Dialogue:
Will Cordeiro & Jo Ann Clark
Will Cordeiro on Jo Ann Clark
I was pleased, when I contacted Jo Ann, that she suggested we exchange books for this dialogue, to provide more context to the single poem in question. And I was pleased again—delighted, actually—upon reading her book, 1001 Facts of Prehistoric Life (Black Lawrence, 2014), a collection which I found brimful with strange conceits and replete with brio.
But first, to the poem “Consolation.” As with many of Jo Ann’s poems, I heard the poem before I understood it. The aural elements trip upon the tongue. There are rollicking lyrical frolics peppered throughout: for example, “someone” paired with “insomnia” in the first part, the phrase “an iliac’s cradle / of winged incivilities” in the second part, and the half rhyme “pine” and “pond” in the third part.
These formal choices provide the poet’s unique idiolect and giddy-up. I find the impulses of poets whom I enjoy most to involve an itch to scratch odd-lot pieces of language together as if they were steel and flint: it’s a pyro’s riotous urge to throw up little stolen sparks of god. I imagine Jo Ann carries a tinderbox of such linguistic chunks around with her, touching them together, seeing what they teach her. It’s such rich sonic friction in her poems that makes them so striking.
As for meanings, they are at once somehow lucid and elusive. In the first part, Consolation is personified, a stranger outside the window at night. But the person within cannot see her nor can Consolation catch a glimpse of the person inside, who has been up too late, worrying and grief-stricken. A missed connection. As if the fates were misaligned for this unearthly visitation.
In the second part, she sings the body, font of both mourning and grace. Or perhaps the body sings itself: oblique bones and knobs tinkle upon their osteological xylophone. The connective ligatures and the ghostly pilot within hold it all together, just barely. One is more than bare bones. Yet, the vibratory rattling triggers a shattering keening that can’t be held back.
In the third part, the poem inhabits a quiet space where the person feels their body aging amid an old-growth forest. The line “so distant from the hope of yourself” implies, to me, that the person has moved beyond an egoistic regard for their selfhood. Grief, even grief for another, is rooted in the intimation of one’s own mortality. At the end, the person recognizes—with what seems like genuine consolation, though we can’t be sure—that they will be scattered and absorbed into the dark surrounding growth, another shade.
The three parts of the poem constitute stations in a journey from grief to consolation. The expected reconciliation with life, and the body, is ultimately abandoned. Instead, consolation comes in the form of giving up human things, knowing the body must be returned to nature, the self become a ghostly trace where “worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie,” as Hopkins puts it. Jo Ann’s poem “Consolation,” though quiet and laconic, displays many of the poetic virtues that inform her book-length work. Still, no single short poem can capture her many-faceted range. Richard Howard, a mentor at Columbia, once compared her work to the incomparable Amy Clampitt’s. Like Clampitt, Jo Ann’s poems profess an extravagant gusto. Her poems teem with images expressed in mannered, roundabout, sometimes vertiginous sentences cascading down the page. When one reads Jo Ann’s work, it’s not only Clampitt, but the work of poets like May Swenson, Richard Kenney, Daryl Hine, and Heather McHugh that one recalls—poets who swoop and swoon helter-skelter through vast intellectual terrains while remaining convivial if not capricious by keeping ludic euphony and double-sided wit in the foreground.
Her sheer virtuosity with different verse forms and her quicksilver tone changes, from cheeky to chic, make her book, 1001 Facts of Prehistoric Life, a small marvel. She raids sources from ancient myth to modern science, with a particular penchant for odes to dinosaurs and other since-disappeared clades of critters. I take these figures as elegiac, parallels for one’s own coming extinction. The dinosaur poems are paired with poems with topics ranging from tumors to ruin to Scheherazade who has a sword dangling above her every word. Though many of these poems may be threnodies, mourning a vanishing world, their countervailing chockablock moxie offers a compensatory vitality. Little that’s dirge-like, moaning or droning, touches these pages. No, they’re boppy and hopped up, all bon mot jitterbugging and phonic hopscotching.
One of her mazelike subjects of bemusement is the charades of identity. A motif of sororal doubling is braided throughout the book. Many poems are addressed to a sister, for instance. A feminist gesture of fellow feeling and a reaching-out to the reader, the trope, I also suspect, stands in as a metacommentary on personae. The sister is another myself, an interlocutor, a locus of affinity, and yet a shifty mask that finagles means for more authentic telling. One doesn’t need the wholly (or the holy) Other to contemplate alterity—the chasm between small differences, such as those between two twin sisters, will do just fine. As Rimbaud said, “Je est un autre.” Or, the “I” is someone else. Identity is a funhouse infinity room of sundry mirrors. Indeed, in 1001 Facts, the seemingly biographical sisters are doubled by the fictive sisters Scheherazade and Dinarzade. The allusion points to 1001 Nights where Dinarzade came up with the lifesaving tactic of spinning out cliffhangers. Similarly, the speaker in this book often addresses her sister so that every line break acts as a tiny cliffhanger. These characters hint that subjectivity is composed of its own unraveling, revealed in the interstices of its spun-out narrative threads.
Still, the book keeps its facts straight while insistently telling it slant. At first blush, more than a few of the poems appear brain-rackingly intractable, risqué, or rococo. They syntactically tergiversate, bend hairpin turns with their line breaks, and use out-of-the-way or outré diction. But I for one enjoy looking up a word like “hocket” (which means “a technique in medieval musical composition in which two or three voice parts are given notes or short phrases in rapid alternation, producing an erratic, hiccupping effect,” by the way). A word like that can lend an active exactitude to a poem and has such an amusing mouthfeel. But, against today’s typical style of flatter or chattier work, Jo Ann’s poems sometimes require a bit of puzzlement and elbow grease. But that gives the reader elbow room to maneuver and cause to exercise their intellectual muscles.
In “My Sister’s Fixation,” for example, the poem ends in deft wordplay: “Cut it out! Cut it out!” The speaker is asking her sister to stop ribbing her while also pleading for their “twinning cancers” to be excised. In “Une lettre de la mer de glace” the phrase “whitening lies” refers to both the blank scenery’s snowy coverup and the circuitous duplicity we introduce into conversation to aggrandize our commonplace lives. Jo Ann’s boggling sense of play is not above a goofy spoonerism, either, such as “analeg logs.” These, however, are only a few of the more scrutable instances of her fancy. Much remains teasingly beyond exegesis.
One poem, “Other Flightless Birds,” wittily riffs, for example, on the evolution of flight, including flights of mind, thus:
not to be con-
fused with
what the
matter was,
monkey-over
mastodon coming
as no surprise
to whatever
had been paying
attention.
Of course, we are a little confused sometimes; but this induces negative capability. The poems betoken us to pay more attention, a currency that’s always well repaid. After all, who are these “other flightless birds” of the poem’s title but perhaps us, the featherless biped?
Jo Ann’s poems are full of larks and monkeying around in the best sense. From their abounding risk-taking friskiness, striking out in new directions, the poems spark epiphanies that “call down / votaries of lightning / up-ended obelisks of flame.” May their incisive keening and haunting sounds be some small part of our consolation.
Jo Ann Clark on William Cordeiro
In all the best conceivable ways, and like the work in Will’s prize-winning 2021 collection, Trap Street (Able Muse Press), “Primer for the Primal” is a conventional poem, conservative even. To effects both subtle and robust, Will deploys any number of prosodic conventions. Torqued up tercets and doubling-down couplets?—check. Propulsive alliteration and revelatory, reveling rhyme; metrical fancies and backtracks?— check; and check. For in this issue’s poem, as in Trap Street, Will celebrates to the brink of indulgence the profligacies inherent to the English language. Yet his indulgences are never gratuitous. They’re like those sold to a sinner dodging penance; like those granted to a child pleading to stay up late for more play.
But Will can also be disciplined, holding his prosodic fire. In honoring this countervailing impulse toward constraint, he conserves our bastard native tongue. Depending on the contextual terrain, he guards it, gives cover, or beats a strategic retreat—one obscured often enough, as it is here, by a cloud that scrims/vast distance.
A reader (this one, at any rate) might beg pardon for her ignorance, at this Dialogue’s inception, of the fact that the language-conserving, convention-deploying poet behind such wrought, such thought- and heart-ful poetry stuff as this, has also written a spanking-new book of microfictions, Whispering Gallery, which Dumbo Press unleashed in December 2024. Whereas Trap Street operates at the edges of prosodic excess and restraint, the Whispering Gallery topples giddily over the brink. Its prosaic too-muchness is tempered only by the randomly administered microdoses of white space that open up whenever one of its short pieces ends at the midpoint of a page or near the top of the next. What’s more, earlier this same past year, Will (with Lawrence Lenhart) co-wrote the literal dang book on experimental writing: Experimental Writing, A Writer’s Guide and Anthology—the latest offering in Bloomsbury Publishing’s superlative Writer’s Guides and Anthologies series.
Thus am I relieved for Will’s sake to report that he began 2025 incommunicado in North Africa somewhere. Dude deserved a break! Having now wholly availed myself of Whispering Gallery, and toe-dipped into his primer on experimentalism, I can also report that—in all the best ways—there’s little either conventional or conservative about the writer of “Primer for the Primal.” In the spirit of Will’s cross-purposed, cross-pollinating enterprises—as evidenced in these three very different books of poetry, prose and curatorial pedagogy—I ask that you roll with such contradictions. In so doing, we hew closer to the ecumenical reading posture that Will and his Writer’s Guide co-author would have us assume, for all that their highly engaging work deserves more attention than it can get here. As for the multifaceted Whispering Gallery, for me it’s a touchstone gem whose gleaming surfaces illuminate many of “Primer for the Primal’s” interlaced parts and leaping points of departure.
From the jump, the poem’s very title bespeaks Will’s keen apprehension of the compositionally generative, sheer-bliss powers of consonance and assonance—whether operating alone or—far preferably—in trippy, inextricable tandems and triplings. Sounds, as words constitute them, hold prideful, first-among-equals place in Will-world, and they’re what keep his structures and sense-making in line. Thus, when the opening lines of “Primer for the Primal” hit, the title’s grinding, piratical Rs and wailing long-I Eyes have well set us up—primed us—for more of the marvelous same. And then some:
Here's the muck-making squalor
we’ve emerged from—slime
returned for,
scholar:
Will’s writing is replete with such alliterative baton passing. In his figuring mind’s hands, the device relays from the title’s vowels & consonants to the first stanza’s gummed-up Ms, squelching Ks, and short-U gutturals; it connects emerged for to the neatly rhyming collision of squalor with scholar.
My first encounter with the propulsive music of this voice—(self-)mocking and restless—left me so gleeful that it briefly arrested, mid-spool, the doomlooping part of my brain. I don’t often feel this way when I read contemporary poetry. (More often, such transitory glee occurs when my strip-mall gym is blasting House-of-Pain era rap.) Yet his writing abounds in such delightful earfuls. [How’s about a shock-dark, pockmarked moon; a roadside ditch checker(ed) with woodpeckers; a slur of voices as the glowworms purl; or this boneyard of discarded lonesomes? Or, whatever in god’s name a chitin is, from a scintillating flitter of chitin? Will’s not the only ballast Dialogist consulting dictionaries. (In case you, too, are wondering: chitin is a fibrous substance consisting of polysaccharides and forming the major constituent in the exoskeleton of arthropods and the cell walls of fungi. Says Google. You’re welcome!]
And with more gladsome such music playing on, Will amplifies the dead, desiccated, or damaged organics washing ashore at the scholar’s feet:
seeds, shells, driftwood, scat.
Jeweled pools; breakwater’s
neap and slack
tides hoick up seeped oyster pulp
buckled in the rush.
Slushed polyps
rollick, sifting rocks;
wrack-wrought rot…
The “scholar” directly addressed, or self-addressed, by “Primer’s” speaker, features prominently is various guises in Whispering Gallery. There, too, he or she is often ankle-deep in detritus: in “Letters,” the list of items in a Borges-beholden tenant’s “messy apartment” includes “junk mail, overdue bills, catalogs for camping gear and lingerie, stale crumbs, crumpled Chinese fortunes, the crossword section of the Sunday Times, a translation of Virgil, empty Ding Dong wrappers, nutrition factions on the back of my corn chips bag…;” in “Ode to Outmoded Theories,” an epistemologically-inclined speaker catalogues “loads of books”—“learned journals, monographs, encyclopedias”—“the dreck of intellect”—being “cart(ed) off” “from the stacks.” In other short fictions, we again find characters in a liminal scape where states of matter collide or coalesce. Here entire is the gorgeous “Ebbtide and Floodtide:”
Waves somersault and scintilla. Gulls hover, swivel, and
shriek, like stardust fraught in a void. I follow the tides and
ride the gold veins of my blood Sand’s partitioned into
atoms; atoms reform into distant novas. At the shoreline,
laced with debris, there’s a harmonious tumult. Insight and
outlook exchange places. Everything seems pervious with
new possibilities like an ovum. Sandfleas bubble, scuttling
into pinhole burrows. Tiny crabs sidestep under sun-scorched,
scum-scoured rubble. A flux of decomposition. Solar
energy’s written on my skin all day. When I return, I’ll be
the foam. I’ll be a wet gleam rendering a stone’s true color.
In contrast to “Primer for the Primal,” where our monovalent scholar-poet sounds divided against its single-yet-split self, in “Ebbtide and Floodtide,” the voice we (over)hear is that of an integrated personae. Both, however, are speaking of—and into—voids. To the split self in “Primer” “the void” “speaks back.”
Now the dead are entering
our world. Sing, poet,
and linger
in the resurrected voice.
Notes, so charged, they change
you: the void
speaks back. Quivering of flesh—
arrowing instant’s
river. Flash-
in the pan. Cumbers
us, kindles.
Thus “charged” and “change(ing),” the poet exhorted to transformationally “sing” himself out of the muck can now attend to the cosmic crucible above his scholar-self’s overstuffed headpan.
Because nothing will return
to you, day’s light dims
through turning—
each bright star, each morning burns
itself away. Clouds
die, are born,
die again. Their lapsed mass scrims
vast distance, listing
to a rim
where more absence lies.
And you live.
With his head in these literal clouds, the “absence” is not that of the voluable void. Rather, it’s a primal, revivifying silence where “you” can “live.”
Or not?...
This graceful, minor-key, impurely-rhyming final couplet holds out other possibilities. Perhaps our newly unen-cumber(ed) speaker gained access to an unearthly “absence” whose solitude is one encroached by lowly, human loneliness. Perhaps “more absence lies” in a Somewhere of endless, lying deceivings of both others and self. Just maybe, the “you” where “you live” is not the self-talking plural pronoun of the scholar-poet’s “resurrected voice.” It could be the case that that last you is a longed-for, ever-elsewhere Thou kind of you such as poets have never not immortalized; never not died for.
Will’s is a generous oeuvre. Throughout, as it does in the prime example of it offered here, his work serves up many possible readings; it abundantly rewards re-reading. Given its contradiction-accommodating, ambiguity-embracing, closure-confounding natures, its multi-valent takes and prosodic uptakes—the sheer parallel play of it all, with writer and reader in the same back yard, companionably not sharing our toys… Given all that mastery, given these essential mysteries, such play is very much the thing.
For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.
If you’ve been published in a previous issue of ballast and would like to participate in a dialogue, please reach out to our editors at ballastjournal@gmail.com.