Tuesday, 27 May 2014
Kya Tamasha Ho Kay...
Kya Tamasha Ho Kay !!! Khamosh Khari Ho Duniya,
Main chalun hashar main kehtay hue janaan Janaan.!
Main chalun hashar main kehtay hue janaan Janaan.!
Naaraaz Tum Naaraaz Hum...
Naaraaz Tum Naaraaz Hum Kese Mitaayein Yeh Dooriyaan,
Hum Muntazir Tum Bay Khabar Dono Ki Hain Majbooriyan.!
Samajh Kr Raham Dil Tum Ko
Samajh Kr Raham Dil Tum Ko Diya Tha Hum Ne Dil Apna,
Magar Tum To Bala Niklay, Ghazab Niklay, Sitam Niklay.!
Monday, 19 May 2014
Interview with Ellen Birkett Morris
Inside the basket of her ribs,
her tiny heart beats.She snores. I listen.
—from "Sleeping Dogs," by Ellen Birkett Morris
Ellen Birkett Morris writes poetry, fiction and short plays from her home in Louisville, Kentucky. Her fiction has appeared in Antioch Review, Sawmill Magazine, South Carolina Review, Notre Dame Review, and Santa Fe Literary Review. Her story, “The Cycle of Life and Other Incidentals,” was selected as a finalist in the Glimmer Train Press Family Matters short story competition. Her ten-minute play, “Lost Girls,” was a finalist for the 2008 Heideman Award given by Actors Theatreof Louisville and was given a staged reading at the AronoffCenter in Cincinnati. Morris is the author of Surrender, a poetry chapbook from Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has appeared in journals including Thin Air Magazine, ClackamasLiterary Review, Alimentum, Juked, Inscape, and Gastronomica. Her work won top poetry prize in The Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition in 2008 and was Semi-finalist for Rita Dove Poetry Award. Her poem, "Origins," was nominated for the 2006 Pushcart Prize. Morris has received grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Kentucky Foundation for Women and Kentucky Arts Council. She is a recipient of a 2013 Al Smith Fellowship for her fiction given by the Kentucky Arts Council. Morris works as a public relations consultant and writes regularly for www.authorlink.com.
* * *
I've never met Ellen Birkett Morris, but I'd heard her name as a fellow Kentucky writer. When she emailed to ask if she could send me a copy of her poetry chapbook for review, I accepted her invitation.
—Karen L. George
(This interview was conducted via email in April 2014.)
* * *
Your bio mentions you not only write fiction in addition to poetry, but you won the 2013 Kentucky Arts Council’s Al Smith Fellowship for your fiction. Congratulations—quite an honor. Have you written poetry for as long as you’ve written fiction, and do you have a preference as to which you enjoy more?
EBM: I started writing seriously in my mid-thirties with the idea that if I didn’t do it now I never would. I started with children’s fiction and found it was challenging to do all the things a writer needs to do (plot, characterization, pacing, dialogue) and gear it perfectly to children. I moved on to poetry and fiction for adults. I enjoy writing them both equally. I think both forms demand attention to detail and rhythm and insight into the human heart.
Do you work on poetry and fiction projects at the same time, or do you work exclusively on a poetry project until it’s finished and then turn to a fiction project?
EBM: I do work on poetry and fiction concurrently, but with a major focus on just one form. I may write a few poems while I am developing a collection of linked stories or a few pieces of flash fiction while I’m compiling a chapbook, but one genre always takes precedence.
What do you find different and/or challenging about writing/revising poetry vs. fiction?
EBM: I think the challenge in poetry lies in how condensed it is. In fiction you have a lot of room to explain the situation, but in poetry you have to put people there right away. Every word must count. Every image needs to carry weight. I think revising is pretty much revising no matter the genre.
Your poems have a strong narrative voice, as well as great attention to detail and a sense of place. Do you think this was developed and/or strengthened by your fiction writing?
EBM: Thank you! I’m sure the fiction helps, but I think it also has to do with my preference for being grounded in a place and viewpoint when I write. I’ve done poetry and fiction workshops, and teachers always stress the importance of detail and the power of using the particular to help the reader reach a feeling of the universal.
I’ve not read any of your fiction, but I’m curious if you write about totally different, or similar, subjects in your fiction compared to your poetry? And when you sit down to write about something, do you know right away whether you will be writing a poem or a piece of prose, and have you ever started in one form and then switched off to another? Or written about that subject in both forms? Have you ever considered writing something that includes both poetry and fiction?
EBM: A lot of my recent chapbook Surrender dealt with loss and growing older. While I have some stories that center on these themes, I tend to write fiction about what it means to see others and be seen, what it means to really be known by another person. I think this is our central struggle as humans and it comes across whether my stories are about a young naïve soldier in Iraq or a woman who accidently finds her way into a breast feeders group.
I never know what a piece will be when I sit down to write. It really is a process of discovery. I had a story from my childhood of watching SNL with my father and seeing Mick Jagger lean over and lick Keith Richards on the lips. My dad was disgusted and I was fascinated. I thought it was an essay and tried to write it as such. Finally I figured out that it was a poem (titled “The Divide”) that went back through the generations—the Shadow on the radio, Elvis shaking his hips and then Jagger and Richards.
I have written about a subject in two forms before. I had a monologue called “Lost Girls” that was published in The Pedestal Magazine as fiction that I later turned into a ten-minute play that was a finalist for the Heideman Award given by Actor’s Theatre.
I think I would be well suited to develop something in hybrid short form. Short form writing is really popular now with works like Bluets and Dept. of Speculation gaining attention.
How do you think writing poetry affects your fiction writing and vice versa?
EBM: I think writing poetry has helped me hone certain aspects of my fiction writing, such as rhythm and word choice. I recently graduated from the low residency MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, NC and my professors there weren’t surprised that I wrote poetry when they read my prose, which they described as “spare and poetic.”
Many of your poems have a deep connection to the natural world (they contain birds, horses, dogs, bodies of water, trees and plants.) Did you grow up in the country and/or do you currently live in a country rather than urban setting?
EBM: This must come from the poetic tradition because I am a city girl. I was born in Louisville and have lived in Lexington and Cincinnati. I really think this comes from paying attention, because nature is all around us, even in the city. I also think that nature is a great vehicle for poets to carry meaning and image simultaneously.
There are several consecutive poems near the center of the book, “Fatherless Girls,” “Hollow Bones,” and “August Leaves,” that contain no punctuation except for one or two commas. I have an idea why poets might choose to do this, but can you talk about why you chose to eliminate punctuation in those poems?
EBM: I think this had largely to do with the flow of the words. I wanted the sentiments to pour out with brief interruptions for emphasis, and I think the commas achieved that.
In many poems you use second person, addressing a “you” in the poem. I’m wondering about that decision, because I wrote a whole collection of poems exclusively in second person, but in workshops I’ve had people react differently to that choice, some bothered by it because they feel uncomfortable as if you’re addressing them and the situation of the poem doesn’t apply to them. Others readers like it. What is your opinion on that, and can you say why you chose to use it?
EBM: I feel as if the “you” serves to draw readers in and also lends an air of authority to the poems. I am thinking of David Foster Wallace’s short story “Forever Overhead” in which a second person voice is used to convey the gravity of coming of age as a boy prepares to jump off a diving board on his 13th birthday.
The preceding question brings me to a sometimes touchy subject. The series of poems in the center of your collection refer to and/or address a “you” that I assumed was your father, partly because of clues in the poems themselves and partly because of your book’s dedication note—“In loving memory of John Birkett.” But I know that many poets write persona poems, exploring people and situations they may or may not have experienced themselves. And as a reviewer, I often choose to refer to the poem’s POV person as the poem’s narrator rather than the poet themselves, because it feels too intrusive and/or presumptuous to do otherwise. What are your feelings about this?
EBM: The “you” of those poems was my father, who died in 2009. I spent many years honing my writing before I experienced the hard life experiences that made me feel like I had something important to say. I have also used “you” as the poem’s narrator (persona poem), as in the poem “Your Mother.” The lines go: "Tell me again about your mother. / Tell me how you held her hand, / limp with fatigue, half-dead." I’m not so much worried about whether a poem is autobiographical or not, but whether the details are authentic and moving.
On a similar subject, in “Detroit Skyline” you speak of a “you” looking like your grandson, so I assumed you were speaking of your father, though again it could be a persona poem. Further in the poem you say, “You…write books.” I hope it’s okay to ask if your father was a writer, and if you feel you inherited an interest in writing from him? I also ask this because one of the recurring themes in Surrender is a reverence for ancestors.
EBM: My father wrote detective fiction novels set in and around the racetrack. Louisville and Lexington served as backdrops for his books The Queen’s Mare and The Last Private Eye, both will be reissued as e-books this fall. He passed on his love of literature by taking me and my sisters to the library and reading to us when we were kids. I actually remember him reading Flannery O’ Connor stories to us when I was around eight. I also got to see how challenging and all consuming the work of writing could be. He sat at our kitchen table every afternoon typing away, so I knew it wasn’t a glamorous job, but felt driven to do it anyway.
Who are some of the poets who have influenced you, and can you say in what ways they have influenced you? What poets/collections are you reading now?
EBM: I like the work of Ted Kooser for the simplicity of it and also the way that he can animate inanimate objects through his poetry. I played around with that idea in my poem “Everything Must Go.” I think W. S. Merwin is amazing. The cadence of his poems are beautiful, and he writes about important things. I have always loved Jane Kenyon, particularly the poem “Otherwise,” which uses repetition beautifully and focuses on the importance of the everyday. Right now, I am reading Mary Ann Reese’s Down Deep and loving it.
What writing projects are you currently working on? Do you have any books forthcoming?
EBM: I have a set of linked short stories set in a fictional eastern Kentucky town in the mid-70s which is under consideration with an editor right now. I am also putting the finishing touches on a chapbook manuscript that I hope to send out soon.
* * *
A sampling of Ellen Birkett Morris's work on-line:
"Down by the Lake" in Zócalo Public Square: http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2013/08/09/down-by-the-lake/chronicles/poetry/
"Blind Weaver" and "Back Street/New Orleans" in Clapboard House: http://clapboardjournal.squarespace.com/new-blog/2013/12/7/ellen-birkettmorris-blind-weaver-and-back-streetnew-orleans
"Sixteen" in Cease, Cows: http://ceasecows.com/2013/09/16/sixteen-by-ellen-birkett-morris/
"Paper Children" in The Daily Palette: http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=1732
You can read more about Morris at Poets & Writers "Directory of Writers:" http://www.pw.org/content/ellen_birkett_morris
____________________________________________
Karen George lives in Northern Kentucky. Since she retired from computer programming to write full-time, she has enjoyed traveling to historic river towns, mountain country, and her first European trip. Her chapbook, Into the Heartland, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2011, and her chapbook, Inner Passage, is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks. You can find her work in Memoir, The Louisville Review, Tupelo Press 30/30 Website, Wind, Border Crossing, Permafrost, Blast Furnace, Adanna, and Still. She is co-founder and fiction editor of the online literary and arts journal, Waypoints.
SURRENDER by Ellen Birkett Morris
Finishing Line Press, 2012
ISBN: 9781622290772
28 pages
http://www.finishinglinepress.com/__________
I've never met Ellen Birkett Morris, but I'd heard her name as a fellow Kentucky writer. When she emailed to ask if she could send me a copy of her poetry chapbook for review, I accepted her invitation.
—Karen L. George
__________
Review of Ellen Birkett Morris' Surrender
Ellen Birkett Morris writes poetry, fiction and short plays from her home in Louisville, Kentucky. Her fiction has appeared in Antioch Review, Sawmill Magazine, South Carolina Review, NotreDame Review, and Santa Fe Literary Review. Her story, “The Cycle of Life and Other Incidentals,” was selected as a finalist in the Glimmer Train Press Family Matters short story competition. Her ten-minute play, “Lost Girls,” was a finalist for the 2008 Heideman Award given by Actors Theatre of Louisville and was given a staged reading at the Aronoff Center in Cincinnati. Morris is the author of Surrender, a poetry chapbook from Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has appeared in journals including Thin Air Magazine, Clackamas Literary Review, Alimentum, Juked, Inscape, and Gastronomica. Her work won top poetry prize in The Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition in 2008 and was Semi-finalist for Rita Dove Poetry Award. Her poem, "Origins," was nominated for the 2006 Pushcart Prize. Morris has received grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Kentucky Foundation for Women and Kentucky Arts Council. She is a recipient of a 2013 Al Smith Fellowship for her fiction given by the Kentucky Arts Council. Morris works as a public relations consultant and writes regularly for www.authorlink.com.
The opening poem, "Everything Must Go," refers to the sign at a garage sale. The narrator describes one item for sale: "The electric blue bathing suit / hangs from a post." The poem has a wistful, nostalgic mood set by the image "The chest juts out, a trick of wind / or padding," and how the narrator imagines the teen who once wore the swimsuit: "...open / face, honeyed braids, long legs, her bare / feet with toenails painted pink." The poet also invites us deeper with the phrase "inviting me / to look at what others had cast aside." "Cast aside" refers literally to getting rid of this old item of clothing, but also hauntingly suggests people, places, and things outgrown, rejected, or surrendered to through the years. The title, "Everything Must Go," foreshadows the stories of loss and letting go in the poems that follow, by implying that eventually everything in life must go. The poem's sense of longing is intensified by the repeated long "a," "e," and "o" sounds that make the reader wonder what memories this garage sale has churned up in the narrator.
Morris writes about some of the surrenders many experience as teens: in "Sixteen" surrendering to an awakening of sexual desire, and in "Down by the Lake" where kids surrender to getting high.
In "Surrender," the title poem of the book, the narrator surrenders her daughter to the school bus, feeling "invisible," her "white T-shirt a flag of surrender. / Surrendered to love, / I leave my daughter at the curb." And this image of the mother sending her daughter off is beautifully paired with the reverse image at the end of the poem —her daughter waving to her mother "as she sends me off into the world."
This connection of a mother to a daughter is also the subject of the prose poem, "Measurements," in which a daughter remembers how her mother hand-measured ingredients, and "When the time came, she taught me her tricks. No shiny measuring cup could match the glory of my mother's words as I dropped my first handful of flour into the bowl. Perfect. Just perfect."
The poems "The Movies" and "Louisville, KY, USA" celebrate the surrender involved in romantic love. "The Movies" ends beautifully with two people who have been in a relationship for many years we suspect, coming home from a movie and making love. The poet portrays them as totally comfortable with each other, snuggling:
shadows on the bedroom wall.
There is such comfort and tenderness in the image of "sheets soft with age," because besides being literal it suggest the couple's relationship has softened as it matured. The last image of leaf shadows can be interpreted as both beautiful and at the same time a foreshadowing perhaps of darker times that come into everyone's life, which will be dealt with in later poems.
"Louisville, KY, USA" also has the same wistful, drowsy feel of the "The Movies," of two people who have lived and loved together for many years, waking together "in our familiar bed, / warm with Saturday sleep." This poem also portrays the narrator's surrender or acceptance of the fact that her partner is aging, as she is, by referring to "your gray chest hair...wrinkles around your eyes," and the lovely ending line, "we lie together slowing." The "together slowing" suggests both the image of their heart rates slowing after lovemaking, and the idea of slowing down in other ways as a result of aging.
The chapbook's central theme of surrender is carried in poems of loved ones as they age, become ill, and die. In "Your Mother" the poem's narrator asks her husband to tell her about his mother. The poem is written in second person, addressing the husband as "you," which creates a lovely sense of intimacy between the poem's characters, but also between the narrator and the reader, and the husband and his aging mother who's in a nursing home. At the poem's center is the haunting image of "old people propped this way or that, / like brooms in a closet, waiting to be chosen." This is such an effective image because as sad as it is to envision these people doing nothing but waiting to die, "waiting to chosen" also suggests to me a kind of hope, that they've lived their lives and are ready to move on to the next phase, whatever that might be. And brooms also denote something useful and essential, perhaps alluding to the fact that these nursing home residents the poet describes as "smiling, sad-eyed or dreaming" have moved pat their years of having a purpose. "Your Mother," as so many other poems in Surrender,is filled with tenderness and reverence for our roots, the places and people who have nourished us, as seen in the second stanza:
How you brushed her long grey hair.
Then held up a mirror, smiling,As she once did for you.
This tenderness accompanied with sadness continues in the poem "Leaving," in which the husband empties "his boyhood home." The poem ends with lines full of longing emphasized by the repeated use of the consonant "l":
The fall light is filled with golden dust,
dried leaves, ash, the yellow of goodbye.The "yellow of goodbye" mirrors the mother's tea roses of the preceding lines, which the poet says were "started with a cutting / from her mother's garden." This image is both beautiful and sad in itself, but I also wondered if the husband and wife in this poem took any cuttings of the roses, to keep the tradition going, and since that's never mentioned in the poem, that omission intensified the poem's sadness for me. The poem takes place in the fall of the year, which also echoes what the reader feels is the impending death of the mother. At the poem's center the wife surrenders to letting her husband surrender to the experience of emptying his mother's house, lines that effectively use repetition:
I ache to touch
my husband, but leave him to his leaving.Surrender contains a series of poems in which the narrator deals with the loss and letting go of her father —one of the most difficult kinds of surrender we experience as humans. In "Your Last Day" she describes his death in the moving last four lines:
...felt free to go. Two hours later
you gave a final exhalation.
It was a sigh, really.
It was a sigh, really.
A sigh.
The way the above lines are laid out on the page, each one shorter, creates a winding-down effect visually that mirrors the father's last breaths, that though certainly sad, also contains a beauty, a peacefulness echoed in the repeated "sigh." The poet's use of the word "sigh" is an example of how much a poet can pack in one word, because sighing, letting one's breath out audibly, can suggest sorrow, weariness, regret or relief. People sigh with yearning, or in response to someone or something beautiful, such as a work of art or music. The word "sigh" also echoes back to the chapbook's title, Surrender, as in letting go of breath, in this case the father's final breath, in which the poet also masterfully suggests (without saying it) the daughter's accompanying sigh.
In both "Fatherless Girls" and "Hollow Bones" the daughter of the poem speaks to her recently deceased father in second person, addressing him as "you," again creating a breathtaking feeling of intimacy. In "Fatherless Girls" the daughter imagines heat lightning as "Those small fires you set just to say hello," and in "Hollow Bones" she muses that if her father had "hollow bones" like a crow:
...I could lift you from your bed
Carry you outside to feel the sunSee the clouds drift across the sky
Watch the shadows lengthen
The very next line in "Hollow Bones," that follows the above image of rising and light is one of falling and darkness: "But you fall into a darkness I cannot penetrate." This poem, as others in the book, effectively use contrasting images of light and darkness. This poem, as many others, also establishes the poet's connection and appreciation of the natural world and its cycles which echo human life cycles. For example, in the elegiac poem "August Leaves" the narrator walks by a lake, remembering her father. The opening lines contain lilting sounds of repeated consonants, making it sound like both a dirge and a lullaby:
August leaves
Singed around the edgesSlow baked by summer sun
Float in the air
Land in the quarry lake
I pace the shallow water
Lines like the above emphasize the duality of life, how sometimes opposing sensations are intricately connected —joy and sorrow, pain and beauty—especially at times such as the death of a parent, when we're most vulnerable and yet these times are often when we grow the most as humans.
The theme of reverence for your ancestry, first introduced in the second poem, "Measurements," carries through the book in poems such as "Detroit Skyline," "Oxblood," "Man Without a Country," and "Stones in My Pocket." In "Oxblood" the narrator's memory of one of her ancestors, perhaps a grandfather, is brought back by "the mention of shoe polish." She remembers his "wooden / caddy. The bristled brush...tins of polish, the deep red / my favorite. Oxblood...The soft clothes like diapers." These concrete images of sight, sound, and smell ground the poem and bring it alive, present to the senses much in the same way objects such as old photos can bring back people, places, and events as if they were present. "Detroit Skyline" is just such a poem based on a photograph:
You look straight into the camera,
squinting against the sun, hair blownby the wind, the Detroit skyline behind you.
You are eight. The city is king.
Summer afternoons are endless.
The simplicity of the last two above lines are so powerful, creating a staccato effect that echoes the starkness of the city behind the "you" in the photograph, suggesting the "head-on" way he experiences life.
In this chapbook's second last poem, "Stones in My Pocket," the narrator travels to the land of her ancestors:
...My father gone but a year,
I go in search of ghosts, track his namesake across the water.The journey of seven hours took my people seven weeks
In a famine ship.
The connection to the past, and reverence for her ancestors continues into the narrator's own imagined future in the poem's beautiful closing lines:
I can only hope that someone from the future
Will seek my name on a gravestone,
Look out at the land, imagine me there,
Feel the wind on her face like the breath
Of a loved one as he leans in for one last kiss.
This image of "one last kiss" hauntingly mirrors the mother's kiss in "Your Mother" and the breath of the father in "August Leaves" and "Tour Last Day."
The last poem, "Inheritance," goes back in time to the couple's wedding day, and a later realization of what they inherited: "The deep strain of melancholy / that runs through our genes." This poem and the book ends with the following haunting image that echoes back to other mentions of shadows in earlier poems such as "The Movies":
As a shadow staggers in the doorway
Returned not to celebrate or mourn, But to curse the day we were born.
This image is a powerful contrast to the poem's preceding image of joy and promise of the wedding celebration: "Drunk with abundance, weaving / Arm in arm to the music we sway" — a fitting end to a book full of life's dualities and dichotomies: love and loss, abundance and illness, birth and death, connection and disconnection.
Ellen Birkett Morris' Surrender draws us into places, times, and spaces splendid with the beauty of the natural world, entangled by the surrenders of our lives as humans, luminous with yearning, tenderness and awe.
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