Mark Wunderlich Reads Spencer Reece

The New Yorker: Poetry

In this episode of The New Yorker Poetry Podcast, host Kevin Young sits down with poet Mark Wunderlich to discuss two distinct works. They b

Key takeaways

• Mark Wunderlich describes the sonnet as a 'linguistic machine' used for resolving poetic contradictions.
• The discussion connects the craft of quilting to poetry, specifically referencing the scale and impact of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Main topics

• The Sonnet Form
• The AIDS Memorial Quilt

Notable quotes

I think of it as a kind of poetic and linguistic machine that we use for solving problems.

Conclusion

A profound exploration of how poetic form and imagery serve to memoria

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:03) Hi, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine. On this program, we invite a poet to select a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss. Then, they read one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine. Today, my guest is Mark Wunderlich. He's the author of five books of poems, including The Anchorage, which received the Lambda Literary Award, The Earth of Veils, which received the Rilke Prize, and God of Nothingness, which was published in 2021. His new book, Maity, is forthcoming from Graywalt Press. Mark, welcome. Thanks for joining. Thanks so much, Kevin. I'm glad to be here. It's so good to see you. So the first poem you've chosen to read is My Great Grandmother's Bible by Spencer Reese. What was it about this poem that caught your eye when you were looking through the archives? Speaker 1 (0:57) I remember... When this poem first came out, and I remember reading it back in 2009, and I had forgotten about it for some time. And recently, I saw Spencer Reese. I saw him preach at his church in Rhode Island. And I recalled this poem, and I wanted to revisit Speaker 2 (1:19) it. Wonderful. Why don't we hear it? Here's Mark Wunderlich reading My Great-Grandmother's Bible by Spencer Reese. Speaker 2 (1:29) My Great Speaker 1 (1:29) Grandmother's Bible Speaker 1 (1:32) Faux leather bound and thick as an onion it flakes, an heirloom from Iowa my dead often read. I open the black flap to speak the spakes and quickly lose track of who wed, who bred. She taped our family register as it tore, her hands stuttering like a sewing machine, darning the blanks with farmers gone before. Inez, Alva, Delbert, Irma Dean. Our undistinguished line she pressed in the heft between the testaments with spaces to spare, smudged with mistakes or tears. Her fingers left a mounting watchfulness I find hard to bear. When I saw the AIDS quilt spread out in acres, it was stitched. with similar scripts by similar makers. Speaker 2 (2:32) That was My Great Grandmother's Bible by Spencer Reese, which was originally published in the November 2, 2009 issue of The New Yorker. Wow, what a great poem and so well read. I love all the sounds and of course it's a sonnet. So we have this small song, little song as a sonnet means. But I was really struck by the kind of internal rhymes, the ways at the ends of the lines you have these almost moments of coupleting, dead often read or speak the spakes, who wed, who bred. Those little moments at the end which... I feel like do something to the poem that you don't always see. I'm curious how you see the sonnet form working in this poem. Speaker 1 (3:19) Well, I love the sonnet, of course, and I think of it as a kind of poetic and linguistic machine that we use for solving problems. I love that. You take a kind of contradiction and you feed it into this little machine made of words. And the ways in which... the sonnet form turns the poem over, it's working toward at least the feeling of resolution, even though there may be contradictory forces that cannot be resolved. The poem is striving for that kind of resolution. And what this poem, I think, is really trying to square is the difference between the life that we inherit from our families and our ancestors and perhaps a chosen life. And the move that this poem makes from, you know, a Bible and, you know, a great-grandmother in Iowa and these, you know, old-fashioned names to the AIDS quilt really marks. that departure from one place to another. And I find it a very moving attempt to resolve the two parts of a past. And, you know, for listeners who might not have ever seen the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, which is invoked in the last two lines of this poem and the great kind of departure that the poem makes as it goes to describe that, that was started in 1987. And it is currently the largest single collective folk art project in the world. And it contains over 50,000 panels and over 110,000 names of people who died from AIDS. And I remember when it was... They are stretched out in front of the Washington Monument. Yeah, on the mall. On the mall. And it took up the entire mall. Yeah, it's huge. It's absolutely huge. And it's a tremendously moving thing to witness it and to see it. And of course... You know, quilting is the homiest, most Speaker 3 (5:36) grandmotherly of all the art forms, but it also has a kind of radical. Speaker 1 (5:42) Oh, it's so Speaker 2 (5:43) radical to Speaker 1 (5:43) me. It really is. You know, I think of the amazing African-American quilts that are just a part of. Incredible movement of American abstraction, really. I'm sure Speaker 2 (5:57) the Gee's Benz quilts, you probably know. Those are so beautiful. My grandmother quilted. My great-grandmother, unfortunately, a dog ate a lot of those quilts. But, you know, I think of it a lot in terms of exactly what you're saying. They're witnessing and making out of often loss. Certainly things... otherwise thought left behind into something beautiful and useful. And do you think grief works the same way? Speaker 6 (6:26) I think Spencer is, his poems are often Speaker 1 (6:32) these attempts to take experience and turn it into meaning Speaker 6 (6:37) to, Speaker 1 (6:39) you know, quote a great friend of his, Louise Glick. And she once said that that's why she wrote poems, because she wanted experience to have meaning. Speaker 3 (6:48) And Speaker 1 (6:48) I think that in all of Spencer's poems, he's doing that. He's also really, of course, concerned with the spiritual life. And that he's not afraid of those bigger questions of invoking God, of making use of biblical language. And, you know, when we get to those names, a list of names, Inez, Elva, Delbert, Irma Dean, those Speaker 3 (7:12) sound biblical. Elva and Inez, in fact, maybe. I doubt Delbert Speaker 2 (7:17) and Irma Dean are. I think that there's something really powerful, though, about that rhyme that you really brought home for us, Sewing Machine Irma Dean. You know, who would have guessed you would have got from there to there? But I think there's that other moment. Further down where it says smudged with mistakes or tears. But I almost read it the first time as tears. Tears, right. And this idea, her fingers left a mounting watchfulness I find hard to bear, which also kind of makes us think it might be tears. But instead, I think you're right. It's mistakes or tears. It's both. How do you read that? I guess I'm trying to understand the sounds here because they're so amazing. Speaker 1 (7:59) Well, he's got another one of those in this poem too where Speaker 3 (8:02) we get to read or read. Sure. Which is it in the second line, you know, my dead often read. Yeah. Or my dead often read. Yeah. Which of course is kind Speaker 1 (8:15) of the great magic trick of poetry, right? Yes. That we can take a book off a shelf and we can – from someone long gone and we can breathe in air and read that poem out into the world and the poet is using our body as a kind of instrument. We're sort of breathing them back into life. And I think that poems like this that are about memorializing the dead or that are thinking about that, this is both a memorial to his great-grandmother and these names of long-gone farmers from Iowa. But of course, it invokes this huge memorial of the AIDS quilt as well. So it's a poem that, you know, those rhymes are kind of stitching things up. They're gathering things together. A rhyme is both. way of creating a relationship between two different words in a poem. Also in a sonnet, the rhyme scheme is driving you forward. It's limiting your choices. Speaker 6 (9:20) It's kind of staying your hand a little bit. You know, you have to aim for that rhyme once you've composed that line. And that makes it feel as if there's some other force at work in Speaker 1 (9:32) a way when you compose a sonnet, when you're using these tight rhymes that he does in this poem. And it all kind of seems to be sewing the whole thing together, stitching it all up. The other thing, of course, about quilting and sewing is that it's work that women have done and has often been hidden, has often been not thought of as art, but has been Speaker 6 (9:57) relegated to the realm of craft and of the domestic. And this poem, I think, also helps to elevate that, shows us some of the possibilities of that art form. Speaker 2 (10:09) I think it's also a communal art. You know, it was often practiced. You have a quilting bee. It's an act of sisterhood, I think. And there's very much that communal quality in the AIDS quilt, of course. But also, I think, in that leap between a mounting watchfulness I find hard to bear, it's kind of a lonely. You know, there's this moment I feel like at the end where the speaker, Spencer, however you want to think of it, is wrestling with what all this means. It's come down to a mounting watchfulness, which, you know, is a hard way to go about things perhaps. I don't know. It also feels like the poet's burden somehow. And I almost think that leap, which of course is filled with mourning when I saw the age quilt, it has these makers behind it. that I think he's trying to get us to think about. And I think that similarity is as much important to him as the leap and the turn that you're describing so well. Speaker 1 (11:11) Well, there's another aspect of this poem too, that he's looking at the Bible, which has been this place where all the family records are kept. And as a gay person, Speaker 3 (11:25) you know, I... Didn't have children. I'm not going to have children. Spencer does not have children. There Speaker 1 (11:32) is that idea, too, that you have to square with that you're the end of a line in some way. Right. And that's that possibility. And so to inherit something that you are also. The end of is a kind of sobering thought Speaker 3 (11:49) sometimes. Now, he does describe the line as undistinguished here. And so, you know, there's a little bit of that sense, you Speaker 2 (11:59) know, maybe. Oh, well. Well, there's Speaker 3 (12:03) a Speaker 2 (12:03) play with the heft of the testaments, but in spaces despair, which, as you point out, may not be filled. And there's this real sense of. Both loss but also I think not humor but certainly a riness, which is very Iowa, I think, you know, a very Midwestern approach to one's heritage. And there's also this kind of interesting quality that I'm still trying to capture exactly. The stuttering, the darning, the making, the smudging, the mounting. There's a... activity there, but also a kind of poetic activity, I wonder. And do you see this as a kind of Ars Poetica poem about what poetry can be or does or should do? Speaker 1 (12:50) I think, yes. And I think that, you know, the idea of sewing does seem very much like writing in a lot of ways. You can imagine the... the Bayou Tapestry or, you know,