Dear Samira and Hannah,

I went back to Massachusetts last weekend to see a play. Performed by two great writers, Hannah Brooks-Motl and Dan Bevacqua, in their home. The play, written by Hannah, placed a couple (Spouse One and Spouse Two) at the dining room table. There they spoke to each other and to the audience — to the play itself — in co-habitation’s repetitive loops, iterating with difference the questions and accusations relative to pairs. Are you okay, do you care, I don’t care, you don’t care. Rather than mock the form, from these repetitions grew a desirous and effecting language. In such utterances, a relationship is not represented, but is made.

The play borrowed both its title, Marriage is Meisner, and organizing principle from the Meisner Technique: repeated phrases populate a scene, drawing actors away from their individual memories and interiors and toward their fellow actors. Lines acquire meaning and pulse from the spontaneity enshrined in the moment of conversational exchange. The play did not make marriage into a performance, but enjoyed the pre-existing theater of the family home. If for J.L. Austin the scene of the marriage ceremony represents a performative utterance par excellence (the words “I do” carrying the weight of law), then it is the quotidian, day-to-day speech associated with coupledom that confirms, morphs, and challenges the authority of marriage’s social container in Marriage is Meisner. Our errors in the face of this constraint begin to define the form.

Is love understanding, or not understanding? asks Spouse One. In Meisner’s light, the more archaic roots of the term “understanding” became to the play’s world quietly available, an ars poetic atmosphere from which the performance could borrow. To understand: not to be under anything, but to be in the midst of. To be in-between. What kind of knowledge lives there? In What Are You Afraid Of, Laura Henriksen writes:

how i experience dread

how she experiences dread

an experience of communal dread

not knowing what is signalled

by that beeping

you are not understood

you are in the wrong place

you did not understand

What constitutes this addressed subject, the poem’s “you,” is a failure of understanding rather than understanding’s narrative success. “[Y]ou are not understood.” While we do not know “what is signalled” by the beeping that populates this environment, our ability to hear it affirms our joint circumstance. In a “wrong” place full of uncertainty, across our disparate experiences of “dread,” emerges the thing we call “communal” feeling. It is not implied that we perform dread alike. “[H]ow i experience dread / how she experiences dread” each retain their distinctive possibilities, set apart by lineation. But they converge at this meeting place. They are reliant upon and responsive to our shared midst, polluted with emergency’s constant beeps.

I keep wanting to write not midst, but mist.

While watching the play, I wept. The show was hilarious and possessed a huge heart. A discussion of ticks was especially moving. Those intimate and deadly creatures who live in affirmation of the companion form: yes, we need many someones here (or, at least one) to check carefully behind the ears, and in the armpits.


The audience, assembled in the living room, was not called to testify on behalf of any couple in particular, but to the public nature of our “private lives,” inclusive not only of the so-called domestic, but of the imagination itself. What is this particular “privacy” of the mind, one dependent utterly upon the exchanges and loops we make with others, and yet so horrifically and delightfully our own? My brain is indebted to you, though still feels to be behind this curtain.

My weeping strikes me now as dramatic. But the play enacted something I have often dreamt of: a witness to the intimate world, the one we are told must live inside the house. The play created for love its innate though routinely denied audience, one at last allowed to laugh and cry responsively, to place eyes and ears on love. That we already have, in another sense, too many “eyes and ears” on love — surveilling and corrective eyes — is not lost on me. But the audience’s gaze was cast by the play into an explicitly constitutive rather than tacitly receptive role. We too became responsible for establishing and revealing this theater with our own repetitive murmurs and attentive looks. We too had to partake in building for love its stage.

This is something Leah and Riley and I used to talk about with frequency. The need for a stage for love. And the fantasy of arriving with pleasure upon that stage, unafraid of its demand: to show the faces we reserve in shyness for just a few others, to the world. In watching the show, I felt a great desire to see all of my friends as actors. To get them up onto that stage. After the play, I slipped Hannah a note to record this sentiment. I love to see my friend as an actress.

Even the rain became, in the home theater, a participatory character: a storm arrived in Amherst right on cue, pounding loudly upon the roof as the play reached a pitch. Nature itself gained this magical and scripted sense, enlivening the world’s true artifice. 

I realize now that I have omitted the play’s subtitle: Waiting for my husband to join me in my imagination. This state of “waiting” was for the play love’s true zone.


The in-between work of theater and of love is in a significant way the work of our journal. This is the kind of “common place” I want all the time to become more sensitive to: the many betweens, absences, and needful invitations we live among that without which writing, to me, seems mute.

Translating, perhaps more than other forms of writing, stands to emphasize this relation. I have been living with Lindsay Turner’s writing on the great poet Stéphane Bouquet, who died last year in Paris. I love Bouquet’s work: his book, The Next Loves (Nightboat Books, trans. Lindsay Turner), feels especially tethered to this conversation. Its first poem is entitled “Les Amours,” or “The Loves,” rather than Mes Amours (My Loves). The love-relation is figured capaciously; it is already a public creature rather than private good, formed interstitially, with excitement and difficulty:

someone’s holding an imaginary map of the conversation we’ll say

that and that

the streets will be all orderly

if I stay close inside

the zone he surveys

but it isn’t easy

To read these lines now evokes in me a great pain. The pain of feeling, through reading, close to a writer who is here in the text but no longer on earth, where I am, with the poem. It feels wrong to gesture to this divide, to give it any purchase at all. About translating Bouquet now, after his death, Turner writes:

When I did start working, I was surprised that I also felt no small amount of anger—not at Stéphane for dying, but at death for taking him and at the world for letting him go. This was anger I felt as a translator in specific. I know a certain passage is about an unnamed Pasolini poem, for example, but there’s no way to tell which one. Stéphane’s the only one who knew. 

The in-between knowledge of the poem, reader, translator, and poet. The waiting required of us by life is found again, with difference, in death. I cherish this description of the translator’s occupation: to go to the poem, and knock. How fortunate I feel, as a reader, to be the beneficiary of such a knock, one which here brings with it a last book of Bouquet’s, ALL THAT HOLDS (Nightboat Books, forthcoming). Poetry is both life work and death work. In “Tale of the fern and the waves and the rest,” Bouquet writes of a song sung by a child:

Right now this time
I’m not afraid
Oh oh bad robber
Give back my heart 

I too want my heart back, from the bad robber. Thank you, Lindsay, for doing this work in the doorway. That is where love and poetry live.

I do love you two forever,
Scout



Dear Scout and Hannah,

I’ve been worried that too much of my life is speech. While getting dressed, the drone of old law and order episodes from my laptop. While making coffee, the daily news. On the way to school I hear the fragments of speech made by the morning commuters on their walks, and the joggers’s panting on their runs. To make extra money, I spend weekends reading through prospective law school application essays and give hours of feedback over google meets calls. They prefer when I speak and they silently take notes.


I enter the copy room and talk to a permanent faculty member in the department. They want to know about me, but they don’t remember me. I repeat myself, my tongue thick, indented by my teeth. I want to sit on the linoleum floor, but for the first time in a long time, I feel the strain of professionalism.

I set my books facedown on the scanner. The light flashes up as I press the spines of the books flat. The book becomes me and I punish it, pressing it harder against the pane of warm glass. It catches fragments of my sleeve and hand in its gaze. When I pass the copies out to my students everyone gets an image of my wrist to take home.

In class a few weeks ago, I brought the poem “Whereas” by Layli Long Soldier. Admittedly, I was initially undesiring of this particular poem. I didn’t trust my mostly white, mostly freshman students to talk about a poem that dealt so directly with institutionalized violence, and I felt inept to explain it in a fifty-minute class while also teaching them about craft. It was part of the few required readings, though, and after teaching Elizabeth Bishop for three classes straight, I had no choice.

We each went around the room and read a stanza from “Whereas,” some merely a monostitch, some long winding paragraphs. After we read through the poem I asked my students if they understood what the poem was referencing. They silently looked at me. I felt my mouth go dry again. I explained. Obliquely. “The history of genocide against native people,” which I knew they knew but didn’t want to say. And then I explained the occasion for the poem: the US government finally issuing an apology for the treatment of native people in a way that failed to mention its cruelty. I passed around the photocopy of Public Law 107–40 with my thumb in the corner. The students hadn’t heard of the law, so we all read a line from it concurrently.

After 9/11, Public Law 107–40 argued that the United States was entitled to protect itself. It was the reason Obama dropped drones in Syria and his use of indefinite detention in the US, Bush’s torture camps in Guantanamo Bay, Biden’s airstrikes in Somalia, Trump’s airstrikes on boats off Venezuela and the countless bombardment of twenty-two countries since 2001. I asked my students if they saw the parallel in language and structure between this government document, and “Whereas.” They were silent but a few began to murmur. “Yes”and “mhmhm.” I told them to reflect in writing on how atrocities across the world affect them too, whether they want them to or not, that they benefit from the cheap gas and easy lives our government had stolen from other people. I thought they would struggle to write anything at all, and I was afraid that my comparison was inappropriate and self-centered. But they surprised me by writing for fifteen minutes straight, not looking up once. When my phone’s timer buzzed they acted like they hadn’t heard and kept writing.

By the end of class the students were still quiet, but they seemed more alive than they had at the beginning. They were buzzing with motion, mostly anxiety, but also aliveness. It was easy for them, like me, to forget without speech the reasons we live and others don’t.

Is this the same way that, in Tiffiniy Yingus Cheng’s poem “REALISM,”“speech is the flesh”? In Cheng’s two poems, speech itself seems to perform this in-betweenness of meaning. Speech is both paradoxically abstract (representational of the physical world) and concrete (the literal building blocks of a poem). Cheng’s poems oscillate between these two poles of representation, doing what lyric poetry does best: imagining that something both is and isn’t at the same time. In this same poem, Cheng writes:

like yesterday’s speech for the listeners 
            the skin speckled at the crease of info
the bright streetlights they switched over from warm light
            couldn’t eat your words or the red chair

the day’s color blasted off, not much more may be done today

Here speech impacts the human body of its “listeners,” causing “speckl[ing] at the crease of info.” We can take from this, in a poem thematically concerned with public action, that speech itself causes a physical, if minor, impact on the body. What are the implications of this “speck[ling]”? A browning, an adorning, a blemishing? The poem is unclear regarding how this speckling lands, yet we know for certain there is a physical, material impact that the speech itself induces in its listeners.

And yet, there are limits to speech. Speech cannot be “eat[en],” much like an absurdly physical object, “the red chair.” Not only does this poem show a dimensionality, a specificity of circumstance for when and how speech can materially exist, but under the guise of irony the poem also performs a strong sense of pessimism toward the nature of speech. The poem plays with the inherent irony of the phrase you’re gonna eat your words. It’s something no one can do, eat words, yet the implications of its failure (that one “couldn’t” do it) point to its paradox: it is both material and immaterial in the world of a poem. We become aware of the poem as adjusting the idiom (thus trying to “eat” these words), as well as of its failure to do so (we can’t help but remember the phrase itself).

Moments of physical description in the poem, however — “the bright streetlights they switched over from warm light” — seem devoid of this kind of irony. Speech on speech is ironic, speech on the physical world is not. I felt the pessimism in the poem’s approach to speech was twofaced: in its close attention to phrases and expressions, it reveals its frustration with language. In the creation of the poem though, it believes in the power of language to speak in description of the physical world.

The poem ends by acknowledging the need for action (political action) with the overwhelming presence of language to write and determine its success:

marching down the street towards better living communities
I am no slouch, the slight advantage in athletic socks does not matter in the end
            wear them whenever. No end cap on the day, the world writes tomes

Here the speaker hopes to put their body physically toward the betterment of “living communities” in seeming contrast with the negative tone the poem ends on, “the world writ[ing] tomes.” In “tomes” how do I not hear tombs. Life and Death. Why is writing associated with death, and yet optimism exists in writing's action? There’s something ultimate being said here, I think, about how writing imagines the past, while “marching”exists in the present. Writing will always be based in the past, and yet in action we are alive. In movement the “end cap on the day” is removed.

I want to end this section of the letter by thinking of Fatou Traore, a mother who’s lived in Iowa City for over twenty years now, but who was wrongfully detained by ICE and shipped to Sierra Leone, a country she has no ties to. I think about her when I receive the emails appraising me of her situation and begging me and everyone to call congressional offices. As the movement to bring her home increases, I sometimes feel a slight hope in the power of speech. Speech is slow and draining, cumbersome and progressive, not “revolutionary,” but I hope in this case it is enough. I want us all to do more, me most of all. But I also want for this woman to be reunited with her family back in Iowa City. Perhaps speech can become, as you speak about, Scout, a stage for love and a vehicle for imagination. The transcription of utopia Adorno speaks of in literature. If speech alone is enough, then that would be a miracle.


Love,
Samira

Dear Samira and Scout,

Words are miniature people with demands. They can be floating in front of our faces, dangling from trees, flipping around like sprites in motion. Emotional birds talking. Material substances with souls that travel from dense woodland into the bright city. Your writing, Samira, makes me think about the different actions words might direct, or how words can become events. Sometimes words are the law. Sometimes words propel events, like the release of political prisoners. Words get detached from personal bodies, becoming actors who alter space.

I heard in a song this morning, GOD ISN’T DEAD HE IS SURELY ALIVE. These words are insistent, defensive, demanding of a certain truth. Do those words make God into a living person? Surely for the singer. NIGHT THOUGHT SON DAUGHTER is a series of words we repeated last night. They make a small difference in how I approach the environment of dreams. Hung up on the marquee, words spell out the title of a documentary film: “I stood on the street with other people until they finished spelling SOON,” Fran Matos writes in “THE MOVIES,” as two boys on the ladder change around the letters.

Words in a script propel action on the stage. These words combined with actions propel gigantic feelings. So when they are performed on stage by those people we love, I understand it to be as devastating as it was for you, Scout. Matos writes of crying while hearing a poem she had memorized as the words tumbled out in a familiar order. “I knew exactly which words would come next and I cried until I had to leave.” Matos’s poems stage an inquiry into the utopian idea you suggest, Samira, that poems can make things happen differently in the world — that they might be able to actually alter our physical environment, or “uncrack my phone” — as the difference between our life and the life that poems assemble starts to break down:

I didn’t know if I meant my life or the poem

If I assembled the poem what could happen

It wasn’t a dream it was a place

Matos assembles “this” poem, “MY LIFE OR THE POEM,” out of the predicament of not knowing the difference between what happens in life and what can happen in poetry. These lines pose and then evade the question of “what could happen,” what actions the poem could direct. The lines break through the fragile barrier between life and poetry. What if the dreams poems perform are completely real? “It wasn’t a dream it was a place.” Words sometimes confess unnoticed feelings and experiences, like the responsive feelings of the children who choose a nun as their mother in “THE MOVIES”:

The mother superior wore a white habit and enjoyed sitting by the playground

She behaved so maternally towards the children that they eventually started referring to her as their actual mother

This became confusing as they called her mother mother

But the poem knows these confusing words are not mistaken. The shift from mother superior to mother mother lets slip the felt amplification of the caring environment over which this mother presides. She possesses superior mothering skills. Unfortunately for the children’s “real” parents, they have chosen the one they prefer. In Matos’s poetry, our emotional, imaginative attachments to the world do not “warp” a more objective reality but instead make different coinciding worlds. Mother mother makes the nun their mother doubly. Emotional words structure our felt worlds. I do not want to say these worlds are “alternative” to the world, but that instead they are. The poem participates in the emotional environment the children and the nun build together, extending it with the technology of words.

The difference — between mother superior and mother mother — is not just felt by one private interior self but is instead collectively proposed through a collaborative chant: “they called her.” These poems stage many scenes of collaborative “calls” with which the poet participates, this poet who is “spreading the message / To every friend, every familiar face.” Poems take “action” as they “spread” certain messages, like telepathic signals that shoot through into our brains and make us “capable of different thoughts, different poems.”

In Laura Henriksen’s long poem What Are You Afraid Of, which we are lucky to excerpt in this issue, she considers the unfolding “event” of political speech in a community meeting in response to the Palestinian cultural and academic boycott of Israel. The “speech” of a boycott uncovers the evil in “prior” friends. The poem narrates this backlash:

that they felt we had exceeded

the permissible limit

by speaking of palestine

they felt threatened

and were offended

that their threatened feeling

was not our central concern

nauseated and burning

in a rectory basement i saw

their fear and i despised them

and still do

For these colleagues, speech about Palestine becomes an active threat that exceeds the “permissible limit” of what can be said. But the words these colleagues use to express their “threatened feeling” have an offensive impact too, an impact they refuse to acknowledge. We watch the speaker’s “burning” rash spread across the poem as it becomes a figure for these despised feelings. Words alter the body. Samira, you wrote of the unstable relationship between matter and language, “pessimism” about the impact of words. Henriksen asks a similar question:

how a voice rots

placement

of blame

incremental

adjustments

papers on the surface of a desk

before the house explodes

The explosion of a house seems to obliterate any “incremental” difference the words on these “papers” might have made. “Voice rots.” I am often optimistic about the animating motion of words. But Henriksen considers their disappointments:

you are not understood

you are in the wrong place

you did not understand

The frustrating pain of language is that despite its beautiful possibilities we are often not understood or able to understand others. We live with words in the “wrong place,” a world that should be completely transformed. But I am also relieved that words do not allow for transparent understanding. They are not designed for understanding experience, as if any part of experience could be “retrieved.” Henriksen’s lines insist on this lack of understanding, rather than trying to cover over that lack. You wrote about the betweenness of “understanding,” Scout, how it exists between people rather than expressing one private interior. Words do not bridge gaps but maintain them. Because memory is the same thing as the imagination, the past is something that only lives in improvised speech. Words can make something that is, even if it never was. I agree, Samira, that too much of life is speech. Sometimes all this chatter is complete torture. But I still know that I need these words.


Love,
Hannah