Mary Jo Bang: Astonishment

Mary Jo Bang brings together poems united by astonishment at the continuation of a world that seems utterly self-destructive. She shares Claudia Rankine on the illusions of American optimism (“Don’t Let Me Be Lonely”), Srikanth Reddy on mortality and teaching literature (“Underworld Lit”), and Timothy Donnelly on the human experience of a polluted world (“In My Life”). She closes with her own “Cosmic Madonna,” an ekphrastic poem inspired by Salvador Dali.

Watch the full recordings of Rankine, Reddy, and Donnelly reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:

Claudia Rankine (October 19, 2005)
Srikanth Reddy (November 12, 2015)
Timothy Donnelly (October 19, 2023)

You can also enjoy a recording of Mary Jo Bang reading for the Poetry Center in 2011.

Transcript

Julie Swarstad Johnson:
[00:00:02.78] You're listening to Poetry Centered, where you'll hear recordings of poets reading and speaking about their work selected and introduced by contemporary poet. The show comes to you from the University of Arizona Poetry Center and our online archive of poetry readings called Voca. My name is Julie Swarstad Johnson, and I'm here to thank you for joining us. Our host for this episode is poet and translator Mary Jo Bang. She's the author of nine books of poetry, including her most recent, A Film in Which I Play Everyone, out last year. She has also just completed a translation of Dante's Paradiso, forthcoming in 2025. 

[00:00:46.79] For this episode, Mary Jo brings together poems United by astonishment, astonishment that the world continues despite ongoing self-destruction. You'll hear from Claudia Rankinee, Srikanth Reddy, and Timothy Donnelly with a poem from our host to close. Welcome, Mary Jo, and thank you for being our guide today. 

Mary Jo Bang:
[00:01:10.83] Hello. This is Mary Jo Bang. I'm recording from Saint Louis, Missouri. At the end of Percy Shelley's unfinished 1821 essay, A Defence of Poetry, which was only published posthumously in 1840. Shelley called poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world. That claim has always sounded grandiose to me. 

[00:01:40.49] The entire essay is filled with similar overblown assertions about poets and their poems. Three sentences before the end. However, there is a description of what poets do that I believe is accurate. Quote, they measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit. And they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations. For it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age end quote. 

[00:02:19.56] That sense of astonishment at the way the world manifests itself is what ties together the three readings I've selected for this podcast. Each poet tells the story of a mind trying to process a sense of wonder at how the world keeps going on in a way that often appears totally self-destructive. Each poet distills the complications of their own lives and their own way of seeing. Because a poem is a record of someone thinking at a specific point in time, it becomes a form of history, a form that often outlasts other historical renderings. 

[00:03:03.99] I've arranged the three readings in chronological order. The first is Claudia Rankinee, reading on October 19, 2005, from her book Don't Let Me Be Lonely, which had been published roughly a year earlier. The book was subtitled an American lyric. And on the back of the book, where the genre is printed for retail purposes, it reads lyric essay/poetry, which must have confused those in charge of stocking the book at the bookstores. 

[00:03:39.10] Because shortly after the book was published, I recommended it to a student who then went to the local Barnes and Noble bookstore. When she wasn't able to find the book in the poetry section, she asked an employee who led her to the memoir section. If the retail world was confused, poets were not. Most of us were excited by the hybrid form of the book, which weaves together observations about race, language, pharmaceuticals, and power. 

[00:04:12.14] The book is set in post-9/11 New York city. And the speaker posits herself as a writer writing a book about the liver. The prose poems on the page are broken up by a repeating icon, a static-filled television screen that actually half hides the image of George W. Bush, who had just been reelected president in 2004. Before his election in 2000, Bush had been the governor of Texas at the time when three men, two of whom were avowed white supremacists, were tried for the murder of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas. 

[00:04:55.55] In 1998, the three men beat Byrd, who was black, then chained him to a pickup truck and dragged him while initially alive for miles down an asphalt road, severing his arm and head from his body and killing him. They deposited his torso in front of a black cemetery. The then Governor Bush refused to support hate crime legislation and misrepresented the outcome of the trial, saying all three men had been sentenced to death. Only two had. The third received a sentence of life imprisonment with the possibility of eventual parole. 

[00:05:39.13] [MUSIC PLAYING] 

Claudia Rankine:
[00:05:42.30] I want to start the reading with a quote by the critic Homi Bhabha from his book, The Location of Culture. He says, remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful remembering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present. For me, Don't Let Me Be Lonely is, attempts to chronicle the time and times that we're in presently in an attempt to make sense of those times. 

[00:06:31.50] “Cornel West makes the point that hope is different from American optimism. After the initial presidential election results come in, I stop watching the news. I want to continue watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts. But I cannot. I lose hope. 

[00:07:02.22] However, Bush came to have won. He would still be winning 10 days later, and we would still be in the throes of our American optimism. All the non-reporting is a distraction from Bush himself. The same Bush who can't remember if two or three people were convicted for dragging a Black man to his death in his home state of Texas. You don't remember because you don't care. 

[00:07:37.46] Sometimes my mother's voice swells and fills my forehead. Mostly, I resist the flooding. But in Bush's case, I find myself talking to the television screen. You don't know because you don't care. Then, like all things impassioned, this voice takes on a life of its own. You don't know because you don't bloody care, do you? 

[00:08:13.53] I forget things, too. It makes me sad or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism, the sadness lives in the recognition that a life cannot matter. Or as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. 

[00:08:48.84] I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps, this is the real source of my sadness. Or perhaps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers. I don't know. I just find when the news comes on, I switch the channel. This new tendency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw. 

[00:09:27.40] IMH, the inability to maintain hope, which translates into no innate trust in the Supreme laws that govern us. Cornel West says this is what is wrong with Black people today. Too nihilistic, too scarred by hope to hope. To experience, to experience. To close to dead is what I think. 

[00:10:05.85] I lived for a while in London. And while I was there, there was a thing called the Museum of. And it rotated. So sometimes it was the Museum of Circles. Sometimes it was the Museum of Hate. And while I was there, it was the Museum of Emotions.” And it was appropriately enough sponsored by The Body Shop. 

[00:10:32.17] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:10:36.45] “The Museum of Emotions in London has a game that asks yes and no questions. As long as you answer correctly, you can continue playing. The third question is, were you terribly upset? And did you find yourself weeping when Princess Diana died? I told the truth and stepped on the no tile. I was not allowed to continue. 

[00:11:14.28] The museum employee, who must have had a thing with shame, looked away as I stepped down. Walking out, I couldn't help, but think the question should have been, was Princess Diana ever really alive? I mean, alive to anyone outside of her friends and family truly. 

[00:11:40.26] The English were very distraught after her death. On the television, they showed thousands of mourners leaving flowers in front of the palace. Weren't they mourning the protection they felt she should have had? A protection they'll never have. Weren't they simply grieving the random inevitability of their own lives? 

[00:12:13.79] My mother tells me I'm just biding time. She means it as a push toward not biding time. She wants me to lead a readable life, one that can be read as worthwhile and successful. My mother is not overly concerned with happiness. It's fruitless, pursuit, or otherwise. As far as she can remember, there is only pain connected to the joy of childbirth. She remembers the pain and wants it to have been worthwhile for a reasonable life. 

[00:12:58.67] As I watch my mother's mouth move, I ask myself. Am I often troubled by constipation? Have I ever vomited love or coughed up blame? Is anything wrong with my mind?” That usually gets a laugh. 

[00:13:25.52] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:13:26.17] Maybe yours is the more appropriate response. Or maybe we have some mother sympathizers. 

[00:13:37.41] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:13:51.45] “In the night, I watched television to help me fall asleep or I watched television because I cannot sleep. My husband sleeps through my sleeplessness and the noise of the television. Eventually, it is all a blur. I never remember turning the TV off. But always when I wake up in the morning, it is off. Perhaps he turns it off. I don't know. 

[00:14:21.12] Some nights I count the commercials for antidepressants. If the same commercial is repeated, I still count it. It seems right that pharmaceutical companies should advertise in the middle of the night when people are less distracted and capable of tuning in more and more and most precisely to their fearful bodies and their accompanying anxieties. 

[00:14:51.88] One commercial for Paxil says simply, your life is waiting. Parataxis, I think first. But then I wonder, for what? For what does it wait? For life, I guess. Across the screen, this time minus audio flashes, your life is waiting. It remains on the screen long enough so that when I close my eyes to check if I am sleeping. Instead of darkness, your life is waiting, stares back at me.” 

[00:15:37.66] [MUSIC PLAYING] 

Mary Jo Bang:
[00:15:45.27] This next selection is Srikanth Reddy, reading at the Poetry Center on November 12, 2015, from what was then a manuscript in progress titled Underworld Lit. He's going to read parts 1, 4, and 8. The book would be published five years later in 2020. Reddy's book, like Rankine's, also adopts a conceit. 

[00:16:11.71] In this case, the speaker is a university professor teaching a course on the literature of the underworld. His story of teaching this class is woven together with a supposed French translation of an obscure work of Chinese folklore, where a magistrate's assistant named Chen is called to the underworld to answer for war crimes he committed when alive. Even here, in this ancient account of being human, the reader encounters the powerful, desecrating the body of someone considered an enemy. The story of the teaching, the stories of the underworld takes on new resonance when we learn that the speaker has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal melanoma, which appears to be in remission. And so it goes, history and literature continually trip over one another as they intersect with our own lives, our own inevitable death. 

[00:17:17.01] [APPLAUSE] 

Srikanth Reddy:
[00:17:20.90] Thanks, Tyler. That was really-- I don't feel like I can live up to it. So this is OK. You can hear me? Yes. OK. Can you see my shadow puppet here. That's a deer. 

[00:17:37.24] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:17:40.82] It's going to read the whole poem. 

[00:17:43.66] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:17:46.08] And you've had time to fill out this thing. How would you rate this event? I'm just going to suggest excellent. 

[00:17:52.66] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:17:54.80] Maybe before we even begin. Yeah, just get out of the way. 

[00:17:58.08] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:17:59.66] So I'm going to read from a new book that I'm working on now. That is, I have no idea how it's going. But I won't really say much about it. It's a long, long poem. Probably too long. It's called Underworld Lit. 

[00:18:23.37] Yeah, I won't say much about it. It's in three sections. It's about a year. The first section is called “Fall Term.” Any resemblance to persons, historical, or real is purely coincidental. 

[00:18:42.52] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:18:44.58] And I'll jump around, so I'm going to read the numbers for each section. But you'll get a feeling that I'm just jumping around. “One. In the inky, dismal, and unprofitable research of a recent leave of absence from the middle of my life, I came across an inscription on a historical prism of Ashurbanipal that I found to be somewhat disquieting, of an enemy whose remains he had abused in a manner that does not bear repeating here. This most studious and exacting of Mesopotamian Kings professes, I made him more dead than he was before. 

[00:19:28.72] Prisms of this sort were often buried in the foundations of government buildings, and therefore, intended to be read by gods, but not men. Somewhere in the maze of carrels and stacks, I thought I could hear a low dial tone humming without end. In Ashurbanipal's library, there is a poem written on clay that correct various commonly held errors regarding the world of the dead. Pache, Mulian, Odysseus, Madame Blavatsky and Kwasi Benefo. It is not customarily permitted to visit the underworld. No, the underworld visits you. 

[00:20:20.38] Four. Already, it's beginning to seem that I cannot avoid the subject of this nation's interminable abuse of another's remains. But I would have preferred to write something along the lines of a poetic essay on comparative underworlds. For the past few years, I've taught a course on underworld lit, which has frequently proven to be a disappointment both to myself and to the students summoned head scarves, some occasionally dressed in fatigues who have registered for the seminar in order to satisfy their humanities requirement. 

[00:21:02.63] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:21:05.43] It confirmed my hatred of epics and reaffirmed my faith that I will never study non-western literature. The instructor is fairly intelligent and enthusiastic about his brand of writing, but is unreceptive even intolerant of anything that is not a poem or a poem in prose form. 

[00:21:29.47] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:21:32.45] Made me question things, including the value of higher learning. 

[00:21:37.01] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:21:41.34] It occurred to me that by writing about teaching, I might learned something. There would be assignments, a midterm, and a final examination, followed by a series of timed detonations and the collapse of an abandoned complex under stars. I needed to find my footing in the order of things. And because I know almost nothing about the world, I decided to work my way up from below. 

[00:22:10.68] Eight. While outlining the requirements for our first critical essay of the term, I notice a hand rising tentatively in the classroom's farthest corner. What if I'm ideologically opposed to revision? Asks the red-headed boy in a new slaves t-shirt. A city bus unloads its pageantry just outside the window. A handful of sparrows erupts from the equestrian statue on the quad. 

[00:22:45.37] I remember Sun Tzu's advice to humanities instructors, which I review on index cards on the eve of each new term. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder and crush him. 

[00:23:00.23] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:23:04.39] What exactly is your ideology? I ask, mentally stroking my beard. I'm a Zen Naxalite crypto-Objectivist, replies my interlocutor. How about you? Removing a stray bran flake lodged in my beard, I have no choice but to improvise. Pro recycling, anti-genocide? 

[00:23:32.78] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:23:35.65] A voice from beyond my peripheral vision says, you're nothing, but a pseudo-Kantian neoliberal mirage with meta narcissistic tendencies. 

[00:23:45.94] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:23:48.65] No, I'm not. 

[00:23:49.36] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:23:51.47] Yes, you are. 

[00:23:52.35] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:23:54.02] No, I'm not. 

[00:23:54.97] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:23:56.18] Yes, you are.” 

[00:23:59.29] [MUSIC PLAYING] 

Mary Jo Bang:
[00:24:06.38] My last selection is Timothy Donnelly reading from his book Chariot on October 12, 2023, which brings us almost to the present moment. Since Rankine's book was published in 2004, these three books create a 20-year window through which we can view America at the beginning of the 21st century. For Donnelly's reading, I've chosen “In My Life,” the first poem in his book because it looks squarely at the physical world, and then tells us how it feels to have a body and how that body tries to make sense of what it sees and what it feels. 

[00:24:47.13] Rankine and ready-made us aware of what it's like to read about the desecration of a body. And we're forced to see that violation in the mind's eye. Donnelly's poem focuses on what it feels like to see the desecration of the Earth through the same eyes that see the stars both in the sky if we're lucky enough to live where the stars are still visible through urban light pollution. And on a computer screen, that parallel reality, which sometimes feels more real than reality itself. 

[00:25:22.89] [MUSIC PLAYING] 

Timothy Donnelly:
[00:25:25.31] Thank you. 

[00:25:26.19] [LAUGHTER] 

[00:25:27.92] We talked today in the class about my interest in ancient history. And a way that I'm sure everyone in this room is. But I know that I am. I'm interested in the idea of what it means to be human rather than other things and to know that we occupy as humans what we've thought to be a special place, and perhaps is a special place on this planet. 

[00:25:54.89] I don't know that we've always treated our special place, our special privilege with all due care. But I sometimes agree with someone like Rilke, who suggested that we might be the scribes of the earth, the consciousness of the Earth that can reflect back on itself. And I take that vocation really seriously. This is the first poem in my new book, Chariot. And I'll just read about eight poems from this book. They're all short. 

[00:26:23.00] I wrote a lot of longer poems in the previous books. And as I was telling the class today, I decided that I would write a book of just 20 line poems. And I wrote this book during the brunt of the pandemic from about March 2020 until August 2022. 

[00:26:41.52] This poem is called “In My Life.” I live in a part of Brooklyn, a fine part of Brooklyn. But also, we live next to a very polluted waterway that became polluted through all the efforts of industrial life in the city back in the 19th century through parts of the 20th. 

[00:27:02.43] “In my life, I have never seen the Milky way, the way it looks in pictures in my feed on Instagram, which is to say, like the trail of froth a sperm whale makes in videos when it swims up close to the air. But immeasurably, more luminous and spattered everywhere in tiny barnacles of stars. Whole portions of the sky stained improbably azure, purple, teal, a general sense of superimposition, but no real threat of being pounced on or made to suffer in captivity. 

[00:27:34.69] The specter of symphonic music off in the background of the mind, relaxing with neurochemicals. Any suspicion vis-a-vis authenticity or preference to not be made a fool of except by invitation. Telling itself somewhere along the way, it agreed to go along with everything, so long as no one gets hurt. But I have seen its local counterpart and the residues of industry haunting the Gowanus Canal, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and polychlorinated biphenyls, coal tar wastes, and heavy metals, dazzling the surface of the waterway in galactic shapes in peacock green, gold, sapphire. And while I have no desire to make pollution beautiful or to see it romantically. A voice says, that's exactly what I'm doing. While another whispers down to me from a remove saying, I am in my life like a dolphin. Like a dolphin trapped in a cove.” 

[00:28:35.42] [MUSIC PLAYING] 

Mary Jo Bang:
[00:28:44.24] I'd like to thank everyone at the Arizona Poetry Center and especially Julie Swarstad Johnson, for inviting me to make this podcast. It was really fascinating going back all the way to the '70s through the archives listening to readings. I also want to thank Claudia Rankine, Srikanth Reddy, and Timothy Donnelly for their readings. And I hope you'll go back when you have time and listen to the rest of their reading from those dates. 

[00:29:18.74] For my poem, I'm going to read an acrostic poem inspired by a Salvador Dali painting titled Cosmic Madonna, which was done in 1958. It's part of a series called “The Museum of Mary,” which are all ekphrastic poems using artworks that contain a woman named Mary. “Cosmic Madonna.” 

[00:29:43.25] “I'm available in laminate, plywood, or plastic. Hopefully, they'll all last through a nuclear winter. That's not to say there won't be difficult days. There will be. They keep coming around like a regifted Christmas. Out the window, the street is clear. No people, no cars. Then here comes a clock dragging a minute through the mud, ruining the illusion of standstill and closure. 

[00:30:13.16] The last of my seven sorrows is the boy who disappeared like a pin that rolled under a floorboard unreachable never to be seen again. I know that's nothing compared to a war or the dead lie looking up their eyes aimed forever at heaven. I was once a bronze statue. Someone said they saw me weeping. 

[00:30:37.97] Tell me, am I the only one who doubts that a bronze icon can cry or wonders why the men in a painting of the Magi are wearing tunics and tights? Was that the fashion year zero in the West Bank? Surely not. One life lacks the depth and extravagance of a country in crisis. Yet here we are crying for their lives and ours, his life and mine. That time and this. And all of the times when death happened through spiteful and vain acts of self-interest.” 

[00:31:20.54] [MUSIC PLAYING] 

Julie Swarstad Johnson:
[00:31:28.37] Mary Jo, thank you so much for your selections and your own poem. You've got me thinking about all the valences of astonishment in new ways. Listeners, we hope you've enjoyed this as well. And we thank you as ever for being with us. Two weeks from today, we'll be joined by poet Eugenia Leigh, another treat. Thanks again, and we look forward to next time. 

[00:31:51.11] Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world-class library collection of more than 80,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the poetry center library and buildings are housed on the Indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui. 

Aria Pahari:
[00:32:18.86] Poetry Centered is the work of Aria Pahari, that's me and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audio-visual archive online at voca.arizona.edu.