I, like a lot of beating-hearted teenagers, first fell in love with Anis Mojgani over Shake the Dust. I wanted to “brush my shoulders off,” peel the wane of fluff from my legs and arms, let the old skin flake and shed so I could come back a chameleon, and “walk into it.” I was a teenager then, or maybe I was in college. Maybe I was a college teenager.
I needed someone to tell me that life wasn’t all lollipops and raindrops, but instead give me the real struggle of it. It didn’t happen throughout my high school literature circuit so I began looking to poems somewhere between not getting out of bed for Pre-Calc and changing my major from religious studies to creative writing. Somewhere on the in-between, probably lying in bed because I did that for most of my freshman year, I confused a perfect world with my world. I thought when you made silly faces at boys in class, it wouldn’t lead to cheating on your back-home boyfriend. I thought that people didn’t backstab each other, that they loved one another truly when they said, “this is a commitment.” I believed my friends partook in recreational drug-use, but none of that back-shed-lab stuff. I believed in the majority good, the hearts of the people I met and the friendly faces that passed me on the all-brick campus where I had my first writing lesson: No one wants to hear about the good stuff, and no one wants to be entertained by something perfect.
“This is bullshit.” I remember distinctly when Allison said this to my fiction workshop.
Why can’t we write about happiness. Why does shit always have to be dark or go dark. How does darkness just come, just show up on a doorstep and expect to be let in because what else can you possibly do when half the world is bearded in it. There are forests of it, holes of it, religious movements dedicated to it, gangs of starships who have gone to its side and yet we expect to somehow fight it off and let the good triumph. Always, always over evil. What we forget is this binary. This halfness of the world. When we’ve had winter, we know spring is coming. When we have light, we know the moon will skim the sky like a mini-skirt and leave us in the dark. I wish there was a color for it, I wish I could say “leave us in the black” but that’s not even right. It’s like a steeped gray. It comes. Everytime.
Song From Under the River by Anis Mojgani
That’s what Anis Mojgani knows about the world. When I saw his book of poetry, Songs from Under the River, years of poetry collected, up on NetGalley, my breath caught. I may have spit up something I was drinking. Here’s what I had been waiting for. This selection of poetry, ending of course in one of my favorite slam poems ever, Shake the Dust. Those who are not familiar, need to immediately watch the video. It’s a poem that makes you want to pray, even if you’ve never believed in anything greater than yourself. Then, you pray for yourself, you pray by yourself, you pray with yourself. You fold your hands together like a little drummer boy and you lean your head towards your feet and you become humble to the words coming out of this man’s swollen mouth. So full of words, it’s buoyant.
I thought Shake the Dust was his best. I thought he gave it as a gift to the teenage world. With all these hormones, all this carrying-on, all this switchback, where’s the poem for us. It’s here in these words of half-God, half-growing pains. That’s not it though, Shake the Dust isn’t all he whispered into the darkness. There’s so much more to Anis Mojgani as seen in Songs from Under the River. It made me want to eat my ipad it was so delicious on my tongue. I would read it into the ferns on my porch where a Robin has warmed eggs in the hanging pot of it.
Songs from Under the River is a fascinating collection of new-age poetry, slam-poetry and rambling. I think sometimes it’s easy to consider rambling, poetry, especially if it’s someone you respect as a poet, but it’s just not. You can’t ramble your way through a poem. Poetry is a thing that needs specific words. That’s why I believe that once you reach poet status, you have reached the highest level of writing. It’s just too hard to get perfect. Your word choice has to be impeccable and even after you publish that 12-line, succinct, beautiful little capsule, you’ll find that one word that’s off. A poem is one of the hardest things to get right.
National Poetry Month Poster 2013
I think Anis Mojgani has some definite winners in his collection with lines like:
Know this: my heart was too big or my body so I let it go. And most days, this world has thinned me to the point where I am just another cloud forgetting another flock of swans — having shaved off so many of my corners that I have flet at home only in the shape of a ball, bending myself so far backwards that the song of my mother believed I was returning home. But believe me when I tell you my soul somehow still squeezes into narrow spaces. – Closer
Cussing doesn’t come from a lack of vocabulary–I know all the other words. None of them speak the same language that my fucking heart does. – On the day his son was born the astronomer screamed out his window
Come Closer – Anis Mojgani
(5) I was never a broken man/but I too know how to pick the pieces/ up. Some days the pieces are all teeth/ pulled from the mouths of children. Some days they are simply books/ searching for a shelf. (6) I have carved shelves out of my heart/ to try and bring an order to things. All/ it did was make space.
(10) Some ladies’ legs are shaped like/ confessionals/ and some confessionals are built like/ the bows of burning boats. Speaking/ through both my body caught fire like/ everything else. – 17 books
All the flowers have the same name. They all grow in the direction of her mother’s house. – Love is Not a Science
A Paixão Segundo N.A.B. | via Tumblr auf We Heart It.
Sometimes he does fall into the category of unedited. Sometimes you want something to be a poem so badly, and yet it’s just not there yet. I think his poems didn’t make sense because they weren’t edited correctly. It’s a myth that poetry isn’t supposed to make sense. Poetry should make sense in the deepest recesses of your soul, even if it’s so specifically your story and your experience, it should matter to the world. That’s why poetry works, it takes the most true happening of one person and makes it general, worldly, international. My favorite poetryism is from Joe Millar. Joe says when you go to the poetry store, you don’t look for these inflated academic words like however, rudimentary, reveal, assessed, constructed, objective, but words like hairbrush, vein, dogwood bud, wet, chalk. There are other words the poetry bookstore doesn’t sell: love, hate, mad, angry, sentimental, because in poetry you’re supposed to make us feel those words. It’s the great fictionism: show don’t tell, but in even tighter detail.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t inspired by this book and I would be lying if I said every poem in it is perfect. There is some unbreakable writing in this book, lines that I want to etch into a tree. (Line from Anis: “but the initials carved that break the trunk open the tree flaunting its body”).
There were moments when I almost cried because something he wrote on the page was so beautiful that it hurt and helped at the same time. However, some things could be parred down, some poems could be taken from the mind and then worked into real things that live on the page, instead of a reader just being confused at what Anis thinks about during his writing hours. It’s an honest collection of poems and it’s for the individual with secrets; both filled with anger and just quiet little ones that we haven’t found a way to give up yet, or speak up.
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Sometimes, as writers, we look at something and say, yes, this makes perfect sense. This is exactly how you would describe a…fist fight, or a break-up, or a wedding. And then, when the reader gets to the page, it’s just a swan’s feather, or the gully of the Grand Canyon, or just something that makes no sense to anyone else. It’s frustrating and is really just a call-out for better editing and more early morning writing sessions. I’m not knocking Mojgani by any means because he is impeccable and he made a writing career from a college dorm room.
I encourage everyone to live a moment in the church of themselves, that small sanctuary we keep just below our rib cage and just above our stomach and read this poetry collection. Spend time in the river water, don’t just dip your toes in, touch the bottom with your flattened palm.
lumberjack valentine: Somewhere out in the interwebs, there’s a girl who’s dating an alligator wrestler, or an Olympic weight-lifting champion, or a lumberjack. The lumberjack’s girl wears plaid in her freetime and smells distinctly of burnt wood.
dress up poison ivy what every decision do you suggest any kids to do in nc is everything: I’m not sure this makes any sense at all, but thank you for using the google machine to write your life story, or a Halloween drunken memory. Not quite sure which.
irish gypsies in south carolina: Is there a caravan park for this? I’d like to join the travelers.
proofreading marks for broken character: This is the title of some grammarian’s poem, in some desk, in the middle of Utah.
i love reading books because: it’s better than eating junk food, on the couch, watching bad reality television and plastic Barbie women. Best I could do at the moment. #currentlywatchingthevoice #sorrynotsorry
sonographic studies in lettering bold: It’s like you’re speaking German.
to kill a mockingbird street project: This isn’t real, I googled it. I got really excited. You know how you can get your graffiti artist students to read, let them graffiti the books.
princess bell curly hair: Unfortunately, Belle only had a slight wave and wore her hair mostly in a ribbon. Don’t fool yourself, the wardrobe had a side job holding a curling iron. I can tell. You can always tell. Naturally curly-haired girls always have one straight piece. It’s like our birth mark.
roses are red violets are blue this kafka book is just for you: A library needs this on a shelf filled with Kafka.
holy mary tattoo: Is it bad that I read this like a comic book BAM! HOLY MARY! Tattoo.
I’m normally not a fan of nature poetry. I actually (dare I say it) poo-poo’ed Merwin’s last book because it was so….sunset and evergreens. Just take a moment and think about how many descriptions of the sea you’ve actually read. Here’s a brief history of sea literature compiled by yours truly off the top of my curly head: Moby Dick, The Odyssey, Old Man and the Sea, Lord Jim, Treasure Island, Lord of the Flies, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Little Mermaid, Jaws, etc. If I missed one of your particular favorites, feel free to leave suggestions in the comment box. We can win a Guinness for sea literature.
(I’m still really regretting that Merwin comment. If it’s here when I post this blog, don’t bring out the stakes please. I know that Billy Collins and Merwin are the “poets of America” these days, popping up in chain bookstores, and being read out in church, but please, don’t burn down the castle. I’m one opinion).
The Messenger by Stephanie Pippin
I requested Stephanie Pippin’s book on NetGalley because it had birds on the cover. I’m such a stereotype.
I didn’t see that it was a predatory relationship until I had the cover beautifully displayed in front of me. There is feather debris along the side, spread hawk wing above, two lovely feather spears in the death grip of the hawk and a turned over beauty with alfalfa hair. PERSONIFICATION. It’s actually a gorgeous cover for a poetry book.
And there are gorgeous words inside. I’m so happy I requested this book. In fact, I would feel awful if I somehow found it and didn’t get the honor to request it. It’s the kind of book you should request, a royal book, a gift of a book, a book you open and then feel yourself instinctually tied to. It was here where I was gripped:
“At night I am cut free. I confuse myself with birds.”
The rest is history, as they say. I have two full pages of quotes from this book. She describes animals in the way they’re supposed to be seen. Not as objects, but as living, “heavy, alive, warm globes breathing in their shells.” It’s beautiful. I was never so taken with a deer until I read the passages about their grazing in an open forest. It was a cinematic approach to poetry. The way you see the flies buzz just above the rib cage of road kill. Animals stranded as outliers in a world they began.
In this interview, Pippin talks about how she came to know animals from the inside out. Working at a bird sanctuary she was forced to gut animals for feeding. Birds, we forget, are predators. Crows stalk fields of corn, and are farmer’s worst enemies and yet they have sharp eyes as if they’re brothers to the raven, worth writing a poem about, worth the beat of the heart under the floorboards in Poe’s cottage.
Bird Anatomy @ Psyche Pirate
I’ve never forgotten what birds are. Somehow, what dinosaurs are for normal people, birds have become for me. I feel this intrinsic tie to them. Their freedom alludes me, I teach it to my 9th graders, the symbolism of birds to every culture (recently, the “slave culture.”) The reason we sing of birds in gospel choir, the reason Noah uses birds to check that the world has not drowned. Birds were the ones that sought out the rainbow, the promise. This book isn’t just about birds though, it’s about the nature of our world and how we forget the intersection between us and it. It’s so commonly referred to “man v. nature” lately. So many natural disasters hitting too close to home. Salvage the Bones is a great piece of literature on Katrina if you haven’t read it. Then, we hurricanes pushing boats into garages in New York and Rhode Island. The homes of people filled to the brim with water, washed out photographs and soaking couch cushions. Light bulbs floating in the second floor. I don’t know if we’ve become fearful of nature, but we’ve definitely become enemies. Even poor Mother Nature in those tampon commercials.
“This is the lesson of grief, to listen to the chorus at the water’s edge, to read the black weight of abandoned nests.”
Deer & Honeysuckle @ K G Swaim
My mother walks for this. She goes out into the winter air, crisp through the peep holes of her gloves and waits for the sounds of nature. Unlike the rest of the hyperactive world, my mother doesn’t use headphones. She’ll walk at almost any time of day. She walks because “cleanliness is next to godliness” because she knows in the whole of nature is the whole of herself. My mother is the person who finds the one red flower in the thatch of pointed green bushes. She’ll cup an empty bird’s nest in her hands and save it for me on our dining room table. She picks up cracked robin’s eggs with two dainty fingers and whispers at the broken treasure. It’s incredible to watch my mother in nature. Her cheeks blush red and she’s alive.
“Deer/graze the forest. Now the trees. They would speak. They have a stench like standing water. In the forest nothing moves but oak/branches.”
This line made me want to say, “of course trees smell like standing water.” That’s the perfect description. And honeysuckles smell like my childhood when we would go cup creek water and wait for a tadpole to swim in. To do this, you have to make sure there’s no ground in the clear spaces between your fingers, water will flesh out. The crawfish that skittered back through the muddy sand after peppering our hands with water droplets smelled of pebbles and empty coke cans that sat out far too long in the sun. Peeling the flower of a honeysuckle petal to get at the freckle of sweetness. The way boys would rub buttercups under our chin so we’d lift our faces to their voice. (They start young). The turned over trees that became balance beams and my hair, so long and wild that the robins could hear it move. I imagine it must have sounded like rubbing your thumb against your first two fingers and holding that softness up to your ear.
I feel like I could post this video alone on the blog and let it speak the volumes I try to speak to my high school students everyday. Today, instead of fighting another kid, a student asked me to pick him up from the cafeteria when the bell rang. Instead of sticking his fists where the words hurt, he used his words to be a bigger person. I told him, we’re dominant on the animal food chain because we have the ability to reason. I told him not to give someone else control of himself because that’s what fighting is. I told him not to listen to his friends who won’t have a fighting blemish on their record just from cheering him on. We have the ability to say, no, I will not be that guy, that girl, that person, that nobody, that somebody, THAT. I will walk into that cafeteria everyday if I have to, through the hoards of students, to remind just one of my students that they’re important, they’re beautiful, they’re worth it. Tell someone you love them today, tell them they fill a space inside you that rings when they speak.
Book for a Book, Free Shipping World Wide, All $ Goes to Literacy Orgs.
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” —Franz Kafka
This line made me want to say, “of course trees smell like standing water.” That’s the perfect description. And honeysuckles smell like my childhood when we would go cup creek water and wait for a tadpole to swim in. To do this, you have to make sure there’s no ground in the clear spaces between your fingers, water will flesh out. The crawfish that skittered back through the muddy sand after peppering our hands with water droplets smelled of pebbles and empty coke cans that sat out far too long in the sun. Peeling the flower of a honeysuckle petal to get at the freckle of sweetness. The way boys would rub buttercups under our chin so we’d lift our faces to their voice. (They start young). The turned over trees that became balance beams and my hair, so long and wild that the robins could hear it move. I imagine it must have sounded like rubbing your thumb against your first two fingers and holding that softness up to your ear.
