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Deidentified Query: An Atlas of the Interior: Small Narratives and Lyrics
Submission Information
TITLE
An Atlas of the Interior: Small Narratives and Lyrics
PITCH
Long-form independent project (novel, textbook)
GENRE
Poetry
ORGANIZATION
This is a collection of smaller works by the same author (short stories, poems, chapbook).
LENGTH
Novelette/Poetry Book (7,500 to 15,000 words)
Connection
Current resident of the region
ELEVATOR
Can a poet focus on local detail and take us around the globe? What is it, that power of poetry, which, according
to Boris Pasternak, can “take us across the borders, smashing those borders”? How do the poets do it? Welcome
to Jeff Streeby’s An Atlas of the Interior.
To say that the book in front of you is very much in the tradition of the narratives of American West is only to
state the obvious. To say that its form comes from the classical Asian tradition that mixed prose often associated
with travel and verse of a formal lyric moment is again, only to describe something already in front of us. For
the travel in this book happens in time just as much as it does in space. And the journals here are those of
wonder and grief.
Ilya Kaminsky
The author of "An Atlas of the Interior" is a Michigan resident.
Submission Content
Synopsis
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Introduction (writer has been "de-identified")
by
Terry Lucas
In his preface to the eighth edition of Contemporary American Poetry (edited by A. Poulin, Jr. and Michael
Waters), Waters speaks of Poulin’s understanding of the anthologist’s task as one of selecting work that
embodies a central metaphor accurately representing the quality of human experience for a particular era. If this
is a worthwhile goal of the anthologist, why not so for the individual poet, as well?
In "An Atlas of the Interior, “an intersection of two abandoned roads” might be that metaphor. Within the form
of haibun, the writer is able to lay down long stretches of prose, presumably from his own experiences and
inherited oral history. These journal entries and observations with minimal narrative are occasionally
punctuated with haiku and haiku-like lyrics that can perform two separate functions, depending on the reader’s
intent. They can serve as signposts whose beauty and craft can be briefly observed as one speeds by them onto
the next prose section. Or they can be signals to stop and explore side paths along the route, before resuming the
journey. In both form and content, that one moment, that one spot in the intersection where what is captured is
“the sound, [and] the feel of wet gravel under your boots,” rather than an attempt to predict what comes next,
(down either road, in either direction), seems an apt metaphor for our era of deserted modalities within artistic,
political, and spiritual realms.
With the advent of the internet and new personal devices appearing almost daily, capable of extracting and
conveying more and more information, an unprecedented number of people are creating and self-publishing
their words as art in nonce forms via messages, tweets, blogs, online journals, and print-on-demand books that
will seldom, if ever, be seen on the printed page. The former paper trail that most writers traveled on for
centuries is being deserted.
In addition, with record numbers of previously under-represented minorities—in terms of age, gender identity,
origins, and economic status—making their voices heard, both in the political and literary arenas, and in the
blurred territory between them, the standard assumptions of political pundits and literary critics are being
thrown out. Finally, with a growing percentage of the American population describing itself as “spiritual,” and
yet with the lowest number of registered church members in the history of the nation, traditional paths to
finding meaning in life by relating to something greater than ourselves are being abandoned. But travelers are
still seeking in places other than the institutions of church, temple, or mosque, to find community and to make
sense of a world that is no longer dominated by either a traditional theistic or a modern secular viewpoint.
Traveling the American west can bring one to abandoned sections of Route 66, where flora and fauna impinge
upon the blacktop, filling the cracks that have slowly opened up from years of neglect. Here, the road offers
little protection from the ancient, natural order that is wearing down one of humanity’s modern ways of
attempting to civilize it. In the same way, the author writes of values encased in human activities that are either
no longer at the forefront of human endeavors or are waning in popularity. Ranging from the Battle of Buda,
fought between The Holy League and The Ottoman Empire on horseback in 1686, to thoroughbred racing,
citing the heritage of horses like Herod owned by the Duke of Cumberland, to racetracks in Atokad Park, Sioux
City, and Nebraska, the author explores communities of believers still united in the idea of community, but
without the exact content that once formed its nexus of meaning.
“Sometimes,” writes the author in his final journal entry to An Atlas of the Interior, “there is nothing but the
excerpt and…it’s tiny surprise of insight, that one lyrical instant when tone has more effect on the way things
stand than any tidy resolution could ever offer.” Not only does this final page present a brief statement of the
writer’s prosody, but it also enacts its salient points. Part of me believes that the most appropriate thing I can do
in this preface is to refrain from any further commentary, enacting the author’s observation that “we probably
look for too much story, insist on too much unity or complexity or comfortable conventionality, take not enough
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stock of the fulfillments available to us in the small frame of any particular moment.” But there is more to what
Streeby is doing inside this haibun form than to ask for mere reflection on the lyrical moment, “tuned as we are
so acutely to our personal expectations, to what from experience we predict must come next.”
And that “more” pulls on me to add my own pages of commentary, punctuated with my own haiku, in order to
properly answer this work, on the same frequency in which it was written. Perhaps the best way to proceed, that
part of me thinks, is to provide an “atlas” to An Atlas of the Interior, because of the density and sometimes the
obscurity of its text. But as Alfred Korzybski, the founder of general semantics said, “the map is not the
territory.”
Therefore, I have come to decide that my purpose is to be not so much of a guide to the reader, as to give the
reader permission to read this book in a way that a book is not normally read—to allow the book itself to guide
the reader in how to respond to it. This encouragement of a reading as radical as was its writing might foster
both some lyrical moments that the reader can settle into, and elicit some challenging, interactive narratives
with the author. Always contributing to these possibilities are both the haibun form and the book’s eclectic
content containing images as divergent as: “two horses…[that] could have been twins—both tall and rangy and
built to run, both bright bays, both with a little strip and a snip, both with a wide flash of white at the right front
coronet” and “an empty snakeskin— // whatever you might make of that.”
Indeed, that the author invites readers to make whatever they might of any of its images or the intersections of
its half-narratives, constructed as a collaboration between the author and the reader, whether it elicits a written
response or not, seems to be the point of the entire book. The writer asks a lot of his readers by providing a
plethora of dense material, both from history and from literature. Quotes by authors as disparate as Winston
Churchill, Rilke, and Albert Camus, and accounts from historical materials as divergent as the biblical story of
Miriam to Sampson’s three hundred foxes, Vonnegut’s narratives to the verses of Sybil—all of these contrast
with the sparseness of lyrical passages that enact Streeby’s seminal metaphor. But Streeby gives a lot to his
readers as well—particularly to the ones willing to give as much to the reading of the text as he has to its
writing.
An Atlas of the Interior offers itself to be read in no particular order, and without having to read it at one sitting.
Every poem contains the whole, and the whole may be reduced to any page in the book. Or in the writer’s own
words:
First sun—
there is always more than enough of everything
yet to come.
A darkness. A drive home. A catchy song on the radio. Faces. Places. I hope I will remember such things when
at last the colder proposition embedded in the world’s geology comes home to me: that we are bound to serve
the principles of physics, a set of irreducible sequences wherein, for all their variety of rhythms, nothing may
overstep its natural measure—darkness implied in every flame, flame in every ember.
Sample
El Paso: July
Mike is trying to lift up the horse’s head and I’m on one knee trying to get at the big vein in the neck. The
sorrel’s eyes are closed: a week of this and he’s almost used up—washy and shaky and about to go down. But
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before I can open the stop on the jug of Ringer’s, he squeals and bawls and is up on his hind legs, backing away.
He’s like that for what seems a long time before everything stops and he falls over backwards. When he hits the
ground, a cloud of red dust rises and his last breath leaves him all at once—a loud choked-off grunt.
Shadows are falling. The sky at this hour is layered in reds—all the shades of chestnut horses. The dust is
settling. The morning glories on the barn are closing up. Soon the coyotes will be out, the burrowing owls.
Nighthawks will be calling.
Mike holds the broken lead shank. I wince at my bloody wounds—shoulder, hip, and head. The dead horse’s
hide is wet with sweat. We don’t move. We don’t say a thing.
West Texas sunset–
in the seam of earth and sky,
this hot, still moment.
Maybe we knew all along that he would die, but we were young and did not expect life to surrender with such
violent reluctance, did not expect the husk of it lying there in the yard to be so different, so absolutely empty.
Farmington: August
Late afternoon. Already moonrise and the shadows of the mesas begin to hem us in.
Behind the shed row, an electric motor hums and slow-turning arms of a hot walker around their squeaking axle
clang and clank. At the end of a shank, rank, on the muscle, blowing like a steam engine, a black-type colt,
fitting for his first campaign, lunges and bucks then sucks back and plants his feet, stops dead in his tracks. Five
empty arms bounce and bang, loud as a train wreck. His neck stretched, hindquarters braced, he strains against
the halter. The motor and its traction belts complain. The high-strung young horse suddenly falters, squeals like
a scalded cat, cow-kicks at nothing then moves off, shaking his head, his ears pinned flat. Whirling in the
gathering dusk, he raises Cain—strikes or kicks with every stride— his light heels capering, making plain his
brave résume.
This moment has something to do with us though if we are ready for it, neither you nor I can say.
New Mexico day-moon—
all the fittings and fixtures
of things to come.
Hornick, Iowa
Million-fueled, Nature’s bonfire burns on.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection”
It’s dark, so it must be pretty late. You are driving and in the soft light cast by the instrument panel, I can see
your hands on the wheel. The radio is turned down low. WNAX is playing the Mills Brothers—Shine, little
glow worm, glimmer, glimmer—and before I fall asleep again, I notice you are marking time by tapping one
thumb against the Brodie knob.
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Early frost—
here is only this fresh adventure
of recollection.
This is when the war is over and the vets are home trying to pick up where they left off. Little Hornick, Iowa, is
vanishing behind us—the bowling alley and café and the bank and the implement dealer and the lumberyard,
the one-room brick library (you had read all its books), the grain elevator. And everything else as well– the train
station, the old blacksmith shop where you first worked for wages, the remains of the dairy, the school built by
the WPA, VFW post 492, the general store where my great grandmother shops for groceries every day—all
these dependable waymarks have begun their short march into oblivion. The little Victorian cottage where she
lives, behind it an empty carriage house gradually tipping out of square, her flower beds and her garden, the
huge elm tree out front shading everything—all that, too.
Winter moon—
we must refit
all our clumsy architecture of love.
It would certainly be a Sunday, and by the time she came from the church just across the street, you would have
already mowed her lawn. My brother and I most likely had been hard at work capturing box elder bugs and
drowning them in the tin can of kerosene she kept on the dining room window sill. Afterwards, there would
have been fried chicken and applesauce cake (from the newspaper-lined cake pan). Mother would have helped
with the dishes– a pump in the kitchen sink and hot water from the reservoir in the big cob stove.
New Year’s Eve–
my instruments of self-indulgence
perfectly in tune.
Around us, everything familiar was wearing away. In our country of loess hills, the Missouri a quarter mile
wide under the bluffs, cottonwoods thick along the stream banks, a few aging draft horses were at work beside
new Farmall A’s. All summer long draglines cleared the ditches, graders smoothed the roads, crews replaced
planks on the 19th century bridges. Drive-ins on Friday nights, Saturday morning fishing at Brown’s Lake, the
regular summer trip to Okoboji. In the fall there was bird hunting in the shelterbelts and the cornfields. There
were those dances at Shore Acres, the Fireman’s Ball, church bells on Sunday mornings.
Winter grows long,
and all these shades arrive and depart
at my bidding.
That I take the time now and then to re-examine the intricate formulas of character I watched unfold around me
long ago can’t be strange. We must all have to take stock of the things we have carried with us for so long, to
note now and then their scale and composition, their value as evidence of our redemption. How else can we take
our own measure?
Winter’s end—
my old machinery of resignation
breaking down.
Old 141 from the edge of town to the turn-off is pretty much the same. You would still recognize it except
where the county finally straightened the curve that killed Ralph Karell. Hornick is nearly gone. But for me the
frame and context of it are intact. I can walk to the spot where your dog is buried, where the storm cellar steps
descended, where the door of the blacksmith shop opened onto the street. I can trace the aisles of the hardware
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store in the vacant lot where it used to stand. I can go as far as the bottom step of the church and know where
the pulpit is and the choir and how the pews are arranged in a semi-circle facing the big stained glass window.
First sun—
there is always more than enough of everything
yet to come.
A darkness. A drive home. A catchy song on the radio. Faces. Places. I hope I will remember such things when
at last the colder proposition embedded in the world’s geology comes home to me: that we are bound to serve
the principles of physics, a set of irreducible sequences wherein, for all their variety of rhythms, nothing may
overstep its natural measure—darkness implied in every flame, flame in every ember.
Picture This:
New Year’s Day, well after dark. A few stars. The kind of blue-tinged light that often comes with a winter
moon. Interposing clouds to add dramatic chiaroscuro that takes your breath away. Effects a good photographer
might try to capture in black and white. Around you, the negative—snowdrifts that give it all back in lead and
silver, shadows and silhouettes that draw it in and keep it.
After supper, your father announces to you, out of the blue, that by summer he will be dead.
Then he calmly gets in the pickup and pulls out onto the gravel road, headed for home.
Grief—
the uncomfortable furniture of devotion
to rearrange.
I stand in the cold for half an hour watching his lights disappear into the plains.
That pale buscadero, his own trail long cold even before the beginning of things,
throws down on us and we
stop
suddenly as a renegade’s tracks at the river. Our gates open and the catch-pens and pastures of our impressions
empty, every maverick memory, notion, hope, emotion loose and drifting into the malpaís. Our unguarded herds
of speech dwindle and stray, our brand on all those dough-guts only another indecipherable skillet of snakes.
Our gaze lets go the gather too, rolls its hen skins and hightails it over the border. One last rattling breath carries
awareness away like longhorns in cattle cars went rattling east behind those black locomotives.
All the routines around us ran like clockwork. Her shift over, the night nurse left. My dying father smoothed his
hair back with his hand again and again like a bashful cowboy on the porch his first night courting. I caught him
in that last act of preparation soon after he knocked. A little sheepish, I think, he looked at me: This will be a
cinch was all he said. Then game but wary, he stepped through the opening doorway, hat in hand, his rowels
and spur chains bravely jingling.
A jump or two behind him, just a morning in June, a hot sky white as milk above these dried-up hills, and our
little posse poised at the river’s brink, wondering where we all go from here.
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Near Holly Springs: Good Friday
when the world is puddle-wonderful
ee cumings “[In Just-]”
Cold. Skies gray and low after a week of storms. Won’t be much of a weekend.
But that’s mostly a hollow complaint, I guess. Every year it’s nice or it’s not and every year I’ve stopped here,
no matter what, on my way home for Easter. I can’t tell you why exactly. The house has been empty my whole
life. My cousin still used the barn off and on until last spring. For as long as I can remember, Great Granddad’s
2-up work harness, stiff, rotten, layered with sixty or seventy years of cobwebs, hung undisturbed on its hooks
in the feed room.
This time there’s not much left at all. The yard and the driveway are overgrown waist deep in burdock and
fireweed. The barn is a broken foundation filled with rain-soaked debris of its burning. Among the ashes are a
handful of rusty buckles and rings and the charred driving bits from the old bridles. The house is a roofless ruin
being salvaged for its full-cut lumber.
On the front porch, an old journal, coverless and waterlogged, its entries in my great grandmother’s elegant
script. Among a few still-legible fragments is one that bears a date: “November 1, 1897. Monday. A clear crisp
day. Henry has gone to town to…” and the rest is washed out and unreadable. Here I can’t help but remember
that the iron bridge he would have used was pulled down ten years ago and all the ditch dikes are melting away.
Now the old road dead-ends in a slough.
Across the fence, my cousin’s new tractor mired to the axles.
In the bottom pasture, Wolf Creek almost back in its banks.
Flooded fields— fish trapped in shallow pools.
In Justspring, my vigil office.
--END--
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