In high-school language classes we learn that barnyard animals, like people, speak different languages throughout the world. Take the common pig, for example. While an American pig will oink oink, a Japanese pig will buubuu. French swine converse with a brusque groin groin, whereas Chinese swine favor a more melodious hu-lu hu-lu. For fun with the whole menagerie, check out these international animal sounds.

Curiously enough — and mercifully for undergraduate American piglets looking to satisfy core language requirements — here in Spain pigs speak with a familiar oink oink. Whether the oink originated in Spain, the United Kingdom, or the United States is a matter of dispute: no sooner does one group take credit for coining the oink than the other two denounce oinking as yet another alarming example of globalization gone wild. In any case, British and American pigs vacationing in Spain find it easy enough to communicate with their Spanish hosts, even if the same cannot always be said for their human counterparts.

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We knew we had to investigate when we heard about a “live wire” poet named Kary Wayson making the rounds in Seattle. What’s so “live wire” about her, you ask? Well, for starters, she’s won a Pushcart Prize and last year published a full collection of poetry. But that’s sooo last year. This year, her name is generating a whole new buzz. On a Thursday night in January, we put on our Frye boots and headed to Open Books, where Kary was scheduled to read. The tiny bookshop swelled with eager Seattlites. Soon, Olena Kalytiak Davis, another poet of the moment and also slated to read that night, entered the store wearing a pair of room-commanding thigh-high boots. Then Kary, decked out in her own brown-booted poetic swagger, crossed the threshold. The event was a poetic and stylistic burst — a paroxysm by two women who — as Davis put it– “are really, truly trying to make it as writers” and succeeding with an electric, “live wire” panache.

Dark Sky Magazine: Where were you born? How did it influence your decision to write poetry?

Kary Wayson: I was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, but both my parents and their families are from Portland, Oregon. With one parent or the other, I grew up all over US map: Winnebago, Nebraska, Sioux City, Iowa, Milwaukee, OR, Yonkers, NY, and later,  in Minneapolis, though Portland has always been my home.

I came to writing poetry like we all do, as an intense adolescent, barricaded in my bedroom, listening to top-40 music and scribbling in my journal. I was a shy kid, an only child who moved regularly back and forth between my divorced parents — strange to think that they were younger then than I am now! Anyway, I was always moving to a different school in a different city in another state, always the new girl, always dragging around a book. I grew up reading a lot. I can see now that growing up, I used books not so much for escape, but as way to settle into myself, to inhabit a home I made inside my own head, where I cultivated a privacy that was grounding but also lonely. My work comes out of that place.

DSM: Describe some inspirational teachers that have helped you along the way.

KW: Miss Allegretto! My English teacher at St. Mary’s Academy, where I happily spent all four years of high school. I still remember standing at her desk in tears, clutching The Great Gatsby as if my life depended on it. She took me under her wing — looked at my scribblings and encouraged me to keep at it — she even went so far as to type up and mail off a few of my poems for publication in a teachers’ magazine — pretty heady stuff for a 17 year old! I do believe that it was her encouragement that helped me to consider applying for a writing scholarship to the first of my many colleges, the University of Redlands, where I worked with Ralph Angel. His encouragement, among many other things, taught me that the writing of poems could become a legitimate pursuit — that I could — and should! — make a life out of making poems. Later, it was Maxine Scates at Lewis & Clark, who to this day continues to encourage my efforts; and, even later, at the University of Washington’s MFA program, Rick Kenney and Heather McHugh — two of the most brilliant poets and professors I’ve ever met. Those two, each in his and her own way, taught me to pay close attention to the sonic values of language — by which I mean the syllables of words and phrases — as units of meaning, yes, but even more as little motors made of sound.

DSM: The notes in American Husband demonstrate how you draw from other poets. How important is influence? How many of your poems spur from that energy?

KW: It’s essential for a poet to read poems, for any artist to apprentice herself to the masters of form. As for my own personal experience, I find that I must read in order to write. I read constantly — poems, of course, but also lots of fiction, philosophy, art history and and theory. I look at a painting and, if it moves me at all, I am moved to make a poem — or at least a part of one. Same goes for music and film. Other people’s imaginations activate my own. The experience of encountering good art is, for me, as if somebody throws a ball. If it’s coming towards me, my instinct is to catch it and throw it back. Somebody cool said something like that — maybe Jonathan Lethem? in his Harper’s essay called “The Ecstasy of Influence”? Anyway, much of what I feel is my best work comes from interactions with other artists’ best work. I am always so grateful to be moved to write.

DSM: Would you agree that your poems observe more than they announce?

KW: I have to disagree! I think the work does announce. As Allen Grossman says, “poetry is the speech of last resort,” and my poems tend to all live on (and off!) their little emergencies. The impulse behind many of them is the urge to just goddammit say something (anything!) for once and for all.

DSM: Lines like I say blue/but what I mean is/ blonde braids/bleaching on the beach show the distance between what we say and intend. What’s that distance like for you and how does poetry help or not help close that gap?

KW: Jack Gilbert says, “How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,/ and frightening that it does not quite.” The poetry in which I’m most interested explores (rather than solves) the gap between language and experience, between what I said and what I meant. That distance, that gap — I picture it as a great wide gully — catches everything that gets lost in the effort to translate experience into thought, and then again in the effort to set thought into words. I am most moved by art that wants to go down into that scary gully to see what can happen out of what it finds there. I am thinking here of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso” and Laura Jensen’s “Baskets,” two of my favorite poems of all time precisely because they speak from down deep in that gully without trying to fill it or bridge it or explain it away.

DSM: At your reading, you discussed the construction of the poems you were about to read. It sounds like you are deeply involved in the stages of a poem — and that you’re willing to talk about them. What do you wrestle with most when constructing a poem and how do you overcome it?

KW: Every day I have to wrestle myself to the table to write. Every day I do not know how to make a poem. Every day I am confused and scared — scared that I might write like crap, that I might have nothing to say, scared that I’m repeating myself, and why? again? am I doing this anyway? Not for the money! And then I do it anyway: I set the kitchen timer for one hour and ten minutes, then putz around for the first ten (cleaning or pacing –), and then I sit down for the one hour and write, which often starts out as a kind of exploratory journalling and then turns into a fascination with phrasing, which then will result in complete lines and by then the hour has passed and I either keep on or stop with a clean conscience. The more I do it, the easier it is. When I take any more than a few days away from it, I have to begin all over again. So yes, it is a struggle — it’s hard to make a poem! Just like it’s hard to be a person. Every day I am always beginning and beginning again some more.

Poppies In December

by Kary Wayson

These aren’t more than three. They grow
and sleep to the side of the street. In winter
they mind the cold.

They lose all memory. So I think I am only.
Thinking of them in their dark,
during the day in the dark, thinking,

I am an asshole
and a thief.
I think they do not.

They don’t have what I wouldn’t want.
They don’t have anything or visitors.
I visit their day

or say so gravely.
A circuitous route surrounds them.
They live in the curve

of a capital J. They could care less

but not likely. What else won’t they
do, or don’t they say? They are not extra.
They have no feet. This whole hillside

amounts to their two weeks. And then
don’t they leave me alone.

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Kary Wayson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Boston Review, Poetry Northwest, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Nation, The Journal, FIELD, Filter, The Best American Poetry 2007, and the 2010 Pushcart Prize anthology. Kary was a 2003 Discovery/The Nation award winner, and her chapbook, Dog & Me, was published in 2004 by LitRag Press. Her poem “Lives of Artists” won the 2009 Crazyhorse/ Linda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, and her first full collection, American Husband, won the 2009 Ohio State University Press/ The Journal Award in poetry. Kary lives and works in Seattle.

Hamlet On Xbox: To Play Or Not To Play

To play or not to play. To smoke or not to smoke. To love or not to love — three quandaries taken up by the writers of the articles in today’s literature news. And while we appreciate the quandary of whether or not to give over your heart to another human being, we do not appreciate the quandary of whether or not to have a smoke while visiting a friend on his death bed. In case you didn’t hear, Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens are currently engaged in a public dispute with the widow of a well-known British editor who claims that Amis puffed a fag and overstayed his welcome while standing in the bedroom of her soon-to-die-husband, Mark Boxer. If that’s not distasteful enough, video games are looking to classic novels for inspiration (someone find me some Tylenol!!!). Elsewhere, Martin Page explains the romance of getting dumped in Bookslut, Salman Rushdie makes a splash in Hotlanta, and Robert Pinksy lends his discerning eye to a new contest. Last but not least, The Stranger trains its commie-leaning ways on a new book about “Russia” and “Dreams” and “Overcoming Struggle”. Hail hail literary agitprop! — Kevin Murphy

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He slams you into the wall and then drags you into the yard yelling, so you think you’re a real man? You think you’re grown?

You tell him no.

He slams you into the side of the house. Into the backdoor. You hear crunching. It’s not just muscle or fat hitting the wall. It’s bone, the back of your skull. You try to slurp snot back into your nose. He says he’ll break you. Make a new doorway with your head.

You stand up straight, because if you slump, he’ll knock you down for being weak. And lazy. Spineless. Sloppy. You never listen.

One morning you hear sobbing. And screaming. Different than the usual screaming. Louder. Wetter. Not scared, but something else.

You get out of bed, wrapping a blanket around yourself, because it’s early, still dark, and you’re cold. Your feet are cold against the hallway tile but you don’t stop and put socks on.

Someone hands you the phone and you see him lying face up, face dark red and lips so purple they’re almost black. The lady on the phone explains how to perform CPR. You bend over his body, trying to blow air into those stiff purple lips. That body, that rigid body with its unblinking stare. Hands and neck and face, all darkened. You keep trying to blow air into him but nothing happens.

You listen to the lady’s instructions and try to blow into his mouth, your lips pressed against his cold ones. You blow and blow and nothing happens. You blow into nothing.

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Brandi Wells has fiction in McSweeney’s, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, Smokelong Quarterly and Hobart. She has a chapbook forthcoming as part the chapbook collective Fox Force 5, which is being released by Paper Hero Press. She blogs at http://brandiwells.blogspot.com/

I need to get going, but there is one more patient on the schedule. They’re talking about the weather on the receptionist’s radio. The roads are 75 percent snow and ice covered. It’s a two hour drive to my mom’s house.

“Maybe the patient won’t show,” Jan, the receptionist, says. She has a little Christmas tree on her desk, decorated with cat ornaments. Most everyone has gone home. Jan’s working on a sudoku puzzle, tapping her front tooth with her pen.

“Can you stop that?” I ask. “Please?”

***

The neurologist is in his office and the light above the door is red, meaning we have to leave him alone. He goes by one name, Steele, like a rock star. I have runs in both my stockings and it’s too warm in the neuropsychology lab. At lunch, I take the elevator down and stand outside the hospital for ten seconds, letting the snowflakes pelt my face.

***

Mrs. Turpo shows up. She is with her husband, who is wearing a bright red carnation in his lapel. Since her aneurysm, she recognizes no one, not even her husband, until she hears his voice. He wears the red carnation so she can pick him out of a crowd. She recognizes me by the star I always draw on the back of my hand. I show it to her and she says, “Jennifer!”

***

I take her arm and walk with her to the exam room. She won’t remove the fur coat she’s encased in. Maybe it makes her feel bear-like and safe.

“Almost there, almost there,” I tell her. She smiles at me and I smile back. We get settled and I pull all the basic exam sheets out of the file drawer and tap them on the table. I hold up a picture of a dog.

“Dandelion,” she says.

***

It’s scary, driving in a snow storm at night. My dad used to say just get behind another car and keep just enough distance to see its taillights. Focus on those lights and you’ll be all right. But who was the guy in front following? My dad used to tell me that he had the utmost confidence in me, but he used the word utmost too freely. I know, and my mother will remind me, that I was mostly a disappointment.

***

The last time I saw my mother was in the church basement, after Dad’s funeral. People were chowing down on sandwiches and potato salad and corn on the cob like it was a picnic. She slapped me and I slapped her and a little kid with cake all over his face started to cry.

***

Mrs. Turpo is fidgety. I think she has to go to the bathroom. She reminds me of my mom. It’s in the way she is frightened but smiling all the time. My mom misses my dad and Mrs. Turpo, misses knowing her husband’s face.

I fill in the rest of the tests, referring to her last visit, making her scores slightly worse.

“I really don’t want to go, Mrs. Turpo,” I tell her. “Do I have to go?”

She is humming steadily now, like an electrical appliance. Out in the waiting room, Jan and Mr. Turpo burst into laughter. I can’t get the exam sheets into a neat pile like I want. I am stuffing them into her chart. A couple of them slide off the desk onto the floor. Mrs. Turpo leans in close and touches my cheek. She’s looking into my face like she’s seeing something she recognizes. Her coat falls open and I see that underneath it, she is naked.

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Kathy Fish’s stories can be found at Indiana Review, Mississippi Review online, Denver Quarterly, Keyhole Magazine, Everyday Genius, Quick Fiction and elsewhere. A collection of her work is available from Rose Metal Press in a book entitled A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women.