Spicer’s Radar
~ after Jack Spicer after Marianne Moore
In that moment no one exactly knows the direction the cloud swims or how my face looks going on its hungry journey. First, my fat heart unburies itself. Then, this handful of granola sanded with turmeric reminds me of gold. Passing as if it were sun. Go ahead. I couldn’t make out the shine of what you were saying anyway. When we murmur emotions, which stream do we defer to? Our fears help us admire every last drop of ocean. It starts off as tactic but then we’re overwhelmed. The cloud’s noise. Bereaved beds. The humpbacked mountain pushing deep the sand’s edge. Our eyes jealous of whatever moves.
Mini-interview with Michelle Bitting
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
MB: I scribbled a draft of my first significant, prize-winning, weathervane-shifting piece of poetry (titled “Trees”) while nursing my second baby in the late night dark 25 years ago. When my batteries feel low or I’m leaning into writer lethargy, I remember that moment and how even when you think you got nothing to give, keep going and give it up (write it!) anyway. What’s the worst that can happen? You wrote some words down. How wonderful.
HFR: What are you reading?
MB: I’m relishing Diane Seuss’s Modern Poetry and Dean Rader’s Cy Twombly inspired poems right now. But a lot of my reading at present centers on biographical and historical research for my novel.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Spicer’s Radar”?
MB: I adore Jack Spicer’s poetry, and Federico Garcia Lorca’s poems were some of what made me want to write in the first place. Spicer’s translations and work with Lorca’s poems, along with some fab Marianne Moore lines, got this piece spinning and I took it from there. Glad you liked it!
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
MB: I’m hard at work on a genre-flexing, decades-spanning historical/auto-fiction-y novel that centers on Los Angeles in the early part of the 20th century and my great-grandmother Beryl Mercer, a renowned character stage and film actress. She raised my grandmother on her own, saw and dealt with a lot of industry and societal injustice and misogyny, a reprobate actor husband and more. She spoke eight languages and performed for troops on the front lines. Amazing person. It’s challenging and great fun to write.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
MB: Impossible for me to reconcile the violent devastation perpetrated right now on so many innocent children—genocide, family and cultural obliteration, the endless cruelty perpetuated by so-called leaders who hold greed and power dear over humanity—meanwhile attempting to continue creating art and being a useful teacher. Well, turns out the youth I’m surrounded by are the wise ones, the peace and love seeking ones. So, I look to them for guidance.
Michelle Bitting is short-listed for the 2024 Cleaver Magazine “Duality” Creative Non-Fiction Award and has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department for her original poem “Twyla” as a finalist in the Paris/Olympiad cultural exchange this September 2024. She was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and named a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in July 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Catamaran, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. A brand-new chapbook of poems Storm Drain was recently shortlisted for Jacar Press’ book publication contest. Bitting holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Mythological Studies, emphasis Poetry and Psychology. She is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.
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