Inside and Outside the Box by Stan Sanvel Rubin
Inside and Outside the Box by Stan Sanvel Rubin
For the past two years, our poetry reviews editor Stan Sanvel Rubin has wondered what impact pandemic-related isolation and online reading events will have on the future of writing. Like many of us, Stan found comfort and community from attending virtual events, but these events also created new expectations placed on the shoulders of readers and viewers. As we prepare for a second annual reading with a virtual component on December 3, this time under the lens of what haunts us, we invite you to read this essay Stan wrote for us, and to reflect on another year of resilience and grace.
Now that the long crisis is hopefully fading into the “good riddance” category, it’s worth thinking about what we’ve been through and where it leaves literature. Certainly, we will continue to want to connect our work to the world, to seek response and validation, but the way we do that might have changed more than we know.
During the pandemic, I experienced the three key positions (other than tech) in the “Zoom” system: reader, host, audience. It was eye-opening to realize how each differs from similar roles in the world misnamed “normal.” To start with the obvious, the venue is different. Audience is transformed into a composite of separate boxes, replacing a physical collective. “Presence” at such events depends first on audio and video systems whose functioning is subject to the vagaries of electronic connection. If you do make it “there,” it can be an oddly isolating place compared to the energy of an in-room, live group response. (Think how one laugh in a movie theater can be contagious.) Your “place” is not established in a real space, but in your box–and out of it at the same time.
Never has the line between inside and outside this box been more sharply delineated for most Americans. This fits literature. What is a poem, a story, or an essay, after all, but an attempt to draw meaning from a personal “inside” and to bring it, in the shaped way we call art, to an audience “outside?” Literature begins with the interior sounding of words. By shaping and uttering them, the writer hopes to make a “value-added” contribution beyond the commonplace miracle of speech. The field to do so now has suddenly expanded.
That the “two-way screen” is changing the familiar was illustrated to me by a June 2020 announcement from Rattle that their weekly “Rattlecast” will include: a live “Poets Respond” segment before the reading, prompts for poems to be read after it, “or anything else the audience would like to share.” These interactive events are livestreamed on major social media platforms and recorded for posterity on various podcasting apps. Rattle does state a notable caution: “Remember that these poems will be broadcast and archived in audio and video form. We don’t believe this should count as “publication” for literary purposes, but other magazines might.”
New digital platforms appeared almost immediately. Entropy added the category “Virtual Readings” to its valuable “Where to Submit” list. The pandemic has also posed a special challenge for arts organizations. Events that need planning well in advance have been particularly at risk. Residencies, workshops, conferences, and festivals went virtual. There were also strategies for literature to reach “outside” with new forms of community, for instance The Academy of American Poets’ ambitious “Shelter in Poems” virtual reading project.
Whatever is underway, it has to do with the economy of literature in the broadest sense, the function of the poem, story, or essay in the exchange between writer and audience. Just as radio did long ago, “Zoom” and its peers have shifted the scale of communication in the direction of an inclusive, limitless horizon rather than the “closed loop” of limited seating and access. This change is one of locality, or scope of participants included, which differs from any specific location. The presumed common point is “the screen,” but it’s pretty mind-blowing to consider the expansive geography behind this virtual meeting place.
Thanks to this new inclusiveness, I was able, while at home, to be present at regular episodes of an international poetry gathering, enjoy national readings whose viewers and presenters were in many states, and, through the good offices of our local public library, remain active in (and occasionally host) the monthly poetry group I have participated in for several years. The latter specializes in sharing poems by other poets, well known or not. It is individual and celebratory, a good way to keep poems alive person-to-person. When we finally got together again, in a circle in the founder’s garden, we were obviously glad to see and hear familiar, fully present humans. The setting was alive with the flowers and sounds of spring. We saw each other’s faces and living gestures. One word for this is proximity. It’s what “poetry of place” draws on. An imperfect comparison might be seeing through the longer end of the telescope versus the shorter end. Distance offered revelation, scope and a sense of adventure, while the near offered relief, a return to the familiar, the intimacy of shared space.
Has everything changed? A cautionary note was provided in widely circulated comments of poet-professor-editor Gerald Costanzo on the occasion of his retirement:
“Poetry can do many things. But I’m not sure it can account for or articulate adequately what has happened to us. And you will be disappointed by the limits of human communication — especially as these apply to the ones you love. But you will know because you have experienced some of the worst that can happen to us.”
Is it possible that an extended experience of literature on screen at a distance can transform not only a writer’s relationship to audience, but our relationship to the writing? During this time, the writer who wanted to participate as a reader had to become a performer as much as a composer of words, regardless of prior inclination. The gap between spoken literature and written literature, originally initiated by the printing press, has been further breached. Now it’s “back to the future,” due to the effective removal of the page from the center of the process.
Despite Romantic and universalist aspirations, the “value” of writing always has been more or less specific to a given culture. In ours, the printed work derived its value from an economy of scarcity: the editorial scrutiny of many, and the selection of a few, followed by the delayed gratification of publication. The value of publication was in turn determined by some ranking of “prestigious” or “quality” or at least recognizable journals. In academia, a list like that can still be exchanged for tangible reward. Recognition for the sake of reputation can be had now in both worlds: for example, Pushcart Prize and “Best of the Net” nominations. The fracturing of a university–based hierarchy has been in process for many years for many reasons, not least the American impulse toward equality and inclusion, and the flourishing of performance-based and digital work as their own genres.
Our new reliance on technology has accentuated the amorphous status of “publication,” including the meaning of the word. Reading one’s writing on screen to a geographically diverse audience puts the writer not just “on display,” but literally face to face and “word-to-word” with distant peers, some with achievements and reputations of their own. Is it a stretch to suggest that having your work appreciated in such a setting may offer a form of validation approximating a journal acceptance? Attaining the “finality” of print no longer carries an aura of secular sanctification. Nor is it, if it ever was, Emily Dickinson’s “auction of the soul.”
Despite glitches, the immediacy and fluidity of an on-screen reading is actually closer to the temporal flow we live in and create from than is a “stage” or auditorium presentation. Some of the events I participated in were followed not only with the familiar question and answer period, but also spontaneous conversation among whomever stayed logged in long enough, including the featured writers. Some offered “open mic” time as well. Given the ability to come and go as needed, the difference from a physically present experience becomes as significant as the similarity. If “the medium is the message,” the message has altered. It reaches to the “quiet” writer, the one not looking for audience beyond the page. The fact that comparatively few print or online magazines reach a truly broad audience, despite how much creative work is being written, suggests that the “new” screen promises further transformation. The onscreen poem, story, or essay can live many lives.
In the decades when writing was centered on the university, “permanence” was conferred by inclusion in key anthologies and being on the list of so-called major publishers. The rapid proliferation of screen poetry in particular has worked, like the explosion of small presses, to undermine old hierarchies. Impermanence is the new mode. Audiences for these readings can be as unpredictable as the events themselves; a few seemed to occur in almost “flash mob” fashion, with little notice and accommodating last minute sign-in. All could be recorded for easy link access later, another similarity-with-difference from the traditional archive where recordings, if available, are accessed via bureaucratic procedures, often at a fee.
Events I attended were free, or at a nominal contribution to a sponsoring independent bookstore, non-endowed literary program, or advocacy organization. The fact that such readings create possibilities for outreach to everywhere and, at the same time, can provide a stream of small (but theoretically unlimited) revenue is one reason “distance” readings won’t disappear from the scene. Well-established organizations that have “Zoom’d” only out of necessity will have decisions to make about their future.
So has the game really changed? Wait and see. But the outlook for literature is far brighter than it seemed at the start of the crisis two years ago. Adaptability having been proven yet again. Writing is still alive and well.
Stan Sanvel Rubin, a former director of the SUNY Brockport Writers Forum and Video Library, retired in 2014 after a decade as co-founding director of the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA program. His fourth full collection, There. Here., was published by Lost Horse Press; his third, Hidden Sequel, won the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. His poems have appeared widely in magazines including The Georgia Review, AGNI, Poetry Northwest, Kenyon Review, The Florida Review, The Shanghai Literary Review, and others, plus two recent anthologies: the 25th Anniversary Issue of Atlanta Review, and Nautilus Book Award winner For Love of Orcas. He received the 2018 Vi Gale Award from Hubbub. He lives on the North Olympic Peninsula of Washington.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Gen Del Raye
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Gen Del Raye
In “Home Burial”, your short story published in Volume 24, the speaker’s grandmother attends the funeral of a man she worked for whose job was to recommend men in the village to draft in the war. How did the idea for this story originate?
I had already written several stories involving the character of the grandmother, and in researching one of them I came across an interview with a man named Maeda Eiichi who had been put in charge of delivering draft letters in his hometown when he was just sixteen years old. This is the same age that my own grandparents were in 1945. They lived through the war in a village that is very similar to the one described in my story. My grandfather tried to enlist, which would have been tantamount to a death wish in the final year of the war, but failed the physical exam. It would have been someone like Yashima, the man who works in the village office in my story, who would have had the final say and, in effect, saved my grandfather’s life.
One of the strange things about reading first-person accounts of the war is realizing how young many people were when they were forced into taking actions that would dictate the course of another person’s life. For example, Tago Kyōtarō, who described his wartime experiences to the Asahi Shimbun in 2020, was only nineteen when he was put in charge of writing deployment orders for kamikaze bombers in his air division in Taiwan. Seventy-five years later, sitting at his writing desk at home, the weight of what he’d done was so large in his memory that he was able to recreate the exact wording of those deployment orders on a sheet of paper for reporters. I was drawn to the idea of a character who delivers draft letters because it seemed to be an example of this where the consequences were particularly personal and immediately apparent: the delivery person would have to walk up to a person who was often a neighbor or acquaintance and, after saying a few rehearsed lines, hand over the document that would upend their lives. In the interview with Maeda Eiichi, he estimates that he delivered the draft to around 60 people in his small village, and that only about half survived the war. This was a time when, as was made famous in Hanamori Yasuji’s long poem 見よぼくら一銭五厘の旗 (“Look Upon Our One-and-a-Half Sen Flag”), the running joke in the military was that a person’s life was only worth one and a half sen, the price of a postage stamp, because each dead soldier could be replaced with a single draft letter. The grim reality, of course, was that the military was exempt from the cost of postage and, in fact, draft letters were free.
The grandmother is also responsible in this process of war; she was the one who notified the village men, and she also notified the women when their loved ones were killed. You wrote the line “So much was asked of her” which is a simple sentence, but a very delicate and telling way to describe this character. Can you tell us a little bit about how you created such a complex woman who is pulled into many directions of servitude? What was it like creating her?
Thank you for this question. I’m glad the line you highlighted read as strongly to you as it did to me. My idea in this story was to explore the ways in which the very people who were most victimized by the war were often asked to become culpable in the suffering of others. So I think the complexity of the grandmother’s character has a lot to do with the complicated situations into which many people were placed during this time. As a survivor of the firebombing of Osaka in March of 1945, the grandmother in my story is intimately familiar with how the burdens of war have often fallen disproportionately on ordinary civilians. But when she flees the city to the relative safety of a small village in the mountains, and the man who ordinarily delivers draft letters in the village is immobilized by an injury, her status as an outsider makes her the perfect candidate to become his assistant.
One thing that surprised me in my research was how much control local officials had over the draft process. It was essentially left up to people like Yashima, the grandmother’s boss in my story, to decide which and how many of his neighbors would be fast-tracked for conscription, what roles they would fill, and how much persuasion would be used to convince boys aged fifteen to seventeen, who were allowed to join the military but exempt from the draft, to enlist voluntarily. This was a secret at the time, but has become widely known partly thanks to the work of Debun Shigenobu, a former draft-delivery person who has written and spoken extensively about the draft process. After the surrender in August of 1945, people like Yashima and the grandmother in my story were often forced to reckon with the ways in which they had been complicit in allowing the war to go on for as long as it did, but of course this complicity wasn’t limited to people like them; so many people allowed the war to happen and continue to happen whether through concrete actions like building balloon bombs (a type of bomb that was designed to target civilians) at munitions factories or through intangibles like publicly voicing their support of the war effort—one of the big differences with Yashima and the grandmother was that their complicity was harder to forget because the people impacted by their actions were easily identifiable and close at hand.
Every time I’ve read your story, in my mind I see a seed that ruptures and splits, and this slow unfurling of truth spills out. Your story requires patience from the reader because time moves both quickly and slowly, but it’s not a story that relies heavily on plot elements. Did you have to employ a lot of patience while writing and revising in order to achieve a consistent pace throughout?
I usually rewrite stories rather than revise them, and for this story I ended up writing several versions in different styles and from different points of view before I arrived at the final one. So in that sense this story required a lot of patience, and especially belief that all the failed rewrites would eventually lead to a story that works. I think partly because of how long I had been writing in the world of the story, a lot of the things that are revealed in this final version were already known to me, and some were things that I discovered in the process of writing them down. The pacing and tension of the story were things I struggled with, but I tried to believe that so long as I could convey how deeply the grandparents care about each other in the story, that this would do a lot of the work of keeping readers engaged and invested in the outcome.
Without going into too much detail for people who haven’t read your story yet, what does forgiveness for the grandmother look like?
I think the forgiveness she is afforded is always temporary, whether this is in the sense of the grandfather forgiving her or the grandmother forgiving herself. I wish it were different, but I think that’s her reality. On the other hand, there is the long history of kindness that the grandmother and grandfather have shared, the way that they have devoted so much of their lives to caring for each other, and this is a testament to the fact that if she hasn’t exactly been forgiven for what she did, she has at least become more than that version of herself in a deep-rooted and enduring way.
In the past two years, the world has experienced a lot of upheaval and turmoil. Has this impacted your creative process, and if so, how?
For various reasons having to do with the pandemic and also the vagaries of my citizenship, I haven’t seen my parents in person since January of 2020. And even my parents, who live in Japan, haven’t been able to visit my grandparents, who have been hospitalized for much of the pandemic, for nearly two years. It was a strange experience, to write a familiar setting in this story, from such a long distance away and during a time when, for much of it, I believed that I was barred from going home.
You also write poetry. How do these two genres intersect in your writing? When you have an idea for a new project, what makes you decide its form is better suited for a story or a poem?
My initial inspiration to write a story or poem tends to arrive in the form of a sentence. The form the piece takes often depends on the pacing of that sentence: if it needs to be read slowly rather than quickly, I will usually end up writing it as a poem. I love poems that are structured as stories, and prose that rhymes or (however briefly) holds and maintains a meter. I think poetry often has a wider scope than fiction, in that poems can address ideas and arguments about the world that can’t easily be reframed in terms of character and plot, although sometimes flash fiction, which I also write, can be a way to bring more of those poetic concerns into the world of fiction.
What projects are you working on now?
I’m working on finishing a short story collection that will include this piece. I’m trying to write one last story to complete the collection, although I started telling myself that a few stories ago now, so who knows if that will turn out to be true.
Gen Del Raye is half Japanese and was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan. Currently, he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best Small Fictions, Best New Poets, and Poetry Northwest, among others. You can learn more about Gen and his work at his website.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Heather A. Warren
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Heather A. Warren
We selected a phrase from a line in your poem “What Wounds Become”, which acts in conversation with the poet torrin a. greathouse, as the subtitle of Volume 24 because it perfectly embodies thematic and imagistic elements in this issue from a multitude of contributors. What does the line “what becomes of a ghost still living” mean to you?
I think about the concept of Ghost as an occurrence of the past that I cannot see with my eyes. But it’s possible, I can feel a Ghost’s presence with my body. “a ghost still living” is something of the past that continues to be very real – and what can we do to move past what haunts us? This ghost is something still real to the body.
In my poem “What Wounds Become,” I also saw the ghost as a past identity – a gendered identity. I am trying to move past that to be who I am – yet that ghost still lives through the perception and actions of others.
I love the duality of meaning in “Clipped”, the second poem we published of yours in Volume 24. I noticed that the concepts of split binaries and performativity are often represented in your work, both here in Vol. 24 and in other publications. This makes me curious about how you see the world. Can you tell us how you approach thinking about or making sense of something that contains multitudes?
Alongside my artistic life, I have worked in mental health / social services for almost a decade. I want to do my best to be a pro-active learner and to meet people where they are at. I think what I have discovered so far in this particular type of work – is that maybe sometimes, I cannot make sense of something at all. But I do my best, to approach my thinking from different angles and lenses when there’s a complex subject.
How does the act of writing allow one to process, and perhaps, rehabilitate a wound? Writing on any subject of trauma can be another form of that trauma; do you have advice that you can share with other writers on writing about what wounds them? 
For me, the act of creating is a therapeutic process. Sometimes I set out to write about a specific topic – and then suddenly, I am surprised to discover that I am re-writing a wound. When I re-write a personal trauma, I want to transform it, claim my own healing and this process is empowering for me. I really value art-making as a relational process – I never want to be isolated in my practice and I want to write or play music with the intention of building community as its end product. My experiences are in relation to others, my process is in relation to others, and the finished performance (even on the page) is in relation to others. Certain poets like torrin a. greathouse provide visibility that I never had in reading poetry – I am able to know that I am not alone and I hope others feel the same when they read my writing too.
There are some personal experiences I have had that I am not ready to write about – and may never write about. And that’s okay. I wonder sometimes if there’s a trend in the art/literary world that pressures – especially marginalized folx – to produce content relating to their trauma. My advice would be to approach trauma subjects in your craft with the intention of benefiting in a therapeutic way – and not succumbing to any pressures to create anything you don’t want to.
The past two years have brought about a lot of collective and individual upheaval. Has this impacted your creative process?
The past two years have been traumatic and harsh in its difficulty for so many people. I have felt very anxious and isolated and it’s been really tough to feel motivated to write or play music. But that’s okay! We are still living through a global pandemic and I hope that everyone can give themselves permission to do what they need to do. I really had to confront some personal realizations about equating self-worth with producing.
What projects are you working on right now?
My debut collection Binded is forthcoming with Boreal Books / Red Hen Press and I have been working on the copy-editing process! Because the past two years have been so tough for so many, I have been trying to have fun! I am working on a chapbook of really silly poems about my dogs. I am also playing around with beat-box poetry, making weird sounds into my microphone with intentions of a sound art poetry album. This is in collaboration with a friend and the working title is A Parrot With Teeth.
Heather A. Warren (they/them) is a poet and musician from Fairbanks, Alaska. Their writing and music is featured on the full-length album Mother Carries, by Harm. Warren is a 2019 Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award recipient, and their first poetry collection, Binded, is forthcoming from Boreal Books / Red Hen Press. Warren received their MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and they are currently finishing a master’s in social work with the University of New England online.
A Conversation With Kao Kalia Yang—WSR Contributing Creative Nonfiction Editor
What are the types of essays you would like to see in Volume 25?
I want to see essays from a diverse array of perspectives on a wide range of issues in Volume 25. I want to cull from talent from different communities and put together exciting contributions that will push creative and craft boundaries in necessary directions.
What is an ideal submission for you? What would set a submission apart from the others for you?
I’m a generous reader. I am not coming to this particular role with any fixed ideas in mind. I love powerful writing that surprises, captivates, and creates opportunities for both the writer and reader in the experience.
Who are some writers you admire? OR What are some individual poems/stories/essays that you admire?
At the moment, I’m reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and I am underlining lots of things because I’m excited by elements of the writing, the integrity of the ideas, and the wisdom that has been so thoughtfully distilled and communicated. I appreciate the love of language that Ocean Vuong and Mai Der Vang carry and share in their works. I love Shannon Gibney’s fierce honesty on the page and in person. Sun Yung Shin’s intellect is dazzling.
Is there a form of literature that you find most rewarding to read?
I am a writer of prose but I have a deep fascination with poetry. Poetry is like a flower in the world. I love all the things that bloom.
Name three books that could be used to define you as an editor?
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, and Quilting by Lucille Clifton.
What current journals or presses do you admire, and why?
Graywolf Press, Milkweed, and Coffee House Press are all making incredible contributions to American literature by bringing works in translation, publishing innovative voices that are pushing against the mainstream forces at play.
What projects or pieces are you working on now?
I am neck-deep in a memoir about my mother titled Return of the Refugee. It is a book that’s been simmering inside for a long time. I’m ready to get it into the world. I’ve just finished a draft of a fictional work for younger readers titled The Diamond Explorer about a Hmong boy on the Minnesota prairie, a boy who is destined to become a great shaman but he doesn’t know how. I’ve a children’s picture currently being shopped titled Waiting for Bloom about a rose garden planted in a pandemic.
Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong-American writer. She is the author of the memoirs The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, The Song Poet, and Somewhere in the Unknown World. Yang is also the author of the children’s books A Map Into the World, The Shared Room, The Most Beautiful Thing, and Yang Warriors. She co-edited the ground-breaking collection What God is Honored Here?: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss By and For Native Women and Women of Color. Yang’s work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the PEN USA literary awards, the Dayton’s Literary Peace Prize, as Notable Books by the American Library Association, Kirkus Best Books of the Year, the Heartland Bookseller’s Award, and garnered four Minnesota Book Awards. Kao Kalia Yang lives in Minnesota with her family, and teaches and speaks across the nation. https://kaokaliayang.com
A Conversation With Ed Bok Lee—WSR Contributing Poetry Editor
What are the types of poems you would like to see in Volume 25?
Poems that feel like microcosms of something larger.
What is an ideal submission for you? What would set a submission apart from the others for you?
When you make chocolate chip cookies, the most important thing is that you are making them exactly the way you think a chocolate chip cookie should taste and feel in the mouth. Make the chocolate chip cookie you want to eat and can’t get anywhere else. Your dream cookie. So too with poems, except poems can be even gooier, if that’s your thing.
Who are some writers you admire?
Lately, I really admire the poets in Myanmar who protested the coup in that country this past year. Some lost their lives, some have been arrested for giving voice to the people’s frustration, anger, hurt, fear, and power. I don’t have a type of poem I love most, but I was reading and listening to some of the poems by these “street” poets in Myanmar, and the story they individually and collectively tell is so powerful and timeless. There were many different types of poems: devotional, satirical, avant garde, political, confessional, absurdist, etc. etc. Without romanticizing things, it seems to me that any poem that can get you jailed or killed is a poem that every single person still free in the world ought to read.
Is there a form of poetry/fiction/creative nonfiction that you find most rewarding to read?
No. Literature is a forest; the more diversity of forms and subject matters, the more beautiful and healthy and grand the symphony.
Name three books that could be used to define you as an editor?
On any given day, this would probably change. Today, it’d be: The Upanishads. Anything by Yuri Herrera. And, because it’ll be coming out with Rain Taxi Press in just a couple of weeks, Smiling in an Old Photograph: Poems by Kim Ki-taek, which I worked on as both a translator and editor.
What current journals or presses do you admire, and why?
Every single one of them. Everyone involved is doing it first and foremost out of a passion for books and literature. Also, just like how I like my coffee and vegetables and eggs, I really admire local journals and presses who put a lot of energy into working to make the social soil they exist in as rich and fertile as possible, then spanning outward from there. Coffee House Press, whom I know most intimately, is a stellar example.
What projects or pieces are you working on now?
I’m always writing poems toward a next book. Lately, I’m also working on what might be considered lyric essays. “Pandemic Love” coming out this month in a new anthology: We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World. Again, I also co-translated and edited a chapbook of poems from the original Korean, which is due out in mid-October from Rain Taxi, as I mentioned above. And then there’s The Uncommon Speech of Paradise: Poems on the Art of Poetry, due out at the end of September. Some work of mine is in it. So I’ll be doing readings this October and November for those things.
Photo credit: Ted Hall
Ed Bok Lee is the author most recently of Mitochondrial Night. Honors for his books include the American Book Award, Minnesota Book Award, Asian American Literary Award (Members’ Choice), and PEN/Open Book Award, among others. He attended kindergarten in Seoul, South Korea, and teaches Fine Arts at Metropolitan State University in Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN. You can learn more about Ed and his work at his website.