HOW NEWS TRAVELS by Judy Katz
Silverfish Review Press. August 15, 2023
Purchase HERE
Sally Bliumis-Dunn Sally.bliumisdunn@gmail.com
Jessica Greenbaum jessicaruthgreenbaum@gmail.com
There was much excitement in our poetry community when Judy Katz’s stellar book HOW NEWS TRAVELS won the Gerald Cable Award in 2021. Jess Greenbaum and I decided to record our thoughts in honor of the depth and beauty we both admired.
The backstage-pass-asset of being friends with an autobiographical, narrative poet cannot be overstated. We’re rich! We’re behind the scenes and in the audience both! We get to have the original and the translation! In this conversation I think we wanted to offer the bonus dimension of friendship—and how all of the riches that may be more obvious to the reader predisposed to love a poet’s work, are real currency in the poems for all readers.
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SBD: Let’s start with the title, How News Travels. Besides the news of the speaker’s mother’s death which is the subject of the title poem, the title itself has very wide implications in the book. It animates news as though it has a will of its own; it celebrates the “new” and interesting in various contexts within the book. The “how” for me focuses on a kind of mechanics to that traveling which seems like the means by which Katz gives us her poems, her craft.
JG: I totally agree, Sally. I also get that picture of poems as the preoccupations that travel through our thought-streams like little paper boats, coming around the bend again and again. And in the title poem, the image of the speaker carrying news of her mother’s death, “as if my whole body were filled with eggs, / and my task to deliver them unbroken,” also brings alive the visceral sense of “how,” and the “new.” Not all news is created equal! When the news is profound we sense the ineffable news as something tangible. In this poem it might be “like birds flying. / Or a crisp white envelope,” or the fragility of eggs, and ourselves the responsible basket holding them. In the end, of course, the poem is how news travels, and that’s the beauty of it.
SBD: The fragility of eggs is perfect in so many ways. The speaker is fragile and what great tension, eggs, the beginning of life, set against the mother’s death. Between those two extremes, everything in our existence.
The poem which is a frontispiece to the book, “The Other Hemisphere,” is most basically about a family trip in Chile. Besides being both smart and funny and filled with a deep sense
of familial connection, all of which aptly introduce the reader to the speaker of these poems, “The Other Hemisphere” additionally seems to me to be a kind of ars poetica in disguise, the idea that each place and thing in this world possesses a singular allure and too is reminiscent of something else. Animating the particular is, in my mind, a lot of what poetry tries to do, in addition to connecting the particular to other aspects of the world that are similar in some way, the web of metaphor.
Also, the other hemisphere of the world could be read as the other hemisphere of the brain from which creativity arises. Any thoughts on this poem or its place in opening How News Travels?
JG: What a glorious poem! I think your recognition of it as an ars poetica is spot on, and the poem’s vision is one that comes to those of us with. . . experience. The poem’s self-deprecating wit owns the divide between the first half of life’s discoveries and the second half of its nuanced recognitions—and so the contrast in how generations experience the same moment. As you say, the connecting of the particulars that the poet has spent decades first animating, she sees illuminated elsewhere. Suddenly, in the last quarter of the poem—and I believe this narrow poem is the longest in the book (just as Chile is long!)—heartbreak:
I know they want everything
to be the first, the only—
and it is. Everything is the only
of its kind. But also,
after decades of living and seeing,
you discover there are only
so many faces or types
of faces on earth. I have seen
my own mother (long dead)
in the feria—
the Argentine version of her—
what she’d look like
if she had lived her life there.
It’s a breathtaking poem because it writes the experience right out of our subconsciousness. Oh, yes! I know that suspicion, the reader might respond. We see our losses all around us as well as registering their new contexts. “Everything is the only / of its kind,” and so likenesses awaken a reminder that there are no substitutes. I think the poem can’t help but also carry with it the parents’ understanding that they have, at least in the liminal space of this foreign country, traded places with their children, and this recognition has a duality as well—we are happy for them! But we won’t get to have these first discoveries again! (Or lead our children to discovery.) And as her poems so often do, the form and content resound so that the description of Chile—“I couldn’t get over //how capacious this skinny / country was!”—having “Switzerland” like meadows on one side and “Mt. Fuji”-like mountains on the other . . . this also reflects the speaker’s experience within the poem, that we hold so much, from so many places and times of life. How can we hold it all, the poem asks, in the skinniness of our singular personhood, and how can so much of it be gone at the same time?
SBD: Yes! Perfect way to describe the poem, Jess… that the poem “writes the experience right out of our subconsciousness.” Another way of saying, a perfect creative flow. A truth and purity to this flow.
I love the idea of “skinny” and “capacious.” She is so good at bringing opposites up against each other and finding the place, however tenuous, where they coexist. She is kind of a master/mistress in this way of negative capability.
And the poems are often richly saturated with language that reflects the metaphor she establishes. I find that this kind of saturation makes the poems flow organically and sweep over the reader with great power. Even the way “The Other Hemisphere” begins, “It shut us up, the new, dumbed us/into silence.” The “shut us up” is so organic to a poem about being contained within, or at least contemplating the boundaries between, the old and the new. And this idea of being contained is sifted in later when she mentions “as if there were only one door in/to our middle-aged brains,” making that containment a kind of physical space.
In terms of rich saturation of metaphoric language, I am also thinking of the poem, “Season,” which describes literally and metaphorically her mother’s hair falling out from the cancer, phrases like “trees blown bare” and “each leaf brushes.” The use of the word “bare” for trees is a stand-in for the mother’s bare head and “each leaf brushes” calls to the hair that is not there to brush. The poem’s language becomes a thick metaphoric potion.
You trust this poet’s voice on the page because she often starts a poem with a phrase like, “I used to think” and then takes the reader on her journey which often discovers a contradictory truth. It is a way she has of using the “turn” or “volta” in her poems. For example, in the title poem, “How News Travels”: “I used to imagine it like birds flying…/Until now I never conceived of it…”. And in another poem called, “Wake”: “It’s not important to see everything, I said./But I was wrong.”
JG: The instant trust the reader has, yes! I know Katz studied with Billy Collins who taught that the beginning of the poem should be like inviting someone into your house, the opening lines the foyer you are ushering them through, saying to the reader, This is where I am and this is what I am doing. And with Katz we have the sense of her responding to her own half-doubting question of Why am I here doing what I’m doing?
SBD: Yes, exactly. As with Elizabeth Bishop, we are given the privilege of listening to her mind working through complexities as she writes and are often treated as well to her discerning eye that says, for example, in “My Erotic Double,” “She’s got my eyes/but the tightness in the jaw is gone.”
JG: The journey, as you name it, also brings me to the metaphor of travel—which we certainly inherit from Bishop and her Questions of Travel, the many metaphors Bishop evokes to sew herself into a place enough for it to feel, if not like home, that she won’t fall off the earth. While Katz’s speaker is not peripatetic—she has a city life and a country life, those two hemispheres—she maps the customs and climates of our adult seasons alongside the sudden bewilderment one may feel in a deeply known and lived-in place. I’m thinking about her stellar poem, “The Old Economy” which describes the apartment when the kids move out of the room they shared since birth. The poem begins, “It’s like a factory has shut down / in the kids’ bedroom, all the jobs / moved away.” This poem is fit together brilliantly, and (ironically) seemingly without the effort of work at all. When the speaker says, “But for the life of me, / I can’t remember what we made here / day in and day out,” and then guesses, “Something from duct tape? Indian slippers and a banjo?” we are all in; the particulars have delighted us within the illumination of the whole, the awareness of how time can so disappear those decades by which we knew ourselves. What sews us into her experience, though, is not only that awareness, but the duality of living in it alongside the memory of the past. The poem ends with her replaying an exchange she heard between the two children when young. “What are those things?” the younger of the two asks her brother, just looking at dust motes float through a shaft of light.
That’s the tunnel of lint,
the older one said.
Then, as if to save her the time—
You can’t catch them,
I’ve tried.
And voila, we have a meta-experience: the speaker, in trying to reconcile how the daily clang and tangible can suddenly become silent and ephemeral . . . echoes both her children, experiencing the same question on a different level. Maybe we should stop using “empty nest” and switch to the more realistic “shut down factory.”
SBD: Really beautifully stated. That the mystery of trying to “catch” or hold onto experience of those years that are both here and not here for the speaker is enacted or animated by the desire to hold the dust motes.
Another aspect of the dust mote moment is the atmosphere of familial kindness that permeates many of the poems. In this case, the brother understands both the desire and impossibility of holding the dust motes and wants to enlighten the younger sister. There is too a kind of familial genetic curiosity about the mysteries of the world. I think of the poems like “Autumn Walk” and “Astronauts” when the young son asks, in the latter poem, “When did time start?” “Where is everything that dies”?
And these poems move and breathe between so many poles. Here I would like to note just one of those poles: Katz has the ability to take a distance from the self that yields humor in some of the poems, while in other poems she brings us close up to the vulnerability of the self.
JG: The distance and the intimacy! The reader feels the speaker employing each vision in some magic measure apiece. I think we also sense how they employ her, and so the poems map the human condition with a set of spun binoculars—which end to look through?! For the reader, either offers focused revelation, and the poems never report without we go home with a prize. Sally, your salient comment that her poems offer us “the privilege of listening to her mind working,” shows itself in this dynamic. I think the reconciliation of distance and vulnerable intimacy, or the mapping of their meeting place, is a process we are often privy to in the poems.
For instance, in the poem “Day Three,” the speaker considers a newly-blooming peony at the very time her own spirit stalls in emotional lock-down. How can she reconcile this mismatch, and how will she make meaning from it? We get to watch the mind work with every life-saving maneuver poetry has to offer. You mentioned those “particulars” and the poem begins there when naming “the coral peony” beginning to morph “into //another life—” opening “layer upon layer,” “feathering / fan-like, / deckle-edged.” It ends after landing a triple lutz:
if, in three days,
a cut peony
can turn itself
from fist
to flower
to flamingo,
what isn’t possible
for this balled up heart?
Masterful. And with the poets we most admire, we could choose any number of their poems as ars poetica. Surely “Day Three,” not only, in real time, illustrates how a poem works, but also why the poet needs to write them. I used to foolishly consider this poem one of my favorites of hers . . . until so many were favorites I dispensed with the category altogether.
SBD: Yes, another ars poetica for sure, Jess! And yes, too many “favorite” poems to have that term hold its heft any longer.
On a more general note relative to How News Travels, I was thinking about what three phrases would best hold the book’s concerns …grief over the mother, family life, and Judaism?
JG: I agree with those three. One of the book’s flood subjects is the relationship of the individual to the roles she takes on in connection to others. So you could also say the flood subject was, in fact, the duality inhering in “The Other Hemisphere” or “The Old Economy,” or most poems in the book, not only because of the distance / intimacy you mention, but because the past / present duality informs so much of our lives and Katz has a rare and thrilling gift for transforming this aspect of our humanity.
The collection shows how human these dualities make us. Her poignantly sublime perfectly titled pantoum “Urban Renewal” diagrams the past becoming the present as illustrated by the progressions of courtship in the city (gentle reader, she . . . ). Because of a pantoum’s signature repetitions in progressive quatrains—the 2nd and 4thrd lines of one dropping into the next to become the 1st and 3rd lines, and the original 1st and 3rd lines eventually reversing themselves to end the poem—we watch the exchange of language become an exchange (off the page) of vows, the excitement of form reflecting the institution of two players in a marriage, stepping through time to meet up with their beginnings. Here are stanzas 4 – 6 of the poem’s 7.
The night we first met at Man Ray,
also gone,
a mutual friend in town by chance suggested
you pick me up outside the Zig-Zag Bar & Grill
also gone,
and give me a ride in your beat up car.
You pick me up outside the Zig-Zag Bar & Grill.
You lean across to open my door
and give me a ride in your bet up car,
that later becomes our beat-up car.
You lean across to open my door,
and the rest, my love, is history.
There’s never just one duality. There are the two people, the past / present, the present / future, the parent / daughter, parent / child, self / society, Judaism / one’s own Judaism, for starters, and let’s not forget the divided self!
SBD: I wanted to mention another aspect of Katz’s instinctively integrated self by calling brief attention to her poems that deal with Judaism. In Jewish American Women Poets, a feature in which Judy, you, Nomi Stone and Jenny Barber each talk so eloquently about the way in which Judaism enters your poems, Katz gives a beautiful description of how the shabbat ritual of covering her eyes entered her poem, “The Room Behind My Eyes”. https://plumepoetry.com/jewish-american-women-poets-by-sally-bliumis-dunn/ Here is Katz’s description of her process.
“In a way, I wandered into the Jewish content of “The Room Behind My Eyes.” I was sitting in a café with a friend and, in an effort to find a word I was looking for, I made a gesture that’s second nature to me: I pressed my fingertips against my eyelids for a moment. The friend said that that gesture reminded her of being at my house on a Friday night and seeing me cover my eyes after lighting the Sabbath candles.”
And that organic “wandering” into the place where ritual and life meet is precisely how she welcomes the reader so naturally into her experience. Here is one last Katz quote on the topic:
“It’s so interesting where particular language and imagery can lead you in a poem. I also didn’t know I’d be going back through the generations of women in this poem to the first woman looking for ‘the first lost thing’— and yet, I landed there, and it caught my interest. The loss at the center of the Eve story – a loss of connection to the natural world, to a sense of wholeness, ease, integritas – do we all feel this?”
JG: Do we all feel this seems to me to often be the weather that warms and offers the reader the largesse of her revelations. The voice of these poems, at once unprepossessing, then delivers surprise, passion, wit, familial love, heartbreak, coherence and an autonomous, independent intelligence that never needs announce itself through posturing. I’ll just mention one more poem. Like all of them, it contains, it seems to me, the Katz periodic table of all the elements above. Here is the title and first stanza of the volume’s penultimate poem, it’s lines each with extra space around them, unfettered to go with the content:
“Now I Find Myself”
in middle age.
I entered without checking
It’s marvelous here!
Like an old Soviet road
where they ran out of money
for signs.
Do you really need anything else? The speaker offers other observations of a woman in this time of life, “whistling in broad daylight / her gray hair flying. // Oh that was me!” and then she ends:
I am all gaze.
The world is mine.
SBD: And there is another strength of these poems that I want to mention, and this relates back to “The Room Behind My Eyes” which proceeds from the simple gesture of covering her eyes to help recall something and moves to the contemplation of the “first lost thing.” “The first lost thing” is an “idea” that the poem discovers.
William Carlos Williams said, “No ideas but in things” as a warning to poets not to become too abstract. Katz’s grappling with ideas transcends any kind of caution about abstraction and distance from the subject. Quite the opposite. Her play with ideas feels deeply enlightening to the reader. I think of the poem “Niche” and “From Scratch” to name two.
In “From Scratch.” She animates this expression by imagining a going back, “As if everything before/my mother’s death, is dying./As if I have to re-make/ everything I’ve ever known.” And the poem recounts in hilarious hometown detail all she will have to re-make: “I have to/ start the family business, hire/Teenie as head secretary/ and the two skinny blondes/ who race stock cars after work…” “I have to/send my mother to art school/in the brown convertible,/dirty white top folded back/like a sail.” These particulars of remaking “from scratch” are so specific that the reader can easily imagine the scale of what their own remaking might be and fill in the idea with their own particulars.
And in the poem, “Niche,” the speaker begins:
I’m wondering about the niche
I didn’t make for myself as a doctor
the little desk that’s been waiting for me
in the diploma’d room,
the swivel stool I never tried out…”
Katz’s exploration of the idea of niche is so precisely described that the reader can substitute the details of her/his/ their own idea of whatever type of “niche” which makes the idea of the poem, universal. Ironically, it is the particulars that give these idea poems their universality.
As one who does not often broach any articulation as to the existence of God, I was especially grateful for how she illuminates her idea of God in a poem called, “Brief Prayer at a Cousin’s Wedding” and does so with great humor which makes it kind of fun to relax, even enjoy contemplating God as an idea:
If God is a woman
let her dress like Flo –
turquoise scarf tied at the neck,
hair pulled back
from an open face.
Let the fabric of her skirt
float to the knee.
When she sits down,
please god, let her show
a little skin.
Before signing off here, I would like to draw attention to how beautifully and intricately the poems in How News Travels are ordered. Creating a book from discreet poems is an art and I think many readers can learn a lot from looking closely at Katz’s book.
Just one example is how the poems are sometimes linked together homophonically or with a gentle wordplay. The “Weight of Absence” where the house feels like it is ‘sinking’ and then the poem, “Rupture” on the next page with the word ‘sink’ as a kitchen sink in a very different context, but somehow still holding the house sinking after the mother’s death from the poem before. And In “The Appointment” “ill-lit room” evokes a kind of double play. The speaker is literally “ill-lit” by the harsh light in the doctor’s office and her mom in many of the poems is ill and lit or illuminated by her illness.
The last poem in the book, “One Evening, Years Later” is a stunner and after so many poems that yearn for her mother who has died, this poem closes the book with an acceptance of her mother’s absence and brings the book into a full and perfect circle, echoed by the image of the earth that the mother has left, “small and complete beside her./ As if/ she gave birth to it. As if/ it will be fine without her.”
This has been so much fun talking with you about How News Travels.
JG: It’s one of life’s great treats to share a wonder at someone’s poems! I’m so happy for all those readers who will create their own relationship to them.
