions and tidings to stanfordcaesura@gmail.com.