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Lineage, Boundaries, and Form in A Conversation between Poet Edward J. Carvalho and Mitch James Mitch James: Form seems to be centric in this latest collection of work. Instances like tracing the Carvalho lineage in “The Nuclear Family,” dividing “If the radiance of a thousand suns”: Songs of the American Hiroshima into three parts that seem at times disparate, at times unified, and then offering a textual countdown that leaves readers in despondency have provoked much of my thinking thus far. I’m curious (and I believe fellow readers will be, too) how these many poems relate, and whether you feel that any of them being published individually will force them to lose structural integrity as they’re pried from their poetic ancestry? What can you say about your attention to form, motivation, inspiration, or otherwise regarding “If the radiance of a thousand suns”: Songs of the American Hiroshima?
To expand further on the idea of form, you are certainly correct to point out that numeric sequences/numerology play a big part in the cohesion of American Hiroshima. On the one hand, the number three remains a structural focus: We encounter three sections of the manuscript, which may make the reader think about the first atomic test site, “Trinity”; there is, of course, the Christian cultural trope of the trinity in the “Father, Son, Holy Ghost” and how that overlaps with the patriarchal commentary in “The Nuclear Family” section of the manuscript (the countdown, incidentally, was a nod to Saul Williams’s, said the shotgun to the head and his treatment of matriarchal/patriarchal tensions); and we also have dovetailing off the “Nuclear Family” section the further play on three—, e.g., the father, mother, and child. On the other hand, I also use seven in the symbolic sense as a Western referent to perfection as well as its relation to the seven cities said to be targeted in the al Qaeda “American Hiroshima” plot. Here we are, almost serendipitously related to the topic at hand, speaking of the poetic use of numbers like three and seven in the shadow of the seventh anniversary of 9/11. Just as I recently remarked by way of an artist’s statement for a new journal that accepted three poems from American Hiroshima, all of these numerological and form(al) synchronicities create a “synchronous city” of poems that interact with one another in their own way. To address the final part of your question on the motivations and inspirations behind the production of American Hiroshima, there’s a long history there, which we simply won’t have enough time to address here. But, suffice it to say, the imagery of nuclear terror/disaster has resided in my consciousness since third grade when a student brought in materials related to the Three Mile Island disaster. Years later in the early '80s, of course, you had the Cold War dramatizations of nuclear holocaust in films such as The Day After and Threads (I had not encountered the latter of these two films until only recently—The Day After, however, was for me a seminal moment that crystallized the realities of nuclear annihilation). Also, bear in mind that I’m a child of a child of the nuclear age dawn—that is, my mother was a baby boomer. I distinctly remember her telling me about the various “duck and cover” drills where she and her fellow classmates would hear a mock attack siren and hide under the desks waiting for Armageddon to arrive. Those images never really left me and I continue to wrestle with them even more so today as new reports emerge daily on the black market trafficking of nuclear materials and the various political instabilities around the globe which could quite easily lead to world war. MJ: “Is this where it started? With his father Abel? I never knew the man, a two dimensional phantom of portraiture on the mantle, Grandpa Black Headstone on cemetery Sunday mornings.” Among the many moving lines of American Hiroshima, I found this to be the pith of a central theme: origin and destination. American Hiroshima is both a personal divulgence and a cultural indictment. However, the origin and destination (or conclusion, if you will) are muddied with uncertainty. Whether it be the “black fuse of Father Bomb,” or a “man’s last sentence in countdown,” the beginning of one and ending of all is a riddle beyond us. Some texts direct readers’ hopes to a time when men will be men and women will be autonomous and everything will be right with God. American Hiroshima, an often searing and apocalyptic text, is not this specious tale. It leaves the reader in a position of vulnerability akin to the ones created by the likes of Faulkner, with Quentin Compson’s suicide at the end of The Sound and the Fury or McCarthy’s character, Billy, in The Crossing. And as icing on the cake you tack on a blurb from The Bhagavad-Gita about faith; the text seems void of such a thing as faith. There seems to be little salvation or remedy expressed in American Hiroshima. Individually, are we more than mannerisms and compulsions handed down to us through our biological lineage? As a species, are we more than a ripple undulating from a forgotten origin, a ripple stretching to an unknown demise? What kinds of answers do you expect the reader to discover from American Hiroshima when these questions are applied to it? EC: Well, these are certainly enormously probing questions, not just for me to consider in relation to the manuscript, but also in the manner by which readers may approach the content. In some respects, I think that engaging with the apocalyptic forces people to examine the denial, the fear, the reckoning, associated with political and social complicities. To borrow from Cornel West here, I see my Songs of the American Hiroshima as a way for people to examine America’s “night side,” to debate with the terrors we either create or encounter. The lack of faith and/or remedy you cite above as something experienced, for me, means that the work is doing its job—it’s making you as a reader and critic examine the content in a way to find a solution to the problem for yourself. If poetry does its job, then the consciousness of the readership/audience is raised in some capacity or another—it means that the bonds of communication, even if that transmission begins with the emotional—have been established between poet and reader. I think here of Eliot, who said, and I paraphrase here, that “A poem can be experienced emotionally before it is understood.” If, on the other hand it falls flat, then the answers that manifest demonstrate, for me, anyway, that the questions weren’t all that probing to begin with. What was that line from “Tookie” Williams (as played by Jamie Foxx in Redemption)—something like, “An idea is not an idea it if fails to be dangerous.” Poetry constantly walks the line between the literal and metaphysic, so the absence of tangible certainty, for lack of a better term, comes with the territory. Isn’t that why most people find themselves drawn to fiction rather than poetry? And that’s no slap at fiction writers, many of whom are better poets than poets themselves (think Melville here, for starters), but most people want the answers fed to them than work at investigating and engaging critically with aesthetic materials that ask them to seek out some semblance of “truth,” no matter how unstable and untenable that “truth” may later prove to be. That’s not to say that I believe in composing incomprehensible works—no, not at all. I do want my poems to be accessible, otherwise they fail in their resonance. They have to correspond with T. Omits, as my old friend and mentor, Jim Scrimgeour used to say: that is, with “The Ordinary Man (and Woman) In The Street.” But, by the same token, T. Omits has to do some work and put in long hours doing his/her research, too. The responsibilities are reciprocal. Remember also that the text is bookended by The Bhagavad-Gita—in an almost alpha-omega way. For the epigraph (and prefix of the book title), I chose to incorporate Oppenheimer’s use of the “I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” which he quoted (in one variant or another, and there is a lot of good scholarship that debates the versions of his recitation) at the onset of the first bomb test at Trinity. But then, as you so rightly point out, I end the text with lines from The Bhagavad-Gita, also. In some ways, I suppose, my choice to do this not only was one of adding cohesion to the overall theme, but also as a means of reclaiming the text from its ideological significance. It’s interesting to note how the lines traditionally infer the awakening of the atomic age (even quoted recently in the latest Indiana Jones film, incidentally), rather than as spiritual poetry. Talk about specious—most people think that Oppenheimer wrote these lines, I’m sure. So, again, like West and his philosophical approach of bearing witness, I dialogue with the dead to gain the attention of the living. That’s where the manuscript begins—with the deceased grandfather, Abel, and that’s where it ends—with the same black hole of the unknown and what lies beyond for our political and social fates. MJ: I know that we have discussed the ordinance of American Hiroshima, and I don’t mean to belabor your motives for organization and form, but I’d like you to dialogue a bit here about how the second section fits with the first two. I have my own “ideas” of course, but section II “Please Stand By: Atomic Miscellany of These States” appears unique in comparison with sections one and three. Such poems as “A bachelor takes his pound of pasta seriously,” and “Late night logic from a formal postal worker,” are notable in and of themselves, but seem to be disparate from the collective piece. Is this my poor reading here, or are the connections surreptitious? Do the poems that seem not to “fit” comfortably simply function as “Miscellany” or garnish on a prime rib? EC: It’s important that the poems in this section (or the other two, for that matter) not be divorced from their sectional epigraphs or the excerpted “nuclear” Oxford English Dictionary lead-ins. That is, if we examine that the “Please Stand By” section begins with the Czeslaw Milosz poem, “Song on the End of the World,” we should pay particular attention to how this poem ends: “No one believes it’s happening now”—that is, the end of the world. He mentions the bees pollinating, children being born, etc., which is his acknowledgement of our acknowledgment that the daily happenings of the world continue in the social realities while the political realities may offer a vastly different exigency. Thus, the poems you draw particular attention to in your question—"A bachelor takes his pound of pasta seriously” and “Late night logic from a former postal worker” demonstrate in a similar way the same kinds of everyday everyman/woman occurrences that in the one sense inform our existence and in the other, obscure our ability to prognosticate the larger endgame (be it of hegemony, a Gramscian consent, or other similar kind of machination that we’ve allowed to control our collective destiny). So I suppose in some capacity, the “Please Stand By” chapter is both an observation and a condemnation, a celebration of the ordinary and a screed against stasis. The section serves many purposes, I think. It’s also wise when developing content of such extraordinary bleakness to provide the reader with some moments of levity—imagine if the manuscript didn’t contain some of these elements. I think of Robert Barsky’s latest essay for David Downing’s Works and Days volume that I recently guest-edited[1] where he takes note of the importance of a Bakhtinian need for laughter. Sure, in the moment of outburst, the scenarios we face can be both outrageous and yet frightening—and yet, we need to laugh in order to get back in touch with our humanity. The moments—even if they are brief here—where we find laughter in the American Hiroshima are testaments to the humanity I aim to in some way preserve. Beyond the Milosz epigraph, the “nuclear” definition from the OED is useful for expanding on the point of the need for reclaiming humanity I just touched upon. Each section features one of these kinds of varying denotations of “nuclear.” In the first section, I focus on the “nuclear lineage” for the “nuclear family,” which underscores the pervasiveness of an ideological patriarchy that runs through micro- and macrocosms of the family schema, be they the immediate familial unit or in the way we view our political leadership. The final section invokes the literal atomic “nuclear” derivatives. In the middle section, however, I draw the reader’s attention to the composition of language:
The emphasis, of course, is on the linguistic aspect or morphemes, which are: “a distinctive collocation of phonemes (as the free form pin or the bound form -s of pins) having no smaller meaningful parts.” Notice the inclusion of the word “poet” in the OED definition of “a nuclear word.” It’s as if the word itself represents a be-all and end-all in and of itself. I was struck when I saw this because in its own way, the linguistic composition of the word “poet” embodies an essential representation—that the poet is not subject to dilution of any sort, be it political influence or otherwise. Rather, “poet” carries with it an almost unique, “holy” untamperability—and I kind of like the derivative play behind the language there. There’s also the sense that in this section the poet gives visibility to other elemental forces in our society: the impoverished bachelors, the marginalized mail handlers, the child DeJesus drowned in “six inches of gin-soaked slumber,” and so on. At the end of the analysis of this section, the “Please Stand By” is in all senses declaration, denunciation, as well as interrogation. MJ: What role does modern technology play in one’s ability to comprehend, or better yet, experience, creative arts like poetry and literature? More importantly, how much emphasis do you give the technological in your projects as a poet? For example, the commerical alluded to in “(Internet Video of) The 1971 ‘Crying Indian’ PSA Commercial” was a bit before my time. And trust me, this is not a boast, as age is often respected in this business. However, in order for me to get a better handle on what you were depicting, I went to YouTube and watched the commercial there. Not only was it instinctual for me to begin working with unfamiliar material via the Web, but it was almost mandated I do so by the poem’s title. Another example is the poem “Variations on a Theme by A.E. Stallings: Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther (King, Jr.).” knowing that A.E. Stallings is a contemporary poet, but not being too familiar with her work, I hopped on the Internet and performed in minutes what would have otherwise been hours of research. Does this easy approach take away from what should be the laborious but rewarding exegesis of a quality poem? More importantly, are you, as a poet, influenced by these “easy” avenues of discovery? Do you feel more comfortable writing a poem about a 37-year-old commercial, and titling it by name (as well as pointing to its technological origin) because any reader can get on the Internet and attain the fundamentals needed to begin understanding it? EC: There are several moving parts to this question, but I’ll do my best to provide you with a sense of how I might frame some answers here. I think in order to respond to the initial question on poetic interpretability/accessibility in relation to technology, I would have to at least first comment on the role the technological plays in my creative process—both in terms of materiality, as well how I use it as a tool for inspiration and research. The way I see it, those two components of creative and interpretative “access”—of the authorial and audiential—are inextricably linked in some fairly express ways. The poem you reference is a clear example of this theory in practice, though by no means singular. In fact, a large portion of my work comes out of this kind of technological catch-all approach to culling stories of interest from various electronic news outlets—a voluminous and almost never-ending source of the absurd, the surreal, the imaginative, the poignant, the humorous, the harrowing, the veracious, and the terrible. Most of my earlier book solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short arose from my time working as an Asset Manager in Boston, where I had access to a private work space, a company computer, and a high-speed Internet connection. From that experience, poems such as my Hunter S. Thompson poem, “‘, and the page contained only one word, “counselor”.’” began as curious series of links to links as often happens with the Web, initially prompted by the report of Thompson’s death. I eventually landed on TheSmokingGun.com link to the Pitkin County police report (which inspired the basis of the poem’s title) and provided that central image of the “counselor” that acts as refrain throughout. Similarly, the “BTK” persona poem on Dennis Rader the “Bind, Torture, Kill” serial killer, materialized after many hours poring over CNN.com and MSNBC.com news stories that were being featured shortly before the arrest. There are many examples throughout that book, most of which are cited in some way or form. In the capacity that the poems emerge from the grain of the technological, I suppose it would also be a natural if not wholly logical extension for the reader to then pursue a similar course of action when working toward peeling back the proverbial layers of the onion. It makes perfect sense to me that any modern reader (of poetry, criticism, or any other discipline) would use the immediacy of the vast pool of networked knowledge to inform themselves poetically, just as much as they would to self-diagnose if there was a medical problem, or to research any particular topic of interest. Do I think this demystifies or in some way relegates the majesty of the poetic? Does it denigrate the authenticity or the “hidden challenges” of the occultic nuances of a poem? Absolutely not. First and foremost—and you’ll hear me say this time and again—the poems should be accessible to the reader, and if the access is facilitated by the same source that provided the moment when what Walt Whitman referred to as “afflatus” moves through the imagination and the soul of the author, then so be it. Poetry is shared and cooperative in that sense, and technology is but one vehicle used to merge that experience. Now, with respect to the specifics on the “Crying Indian” poem—the memory of the television commercial is a strange technological amalgam in its own right. The image of the tear on the Indian’s face stayed with me over these many years (not unforeseen considering the fact that my age and that of the commercial have lived parallel lives of a sort). The Internet, unlike cerebral gray matter that has admittedly eroded over time, provided me the means to go back and examine some of the specific focal points made fuzzy by the “cathode memory” referenced in the poem. So, in a sense, the advances in the technological apparatus—from television to Internet—and its capacity to enhance memory, served to further inform the poetic evolution. True, the initial image had already crystallized those many years ago, but the poem itself would probably not have taken the same shape were it not for the rendering of playback, review, and the subsequent critical and creative inquiries that sustain there. On top of the opportunity provided by modern Flash video technology that permits me to control scrutiny, there was also the supplemental research that came from surfing additional Web sites that helped to fill in other blanks for me (such as the historical context of “Earth Day,” the fact that the “Indian” was not a Native American at all, but an Italian-American actor; the fact that the tear was a staged artifice of glycerin, etc.). As such, the poem took on some unanticipated turns, not at all unlike the evolutions of similarly crafted poems throughout sections two and three of Songs of the American Hiroshima. MJ: I want to take the discussion back to “The Nuclear Family,” the first section of American Hiroshima for a moment. In the second poem of this cluster, “II. Questions about Vietnam and my Father (after REM),” you’ve integrated a chart that calls attention to itself. I have looked it over several times making my own associations and coming to my own conclusions on its purpose in the text. However, the question that keeps coming back to me is this: Is the chart a poem or is it chart? If it is a poem, could you please talk about that a bit, in whatever way you see fit. If it is not a poem, why? And what about intent? Is the chart making some statement that the words and their structure before and after it cannot? Are you being naughty here, Ed? EC: Do you mean like Naughty by Nature naughty or “call me Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty” naughty? Or, do you mean naught(y) in the sense of the negation of aught/ought and poetic responsibility when relying upon visual representations? Sorry, but I couldn’t resist giving you a hard time—now you could say effectively that I’m being “naughty.” After having studied with Ken Sherwood, as did you, in the Fall 2007 Media Poetics class at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, I became even more fascinated with the intersections between the static word and the movable image, for lack of a better phrasing. Simonides once said, and this may be half-quoted here, something along the lines of “Painting is a mute poem and poetry is a speaking picture.” As you know, the visual ties to poetry go back, most famously, to Blake with his engravings and play on illuminated manuscripts (which has an even deeper lineage in Oriental texts), and then later, to Ginsberg through photography primarily. You also see these kinds of traditions expressed, though not directly by the poet himself, in the early work of Martín Espada. Consider the poetic interplay of his father Frank’s photography throughout the pages of The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero or as jumping off points for thematic contextualization with the covers of Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands. In the case you reference above, the technique is, admittedly, a bit more abstract in a sense. It resonates with more poetic play and wordplay, so it tends toward the literal more than (but, yet not devoid of) the figurative. Sometimes I find it easier to express the points I’m trying to get at through different media—the computer, as we discussed earlier—provides a significant outlet for experimentation, and perhaps while not as radical as some in the New Media Poetic camp, the experimentation I embark on with this poetic chart “Little Boy EST. 1970” (or “Birth of Little Boy”) has its own new media acknowledgements. Besides, what better way to show the “baby boomer” connotations and how I find myself historically placed between the end of WWII and the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, than to provide a visual representation that ties the birth of my parents with my birth in the Vietnam (what would soon be a post-Vietnam) ethos of the early 1970s? The simple answer here is that a chart is not always a chart. MJ: The last question I’d like to pose juxtaposes two genres—poetry and fiction. As a project before beginning to study America Hiroshima, I was reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Normally, I don’t make reading a novel a “project.” However, wanting to read The Road was high enough on my priority list to expend “project”-worthy effort, and it couldn’t have come at a better time: moving from The Road to American Hiroshima was like reading companion pieces. I found myself asking two questions upon finishing your latest work. On the one hand, The Road and American Hiroshima share many thematic elements. What liberties does poetry afford you to explicate these themes that fiction doesn’t, and is poetry a better tool for the task? On the other hand, despite the sordid milieu of The Road, McCarthy uses the love between a father and son as a kernel of hope not only for the characters involved, but also for the entirety of the human race, while American Hiroshima distorts the father-son dynamic considerably. Does American Hiroshima ever provide a similar kernel of hope? If not, why? EC: Well, I’m thrilled that you brought the McCarthy book to the fore. Before going too deeply into my answer, I feel it incumbent to acknowledge that McCarthy is certainly a greater poet—and I’m not speaking out of turn, when I apply this term to a writer known for his fiction—than most “poets” on the scene today. His language craft is just so utterly precise and resonant with music. Consider the line when he talks about The Road’s wastelanded dead, their hopes and aspirations “ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts”—are you kidding me?! Just extraordinary artistry here. He says so much with the words he chooses and there’s a lesson for all poets here, which is to say, read more fiction and nonfiction! Break with the “poetry any and all” approach and reach across the aisle to embrace other kinds of writing. There’s real value in it, I think. McCarthy’s Road is a sophisticated work. While I certainly do read it from the point of view of a nuclear wasteland setting—the copious ash, the father’s illness that is coincidental with radiation sickness, etc. —McCarthy never fully identifies the catastrophe—the word “nuclear” never appears in the text. Though in some fairly obvious ways, I think, his descriptions on p. 52 of the paperback edition direct our attention toward the opening salvos of nuclear war: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. [. . .] A dull rose glow in the windowglass.” I use this very excerpt in the “EXTRACTIONS” front matter of Songs of the American Hiroshima. To get back to answering the first part of the question, no, I don’t think poetry is any better or less suited to address a subject such as apocalypse and humanity’s role in it. In fact, I’m not sure I can even distinguish in the two examples we’re talking about, The Road and Songs of the American Hiroshima, as separate from the poetic tradition. I read McCarthy’s book as a prose poem, much as I read Sherman Alexie’s “short fiction” in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven as prose poetry. But I have read extensively into the subject of the “nuclear” and the post-apocalyptic related to nuclear war to say that fiction does the job as well as poetry as well as nonfiction realities. To me, nuclear war is nuclear war and the medium almost becomes subservient to the frightening reality in the world (and of the politicians altering that reality) around us. Take a close look at the 1985 BBC production of Threads, that is, if you can find a copy stateside (chances are you’ll have to look on eBay for a former video store rental copy as the DVD was never released for Region 1) and compare with The Road or American Hiroshima. Even better, check out The Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Last Best Chance promotional DVD available for order from NTI.org. These films are fictional adaptations, in the first case a Cold War propagandizing of a sort, and in the latter a more contemporary post-9/11 scenario, but are just as realistic as the early atomic test footage, homeowner insurance pamphlets like “How to Build a Fallout Shelter” from the '50's and '60s, or George Tenet’s admission in his recent book At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA of a small-yield rogue nuclear weapon loose in NYC in the month after 9/11. The final part of your question that relates to hope is more difficult for me to answer, and I don’t want to retread on the subject of faith we covered a bit earlier. The relationships that I explore between the fathers and sons in the text are less reconcilable than what McCarthy was working toward. The first “Nuclear Family” section of the manuscript features some of my darkest content, and perhaps this is why, as we discussed a short while ago, that the content gels so well with the expressly bleak nuclear war imagery in the final section. The hope in my manuscript comes more from implication than McCarthy’s more overt attentions to it. In a recent New York Times piece by Charles McGrath, “At World’s End, Honing a Father-Son Dynamic,” Viggo Mortensen, who plays “the man” in the forthcoming film adaptation of The Road, says that the film at its core is both a “love story” and “an endurance contest.” My book probably falls into the latter category—though it’s a failed love story because the love is so dysfunctional, but that’s not to say that the hope is completely lost, either. People often have to face the prospect of losing everything before they reclaim something. My hope is that the kernel of prosperity lies in waking fellow human beings up to the volatility of our current existence. If Songs of the American Hiroshima functions at that level, then I’ve achieved what I set out to do. Mitch James was born and raised in Central Illinois, where he received a B.A. in English with a minor in Creative Writing from Eastern Illinois University. He currently lives in Pennsylvania, where he has just completed his Masters in Literature from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He has had fiction and poetry published in such journals as Westward Quarterly, The Vehicle, and Decomp Lit. His first chapbook, The Lineage of Dirt, is scheduled for publication in 2009 (PAresia Press). Edward J. Carvalho is a twice-nominated Pushcart Prize poet (2004-2005), MFA recipient (Goddard College 2006), and PhD candidate in the Literature and Criticism program at Indiana University of Pennsylvia. He is the author of solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short (Fine Tooth Press, 2007), the poetry audiobook Chants from the Seven Cities (Guerrilla Ignition, 2009), and the forthcoming “If the radiance of a thousand suns”: Songs of the American Hiroshima (Six Bad Apples Press, 2009). His poems––once described as “original, innovative, imaginative and brutal”––have appeared along with his essays, reviews, and critical papers in numerous journals throughout the country. His interview with poet Martín Espada, “A branch on the Tree of Whitman: Martín Espada on the 150th Anniversary of Leaves of Grass,” was recently published by Quay and accepted for re-publication in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (University of Iowa, Summer 2008). He was recently selected as one of 17 international applicants to participate in the Whitman International Seminar Dortmund, Germany, where he also delivered a paper during the conference symposium. He is the guest editor for David B. Downing’s Works and Days journal on Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11 University, which features his interviews with Noam Chomsky, Martín Espada, and Cornel West, along with new scholarship from other notable intellectuals (2008–09). Additionally, he is the recent recipient of Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Twentieth and Twenty-First Annual IUP Doctoral Fellowships (2006, 2008) and employed there with a Teaching Associateship in the English Department. Carvalho was born in Connecticut in 1970. Carvalho, Edward J and David B. Downing, eds. Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11 University. Spec. issue of Works and Days 51–54 26 –27.1/4 (2008-09). See “The Day After” Canticles, from American Hiroshima.
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Ed Carvalho: This isn’t me being sardonic or
semantically irresponsible when I choose to respond to the initial part of the
question of form, but the fact is form comes in many forms. What do I mean by
that? In the most reductive sense, the manuscript itself has a structural form,
while the poems individually have a more independent responsibility to the forms
they present on the page. Similarly, there are stylistic forms to take into
consideration in that some of the American
Hiroshima poems have a distinctive lyrical trajectory while others strive
toward more emphasis on the narrative or even the journalistic. And the poems
certainly do collectively live in the structural form of each chapter where they
reside. But to address the second part of your question on whether they can
resonate individually as individual poems, I would have to say, yes (though it
may be true, some stand alone more effectively than others). The long and short
of things here is that form, in the sense that I think you mean it, is important
in Songs of the American Hiroshima, but
perhaps not from the standpoint of stylistic primacy.