No Matter What: A Review of Rachel McKibbens’ Pink Elephant

The following review was written by guest reviewer Bob Blair.

Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what. – Bruce Weigl, “The Impossible”

The 46 poems in Rachel McKibbens’ first book, Pink Elephant, validate Weigl’s claim for the power of clarity. A memoir in verse, a mosaic of savage vignettes from her nightmare childhood through the challenges of motherhood, these poems recount and reflect on the violence and desperation of McKibbens’ early years – their enduring effects, and her struggle to overcome that history.

The book’s title, which recalls the comfort of a child’s stuffed toy, gives no hint of what’s ahead. The first clue comes in the dedication:

for my brother, who lived

for my father, who learned

Both men feature prominently in the first half of the book – which addresses McKibben’s often terrifying childhood. Peter, the Hansel to McKibbens’ Gretel, first appears in the book’s opening poem:

I love my brother. He had the exact same childhood as I did.

But he doesn’t get the credit for it. He isn’t the writer. I am

the star of the violence. I expose. My Peter, when he marries,

I will be so sad. No girl in the world deserves him but me. (I Forget Who I Said It To…)

Peter was her comrade in the trenches of their family warfare, and, at times, took the brunt of their father’s rages for her. But he was also the child – the son – their mother favored. So, resentment and anger coexist with the solidarity.

The morning I caught my brother behind the couch,

my pet hamster in his hands, holding her

steady as a bowl of blood, a new heat

moved through me, tightened itself

around my throat like a leash.

I smacked his face and bit his shoulder.

He dropped the hamster to the floor. An Easter present

from my father. Mine. I grabbed her

and held her up to his face,

squeezed until she went limp beneath the crush. (For Du’a Khalil)

Jealousy, rage and violence echo throughout Pink Elephant – background music to a family saga in which alcoholism, assaults, and psychological abuse are recurring motifs. As McKibbens’ story develops poem by poem, we see her struggling against her father’s brutal rages and her mother’s crushing indifference.

Because Pink Elephant is essentially a memoir, it helps to read the poems in the order in which McKibbens presents them. There are links among the poems and sequences embedded in the overall arc of the book. For example, Parts 1 and 2 include “The First Time” (she ran away from home with her brother), “The Day After the First Time We Ran Away from Home,” “The Second Time” (she ran away with her step mother), and “The Last Time.” The sequence begins with the futility of escape --

It’s funny to me now, picturing

two children running away

as unprepared as a fed up housewife –

where did we imagine we could go?

What new home would drop from the sky for us?

Which saint would dare burst from its plaster

shell to scoop us from our ugly lives? (The First Time)

-- and concludes with her confrontation with the abusive father she had been trying to flee. Having taken a hammer from his tool chest, she sneaks up to his bedroom --

I turned the knob slowly,

stood over my father’s body,

his chest heaving, then sinking

when his tongue rattled, then stopped,

and the whites of his eyes

rolled over, and he stared

only at the weapon in my hand

and I looked at him and said,

If you ever touch us again,

I will kill you.

And then he saw me.

Okay, he said.

Okay. (The Last Time)

The poems in the second half of the book deal with McKibbens’ men and her reflections on raising her own children. We also see more of her mother here, but mainly as the woman her daughter sought desperately, but hopelessly, to please -- an anti-model of parenthood. In McKibbens’ eyes her mother saw her as “a filthy little hitchhiker you never meant to pick up,/ a greedy little fetus. An accident waiting to happen.” In “The Pacifier,” she describes breast-feeding one of her own children and reflects on the taunting that accompanied her mother’s breast-feedings.

Father told me how she would tease,

rubbing her nipple across my lip

until my head whipped toward it

how she’d pull back and laugh

as I wagged my empty mouth,

rooting for her tough, sweet skin.

…

This is how I learned the difference

between women and mothers.

That is when I knew

what I wanted to be. (The Pacifier)

Not a few of the experiences described in Pink Elephant are deeply troubling. In “Tomboy,” a poem about how McKibbens absorbed her father’s anger and misogyny, the young girl smuggles an imaginary mermaid home from a beach trip:

I begged her to teach me the love in women,

to help me seem less unnatural.

But her words rippled in her throat –

a wild ocean language I could not comprehend.

Give me something, I warned, or I’ll dry you out.

She began to writhe beneath my voice

as I spit words that slurred her flesh.

It was my own wild language, passed down

to me by my father: words, sounds, rages,

the darkest blue shades of misogyny

no child’s mouth should ever dare commit. (Tomboy)

The child’s frustration and anger quickly turn to violence, and she attacks the captive mermaid she decries as “full of woman’s ungratefulness.”

The next morning I packed her throat full of sand.

Stuffed her gills with mud and broken seashells.

She lacked all strength to squirm and simply

looked at me in horror

watching me return to the only child I knew how to be –

I was mythological and frightening.

I was half man,

I was half flawless. (Tomboy)

“Tomboy” is both psychologically insightful and richly imaginative, but some readers likely will recoil at its graphic violence – and it is far from the most violent of Pink Elephant’s poems.

Still, psychologists have noted that humans tend to give greater attention and psychological weight to negative experiences, threats over opportunities, and bad news over good. That theory may – along with the thoughtful craft that went into the making and interweaving of Pink Elephant’s poems – help explain the power and appeal of the book’s sustained and intimate narrative.

Given the grim childhood she describes, it is affirming to read how McKibbens reacts against her own history in raising her children, declaring: “My children are all five of my hearts, unleashed.” (A Sunday Cross-Examination of My Future Next Husband)

Pink Elephant offers a poetry of pain, survival and, ultimately, self-affirmation. Its stories are told unflinchingly, but with touches of sharp, dark humor. The book’s Hansel and Gretel overtones, symbolic mermaids, surreal dream scenes and spare but graphic descriptions of physical and emotional brutality often give the stories a quasi-mythological feel – and the atmosphere of a gothic horror tale.

The epigraph by Bruce Weigl at the beginning of this review is the final line of a poem about being molested at age seven. It asserts that however ugly and painful one’s experiences, recounting them with unblinking clarity can give rise to an unexpected beauty. Pink Elephant offers readers just that sort of beauty.

Rachel McKibbens is the mother of five children. A self-described ex-punk rock chola, she is the 2009 Women of the World poetry slam champion, an eight-time National Poetry Slam team member, a three-time NPS finalist, and a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow and Pushcart nominee. For four years, she co-curated the louderARTS Project reading series in New York City, coaching their slam team to three consecutive National Poetry Slam final stages. She teaches poetry and creative writing at diverse venues, from housing projects to hospitals, high schools and universities.

Bob Blair facilitates a weekly poetry workshop at Miriam’s Kitchen (www.miriamskitchen.org) in Washington, D.C.

Rachel McKibbens

Pink Elephant

Cypher Books

$12.95

I bite shut my eyes between songs: Review of Sherwin Bitsui's Flood Song

Flood Song by Sherwin Bitsui

Reviewed by Melissa Tuckey

Sherwin Bitsui is a member of the Dine tribe of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani (Many Goats Clan), who grew up on the Navajo reservation in White Cone, Arizona. Flood Song is his second book of poems. Bitsui writes in English, and also speaks Dine, so that the poems navigate between Dine culture and industrial/ American culture.

In a recent interview, describing how the book moves between these experiences, Bitsui says:

Politically, English is the language of my tribal nation’s oppressor, but we certainly have to use it to come into a new kind of knowing that will help us translate this outer culture into our own and vice versa. Flood Song feels like it’s trying to braid these diverging worldviews together in order to create a middle area that is accessible to both perspectives.

Flood Song is a poem in which images such as “I cover my eyes with electrical wires,/see yellow dawn eclipse Stop signs” co-exist with “grandfather’s accent rippling/ around the stone flung into his thinning mattress,” the grandfather who “Years before, he would have named this season/ by flattening a field where grasshoppers jumped into black smoke.”

Flood Song is both a vision and an utterance, from the first line of the poem, “I bite shut my eyes between songs.” We are drawn by the vividness of image and its strangeness. The speaker has a world to make, one that crosses between cultures. The singer’s “shrill cry.... becomes the wailing that returns to the reservation.” As readers we are participants in this ritual, we follow the singer “across sand dunes/ warm his hand with your breath.”

This sense of braiding or bringing together of disparate worldviews is present at the very level of sentence-making in the book. Entering the poems, we are entering a world. Sentences like “bison horns twist into the sides of trains/ winding through the broth filled eyes of hens/ squawking from the icebox./ shock-coils from the jet engine’s roar/ erupt from memory of splintered eagle bone” render a world where past, present and future are simultaneously present and time is luminous. The natural world here is violently displaced, but continues to exist in the memory of an eagle bone, and as song.

As Americans – especially those of us who are white – we often do not live with our history. We live in the present tense and even that is not fast or new enough. These poems contain history and vision, as well as the shocking pace of the new, even while they bend toward beauty.

At its most surreal, the poem is birthing a new world: “The storm lying outside its fetal shell/folds back its antelope ears.” Bitsui writes, “I wanted to crack open bulldozers and spray their yolk over the hills so that a new/ birth cry would awaken the people who had fallen asleep.”

I especially enjoy the sense that experimentation is not for its own sake, but that there is something pressing within this book to born, to be remembered, to be told.

Tribute to Sam Hamill & Poets Against War

Blasphemy

For Sam Hamill

Let the blasphemy be spoken: poetry can save us,

not the way a fisherman pulls the drowning swimmer

into his boat, not the way Jesus, between screams,

promised life everlasting to the thief crucified beside him

on the hill, but salvation nevertheless.

Somewhere a convict sobs into a book of poems

from the prison library, and I know why

his hands are careful not to break the brittle pages.

by Martín Espada

Festival Goers: Join Martín Espada, Marilyn Nelson, and Sarah Browning as we pay tribute to Sam Hamill Thursday, March 22, 2-3:30 pm, in the auditorium of the True Reformer Building.

Our faces coated with history: A Review of Tocqueville by Khaled Mattawa

Tocqueville, by Khaled Mattawa

Reviewed by Yvette Neisser Moreno

In his fourth book, Tocqueville, Libyan-American poet Khaled Mattawa examines the world and human experiences with a wide lens and communicates his perceptions to the reader in a multiplicity of voices and poetic styles. Mattawa has been straddling worlds for a long time, as one of America’s most preeminent translators of contemporary Arabic poetry, and in his own poetry the individual experience is inextricably intertwined with global events, and vice versa. Indeed, Mattawa’s ars poetica is summed up in these lines: “[T]o love one person / you must contemplate loving the whole world” (p. 10).

One such poem in which Mattawa brings multiple worlds together is “PowerPoint I.” Here the poet makes extraordinary leaps and striking comparisons between seemingly unrelated subjects, including a record-setting swimmer, an ordinary person training a puppy, imperialism, American movie culture, with references to World War II, the Vietnam War, and the current U.S. war in Afghanistan, among others. The closing stanza of this 6-page poem remarkably brings all these strands together in a commentary on contemporary society’s place in history:

The dog owner opens a magazine and reads about the swimmer’s accomplishment

which is to have become for a short while the cogwheel driving the second-arm of civilization’s time,

because to say Empire is to say: the Tet offensive and one step for man,

and going out to the movies and making sure the dog does not maul the new sofa,

wherein the blind man’s accomplishment, via an eye bank in Bombay, is another toddle unto revelation,

so many magical powers or advanced technology incorporated within

where the march of progress becomes loops and loops of human matter strung around the cinemaplex,

the human soul as a conglomerate, a spark plug winking within the universe’s internal combustion,

triumphs like motes of pollen from new epochs stinging the Cyclops’s eye,

so much dithering, a catharsis that hurls us screaming unto the street, our faces coated with history. (12-13)

The book’s centerpiece is its ambitious title poem, a 26-page collage of short lyric poems and prose passages, which takes its name from the famous chronicler of American democracy Alexis de Tocqueville. The choice to title this poem—and the collection—“Tocqueville” indicates that Mattawa sees the piece as continuing Tocqueville’s project of defining democracy and its impact on the American people and society. Perhaps the aim is to demonstrate the irony of the fact that the United States’ efforts to spread “democracy” across the globe have had sometimes devastating results.

The poem centers on recounting the shocking life stories of several Somali citizens during their country’s tumultuous recent history, as reported by the BBC. Prose fragments of these stories are interspersed with excerpts from works such as Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile,” and the Qur’an, as well as short poems written in a first-person, beautifully lyric voice:

Sometimes I want to call what I see

through the keyhole “a flower.”

Then I see the clock racing,

the digits tumbling over themselves.

Then I turn to her face

and ask a question of love. (23-24)

Although the notes in the back of the book reveal that the war zone described in “Tocqueville” is (at least primarily) Somalia, the poem itself provides no geographical or contextual reference.

Thus, the stories and images presented in the poem take on a universal quality—the sense that these horrors could occur anywhere. For me, this reading experience was somewhat reminiscent of Split This Rock poet Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic or Carolyn Forché’s The Angel of History.

In terms of form, Mattawa—like fellow 2012 Split This Rock featured poet Douglas Kearney—pushes the boundaries of free verse into new territory by interspersing prose and lyric poetry. In particular, the book includes a series of poems called “PowerPoints,” which include charts and placeholders for images along with text. In a commentary on the writing process of his book Amorisco, Mattawa explains his experimental style:

I wanted to write in that pure mode that seems to transcend time and circumstance, and that it many cases acts as a skeleton upon which much of poetry is placed. In the longer poems that range freely among pressing questions and unresolved episodes I work in counter-mode attaching, welding, and knotting as much material (and prose) to a lyric impulse as it could handle. Of course, I love the lyric mode, but I sometimes resist its taciturn wisdom and the purity of its bones. (coppercanyonpress.org)

While I deeply appreciate the way Mattawa’s longer poems challenge the reader to reconsider the relationship between history and current events, and between US society and US foreign policy, I am always drawn to simple, lyric moments. As such, I was quite moved by Mattawa’s poem “Trees,” which ends with the following meditation on how we should define them:

Should I group them by touch or color—

trees of pearly, gray smooth bark,

of leaves like old women’s hands,

trees of round, dark red fruit?

Should I name them to their stories—

tree that hides the stop sign in summer,

tree where I once shot a bird,

tree I planted to cast a shadow on her grave?

Kevin Simmonds on Split This Rock and the transformative power of poetry:

"Split This Rock is unapologetically committed to the idea that much of the most important and lasting poetry comes out of a struggle against power structures that have oppressed women, minorities and LGBTIQ people. "Political" poetry isn't this short-sighted hackneyed genre bereft of style and craft. STR lifts the work of those who've gone on like June Jordan and Langston Hughes alongside contemporaries like Naomi Shihab Nye and Homero Aridjis. Poets like these consider messy subjects that, when amplified by poetry, can have a civilizing effect on us. I'm also thinking of luminaries like Nazim Hikmet. These are poets whose work has been translated, spoken through microphone and bullhorns at rallies, banned from classrooms and constantly stolen from bookstores.

As I see it, good poetry concerns itself with magnanimity, laying aside purposely divisive bullshit and looking again at a thing, a situation, an idea. Looking at what in it is worth knowing, worth cherishing and aiming for. That's a generosity I find unique to poetry. LGBTIQ people are drawn to that and have clung to poetry to "rewrite, reinvent and reify" their lives, as critic and poet David Eye wrote about Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality, the anthology I recently edited for Sibling Rivalry Press. Consider this: the LGBTIQ community can boast about a poetic ancestry that includes Sappho, Virgil, Walt Whitman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Federico Garcia Lorca, Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, Mutsuo Takahashi, Adrienne Rich, Joy Harjo and so on. I know poetry has saved me and saves me to this day."

Thank you, Kevin! Check out the Collective Brightness reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2012, Thursday March 22nd - 4:00pm, True Reformer Building Auditorium (1200 U St. NW)

March Sunday Kind of Love: Carmen Calatayud & Emma Trelles

Sunday Kind of Love

featuring

Carmen Calatayud

&

Emma Trelles

Sunday, March 18

5-7 pm

Busboys and Poets

2021 14th St. NW

Washington, DC

Hosted by Sarah Browning & Katy Richey

$5

As always, open mic follows!

Co-Sponsored by Busboys and Poets, Split This Rock & Letras Latinas, the Literary Program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame

For more information:

www.BusboysandPoets.com

www.SplitThisRock.org

info@splitthisrock.org

202-387-POET

Carmen Calatayud's first book of poems, Cave Walk, was chosen by poets Pamela Uschuk and William Pitt Root for the Silver Concho Poetry Series and is forthcoming from Press 53 in September 2012. She is a poet moderator for Poets Responding to SB 1070, a Facebook group that features poetry and news about Arizona's controversial immigration law that legalizes racial profiling. Calatayud works as a psychotherapist and addictions counselor in Washington, DC.

Emma Trelles is the author of Tropicalia, winner of the 2010 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize and published by the University of Notre Dame Press (2011). She is also the author of the chapbook Little Spells (GOSS183 press), a recommended read by the Valparaiso Poetry Review and the Montserrat Review.

Read a review of Tropicalia over at Post No Ills.

Haiku Postcards to President Obama

Split This Rock had collected many haiku postcards for President Obama at AWP. Here are some of our favorite haikus:


WATER RISING, RAIN
ON THE WORLD ---FROM THE DRY HEIGHTS
BAILING OUT THE BANKS

Lyle Daggett





The nation breathed fear,
drank wartime like cheap courage,
seeks hang over cure

Dan Vera





Keep your humble head.
The earth is in your corner.
Sing like words are water.

Qiana Towns





Barack Obama
the Republicans do not
glitter like you do.

CWINROCK





Boy picks up a stick
rattles it across the fence.
Lonely yards listen.

Bryan Fry





A black man's throat splits
White house air into music:
tears come to my eyes

L. Alleyne





WE CAN NOT FIND JOBS.
There is no food inside our
Refrigerator.

Andrea