Fogged Clarity Podcast Fogged Clarity

Because, shit, it’s too dry to snow but it’s cold

and the crocus is cold under the wind, wind

the cat contemplates through the screen, geese out

on the river now terrorized by swans . . . But nobody’s

bored with this; it’s elegant just being alive in an age

of advertising, not seeing any ads but this weather.

There’s wind on other planets, it’s somehow

interesting to know, and a broken shed latch

swings hard against the plywood door. This brings me

to radio, the little half-lit awarenesses fluttering

inside of each morning, the cat and the cricket she eats,

the man and the woman he needs—one soft

and wholly graspable in front of the other—

until there’s just sky and song in the distance,

no clouds present for breakfast either, just two herons

out near some cattails. You know what I mean?





David Dodd Lee has published eight collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014). His poems have recently appeared in Guernica, Field, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, and The Nation, among other journals. Lee teaches creative writing, visual art, and literature at Indiana University South Bend, where he also serves as editor-in-chief of the university’s 42 Miles Press.

The Austin songwriter discusses breaking from a Southern Baptist upbringing and plays two poignant, sharply political songs from his latest album in this session recorded backstage at the Arc in Ann Arbor, MI.



David Ramirez is a musician and songwriter from Austin, Texas. He has released four full-length albums, the most recent of which is 2017’s We’re Not Going Anywhere (Thirty Tigers).

I had one of those sinking spells—she was no more than an infant,

blue eyes . . .

I thought I could smell some reel-to-reel tape

So I bought a pill halver . . .

Most of the furniture sat fading in the sunshine—

The child moved her tiny hand . . .

My blood pressure moderated (again), misguided, but innocent . . .

One more in a long series of “isms”

It was an ordinary garden-hose type of summer day in Caledonia

A vision painted there, but blinking at me, sadder than Modigliani

The infant liked this way too much

Her head growing taller, and thinner

Somebody handed me a card

You want to donate flowers?______ or food?______





David Dodd Lee has published eight collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014). His poems have recently appeared in Guernica, Field, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, and The Nation, among other journals. Lee teaches creative writing, visual art, and literature at Indiana University South Bend, where he also serves as editor-in-chief of the university’s 42 Miles Press.

The Colgate University Political Science professor and author of The Polarizers: “Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era” discusses the 2018 midterm elections, Bernie Sanders, and the media’s inability to save us in an exclusive discussion.

TRANSCRIPTION



Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This morning I’m pleased to be joined by Sam Rosenfeld, assistant professor of political science at Colgate University and author of The Polarizers: Post-War Architects of Our Partisan Era. Rosenfeld holds a PhD in history from Harvard University and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Review, Politico andVox, among other outlets. Sam, I appreciate you taking the time.

Sam Rosenfeld: Thanks so much for having me.

BE: Absolutely. Let’s talk first about your book The Polarizers. And congratulations on that. It came out in December of last year and it’s incredibly pertinent to the times we’re living in. So we’ve been hearing so much of late about divisiveness in America and we daily witness the enormous partisan divide in Washington. Your book reveals that such ideological separation was and is the plan of activist politicians and thought leaders on both the right and left following World War II. The book evidences that party polarization was a deliberate response by these individuals to combat what they saw as a growing lack of discernible difference between Democrats and Republicans. Can you explain why the engineers of party polarization regarded and seemingly still regard unity and a relatively unified national political ideology as a problem in the first place?

SR: Absolutely. So, the middle 20th century party system that is forged in the New Deal realignment of 1930’s, and then consolidated in the early post-war era is one that still to this day is a lot of gauzy nostalgia for among commentators who lament contemporary polarization and came of age in an era when things seemed a lot more civil and consensual. It was a party system in which it was, for contingent historical reasons–particularly the Democratic party, which was the dominate electorate majority party for many of these decades, after the New Deal–contained within it both the most liberal and activist political actors, and at the national level was the center left party. But also contained within it conservative and reactionary and, on the question of race, the most white supremacist faction of American politics in the form of southern Democrats who had disproportional amount of power in Congress. So the majority center-left party contained these hugely divergent ideological factions. On the right, in the Republican Party you also had a minority progressive–a northern Republican progressive tradition–dating back to the Mugwumps and capital-P Progressives that still had influence in the party, as well as a bunch of small government stalwart conservatives. So in both parties you had these big, internal ideological factions. And that meant that when policy was made, when legislation and legislative coalitions were put together, it was routinely done on a bipartisan basis. You had ad hoc coalitions of Republican and Democratic liberals to do some stuff. And then you had an institutionalized coalition of what was called the Conservative coalition of largely southern Democrats working with Republicans to block liberal legislation. But what it basically meant was that the parties, which is what organized the electorates votes and behavior on election day had much less influence shaping policy making. And bipartisanship–the norms of working across the aisle in various ways–were institutionalized and regularized. This is how people expected politics to happen. On the one hand, that makes it look like what was going on there was a unitary consensus, where people just didn’t disagree in that...

The poet discusses Denis Johnson, Larry Levis, Coos Bay, and the obsessions behind his latest collection of poems, Early Hour.



TRANSCRIPTION



Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This morning I’m pleased to be speaking to one of my favorite poets working today, Michael McGriff is the author of four books of poetry and a collection of stories Our Secret Life in the Movies which he co-authored with J.M. Tyree. He also served as translator for Swedish poet and Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer’s collection of poems The Sorrow Gondola. McGriff’s latest book of poems Early Hour was released in August of last year and takes its name from a painting of the same name by German Expressionist Karl Hofer. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at the University of Idaho. Michael, thanks for taking the time…

I wonder if you could explain the marriage of influences behind your latest book, Early Hour; I’ve heard it referred to as a meditative sequence of Hofer’s painting, but then we find the “Black Postcard” poems in homage to Tranströmer interspersed throughout—this with all the poems seemingly situated in this landscape of an almost post-industrial Northwest that has for a long time served as your backdrop. Can you talk about the tonal similarities you found in the work of Hofer and Tranströmer and how you found their respective aesthetics to align with the mood and geography of the Northwest you grew up in?

Michael McGriff: That’s…I’ll try! I think the way–your question, I think, describes the book “aesthetically”, perfectly. It is a synthesis of the section of so-called “Black Postcard” poems that are an homage to Tranströmer and there’s all the poems that are directly engaging the painting “Early Hour”, which is the name of the book. Of course, all the landscape markers are my obsessive aesthetic images which are images of my hometown in the Pacific Northwest. But the book…I had all these things cooking anyway, but the book sparked into life when I was at the Portland Art Museum and I saw the painting “Early Hour”, by Karl Hofer who was a German Expressionist painter who I really had no knowledge about, but this painting kind of caught me dead in my tracks. The more I looked at it the more I was totally overwhelmed by it, and mostly because it seems, on first glimpse, to be a pretty ordinary European painting. You know, it’s a naked guy and a naked woman in bed and in repose; they’ve got a dog at their feet. There’s a landscape in the background. But there’s just something spooky about it, and the guy starts to look really deathly the more you look at him. You know, then you look on the placard: it was painted in 1935, the guy’s a German, and then all of history sort of triangulates the foreboding tones. So, I wrote in response to that painting for quite a while. Or at least it was in the back of my mind while I was writing.

BE: Early Hour (Hofer’s) seems concerned with probing that space that exists between the woken man and the sleeping woman–to those unfamiliar with the piece we’ll post it alongside this interview–the separateness despite the intimacy of the circumstance seems a tension that propels a lot of the poems, and some have called Early Hour a book about desire. Is desire a product of the ultimate unknowability of an other, even a lover? Do you think desire is the yearning to bridge that gap?

MM: Yeah, I do. I mean, the book kind of situates itself like you’re saying. It’s got the apostrophic address: the speaker of the book reaching out to this other, this lover, however you want to characterize her. But beyond that, I think, it’s that and that component of the self or however you want to think about it, as well. But I think you’re totally right. I love that about the painting. They’re so physically close together, those two figures, but they’re really in vastly different worlds at the same t

We begin

with this Rorschach

of blood on thigh:

first, a gravedigger shoveling earth

into our bed,

then the rotting barn

we once undressed in.

Beneath this wet duress, we beg

in unison

to be born.

 

***

What’s the word

for the soft white belly

after the harpoon,

but before the hooks?

Last month, we bought the books

that told us what to buy.

Then bought none of it.

 

***

That August, when the river dries up

and the cattails sway like torches

waiting to be lit, we miss

the mud most.

We call it a crick, then dip

our toes into what’s not there.

 

***

Our little god-gone-

cannibal, our little omnivorous

accident, our little shit storm

of surrender, our little meaning-

cum-mercy, our little ball

of lightning, our little life-

boat hell-bent

on being held.

 

***

After the first deep freeze,

the elm leaves seal themselves

beneath the puddles:

each leaf blackened red

like a wound

we step carefully over.

She will unstitch you,

our mothers say.

The days pass: ocean,

ocean, accident.

Here a cave of prehistoric

fear, there a nest of teeth.

When you won’t sleep,

I lay you down on the floor

and kneel at the altar

of you altering me.





Fritz Ward is the author of Tsunami Diorama (The Word Works, 2017) and the chapbook Doppelganged (Blue Hour Press, 2011). The recipient of the Cecil Hemley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, Fritz’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, The Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He works at Swarthmore College and lives just outside of Philadelphia.