LITANY FOR THE CITY by Ryan Teitman

Ryan Teitman
Litany for the City 

BOA Editions 
http://www.boaeditions.org/ 

By the numbers
ISBN 9781934414804 
Publication: 2012 
Total pages: 80 
Number of poems: 21

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I first met Ryan Teitman in 2009 when he was a student attending Indiana University’s MFA program. I'm an admirer of his poetry and when I saw that he had published his first book (a prize-winner no less),  I jumped at the chance to share it with you.  Fortunately, he also agreed to an interview, so click here to read the interview and learn more about this talented poet. He’s definitely one to watch. 

—Nancy Chen Long

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Ryan Teitman’s first book of poetry Litany for the City was selected by Jane Hirshfield as the 2012 winner of the A. Pouling, Jr. Poetry Prize, published by BOA Editions. Litany for the City is a meditation on place, the importance of place, the embodiment of place, the conflation of place and body. Teitman provides structure for the reader through the theme of city / place / location—from consideration of a city such as Philedelphia, to a place like that of a dry wheat field (“Ephesians”), to the tender location on the body, a “patch of jawbone hidden by the earlobe” (“Vespers”). In addition, Teitman also provides structure through a number of motifs, most notably that of religion: the title of the book, the title of poems, in diction, and through images.

As counterpoints to such grounding structure, Teitman offers delightful surprises with his images and juxtapositions. For example, we find the jarring image of a syphilitic eye compared to the domestic image of a fig on a breakfast plate (“The Cabinet of Things Swallowed”); there’s the rusted belly of a stove disintegrating into death-cinders right next to birds teeming with life as they build their nests in a copper bowl, the rust-red matte of the stove-belly next to the copper-red shine of the bowl-womb  (“Ars Poetica”).

Litany for the City opens with the poem “Philadelphia, 1976,” an ode of sorts, filled with kaleidoscopic bursts of memory-images, personal, poignant. The title of the poem locates us not only in a geographic place, but also a point-in-time—the bicentennial of the U.S. The title brings with it the historical importance of the Declaration of Independence adopted on July 4, 1776 in Philadelphia, perhaps establishing a comparison of what the city is now in light of its auspicious beginnings, or perhaps suggesting that change is inevitable in the expanse of time, changes to city, analogous changes to self. What one is in light of what one could be.

“Philadelphia, 1976,” is a list, a litany, of images, each one inviting the reader to linger. The poem is emblematic of the detailed imagery that courses through the poem. In the first stanza, the reader is seduced with sound:

          A still night has its own cruel music:

                       the catch of bridge cables plucked

                                      by stone-scented wind; the low, bent

          hum of the Delaware, rippling like a singing saw.

The images turn more personal, when the speaker tells us, perhaps speaking of himself:

                                      Those are the nights

          when any boy would drop

                         Pabst empties off the Tacony-Palmyra

                                        Bridge, then watch the stars

           strip off their summer dresses and dive naked

            …

Towards the end of the poem, the speaker addresses the reader directly, asking the question “what’s our city made of?” Use of the pronoun “our” brings the reader into the speaker’s intimate circle. The speaker continues his active engagement with the reader, inviting the reader to go with him to the bridge, watch the fireworks, and then, in a sacramental gesture, “let // the spent flakes of soot settle on our eyelids / like wafers of host dropped onto tongues.” Surely, the poem is an ode. It is a meditation. It is a prayer for a beloved city that seems to form a portion of the speaker's sense of self.

The second poem of the collection, “Vespers,” is a narrow poem in couplets, a sensual poem, with its images that linger on the body. The poem opens with an evocative image—the smell of orange: “Peel an orange, set / a candle in the rind.” This first stanza, with its use of the imperative, coaxes the reader into feeling as if s/he were peeling the orange, feeling the press of the wax candle into waxy rind. And, as with the preceding poem, Teitman increases the intimacy with the reader through the first-person plural of “we” when speaking of the moment just before death, and juxtaposing that moment next to the waking moment with lover:

Before we die,

we taste almonds;

we wake to a lover

slipping a tongue

in our ear;

“Vespers” commingles the sacred and the corporeal with “drops of sweat // that slide like rosary beads” and the ending observation that “[f]aith // is tasting flesh / through all coverings,” even “through our thin skin that keeps / all we are from spilling out.” The poem is faithful to its title, befitting a prayer at sunset.

Teitman repeats certain words in "Vespers," e.g., "oil" and "lover." Such repetition of words, images, and motifs is one of the many strengths of this collection and is found not only in a single poem, but throughout the book. For example, let’s look at the first of three “Dear Doctor Franklin” epistolary poems, specifically attending to the repetition of work/traveling to work, sight/light, the imperfections of the body, and the word "press." The poem opens with the speaker writing to Benjamin Franklin, not surprisingly, of invention:

Everything is an invention,

I’ve come to learn. The way we press

into each other on the morning train—

that brush of cloth and wool

that seeps into us like a benediction,

or how the old woman

…

From the image of the morning train and its implied travel to work, the poem returns to the motif of traveling to work, as the old woman waits for a bus, pressing a newspaper “to her face when she thinks no one / is watching,” reminiscing about the smell of the newsprint, how it brings back memories of her work at the printing plant. In fear of stating the obvious, I’ll point out that the pressing of people into the train in the first stanzas becomes the pressing of the newspaper to the old woman’s face as she recalls working at a printing press.

After an image of her work-weary, (ink) “dye-purpled hands”, the poem immediately returns to the motif of watching mentioned above: “I see eyeglasses / on everyone nowadays,” and extends the idea of everyone having a bodily flaw (i.e, everyone needing glasses to see):

It comforts me to know that light

visits us all differently,

that the imprecisions of our bodies

can work on us …

The morning train, which opened the poem reappears: “these mornings—I watch [the city] rattle // in the hand-printed windows / of the train.” And invention resurfaces, again bridging back to the opening stanza: “I want to find the line // where the city becomes the city, / where invention becomes instrument.” Work and train and travel and seeing and light and shadow and city, they checker through the poem, finally ending on sight: “… I see how fragile our eyes will become.”

Like the "Dear Doctor Franklin" poems, "Ephesians" is another epistolary poem. It's also one of a number of prose poems in the collection and is a prime example of Teitman’s careful attention to detail in the flow of images that he crafts. The poem is addressed to “Beloved” and opens with an imperative to “remember what we used to know” followed by a series of startling images: an owl in a barn, perched on a rafter, a kitten in its beak; the speaker and the beloved walking through a field, weathered wheat brittle beneath their feet, and their hands coated with ice-cream; the beloved hatcheting at hives in an apiary, screaming “I am the Lord God of all creation!” That night, after being stung by a hive full of angry bees, the beloved’s father reads fables to (presumably) her, as a doctor wraps honey-dipped bandages around her welts. The speaker then shares an even more startling image:

… You opened your mouth and let the doctor reach in with pliers, let him pull out one bee after another from under your swollen tongue, and let him hold each corpse—glistened with spit—up to the windowpane, before dropping it in a jar by your bedside. You carried that jar with you always, half-filled with their dried bodies, like kernels of corn.

The poem has religious overtones, the title itself bringing into context the Epistle to the Ephesians, a book from the Second Testament. The poem shares a number of characteristics with Epistle to the Ephesians. Of course, both are epistles. In addition, bees feature prominently in the poem, which echoes the importance of bees to the Ephesians. The Ephesians were once devotees of the Greek goddess Artemis, her temple at Ephesus being one of the ‘seven wonders of the ancient world.’ Bees were one of her trademarks: They were included on statues of her, her priestess’ were called bees, and Ephesian coins at one time were stamped with the image of a bee.

In addition, the beloved in the poem repeats a verse from Epistle to the Ephesians, “wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead”(5:14), which is in a section where Paul directs the Ephesians to renounce their pagan ways, to renounce fornication, impurity, and idolatry. The speaker hears the beloved say this verse while she's dreaming, after they'd fallen asleep in the hayloft. When they awake, it appears that the beloved and the speaker have eaten the bees: “In the morning the jar was empty, and our eyes were the color of nectar.” It's an eerie image that suggests the two have taken on the characteristics of what they have consumed. This is perhaps a nod to transubstantiation, the Catholic doctrine that underlies the Eucharist. As one Catholic explains: “Ordinary food is consumed and becomes that which consumes it. In the Eucharist, we consume God and become that which we consume.” What a fascinating possible reading—that the beloved and the speaker have consumed the bees and have either become bee-like or become in the likeness of Artemis.

Along with “Ephesians,” there are a number of other prose poems in the collection, including an ambitious prose-poem sequence called “Metropolitan Suite,” which is in the last section of the book. “Metropolitan Suite” is comprised of fourteen prose-poems, all dealing with “city.” Each prose-poem section contains treatment of specific details, as well as elements that thread throughout the sequence. Take for example the first prose poem in the sequence (which can be read here in the first paragraph.) In this poem, the specific details concern music. The poem opens with a command to “Sing!” A woman plays a mandolin. Men chant. The rousing music of a carousel is at full tilt and the speaker admonishes us to lilt “Yes! Thank God you found it, my treasure, my prize, my jewel of the Americas” when we receive a black umbrella. The poem ends with us hearing the woman, as she sings for days “city, my love.” And in this poem, one of the elements that connects it to other poems is the presence of a museum, “People from across the world came to reclaim their losses from the museum.” The museum here  echoes other poems in the book (e.g., “The Cabinet of Things Swallowed”), as well as other poems in the prose-poem sequence (e.g., “The museum and its wall of eyes” in the third poem of the sequence.)

However, in this first prose-poem in “Metropolitan Suite,” the cherry-on-top for this reader is the surreal feel as we expand from that of a particular city into that of a mythic, universal city: “A woman sits on a statue of Lenin” the speaker tells us, and we think a city in Russia perhaps, or maybe Seattle or possibly Las Vegas or New York City, each with a statue of Lenin. “This is Brotherly Love” the speaker says, and we feel an aspect of Philadelphia enter our understanding. Oh, “[t]his is the City of the Big Shoulders,” the speaker continues, and we weave in the energy of Chicago, and maybe even factor in Carl Sandberg’s poem of the same name, in which the speaker of that poem calls Chicago the "City of the Big Shoulders." A single city setting—a woman sitting on a statue, men chanting from the square, a city with a museum, a river, a city filled with people who have a love of umbrellas. One city that is at the same time a litany of cities that is at the same time the universal city that transcends all cities.

“Metropolitan Suite” is a gift of image and language. And that is how it is with each poem in Teitman’s debut book Litany for the City. Each poem offers something tangible and memorable. Teitman's mindful and creative use of detail, juxtaposition, anaphora, the theme of city, and numerous motifs, creates an engaging world. Filled with finely-chiseled poems that lean toward the lyric, Litany for the City is a compelling read that engages the reader from beginning to end.

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[a poem from Litany for the City]

The City That Swallowed the Sea

I want to forget the city that swallowed the sea,

where the churches unbreak bread and send old men

onto their hymnaled knees, where the streets sing

like handbells and the night cracks like a broken bottle

crushed under the heel of a priest taking confessions,

where the newsmen huddle on a street corner

under evening editions while the rain skins

their stubbled chins and the creeping asphalt

licks at the face of the shoreline still,

sipping at the sea, sipping at the salt

that steams up from the waves each sweaty night

and blankets the shoreline in a tight knit

of creamy silt, and I remember the prayers I said,

with my knees cupped in sand,

how I prayed to the saints for an intercession,

how it came like a punch to the blood,

wrapped its fingers around the throat of my blood,

squeezed the ribs of my blood until I could feel

the nicked edges of broken-blood ribs tickling

my blood's tiny lungs, those neat, unfurled sails tacking up

and down my veins, and I remember the saint

of th e city, our patron and the patron of bookkeepers,

the patron against lead poisoning, the patron of shims

and tambourines, the patron of hiccups and tin whistles,

patron of pandemics and against pandemics,

of ironworkers and against ironworkers, and I want to forget

when I was five, and our teacher told us to draw

a picture of ourselves, and I drew the skyline above the sea,

said I was changing my name to "The City,"

and she leaned in close and said that I would never be

the city that swallowed the sea, and my face

turned warm, and her breath was the dry hush

of the sea as it slides each day from the city,

and we rope it and haul it back like a brindle calf

with three legs tied, and we drink it a little

each day, and the censusman knocks every morning

to measure how much we drank,

and I want to forget our duty to be the city

that swallowed the sea, to be the saints of the c ity

that swallowed the sea, and I want to forget those streets

that ribboned and choked and split my bones,

that sea that skipped down the avenues of my nerves

and planted a kiss on the tin y bronze bell

that hangs—unpolished—from the stem of my brain.

“The City That Swallowed the Sea” was first published in Pleiades.

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Nancy Chen Long lives with her woodsman husband and blue-eyed dog in a small cedar cabin in the forested hills of south-central Indiana. She volunteers with the local Writers Guild, offering free poetry workshops, facilitating creative writing and feedback groups, and assisting with two reading series’—one for prose writers and another for poets. You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in RHINO, The Louisville Review, Roanoke Review, Found Poetry Review, and Adanna Literary Journal.

An Interview with Poet Ryan Teitman

Every clock in our house
had unfinished business.
Every note my father
struck in the dark
before he left for work
was another life waiting—

-from “Hard Light Through Hemlock,” by Ryan Teitman

Ryan Teitman, a 2004 graduate of Penn State’s English Department, is the author of the poetry collection Litany for the City. This, his first book, won the A. Poulin Jr. Prize and is published by BOA Editions. Teitman, formerly the Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, recently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the recipient of an  AWP Intro Journal Award in poetry, the winner of the Mid-American Review’s Fineline Competition, and a finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, The Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Third Coast, and many other journals. Teitman worked as a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia before earning an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English at Indiana University. He currently works as the Emerging Writing Lecturer at Gettysburg College.

*   *   *

Ryan and I met in 2009 at Indiana University. He was a student in IU’s MFA program and I had the wonderful good fortune to read a few of his
early drafts, drafts so finely honed and beautiful that they were more like polished gems. I approached Ryan for this interview when I decided to review his debut book Litany for the City. (You can read the review here.) To give you a flavor of his poetry before we get into the interview, here’s a quick overview of the book: 

Litany for the City is a slim volume of richly-textured poems, full of exquisitely detailed and surprising images. As the title suggests, the theme of the city is a primary impulse in the book, be it a specific city such as Philadelphia or London, or the hazed impression of a generic city, or the repetition of the word “city.” Also weaving in and out to bind the collection together are religious elements, evident simply by glancing at the title of the book and the title of the poems in the table of contents, e.g., “Vespers,” “Cathedrals,” “A Sunday Box.” Litany for the City is an impressive debut with its thought-provoking, sensory-filled, and sometimes fascinatingly strange, details. Before continuing with the interview, I’ll leave you with an example of such detail, a snippet from a section of the prose-poem sequence "Metropolitan Suite":

Sunday morning in Jackson Heights, the street vendors cook their tamales—the ripe green smell of peppers roasting black on burners, the subway station rattling overhead like a misshapen music box. On Market, the Chinese food cart sells fresh cuttlefish; men and women wedge their briefcases under their arms and hold their order with both hands, letting the tentacles dangle loosely over the plate’s edge. (64)

—Nancy Chen Long 

(This interview was conducted via email in March 2013.)

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Some say that one of the primary difficulties a poet may have with a first manuscript is shaping it into a book, as opposed to a collection of disparate poems. Litany for the City coheres strongly around place/physicality, the theme of city/body. Was that something that you set out to do, or something that unfolded as you went along, or perhaps a last minute epiphany? Please share how you shaped the manuscript.

RT: I believe that—consciously or subconsciously—we write about our obsessions. I was writing the book when I lived in Indiana, and most of the poems dealt with Philadelphia, the city I had just left. Slowly, as I continued writing, I realized I wasn’t just writing about one place, but the nature of place itself, especially the idea of cities. The final section, “Metropolitan Suite,” came to the book late. I thought it was a separate project, but I realized it was the idea that my manuscript had been leading to the whole time. Once I made that change, the book went from getting no interest from publishers to being a semi-finalist and finalist in several contests before winning the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions.


Religious references and allusions are woven throughout the book: the title of the book itself, titles of poems (e.g., “A Sunday Box, “Ephesians”), imagery and diction (e.g. “leaving / baskets of baby fish / at the doors of every church,” “wafers of host,” repeated references to hemlock, fish, chant, prayer.) How does religion/faith factor into your writing? 

RT: I was raised Catholic and it influenced the way I think about language. The poetic devices I tend to gravitate to (litany, anaphora, repetition) are the ones I heard on Sundays at Mass. As a poet, I believe that language has power, and the first place I learned that was in the church. In the Mass, the priest turns bread and wine into flesh and blood through prayer—through language. And one of the core beliefs of Catholicism is that the transformation is not metaphorical. It’s literal. Seeing words have that kind of power had a profound impact on me.


Have you been involved in promoting the book? If so, please tell us little about that process.

RT: I try to do as many readings as I can. It’s difficult since I teach full-time, but I believe that getting out there and giving readings is one of the best ways to spread the word about the book.


The poems in Litany for the City are beautifully detailed, imagistic. One of my favorites is “Ode to a Hawk with Wings Burning.” Can you tell us a little about how that poem came to be? When did you first draft it? How did it start? Was it heavily revised, or was it one of those born fully formed?

RT: “Ode to a Hawk with Wings Burning” came from two separate places. One was watching the hawks in the field across the street from my apartment in Indiana. The other was a story I heard about a boy trying to fill a water balloon with gasoline and having the balloon explode in his face. (The boy was okay.) Neither had anything to do with the other, but by some strange accident, the two images became conflated and I got the visual of a hawk on fire flying through the air. It stuck. The poem happened pretty quickly after that. I remember a particularly frustrating round of revision regarding the poem’s ending, but the rest came pretty fully formed.


The poems in the book lean toward the lyric. Do you write narrative poetry?

RT: The poems in Litany for the City were mostly lyric, but the poems in my new manuscript have a much stronger tendency toward narrative, which I’m interested in exploring—especially the stories from my family.


Tell us a little about your writing process, e.g. do you write daily? do you prefer to write in silence, or while walking? What inspires you?

RT: I wish I wrote daily. But I’m just not like that—I go through spurts; I’ll write furiously for a few weeks, then not write anything for a month. I tend to write better in the mornings. I’m useless, creatively, after about 8 p.m.


When you write, do you imagine a reader? If so, what type of reader?

RT: It sounds incredibly self-centered, but my ideal reader is me. Let me explain that: I love reading and I love poetry. I know the feeling of reading a poem that you absolutely love, a poem that makes you want to tell someone about it. I once stopped a conversation and made an entire room listen to a poem I had read in a literary journal. That’s the kind of poem that I strive to write—a poem that I, as a reader, would want to share with others.


Generally speaking, how do you approach revision? Do you use a checklist or have any tried-and-true practices?

RT: I peck away at poems for a long time. I seem to do my best revising when I walk away and let the poem sit in the back of my brain for a while. I get ideas for revision in the shower or while I’m doing something completely unrelated to writing. When I let my mind wander, I’ll find I’ve rewritten a line or image in my head. One thing that’s always important is reading a poem out loud. If my poem doesn’t sound right out loud, that means it’s not right on the page.


When do you remember first being interested in poetry. Was there a mentor who encouraged you? How did you decide pursue poetry academically?

RT: My first poetry teacher was Jeffrey Morgan, a terrific poet who was teaching at Penn State when I was an undergraduate there. He turned me on to so many good poets: Thomas Lux, D.A. Powell, Matthea Harvey.

In graduate school I had many terrific teachers, but my mentor was the poet Ross Gay. He taught me how to write poems out of love. Even a poem of anger should come, fundamentally, out of a place of love. He taught me how to organize a collection of poems. And he taught me a few moves on the basketball court too.


You teach creative writing. There are those who would argue that creative writing can’t be taught. And there are those who say that MFA programs squash creativity and result in cookie-cutter writing. What are your thoughts on these issues?

RT: I live in a house that shares a wall with my neighbors. Their son is learning to play the trumpet. I can hear him playing “Jingle Bells” now. He’s getting better, week by week. I’m sure he has a teacher. I was taught creative writing. I teach creative writing. I see my students become better writers by the end of the semester. So I can see that it’s possible to teach writing. And poetry today is anything but cookie-cutter. It’s all over the place, which is a beautiful thing. But I also think there are worthwhile discussions to be had about how writing is taught. I worry that we focus too much on craft and not enough on play, imagination, and creativity, which are equally important to great writing. An MFA program may not be right for everyone, but that doesn’t mean we should get rid of all of them. An MFA was certainly the right choice for me.


Some poets eschew writing prompts, while others consider them useful. What do you think of writing prompts? Do you use them in your own work?

RT: I’m a huge fan of imitation. When I read a poem that I love, I try to write my own version of it. I wrote “The City That Swallowed the Sea” after reading the long, winding, one-sentence poems of Steve Scafidi’s terrific For Love of Common Words. Creating my own voice as a poet has been a long process of incorporating little bits of the writers I love into something my own.


Who are you reading now? Do you have a favorite poet or poets?

RT: I’ve been writing book reviews lately so I’m reading a lot of contemporary work. Right now I’m reading L. Annette Binder’s short story collection, Rise; Natalie Diaz’s debut poetry book, When My Brother Was an Aztec; and Amy Leach’s book of essays, Things That Are. My first instinct is to name a string of favorite poets instead of just one but I’m going to be bold instead. Favorite poet: Adam Zagajewski.


What are you working on now?

RT: I’m working on my second collection of poems, tentatively titled The Dream Protects the Dreamer.


Finally, what advice would you give to an aspiring writer?

RT: Read as much as you can. Write as much as you can. Be generous. Carry a pen at all times. My pen of choice is the Uniball Vision Rollerball: Fine Point.


A sampling of Ryan’s poems on-line:

• “Ode, Elegy, Aubade, Psalm,” DIAGRAM
• “Ode to a Hawk with Wings Burning,” Sycamore Review 
• selections from “Metropolitan Suite,” West Branch Wired 
• “Hard Light Through Hemlock,” Waccamaw 
• listen to Ryan read “Cathedrals,” “Ephesians,” and “Little Litany” on The Poets Weave

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Nancy Chen Long lives with her woodsman husband and blue-eyed dog in a small cedar cabin in the forested hills of south-central Indiana. She volunteers with the local Writers Guild, offering free poetry workshops, facilitating creative writing and feedback groups, and assisting with two reading series’—one for prose writers and another for poets. You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in RHINO, The Louisville Review, Roanoke Review, Found Poetry Review, and Adanna Literary Journal.

A Review of Burden of Solace and Interview with Poet, Teneice Durrant Delgado

Burden of Solace
Cervena Barva Press
www.cervenabarvapress.com
by Teneice Durrant Delgado
Copyright 2012

Burden of Solace, a review by Barbara Sabol

Teneice Durrant Delgado’s chapbook, Burden of Solace, offers us the double pleasure of a satisfying read and an important education:  the reader is treated to poems not only compelling in content, deft in craft, but also bristling with history.  Little known history:  the Irish slave trade in 17^th century West Indies is the vivid and tragic backdrop for this collection of narrative poems. 

The ten poems that comprise Burden of Solace form a narrative of a young Irish girl abducted into slavery by the British, transported as human cargo and branded (“. . .We were led to the branding/stand, Master’s iron rolling in a fire”) on a slave ship, laboring in the cane fields, routinely raped by slave drivers (“. . .It became a ritual/picking and being plucked”), floating her new-born, slave-bred baby “home on the sea” rather than surrendering him to Master in “Kosoko.” The story unfolds in clear linear progression with the poet, in persona as a young girl, recounting her journey from her mother’s arms in Galway to a slave hut in Barbados.  Little solace afforded the Irish girl/mother enslaved.

The narrative arc of the collection occurs with the poem “Solace,” in which she is mated like a “breeding mare” with the slaves, hiding her reviled white face against the cot when  “. . .twice a/day a black man was unchained outside the hut, forced through the/door. . .and it went like this/for months. . .”  Finally, when Not-John, a prominent figure in the collection, is whipped into the room, she asserts her personhood through their anything-but-tender connection, making him truly see her as they join; thus, for a brief time, she reclaims her identity:

          . . .when he pushed into me, I looked at his face.  And his

          shimmering molasses-hate eyes didn’t see me, just white          

          . . .and I wanted him to see I was

          Irish, forbidden.  I wrapped my limbs around his cross-scarred

          trunk, held hard as I could.  I whispered some scraps of an old

          Irish, forbidden, lullaby, the only offering I had to make.  He wept

          inside me. . .

Delgado’s sure use of prosodic features throughout the poems animates characters and action.  In particular, the speech line, set in italics, naturally flows through the poems, breathing  life into the narrative.  She captures the diction of the time in credible and rhythmic lines such as the voice of Maris, “the seen-too-much-old,/half-Irish/mulatto” who warns the younger female slaves:

          . . .And if you stop

          bleeding, she said, in Irish, forbidden,

          Don’t ever let yourself love that child.

                                                              Don’t

          you ever think that child yours. . .

The most poignant example of speech seaming the narrative occurs in the poem “Mary-Margaret,” as the title character, the girl’s mother, chides her, knowing she will never see her daughter again on earth, “. . .You must be very/good, inion.  If you are bad, I will/be lonely in Heaven.”  The poem closes with the most moving lines, I believe, of the entire book: the speaker, gone just “a fortnight” but already initiated into the wretchedness of slavery, laments:

          Mary-Margaret O’Conry, don’t think

          on me, don’t whisper my name

          over so many polished beads, a litany

          . . .

          Mama, forgive your

          child the sin of survival.

Among the prosodic elements employed is the rhetorical device of repetition: the pairing of the words, “Irish, forbidden,” recurs like a tethering refrain, within and between poems. The utterance serves as a resonant reminder of what has been lost―language, culture, Irish identity― all now illicit.  Forbidden or not, the women use their native tongue to curse, to pray, to lament.  They risk the comfort of prayer in Irish, “Áiméan, forbidden” in the poems “Ann Glover” and “Kosoko.”  In the poem, “Adam,” in response to brutal rape in the sugar cane fields “. . .the women cursed [the drivers] in Irish, forbidden.”  The utterance punctuates “Solace,” alternating with “Ireland, forbidden” five times throughout the poem, the words a lodestone pointing home. And in the final poem of the book, “Jamaica,” the speaker proclaims, “. . .never again will/I cry out for Ireland, forbidden” as she walks to the hanging tree.  That language resides at the core of self comprises a secondary yet equally powerful theme that further unifies the poems in this collection:  Irish dovetails seamlessly with English, lending authenticity to the narrative and intensifying the speaker’s isolation in a foreign and harsh environment.

Solace possesses both a cinematic sweep and sharp focus on tangible detail. The poems become a lens that pans a dominated and impoverished Galway, the high sea voyage to Barbados, sugar cane fields running to a distant horizon, squalor quarters.  The “Look-out Tree” high on the hill.  The speaker renders an island landscape and its savage conditions in both panoramic and close-up, intimate frames.  The view is stark, horrific and heartbreaking; descriptions of violence graphic, no holds barred.  The reader visualizes the Irish women’s “rows of burnt skin” in the fields (“Adam”); the camera zooming in as “her work-bent fingers worry over imaginary/rosaries for three long days” before she is “lassoed. . .dragged up the hill to the Look-out Tree,/hung. . .” (“Anne Glover”); a just-born babe whose first breath never arrived “wrapped in a sugar sack,” the new mother’s blood “making a trail/of rose petals in the dirt” (“Kosoko”). 

In the space of ten poems, Delgado takes the reader on a sad, shocking journey, back to a century when Irish families were torn apart by the West Indies slave trade.  Through the experience of an unnamed Irish girl, the reader can fully imagine a cruel chapter in history.  Dramatic though the story may be, the speaker’s voice is matter-of-fact, perhaps numbed to atrocity, as she reveals a shadow-side of British history: “a story: water, hell, the/consequence of empire.” I admire the poet’s commitment, in terms of rigorous research, passion for her subject and an authentic voice, and I am thankful for the brave and accomplished poems in Burden of Solace.

Interview with Poet, Teneice Durrant Delgado, by Barbara Sabol

Burden of Solace is a powerful and important book, for the strength of the individual poems and the story they tell collectively about the Irish slave trade―a little-known and shameful piece of history.  The speaker’s voice in Solace is compelling―authentic and unadorned; a dry-eyed description of the conditions of an Irish girl’s slavery in Barbados.  Her voice resonated long after I read the book and I remain haunted by the story and its telling.  Of course, I had the pleasure of hearing you read from this book at the Third Thursday Poetry reading last October, and so the poems became that much more audible and animated.  With each re-read, I am even more riveted by the strong sense of place and person in these poems; there is a cinematic quality to the poems and the narrative progression through the book, which leads me to the first question:

B:  The speaker’s voice in these persona poems is consistently credible and genuine. The poems read like memoir in verse.  I wonder how you found your “protagonist’s” voice, and whether she may be a composite character from your research.

T: First thank you so much, Barbara, for inviting me out to read at Third Thursday and for reading Burden of Solace. The voice of the narrator in these poems came to me after much reading and research. I took an interest in the Irish slave trade when I happened upon a book called Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl by Kate McCafferty. It is a fictional account of the trafficking, but it was very rich in detail. From there I found To Hell or Barbados by Sean O’Callaghan, which is part history, part non-fiction account of his own research in present day Montserrat and Barbados. When I began researching this topic, there were very few resources, and most were citing the same three or four authors or state papers. On a shoe-string, I managed a visit to Manchester, England and spoke with a trans-Atlantic scholar, tried to see some plantation records (I was denied access, of course. You can’t just walk into the Rylands Library in Manchester and ask to see 400 year old papers.) I kept reading and re-reading, knowing I wasn’t going to use all of the material I had found, but hoping that it would filter into my subconscious. Then I started imagining myself in these situations: being branded, being isolated, giving birth. That’s when the narrator’s voice started coming out.

B:  The scenes and experiences described in the poems are disturbing, often horrific.  How much

did you identify with the “I” in the poems, and how did putting your poet-self in her shoes impact you while you were writing the book.

T:  Many of the events I describe were written about in detail in stewards’ and missionaries’ reports. For example, pregnant women were, in fact, expected to dig out a little trench in the ground so they could lay face down to receive the whippings. Women were hung for singing or praying in Irish. The women and children were raped daily, and expected to continue working. Several nights I had to stop writing, or cried my way through a draft.

B: There is quite a cast of recurring characters in the book: Not-John, Master D, Maris, and others. Are they based on anecdotal research or completely of your making?

T: The characters that the narrator meets are composites of people that I would expect to be the most influential in a young slave girl’s life. I was wary of making stereotypes, so I tried to give each of them a distinct personality.

B: Even though the same character speaks each poem, the poems form a kind of theater of voices created by poignant lines of monologue and dialogue. Often an utterance takes a dialectal turn of phrase or a Irish word appears. The speech lines are so natural– how did you come upon the speech patterns and language?

T: I think by not thinking too hard about it. I listened to old Irish hymns and read poems. I looked up Old Irish words. I didn’t want to force it. So, along with the research on dates and places, I researched songs and poems and let it all filter through my subconscious.

B: Many characters reappear throughout the book, and they all are all named (even the refuse-to-take-a-western-name, “Not-John”). However, our main subject, who speaks every poem, goes unnamed. I wonder if that was because self-reference didn’t suit the poems, or perhaps because she lost her Irish identity so utterly, that she no longer possessed even her own name.

T: The choice not to name her was deliberate, as was the choice not to give the master’s full name. In regard to the narrator, I often called her “Solace” in my head, since the impetus for this collection was the quote that described the plantation owners need for Irish girls “to solace them.” But, yes, she goes unnamed throughout the sequence; though references are made to what she was called by her mother and what the other Irish girls call her, once she becomes pregnant. Names are so vitally important to our sense of identity, so it seemed fitting leave her unnamed as she struggles with this new, forced and wholly unwelcome life as a slave in Barbados. I didn’t name the master simply because so many masters are already named, their names inked into history books and state papers, ledgers and on the sides of important buildings. No more ink needs to be spent on them.

B: Solace intersects poetry and history is a truly engaging way. I can think of a few other books which brave a poetic re-imagining of history. One such example is Linda Bierds’ The Profile Makers, in which a Civil War survivor examines the plate-glass negatives depicting her family and battle scenes; another is our fellow Spalding University's Low-Residence MFA alum, Frank X Walker’s When Winter Come: The Ascension of York, a book of persona poems in the voice of the explorer, York, who accompanied Lewis and Clarke. Yours is also an ambitious and successful first person journey in a specific historical time frame. Did you model Solace on any particular work of poetry profiling a chapter in history?

T: I was greatly influenced by the first book of York’s travels, Buffalo Dance, the journey of York by Frank X Walker. Hearing Frank read from that collection and Ascension, you get a sense of how much research went into those poems. There is integrity in the research that comes through in the books.

B: On that same note, what role do you think that poetry plays in chronicling history, especially the suppressed underbelly of history, such as the Irish slave trade in the 17th century? I came away from Solace believing that poetry can be revelatory not just about human experiences but also as a powerful truth-telling medium regarding human history.

T: I think persona poems in particular can create a very powerful bridge between history and human experience. The poems create a space for intense emotional experiences in a way that reading a history report or an article may not, and may get at some truths about human experience that facts may not.

B:  Do you think that the revelations in Burden of Solace are relevant to current times?

T: I really hope that this series of poems creates a conversation about present day trafficking, especially in the United States. Many people think that human trafficking is an Asian or an Eastern European problem, but the United States has an alarmingly profitable human trafficking industry.

B:  I’m really interested in how the book came into being. In the author’s note, you mention a
“random” visit to the UK and a fortuitous meeting with Dr. Natalie Zacek. Depending on how
one feels about randomness, do you feel you were destined, in a sense, to write this book?

T: Yes, I think there was some kind of destiny at hand. Coming across the copy of Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl, seeing these little stories about her materialize over the course of six years, crying with her at night, and finding someone willing to publish them. It’s been a long, but rewarding experience.

B: At the risk of needing a spoiler alert, I must ask about the closing of the final poem, “Jamaica.” It ends on an ominous note, opening up several possible resolutions for the poems’ speaker, rather than signaling “The End.” Did you intend that the reader create her own ending to the speaker’s story, or does the poem signal that the main character chooses the one means at her disposal to regain control of her life?

T: I have a very definite ending in my mind, but yes, I was uncomfortable with spelling it out for the reader. There’s enough ambiguity that, if the reader was particularly hopefully, they could craft a different ending than the one I have in mind.

B: What project(s) are you currently working on? Do you feel inclined to take on another historical or even mythological tale in persona mode?

T: I am very interested in the nurses of the world wars and Vietnam. Often we hear of the men in the battle field, but not the women who saw the carnage of war every day. I’m hoping to do some research and perhaps even document some stories before beginning a series of persona poems about their service.

B: A question about balance and the writing life: I know that you’re very involved with other literary projects, such as Winged City Press Chapbooks and New Sins Press, while earning a Master’s Degree in Community Counseling AND being a mom. That’s one full plate. How do you manage to carve poetry writing time into that kind of a schedule?

T: It happens in fits and starts. I’ll turn ideas over for a long time in my head, then when I get a quiet afternoon, I spit it all out. Then I can pick it apart and revise when I get moments. I have a very supportive family and a couple of amazing writer-friends, particularly Stacia Fleegal, who has read every word and scrutinized every comma I’ve ever written.

Thank you, Teneice, for shedding light on the subject of the Irish slave trade in such a tightly and masterfully woven series of poems. I await your next book!

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About the Poet

Teneice Durrant Delgado is a co-founder and poetry editor for Blood Lotus: an online literary journal, and a proud graduate of Spalding Unviersity's Low-Residency MFA. She is the publisher and managing editor for Winged City Press Chapbooks and also serves on the editorial board for New Sins Press. Her Poems have appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Heartland Review, The Furnace Review, Pirene's Fountain, Glass, Pisgah Review and Soundings East. She is the author of two chapbooks, Flame Above Flame and The Goldilocks Complex. Teneice lives in Dayton, Ohio, where she is currently pursuing a degree in CommunityCounseling at the University of Dayton.

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Guest blogger Barbara Sabol lives in the Great Lakes area and has an M. A. in Communication Disorders, an MFA, and a BA in French. She is the author of two chapbooks: Original Ruse (Accents Publishing, 2011) and The Distance Between Blues (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, most recently The Examined Life, San Pedro River Review, The Louisville Review, on the Tupelo Press Poetry Project web site, and in the collection, Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems (Accents Publishing). An essay and book review/interview have also been published in Public-Republic.