700 Watts
There’s something tragically beautiful about New York at night, when the cherries of cashiers’ cigarettes look like stars and the people move like livewire ragdolls around the cart corral I scuffed the side of my Soul on. It left no lasting mark, so I never planned to tell you. They changed the signs on my freeway, I was walled in and swerving, and all the lines were smeared. Forgive me for shopping alone in the dark. The best part of me has been in front of my body, and I needed someone to shove it back in, but no one was home, and touch would’ve made me too real, so I decided to settle for warmth. My new space heaters are small, but they’re all I could afford, and my tiles were getting too cold.
Mother, can you please forgive me once more. I am home and feel terribly myself again.
Mini-interview with Tessa C. Berman
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
TCB: When I was a little girl, about six or so, my childhood dog died. It was my first encounter with death. I asked my mother what happens after something dies. She answered by explaining that some people believe in the heaven of eternal life, some in reincarnation, and others in the body’s atoms returning to the earth. Being young, I asked what she believed; she replied by reading me Song of Myself, 6. From this experience onward, poetry has filled my god-shaped hole. The pieces that move me are the scriptures of my faith of one. Somewhere along the line, I started writing poetry in hopes of creating something that could serve this role for somebody else.
HFR: What are you reading?
TCB: Recently, I’ve been spending a ton of time with Denis Johnson’s The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. I adore the whole book, but “The White Fires of Venus” moves me to tears on every read! I was just introduced to Johnson’s work this fall, and it truly has felt like meeting a lost, dear part of myself. And, as always, I’m trying to spiritually commune with my copy of The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “700 Watts”?
TCB: “700 Watts” was a poem that came out close to finished in a single, overflowing dump. I had just moved out of Virginia for the first time in my life and found myself in a state of crisis. I think of poetry as a practice of ordering bits of personal experience through imagination to reach something intersubjective, and thereby connective. I needed to connect, so the creation of the piece was something akin to a reflex. For a few post-midnight hours, I attempted to beat it back into a well-behaved, sparing verse poem, but the next morning, I returned to the original prose, and the difference in authenticity was inarguable. Since starting my MFA at Syracuse, I’ve had the privilege of working with Christopher Kennedy, and his conception of the prose poem as stripping away artifice and leaving the poet nothing to hide behind has revolutionized my relationship with the form.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
TCB: Right now, my main creative project is completing a first chapbook manuscript. I also plan to finish a few longer-form poems over the next bit, if the muses and/or my subconscious permit, of course! On the critical side, I’m currently co-authoring a paper on the marginalia and drafting process of Anne Spencer, a Virginia-based Harlem Renaissance poet and civil rights activist, whom I encourage everyone to read if they haven’t already!
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
TCB: I’m a firm believer that all poetry is personal. Furthermore, I feel that Eliot’s philosophy (and its contemporary offshoots) that aim to subjugate the human element of the poet are harmful. They seek to parse the poetic soul from the poet in a manner that is both dishonest and limiting. To borrow from Terrance Hayes, you can’t “separate the song of the bird from the bone.”
Tessa C. Berman is a poet and literary scholar from Virginia. She is currently a Creative Writing Fellow at Syracuse University and a poetry reader and reviewer for Salt Hill Journal. While attending the University of Virginia, she co-curated the special collections exhibition Anne Spencer: I Am Here! Her poetry has previously appeared in Literary Matters, among other places. To learn more about her work, visit her website at tessacberman.com.
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Heavy Feather Review 