If Beethoven Were a Whale: Robbi Nester Discusses Her Collection, Narrow Bridge
from (Main Street Rag)
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If Beethoven Were a Whale:
Robbi Nester Discusses Her Poetry Collection, Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag)
Plus, check out Robbi’s two reading series,
Verse Virtual and Words with You.
Summary of Our Interview:
In this interview Robbi Nester discusses her latest book, Narrow Bridge. The book opens with a quote from Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, “The world is a narrow bridge, /and the main thing is not to be afraid.” In this collection Nester addresses things that scare her, from encounters with blunt people while trick-or-treating to having conversations with the ocean. We discuss family histories of immigration, dress-codes in the 60’s, and what we learn about the natural world when we write about it.
Poems Read
Trick or Treat All summer we kids would plan as our mothers stitched and stapled in preparation for this day in late October, when the moon burned orange as maples and the air turned cool. My mother only hoped I might accept at last her bows and baubles. Rather than princesses or gypsies, I preferred the bizarre and the original—a light bulb, or a pencil capped with pink eraser, a praying mantis or a fly. But this year, at eleven, I agreed to let her dress me as a black cat, silky ears and whiskers perched on a black velvet hairband, slinky leotard and tail that brushed the ground. My figure was quite precocious. Most days, I hid beneath loose blouses, unbuttoned cardigans. At last, I let her show me off. Pins in her teeth, she smiled, and made me twirl before the mirror, handed me my coat and flashlight, shopping bag. They gawked, adults and kids alike, as I stepped up to each lighted threshold, bag extended to receive handfuls of Clark bars, Mary Janes, Nik L Nips, and Necco Wafers, wax lips and candy necklaces, Pez charms, enticing Licorice All-Sorts. Finally, one woman on a distant block stepped sternly to the door, declared me an embarrassment. Too old for trick or treat. “Get a bra!” she said, shadow cowboys blurring as I fled. Conversation Trafficking with immensities is dangerous. Knowing this, I went down to the sea and spoke to her—a kind of séance, though neither she nor I were dead. I thought about the moon, drawing the sea out of her basin like a hypnotist. Thousands of miles apart, that hunk of rock still makes the ocean leap and yearn, and riles us too, with its insistent light. The longing between them is that contagious. I’m not the moon. She could hardly hear my voice over the wind and water, though I could tell that she was listening by her expectant silence. I asked the ocean what message she might send. And then I waited. Narrow Bridge 11 For a moment, the sea lay calm and smooth, and then she raised a wide black wing, as a man might lift a hand to slap a fly out of the air. From a dry spot beyond the tide pools, I watched the wave crash down where I had stood, and might have stopped at that, but being curious and none too wise, came creeping down the bank, toward the rippling surf, like arcs on an oscilloscope. Putting out a calming hand, I sang to her, and found that sphynx, the ocean, opened up her silver eyes, and let me sit between her paws. The Making If Beethoven were a whale, he would groan a song as monumental as his bulk, one the waves would write—always in suspension. They would take an hour to break along a shore so distant none of us could fathom where it was. Deaf, yet full of music, he would weave with song the ice-blue play of sun on arctic water, surge of rain on turquoise surf, conjuring the other creatures of the ocean as he sang— mantis shrimp constant as castanets, booming grunts and groupers, dolphins’ chatter in static bursts, the electrical hum of moon jellies, a thousand castoff planets drawn through the ocean like a comb through flowing hair, while choruses of belugas, blue whales, near-sighted narwhals would contribute a plaintive descant line. To start, he would have sung the molten earth, hot and smoking, the burning mountains shedding pools of tears where this whale, the only living creature, could circulate the globe, singing the world into being.
Quotes
Right now I’m writing little tiny poems, and sometimes when I cut them down they go away.
I have a poem that went through 20 drafts, and that’s not unusual for me…”Ties,” in Narrow Bridge, went through 30. It takes time to do these things. Don’t be impatient.
“(I want my poems) to be accessible, but also like a deep lake, like Lake Baikal in Russia.”
Writing Techniques
Try writing a poem about a personal memory. Give just enough detail to show the reader what is going on, but don’t belabor the point, as Robbi does in “Trick or Treat.”
If writing about a mysterious subject, try doing more research on it, as Robbi does in “Conversation” in which she imagines having a conversation with the ocean.
References
Fine Arts Center in Provincetown
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