Poetry Centered
Poetry Centered
Mackenzie Polonyi: Mycorrhizal Love
Mackenzie Polonyi selects poems that engender bell hooks’ idea of love as a verb—a mycorrhizal, persistent, and complicated act linking us to past and present, near and far. She discusses Lucille Clifton on the boundlessness of light (“i was born with twelve fingers”), Fady Joudah’s adaptation of Hussein Barghouthi on the music of what it means to be human (“I Dreamed You”), and Victoria Chang on questions for the generations we cannot meet (“Once you had to stand behind...”). Polonyi closes with her own “Grand Daughter’s Grief Logic,” where grieving ruptures time.
Find the full recordings of Clifton, Joudah, and Chang reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Lucille Clifton (October 12, 1983)
Fady Joudah (February 19, 2015)
Victoria Chang (October 6, 2022)
Full transcripts of every episode are available on Buzzsprout. Look for the transcript tab under each episode.
Voca is now fully captioned, with interactive transcripts and captions available for all readings! Read more about the project here, or try out this new feature by visiting Voca.
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JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:This is Poetry Centered, where you'll hear archival recordings of poets reading and speaking about their work curated for you by a guest host poet. The show comes to you from the University of Arizona Poetry Center and our online archive of poetry readings called Voca. I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson, the Center's archivist, here to welcome you. Our host today is poet Mackenzie Polonyi. Her first book, Post-Volcanic Folk Tales, was selected for the National Poetry Series and came out just last month from Akashic books. In this episode, Mackenzie has brought together recordings of Lucille Clifton, Victoria Chang and Fady Joudah, who reads an adaptation of Hussein Barghouthi. Mackenzie weaves these poems together using bell hooks' idea of love as a verb, a rhizomatic, persistent, complex act that links us to past and present, near and far. Mackenzie, thank you so much for these selections, and thank you for being our guide today.[MUSIC PLAYING]
MACKENZIE POLONYI:Hello, my name is Mackenzie Polonyi. I am recording from my desk in New Jersey. The first recording I would like to share is Lucille Clifton reading "i was born with twelve fingers" on October 12, 1983. The Book of Light by Lucille Clifton begins with a lingual bolt, a plasmatic column of shimmering synonyms for the word light that acts as informative infrastructure. The muchness of language as electrical energy, its potentialities a charge, its limitations, a charge, sparks of naming, shaping, meaning making and reiteration flashing across inceptive pages. Lucille Clifton introduces herself."I am Lucille, which stands for light." Here, the word light cannot be singularly defined. The word light has many possibilities. It is multitudinous, transmutation, of boundless, borderless, accumulative, refractive. Lucille describes names as ineffable. She is not light alone. She is daughter of Thelma, daughter of Georgia, daughter of dazzling you. Here, Lucille Clifton addresses the brilliant woman who shines at the head of her grandmother's bed. It is enough, you must have murmured, to remember that I was and that you are woman. Later, Lucille writes, "Born in Babylon, both nonwhite and woman, what did I see to be except myself? I made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand. Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed." Lucille Clifton's greater self twisted her wild hair and sparked her wild eyes and screamed as long as Lucille could hear her. This, this, this. What is this? Its musical pattern, the rhythm of decision that Lucille Clifton decides herself with extraordinary power to live, to act, to make, to change, to mold, to love, to surround these bones with flesh, to build something human with her body and with her dream, red and raging. What does she tell us she will be? In her own words, "What I can promise to be is water." With her twelve fingers, Lucille Clifton desires, makes, communes and interrogates clear, luminous, luciferous, clarifying, brilliant, streaming hand over hungry hand. Again, she is not light alone. She is strengthened by her wild witch gran, and her magic mama and in her poem from Two-headed Woman entitled, "i was born with twelve fingers," her daughter too. Milk, umbilical, the powerful memory of ghosts, invisible fingers, the sweet sacred meat of others. I learn viscerally from this spell, which is a wondrous will to acknowledge, to share, to connect, to weave like spiders, a loving practice that is mycorrhizal. Hearing Lucille Clifton read her poem and reflecting on The Book of Light, I am reminded of a line from Laurin DeChae's project entitled, "I Am" in Poetry as Spellcasting."It is a spell of active self-definition that recognizes oneness as collective consciousness, polyvocality, and the ways in which we are connected to each other and the material world. Everything is everything. How do we listen with mycelial hands?" Again, this is Lucille Clifton reading "i was born with twelve fingers."[MUSIC PLAYING]
LUCILLE CLIFTON:This is another poem, another kind of mood. I was watching television one day and they were talking about women. And as often happens, when you start talking about women, somewhere in the conversation, they begin to talk about witches.[LAUGHTER] And one of the things that was said then was that you can tell a witch because she has twelve fingers. Well, I was born with twelve fingers. My mother was born with twelve fingers, and my oldest daughter was born with twelve fingers. So I had to write a poem about that. It's a kind of a mood poem, I think."i was born with twelve fingers.""Like my mother and my daughter, each of us born wearing strange black gloves, extra baby fingers hanging over the sides of our cribs and dipping into the milk. Somebody was afraid we would learn to cast spells, and our wonders were cut off. But they didn't understand the powerful memory of ghosts. Now, we take what we want with invisible fingers. And we connect my dead mother, my live daughter and me through our terrible, shadowy hands."[APPLAUSE] Thank you.[MUSIC PLAYING]
MACKENZIE POLONYI:The second recording I would like to share is of Fady Joudah reading a translation of Hussein Barghouthi's poem,"I Dreamed You," on February 19, 2015."Love astounds me. Love astounds me. Love astounds me." Interviewed by Aria Aber in The Yale Review, Fady Joudah reflected upon the responsibility of the poet. Here is an excerpt of his from their correspondence."Love is necessary for humans because without it, we are destroyers of worlds and with it, we still struggle not to be destroyers. The responsibility of the poet? My medical mentor, a Jewish man from Waco, Texas, used to say that a plethora of ongoing research on a particular medical subject indicates that we still do not know enough about that subject. And that is how I feel about the responsibility of the poet. We keep talking about it because it is relentlessly mutable, pluripotent. We are never satisfied with our answers. I often think that the responsibility of the poet is to strive to become the memory that people may possess in the future about what it means to be human, an ever changing constant. In poetry, the range of metaphors and topics is limited, predictable, but the styles are innumerable. Think how we read poetry from centuries ago and are no longer bothered by its outdated diction. All remains of old poetry is the music of what it means to be human. The Book of Light was published 31 years ago. In her poem addressing US imperialism and militarism and the grotesque language of a racist, homophobic senator, Lucille Clifton wrote a searingly exact echoic inculpating line, exposing bare the manipulative, depraved absurdity of the rhetoric of politicians."The smart bombs do recognize the babies." The word smart here is a plain and salient implication. If the bombs are smart, if the advanced and sophisticated technology of the weaponry is intelligent and if the politicians hearts are in fact beating, with their relentless war engine, not spare civilians and children, let alone relent? The smartness of the bombs reveals to us the corruption and the cruelty of imperial supremacist politicians who expand, exploit, extract. This is no accident. The civilians and the children are not collateral damage. The politicians kill on purpose, their hearts hungry only for power and money indoctrinated toward hatred. Lucille Clifton's line is a pertinent portal into lines of shattering clarity from Fady Joudah's most recent collection of poetry, whose title is a bracketed ellipsis, not a vocabulary but punctuation. In her review of Fady Joudah's book in Gulf Coast magazine, Gemini Wahhaj demonstrates that this timelessness marks the loss of language during the ongoing genocide of Palestinians by the Israeli state, and that the recurring ellipses throughout Joudah's book are both an expression of the unspeakable horror of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the censorship of all speech to describe this horror. In the first section of his book, Fady Joudah writes, "They did not mean to kill the children. They meant to. Too many kids got in the way of precisely imprecise one ton bombs dropped 1,001 times over the children's nights." In January, Israeli forces deliberately shot 355 bullets into the vehicle that Hind Rajab, a five-year-old baby girl, was pleading for her life in. I never stop hearing Hind's voice. I never stop picturing her face when I gaze at my nephew's growing face. I never stop thinking of Reem, the soul of her grandfather's soul. I never stop picturing Naifa Rizq al-Sawada's gentle face when I stare into my grandmother's photographs. I never stop hearing Muhammad Bahar's most tender words. We have failed each one of these humans, our neighbors, our brothers, our sisters, our children, these whole worlds." In Aaron Bushnell's words, "This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. And what is our decision in response? This, this, this, to love, as in to act like ritual." We have learned from bell hooks that love is not a noun, but a verb. bell hooks, quoting Erich Fromm in All About Love taught us, "Love is as love does. Love is an act of will, namely, both in intention and in action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love. To truly love, we must learn to mix various ingredients, care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.""To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility." And perhaps most importantly,"there can be no love without justice." In a poem about motherhood, interconnectedness, and astonishment at the sacred magic that is life, that is a life, and lives, from The Black Maria, Aracelis Girmay wrote,"Beloved's, making your ways to and away from us, always across the centuries, inside the vastness of the galaxy, how improbable it is that this iteration of you or you or me might come to be at all?""Body of fear. Body of laughing. And even last a second. This fact should make us fall all to our knees with awe, the beauty of it against these odds, the stacks and stacks of near-misses and slimmest chances that birthed one ancestor into the next and next. Profound, unspeakable cruelty who counters this, who does not see. And so to tenderness, I add my action." What have we failed to see? How can we commit ourselves accountable and responsible to seeing? How may we add our actions to tenderness to day, tomorrow, the day after, tomorrow, together in ritual for life? Here, Joudah offers us a translation of Hussein Barghouthi. I note the rhythm of the first line, the alliteration of the second, the internal rhyme of the third, the music of what it means to be human, to share stories. You too to listen, visited, vow to connect, flow, glow. Love astounds me. I climb your hands. Love astounds me. I climb your hands. Love astounds me. I climb your hands. Free Palestine. Again, this is Fady Joudah reading a translation of Hussein Barghouthi's poem,"I Dreamed You."[MUSIC PLAYING]
FADY JOUDAH:This is a poem. It's a mutation of a translation by a Palestinian poet by the name of-- and actually memoirist and critic, brilliant man who died young from lung cancer. His name is Hussein Barghouthi. And it's called "I Dreamed You." He actually studied comparative literature in Seattle and wrote a wonderful memoir called Blue Light in Arabic. And I don't think it has been translated in English yet, but it'd be fascinating if that happens."I Dreamed You.""A shrine of two, one who's visited for a vow and one who floats on water as glow. Whether visitor or visited, love astounds me as if you were some higher form of what I've lost and then returns to me when the curtain's lifted. I climb your hands. My body falls as glass. My soul rises as fragrance. Some climbing is ascension, some is collapse. I dreamed you. You fire up the Earth without catalyst. Some eyes are mirrors and some mirrors are dust."[MUSIC PLAYING]
MACKENZIE POLONYI:The third and final recording I would like to share is of Victoria Chang reading,"Once you had to stand behind" from her book Dear Memory recorded on October 6, 2022. My own book is about my relationship with my beloved maternal grandmother, my second mother, a woman who raised me, a woman for whom my morning is ceaseless, a bond that for me is a tree. Her death is a door that requires a million keys. I finger for the right one. I almost find it. The grooves that activate the lock shift, their unique patterns. I start again. I wrote about my commitment to loving my grandmother and preserving her dignity through progressive dementia and through her final transition into an after her going, which I believe traumatized me. I write about dementia's bewilderments of time, about my grandmother's experience of home leaving, defecting, exile, and her regret the size of a planet, about hungers for and illusions and betrayals of home, violences of borders, and about my experience as a mentally ill medical mystery who has through physical, psychological, and sexual abuse and through abandonment and dismissal by the medical establishment, felt creaturely or monstrous, more decomposer than girl. My grandmother left Hungary during an uprising in November of 1956, sneaking winter nights beyond barbed wire, landmines, military dogs. That moment of leaving is my haunting and my longing. I live in and am kept out of that month. That month lives in me like an incandescent pit resembling an infinity mirror. Displaced persons here in the US, she and my grandfather, a Hungarian Transylvanian, reunited with some of their close friends from Budapest in Camp Kilmer. I am desperate to understand what the conditions of their lives were then. I can fill certain gaps by remembering or failing to. I can fill certain gaps by reading work by Gáspár Miklós Tamás, a Jewish Hungarian Transylvanian Marxist philosopher, for example. Other gaps can never be filled. They gnaw and spasm and burn and ache. The residue I received from my grandmother matches what Tamás wrote regarding Stalinism, oppression, authoritarianism, repression, police state, hierarchy, inequality, exploitation, propagandistic mendacity, censorship and shortages. My grandfather, László, nearly starved to death in a forced labor camp. My grandmother said his waist was so small she could wrap her hands around it, and her fingers would nearly touch. Tamás wrote of the uprising in his article called "Hungary
1956:A Socialist Revolution" published by International Socialism and republished by Left East. On 23, October 1956, a huge demonstration took place in Budapest. The special forces fired on the crowd. As a result, the government fell. Imre Nagy returned. A multi-party system was declared and the Soviet troops withdrew. The center of power was in the hands of the proletariat of the swiftly formed workers councils, but the focus was on political liberty, pluralism, freedom of expression and on a new constitutional republic. It was made clear once again that the nationalized and socialized enterprises and institutions would remain in the hands of the people, but ruled by the people, not by the apparat. No significant force demanded joining the Western alliances. Privatizations and the introduction of a market economy were deliberately and decisively rejected. At the same time, people demanded the departure of the Russian troops and true national independence. The specter of counter-revolution appeared, too, in acts of summary justice and a few cases of lynching of party officials and of special forces. This, however, was greeted with indignation and revulsion by the majority. Some of my grandparents' close friends who fled were Christian and some were Jewish. I know my grandparents bodies overflowed with fear into my mother and into me, into, into, into. And I know that the fear my grandparents experienced was incommensurable with the fear of their Jewish friends before, during and after Nazi German occupation, wherein Hungary was complicit in genocide, and Hungary's fascist ultranationalist paramilitary party deported and systemically murdered hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews. The racist, homophobic and misogynistic Viktor Orbán unsurprisingly whitewashes this history. As a child, my mother, the oldest daughter of refugees who taught her parents English, hid frequently under the kitchen table and listened with her mycelial hands to their conversations. I preserved the names of all of my grandparents' close friends, with whom they made community in New Jersey. I write their names frequently, practicing their letters. It hollows and hollows my stomach that I cannot ask them questions about their lives, their experiences, their stories, their complicated, complex feelings about home, and also about my grandparents' decisions. I have so many questions that scare me and unspare me. What happens when you have a love for a place, an idea and you neglect people, connection, story and what we learn from story? What happens when people who say they speak for a place you say you love, are not honest with themselves, are not honest with history? What happens when you choose to pretend this dishonesty is honesty? We have learned from bell hooks that there can be no love without justice and that the heart of justice is truth-telling. What happens when you refuse the mirror of your neighbor's eyes? A nation is an idea that ultimately makes another, a state as an apparatus that enforces invisible margins and forces the violent and ridiculous notion of the legality or illegality of a human being legislating bodies and enforces the lies and myths of politicians and their institutions as foundation. What I promise to do is question everything. What I promise to be is my mother's daughter. I have found a comparison for my never ending grief for my grandmother in Victoria Chang's Obit and Dear Memory. In her first epistolary piece in Dear Memory, Victoria Chang wrote, "I have so many questions. I would like to know the people who were left behind. I would like to know if there are people who look like me. I would like to know if you took a train, if you walked, if you had pockets in your dress, if you wore pants, if your hand was in a fist, if you held a small stone. I would like to know if you thought the trees were black or green at night, if it was cold enough to see your breath to sting your fingers." This stupendous, unquenchable unnameable yearning for impossible proximity pulses in me too. Furthermore, in her multimedia piece, Victoria Chang wrote, "Once you had to stand behind your grandmother who left a country. Language belongs to no one. A door opens." Sometimes climbing is collapse. I let myself, my failure, collapse. I let my book, my failure, collapse. I climb my Nagymama's hands. My Nagymama is Aranka. My Nagymama is Naifa Rizq al-Sawada. She is your grandmother too. Profound unspeakable cruelty, who counters this? Who does not see? Again, this is Victoria Chang reading,"Once you had to stand behind."[MUSIC PLAYING]
VICTORIA CHANG:And then I made some more collages where I would grab photos. And initially, I actually glued them on, and then I thought that didn't seem right. So I kind of cut them out, and then left them sort of alight on the page. And then I started kind of folding them a little bit, so there are a little creases on there. But I'll read you this one if I could find the page. I didn't mark my pages because I was too busy talking to Ander and did not prepare appropriately. Distracted and having a nice time. And I can't-- we were talking about all sorts of things actually, because he had a reading last night and a movie viewing, you know Predator? And we were talking about how I hadn't actually seen that before, so OK. I still haven't found it. Let's see. Paper slips 83. Let's try that. I think that's probably it. OK. So This picture in the middle, I'm guessing, is my mother's, mother's mother. So it's my great grandmother. And the person right above her looks a lot like my mom. And then the other people, I think are siblings. There could be one or two missing. I couldn't tell you how many siblings she had, but one, two, three, four, five. There are probably two more. Anyway, I wrote a poem."Once, you had to stand behind your grandmother who left a country. Each of your feet lifted off the land onto the boat like nightingales. I imagine the night sky, you below deck, light coming from two moons, but only half of your face lit up. You stood still as the moons rearranged themselves. During the switch, language was lost at sea. When language belongs to no one, a door opens."[MUSIC PLAYING]
MACKENZIE POLONYI:I will read one poem from my debut book. I chose this poem entitled"Grand Daughter's Grief Logic" because grief, like dementia, bewilders and ruptures time. This warping is represented in form by reading direction. This poem is not read horizontally but vertically. I will briefly introduce this poem by reading a quotation first from a book called The Order of Time by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, and second, a quote from Chase Berggrun's R E D. "Not one of these equations distinguishes the past from the future. If a sequence of events is allowed by these equations, so is the same sequence run backward in time. In the elementary equations of the world, the arrow of time appears only where there is heat. The link between time and heat is therefore fundamental. Every time a difference is manifested between the past and the future, heat is involved. In every sequence of events that becomes absurd, if projected backward, there is something that is heating up." And from R E D, "The future smelled like an old wound. I was sick with volcanic energy." This is "Grand Daughter's Grief Logic.""One. There is no volcaniclastic lake formed in an abandoned mill stone quarry. There is no bedroom brush stroked with the wet mucus trails of your yesterday motions. Weren't you leaving me scent signals, salt, antibacterial balms for transgenerational circumpolar wounds? If you are sugarcube locutions are still descending from cumulo sucrose speech clouds, still dispersing somewhere non cartographic in concentric circles than they are reverberating now upon an inverted negative surface far, far away for there is no volcaniclastic lake but the percussive muscle memory of agglutinative language. Two. In that room where there is no room, I light paint, insomniac on maps rippling with contour lines resembling arborescent rings. I practice your arbre glyphs, dipping my horsehair brush in bioluminescent ink. I practice your gastronomic measurements, dipping my horse hairbrush in mangalitsa lard, inscribing walls with recipes for mythical ember baked biscuits. Here, I once measured your homesick mood, elevations, depressions, zero relief. Here, I once measured volumes of your voice fall. The water in my right ear is a pigeon nest. The water is cooing what is lost. Three. In that room where there is no room, I record residual thermal energy, the old volatile temperatures of your emotional fluctuations, dormant light fixtures, hypothermic furniture, creaseless fabric. There is no such thing. There is only the heat of once. What is the circumference of a sugar cube? Four. There is no sessile oak forest from which botrytized wine casks are made. The other you, stone you, silicified you tricking an inverted negative gap, a tar like bodybag parting air, diagonal down implacable stairs, horizontal beyond implausible doors. Nothing beyond our house was real. Wasn't our forest spelling your name? There is no forest but the contour lines of a past psychogenic fugue state. You left a trail of coordinates behind like caraway pogacha crumbs. You left a trail of hour hands behind like caraway pogacha crumbs. Nothing beyond our house was real. They brought you beyond our house into the stomach of a hearse, a wolf. Five. There is no sessile oak forest from which botrytized wine casks are made. The window, I watched you, other you, stone you, silicified you depart from the window I am standing before. Am I standing here now? The last place I saw you from, its gravity, how everything in my body became a moon. My stomach, my uterus, my bones, my nails, my tongue became moons. The wolf was gone. Under the inverted negative surface, oh, far, far away lake, a pike perch swims in amnestic circles while your lungs, like crescented gondolas, like endangered butterfly wings buoy a familiar symmetry. There is no sessile oak forest, but the bronchial orchards of inflamed lungs that failed us. Six. There is no Carpathian village orchestrating annual apricot fiestas. In that room where there is no room, I lichen paint insomniac on maps, rippling with contour lines resembling Kékestető climate data. Weren't you leaving me, sugar, caraway for the indigestion of your inescapable death, zephyr blue wings beckoning presciently? I study square inches of our intonated fingerprints as if spider silk or rings of swamp Cypress trunks, prehistoric and preserved in sandstorm. There is no other way through this labyrinthine room. There is no room but the wolf's stomach. What is the circumference of body lessness? The wolf's stomach is a blood moon. The blood moon is an entrance, an entrance into the village where volcanic soil is veined with the botanical in utero memory of agglutinative language. There is no village but time's bow broken tensionless. There is no time but clay." As a final note, if I could revise my book again, I would change this poem's ending. I would write, "There is no village but time's bow broken, tensionless. There is no time but clay, which belongs to no one but itself and its own rhythmic processes of becoming, being. There is no clay but the necessity of our relationships." Thank you very much.[MUSIC PLAYING]
JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:You've been listening to Mackenzie Polonyi, and this is Poetry Centered. Mackenzie, thank you again for your reflections on these poems and for your own work. Listeners, thank you for joining us, whether This is your first time or you're a frequent listener. It's a privilege to work on the Voca archive, and it's a delight to share it with you. We're headed toward the end of the current season of episodes, but there's still one left. I hope you'll join us again in two weeks for an episode hosted by Kwame Dawes. In the meantime, check out Voca, which will be celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time.
ARIA PAHARI: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. Poetry Center 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.