By CHRIS KELSEY
We booked three nights but stayed four. We traveled in-state to save money but spent just as much as we might have on flights to the West Coast. It was November. Going against all reason at our latitude, we headed north.
A familiar sound comes from the other room. A voice—from Kentucky; from a monitor speaker, ten feet away in Massachusetts. I hear it in the kitchen. A clip of speech, a cadence heard again and for not the last time. Open floor plan living: all sounds permeate. Racket of chickens, dogs, lilting voice, banjo.
A film, incomplete—still very much its audio-visual pieces. We cohabitate, this thing and I. I am not the maker, though he lives here too. I am adjacent to the making.
I was there when it happened. The beginnings of this thing that has now sprawled through our lives. That was three years ago, on a summer road trip from Boston to points south, stopping to see friends in Charlottesville, Nashville, Memphis, before making our way back north.
The Best American Poetry 2016, ed. Edward Hirsch, included Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ “The First Last Light in the Sky,” from The Common Issue 09.
S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews GREGORY RABASSA
Gregory Rabassa is a genius you might pass on the streets of New York City without even knowing it. Born in 1922, he lived the early years of his life in Yonkers, New York before moving to a farm near Hanover, New Hampshire, four miles from Dartmouth College, where he studied as an undergraduate. In 1967, in his very first attempt at translation, Gregory Rabassa won the National Book Award for his translation of Julio Cortázar’s novel Rayuela (Hopscotch in English). Rabassa’s translation schedule filled up, and, in his own words, he was “too busy” with other projects when Gabriel García Márquez approached him about translating Cien Años de Soledad. At Cortázar’s urging, García Márquez agreed to wait three years until Rabassa’s schedule cleared. Upon the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1970, García Márquez famously declared that Rabassa’s English version of his book was better than the Spanish original.
In this episode of The Common’s Contributors in Conversation podcast, Issue 07 contributors Katherine Robinson and Richie Hofmann discuss their poems “Birds of Rhiannon” and “Little Chapel.”
Book by REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS
Reviewed by
In his biting, insistent book of poems, Bastards of the Reagan Era, Reginald Dwayne Betts lets the reader know he will not depict the ghetto in the feel-good manner of the early ’90s films he references, Menace II Society and Boyz n the Hood. From the solid black cover to the desolate landscape contained therein, light rarely penetrates his bleak book, in which the “boyz” are “bastards” abandoned by Ronald Reagan’s misguided war on drugs. Just as Betts claims “there is more than a dead black / man in the center” of his book, there is more to the author than someone who grew up in a tough neighborhood, sold drugs, and went to jail.
Dwayne Betts was an honors student taking AP classes in Suitland, Maryland, just south of Washington, D.C., when, at 16, he started smoking pot and fell in with the wrong crowd. One day, he and a friend went to a mall looking for trouble. When they found a man asleep in his car in the parking lot, they carjacked him. Their joyride was short. Betts was soon arrested and sent to prison. Betts was a juvenile, but since he used a gun, he was sentenced as an adult and spent over eight years in prison, sometimes in maximum security facilities, where he did stints in solitary. At a time in life when a young person seeks his identity, Betts’s was stripped away in the dehumanized environment of prison, “the country / Where life is cheaper than anywhere else.”
My sister lives in southern Illinois in a town of about 15,000 people called Mt. Vernon, a small town surrounded by acres of empty fields, harvested and shaved bare for the winter. In the villages on either side of the town, mini oil drills bob up and down in the front lawns of small houses and most of the bars have posters tacked to their doors that say “Hunters Welcome” in safety-vest orange. Mt. Vernon itself, though, sits at the intersection of highway 64 and highway 57, and the scenery is often what you’d expect to find at any other small-town stop on a road trip across the middle of the country: hotels, gas stations, fast food, two Mexican restaurants, a Kroger grocery store with a solemn pledge of good service stenciled on the glass window above the shopping carts.
Literary Hub named Ben Shattuck’s “There Once was a Dildo in Nantucket,” from The Common Issue 10, as one of their top ten most read stories of the year.
Book by ADAM KIRSCH
Reviewed by
Stoic faces, stiff poses, graceful envelope rhyme—this book is built on the difference between a caption and a title, between identifying an image and re-animating it. As Adam Kirsch writes in his introduction to Emblems of the Passing World, August Sander’s photographs reveal “what is ordinarily hidden from us—the way we ourselves appear, and will appear to posterity, as types, when we stubbornly insist on experiencing ourselves as individuals.”
The poems that follow are based on photographs of citizens from Germany’s Weimar Republic, a period of political upheaval between the first and second World Wars. Despite severe economic inequality during these years, many of Germany’s most famous artists and writers flourished, including August Sander, a photographer with the ambition of documenting people from all walks of life. Rather than using names, the portraits identify their sitters by social class or occupation, and the poems use their captions as titles. Kirsch, who is both critical and admiring of Sander, carves these subjects from the geological strata of their history and attempts to give them back a semblance of individuality.
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