[New-Poetry] Fwd: Poem of the Week- Simone Muench

Thu Feb 7 20:39:25 EST 2008

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From: PoemoftheWeek.org <andrewmcfadyenketchum at poemoftheweek.org>
To: Poem of theWeek <andrewmcfadyenketchum at poemoftheweek.org>
Sent: Thu, 7 Feb 2008 1:11 pm
Subject: Poem of the Week- Simone Muench

Poem Of The Week   02-08-08 

Simone Muench

Simone Muench

Hex

Trouble came and trouble

brought greasy, ungenerous things:

poke root and bladderwrack, 

chalklines in bloody bedrooms

and black reptilian bags 

smelling of acetylene. 

Trouble came and trouble sang

shush-shush or tell-tell

for I alone will break your bones

as it bedded down for winter 

in a small small town,

smelling of cabbage and tripe

where eight black chickens 

wandered the street.

With trouble came clouds 

agitating the cows, their thick 

ruminant bodies clogging up 

the riverbeds.  Trouble came 

and sang and fish turned belly-up,

house pets appeared in the well.

Children starting dying

of oddities that the small-town

doctor could not name.

Trouble-houses and trouble-towns.

Trouble came in one hundred waves,

in sparks and hexes, with horse-breath 

and spiny borders.  Babies born 

with clubfoots and cleft lips, babies 

born with partial hearts and partial heads

and some just born plain dead.

Trouble is and trouble was 

and trouble came and sang

shush-shush or tell-tell

in a small small town.

                  -First published in Caffeine Destiny

Desire Takes a Road Trip to New Orleans

Desire changes her name to Desirée

so people will stop asking if she’s an abstraction

or a reality.  She buys a blue Nova, spins towards New Orleans 

via Texarkana where she saunters into Ricky Dell’s Roadhouse

for a Gibson chilled with onions that she pops

into her mouth before leaning over the bar

to lick the bartender.  Eight days later,

he still shakes with the wisteria scent of her hair

and the sweet acid of onions hovering over his upper lip

where his mustache singed away.  

All the matches in the bar are black by the time 

Desirée shifts into second with the ease of a boy 

switching his affections from his mother

to his first girlfriend that he finger-fucked in his Dad’s 

silver Impala beneath a moon hung in the sky 

like a wind chime.  The stars sounding out a song 

that only those with an ocean beneath their ribs can hear.  

At Trenton Episcopal, Desirée decides to use the bathroom.  

The choir boys are singing Hallelujah 

when she jaunts in like a lucky horseshoe.  Suddenly,

their platelets ring her name while God’s golden mallet 

hammers away at their malleable, sin-soaked hearts.

When Desirée arrives on the esplanades, all the boys 

on the bayou gather to sing, with crooked hearts 

and crooked feet we flee, down a crooked road 

as we pray, Oh Desirée.   She slits her skirt 

up her creole thigh, strides likes she’s late for a date 

with Dante Alighieri.  She’s got nowhere to go 

but she likes the leg’s elongation, the stretch 

and flex of muscle, the way the calf

bunches up like a ball that she could spiderweb 

the windows of those indifferent to her siren serenade. 

And she knows if she practices her fastball 

she’ll shatter the glass ceiling of heaven and shards 

will scatter the earth in a simulacrum of lust 

as the flushed lips of sordid saints say, 

Oh Desirée, Desirée, only to you we pray.

                            -First published in Crab Orchard Review

Simone Muench grew up in Louisiana and Arkansas before moving to Colorado to receive her BA and MA from the University of Colorado. Her first book The Air Lost in Breathing won the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry (Helicon Nine, 2000). Her second Lampblack & Ash received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry (Sarabande Books, 2005), and was one of the editor’s selections in the New York Times Book Review. Her latest chapbooks are Orange Girl (dancing girl press, 2007) and Sonoluminescence written with Bill Allegrezza (Dusie Press, 2007). She has poems appearing in Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, American Poet, and the anthology The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century. She received her Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is an assistant professor and director of the Writing Program at Lewis University. Currently, she serves on the advisory board for Switchback Books and is a contributing editor to Sharkforum where she presents a 'poem of the week' series.

An Interview with Simone Muench

                                                                                -by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: I was first introduced to these poems at a reading a few weeks ago and instantly fell in love with the rhythm, sound, and images in lines like “trouble came and trouble sang / shush-shush or tell-tell / for I alone will break your bones” and “At Trenton Episcopal, Desirée decides to use the bathroom. / The choir boys are singing Hallelujah / when she jaunts in like a lucky horseshoe.”  

What I find particularly moving about “Hex” is that even though “Hex” is not a narrative poem, it’s not not a  narrative poem, it’s just that we’re granted access to the story in a way we’re not used to— via this intensely focused study of trouble’s descent upon a “small, small town.”  

Is this an accurate reading of “Hex?”  Should readers think of this poem as a small part of a larger story?   Is this a “useful” approach to a poem like this?

Simone Muench: I think most approaches to a poem are useful.  In terms of whether this is a narrative poem, I don’t consider it as such, but at the same time it definitely has a relationship to the ballad with a hint of iambic tetrameter running through it, as well as a nod to Nick Cave’s fabulous "Murder Ballads": 

Come take him by his lily-white hands 

Come take him by his feet

And throw him in this deep deep well

Which is more than one hundred feet

AMK: Without revealing too much, would you mind discussing how this poem developed?  Were you thinking of events from your past or did this poem come from some other place?  

SM:  The world always encroaches on poems, and when I wrote the poem, I was experiencing a sense of foreboding about the future, feeling like we were a failed species.  I was also listening to Bessie Smith and Memphis Minnie, and though the poem isn’t written in a specific blues structure, the darkness of the subject matter and the doubling of certain lines gives it a sort of percussive, obsessive rhythm that I associate with the blues. (See response regarding Nick Cave as well).

AMK: Was “Hex” the sort of poem that you sat down with an intent to write or did it come to you via another avenue? 

SM: I think I came up with the refrain first, “Trouble came and Trouble sang”; I liked the childlike lulling liquidity of it, but I wanted to create a counterpoint to its palliative sound as much as possible with a much more brooding content, specifically the subverting of the cradlesong with 

. . .Babies born

with clubfoots and cleft lips, babies

born with partial hearts and partial heads

and some just born plain dead.

AMK: How did you discover this way to write this poem with “trouble” as the central figure behaving a lot like an antagonist and the town much like a protagonist? 

SM: I was watching a lot of WesternsJ  Trouble incarnated by Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef.  Hanging in my office, I have a Danish language poster of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that I picked up in Copenhagen, so maybe that filtered through my consciousness to metamorphose in the form of a hex poem.

AMK: “Desire Takes a Road Trip to New Orleans” is a neat poem.  It’s in third person omniscient; the speaker of the poem knowing not only what Desirée does (“Desire changes her name to Desirée”) but also what Desirée thinks (“She’s got nowhere to go / but she likes the leg’s elongation”).  At the same time, however, it seems like this is a persona poem, a poem in which the narrator or speaker is someone other than the author.  

Would you mind talking a little bit about this definition of persona?  Do you ever consider the speaker of a poem to be the author of the poem?

SM:  I try to never assume the author of a poem is the speaker of a poem, since for me poems don’t have to be categorized as fiction or non-fiction.  In Diane Wakoski’s "Justice is Reason Enough” she writes about her brother David who committed suicide.  Many made the mistake of assuming the author is the speaker of the poems.  Wakowski never had a brother who committed suicide and when asked about it, she responded something along the lines that there is a truth larger than reality.  The poem certainly isn’t lessened for me knowing that it’s invention.

AMK: Do you think of persona as a mask the poet wears in order to get at a mode of expression or is persona a way for the poet to imagine what it is like to enter someone else's personality and then write about it?  Is there a difference between the two?

SM: I think they’re inextricably bound. I often deploy personae, and many of the poems in my first book are other people’s stories in the manner of Cocteau’s “the poet doesn't invent. [S]he listens.”  Though “Desire Takes a Road Trip” is in third person, I often employ the “I” because it’s constantly revolving—an umbrella pronoun that can separately and simultaneously inhabit the roles of confession, persona and community. Though the “I” is often mistaken for the author speaking, for me at least, it’s not; but I like the quick illusion of intimacy it can create.  I frequently have my Intro to Creative Writing students write persona poems with a stress on invention and strangeness—one of the most imaginative I’ve received was from the point of view of a tomato on Mars.

AMK: Reflecting on both of these poems, why is it that you create central figures that are so rich and, yet, are so elusive? Why write in a persona?  Do these points of view allow you more creative freedom?  A larger elasticity between fiction and non-fiction?

SM: In terms of elusiveness and elasticity, I’m intrigued by the paradoxical construction of autonomy and unification that human relationships require, beautifully exemplified in a poem by Paul Eluard called “Kiss”: “You overtake, without losing yourself, / The borders of your body // You have overstepped time / Here you are a new woman.”  I’m fascinated by the limbo region of ambivalence, which to me is integral to being human. I’m interested in that moment when the border (or the leash) between things begins to dissolve and self becomes other, identity becomes identities. In a poem from Charles Wright’s Country Music he writes:  “I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed. / I want to be entered and picked clean.” I’m entranced by that act of emptying the self, which is neither positive nor negative but an ambi-(valent) state, as is the division between fiction and non-fiction.

AMK: Finally, what’s most important to you in poetry: music, image, sound, metaphor, allusion, story, place…?  You’ve got them all.  What drives you to write a poem?

SM: I responded this question in a previous interview, so I’m going to rephrase some of it here. Each poem changes in terms of process, sometimes it’s an image that becomes the centerpiece, sometimes it’s a sonically challenging line that becomes the rhetorical device to build the poem upon. My friend, the wonderful poet Kristy Odelius, likes to use an analogy between poets and furniture-makers, as we have two mutual friends who are wood workers.  When you first decide to build something you’re usually more concerned with the finished product—the chest-of-drawers or the chiffonier, but the more you construct, the more you fall in love with the materials themselves:  the wood, the words.  My earlier work was more concerned with subject matter, and the finished, polished product; now, I’m much more concerned with the textures and crossgrains of language. I think of my work as more of an homage, sense catalogue, travelogue and langue-logue: a kind of call-&-response in its continued tribute to poets, movies, musicians, and the dead.

AMK: Thank you.

SM: Thanks Andy! Here’s to you handsomely sporting the T-shirt and blazer look.

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