In another tribute to National Poetry Month and our spring poetry titles, today we present the latest from poet Joseph Lease: Testify (April 2011). These are poems about American culture that offer an honest appraisal of the political divisiveness of the last decade, using innovative language that aims to connect with the reader. As you’ll read in the interview that follows between Lease and playwright Claire Chafee, Testify is also decidedly confessional.
You can listen to Joseph read from Testify at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco next Tuesday, April 26th at 7 PM. Or if you live in the Chicago area (where Joseph Lease grew up), catch him at the Newberry Library Bookstore on May 10th at 6 PM and at the reading series at Danny’s Tavern on May 11th at 7:30 PM. For more information on these events, please see our events page. http://www.coffeehousepress.org/events/
About the book:
With singular grace and musicality, the accomplished poems in Testify summon the voices of a divided country. With a storyteller’s rhythm, Lease braids humor, political bite, psychological intensity, and lyric beauty, taking us to a place of warning, critique, and elegy. With a focus on the nation as a dynamic, yet indissoluble, collectivity, Lease deftly brings the conversation to a place of subtle reflection that is as passionate as it is ground-breaking.
On Testify: Joseph Lease in conversation with Claire Chafee
CLAIRE CHAFEE: Your poems are very accessible and very musical: it’s like you bring us into the inside of the prayer. How do you establish this intimacy with an unknown reader when you are alone and working? Do you feel this connection, or is it an act of faith?
JOSEPH LEASE: I feel the connection, and it’s really joyous. I tried to make both the music of the poems and the stories in the poems both very particular and very common, very shared. My poetry has always been eardriven, so for me rhythmical control answers and embodies the emotion that animates the poem. The music becomes incantatory.
CC: There is a generous spirit that guides this new book: generous with your own confessions of frailties, and generous about ours: “don’t / panic” you reassure, “let time wash you, you can swim:” Your faith in the reader becomes increasingly self-evident. You tell the reader: “I believe / you can do this.” Where do you get this conviction, if that is what it is?
JL: I really trust readers, and I try to make sure that my poems invite readers in. And during the time I was writing this particular book I really needed that faith, because while I was finishing Testify, my father became quite ill with cancer and I spent a lot of time sitting with my father and my mother in their small, dark house in the Midwest—this house that seemed so full of light and life and possibility when I was growing up. Somehow being in many places at once—being buoyed by meeting new progressive voices and also listening to a fading progressive voice (my father is an old-time Jewish radical who writes about radical energy in American literature)—made the process of writing the book feel uncanny and haunted and also very open.
CC: “Testify” seems to me to be a rumination on what we worship (“Airbrushed / Gwyneth at / the Renoir / Hotel / St. Pauli / Girl”) in the private, individual story sold to us as redemption. It’s as though you are taking dictation of the constant thrum surrounding us. This book unfolds as an urgent offering; a challenge to question the notion that private hope will save us from a collective fate. How do you merge these two worlds of the private struggle and the public one so seamlessly in your work?
JL: In Testify (and Broken World), I tried to write poems that embody spiritual mystery and the broken but essential promise of American democracy. I explored the idea of “home” while also challenging it in a tender way. I think these poems break open that new ground.
CC: The work seems to beseech us to listen more closely to the language we live in the midst of. You dare us to believe it matters. Take the simple directives, “say democracy” and “say a democracy so polarized, say polarized, say paralyzed.” There is an absence of righteousness that is pretty astonishing in a book so bravely political. There is an acceptance of where we turn for faith. “Oh notebook.” The Dow Jones. The “informed democracy.” You even suggest the simplest efforts, “Try saying wren.Try saying mercy. Try anything.” And in the poem, “Try,” there is this sexy departure: “let’s say I was Frank Sinatra’s / toothpaste, let’s say I lead a life of crime—O cream / park your raspberries / on my moon.” How do you maintain this hope in the midst of so much dark fury? You make political critique and analysis of ideology into music, into an embodiment of song and story: how do you do this?
JL: I was horrified by the Bush Administration: tax cuts for the rich, the Iraq war, the rise of right-wing hate speech within mainstream American culture, the erosion (or collapse) of American journalism. So anger was a catalyst for me, and I chose to respond with poems—poems that enact a dance: what it really feels like to have a mind and a body, what it really feels like to critique America. I wanted to embody those struggles and transformations and rites of passage in language.
CC: There are these beautiful segues between more heightened, imagistic language and the everyday language here. You examine the world of language with a sort of tender democracy: there is great formal specificity, and every word is resonant and beautiful. How do you switch gears so well?
JL: I think it goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning. It’s in the music of words. I feel the connection.
Claire Chafee’s works include Whisper from the Book of Etiquette, Darwin’s Finches, Why We Have a Body, Even Among These Rocks and Five Women on a Hill in Spain. Her work has been produced at Magic Theatre in San Francisco, the off-Broadway Judith Anderson Theatre, and in numerous theaters around the country. Her awards include a Drama-Logue Award, the Bay Area Critics’ Circle Award, and the Oppenheimer Award in New York for Best Emerging Playwright.
Joseph Lease is the author of three critically acclaimed books of poetry: Broken World, Human Rights, and The Room. His poems have also been featured on NPR and published in Bay Poetics, The AGNI 30th Anniversary Poetry Anthology, VQR, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Lease’s poem “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” appeared in The Best American Poetry, edited by Robert Creeley and David Lehman.
