Keşke, Jennifer A. Reimer. Airlie Press, PO Box 13325 Portland OR 97213, 2022, 182 pages, $18 paper, www.airliepress.org.
I discovered Jennifer A. Reimer’s poetry in November 2021 in Berlin at a symposium/workshop celebrating the publication of Forms of Migration: Global Perspectives on Im/migrant Art and Literature, an anthology she co-edited with Stefan Maneval (Falschrum Books, 2022). At the event she gave a presentation on her forthcoming book Keşke, followed by a conversation with the audience. I found the poems simultaneously inviting and challenging. They were formally inventive, often dialogic if not multivoiced, working with lyric and epic traditions. In Keşke (Airlie Press, 2022) Reimer explores the theme of migration through the lens of her European sojourns, especially in Turkey and Denmark, but ultimately hers is a story of linguistic migration, as is clear from the following interview. As Mia You notes on the back cover, through its attention to the movement and fluidity of language, Keşke offers “the generous and generative space of the necessity and impossibility of translation.”
I conducted this interview with her over email in 2024.
PG: The poems in Keşke seem to be based in your personal experience. I mean especially your multiple references to Turkey, but also Cyprus and Denmark, where you have spent some time. The failed military coup that took place in Turkey in 2016 is the subject of four linked poems. I’m also thinking of poems like “Café Bien-Ankara” and “52 Albany St.” Do you care to shed light on your poems in terms of your lived experience? How, in your case, does biography shape art?
JR: One of the things this book project does is juxtapose the personal and political and the personal and mythological-epic. You are correct that the prose(ish) poems are often drawing on some of my own personal experiences, while the Keşke serial poem is more invested in a larger, rangier, historical —she—. An attempt to explore place-based writing unites the different components of the book. The Keşke poems take up the spacious geographies of classical myth (the Mediterranean basin) as well some Northern European landscapes that evoke Hamlet’s Ophelia (my time in Denmark in 2015 certainly shaped these poems, as well my thinking through connections between Ophelia and Calypso). Meanwhile, poems such as “Istiklal Caddesi,” “Café Bien-Ankara,” and “52 Albany St” are more specifically located in time and space (we could call them chronotopes in the Bakhtinian sense). In the prose(ish) poems, I played around with pronouns and point of view in different drafts. Several earlier drafts used “I.” These drafts felt too unnervingly autobiographical. I ultimately chose to use the second person. I am drawn to second person’s compelling slippage between internal and external address. The “you” is both intimate and other, insider and outsider. It is the speaker referring to herself through a (protective?) layer of distancing, and it is simultaneously a personal invocation to the reader, who may feel called into the text through the direct address (something along the lines of an Althusserian form of interpolation, but without the problematic operations of power!). I think for many practicing a place-based form of writing, auto/biography plays a role, even if in the barest sense of being the body whose eye/I who observes the place(s).
I was tired of empty words and empty promises but also ravenously hungry for meaning.
PG: Madeline Miller, who calls your poems “haunting, spare and beautiful,” recreates ancient Greek stories in her novels The Song of Achilles and Circe. Something similar happens in your volume, as you rework the myth of Calypso—but obviously your story requires a wholly different approach to genre and narrative, to say nothing of particular devices. Would you like to elaborate on this connection—and also more generally on contemporary versions/transpositions of Homeric myths?
JR: I’m a massive fan of Miller’s work. I was reading Circe and The Song of Achilles around the same time that I was writing the earliest drafts of Keşke. A very dear friend of mine knows her from their shared time at University of Chicago, and it was he who pointed me to Circe. Shortly after I’d written the first Keşke poem (and before I knew there would be more), he and I were on a trip in Malta, where we were taken to a (very uninspiring) crevasse in one of the island’s beautiful cliffsides and informed that this was the location of Calypso’s cave in The Odyssey. This led to many late-night (wine-fueled) discussions about the poem, and Madeline Miller’s novels, and the trip and these conversations were a catalyst for my thinking about Calypso’s story over the subsequent weeks and months. There is, of course, a whole genre now of re(visioning) Homeric myths, beyond Miller’s novels. I also really like what Pat Barker does with The Iliad in The Silence of the Girls. I actually thought about attempting to tell Calypso’s story in novel form, but it felt derivative and unoriginal in the wake of such elegant storytelling by Miller and Barker.
After the trip to Malta, it occurred to me that I could link Calypso’s voice to the idea of female longing/wishing, an idea that was taking shape through the other poetic work I was attempting with the word keşke. If only Odysseus had stayed. If only Calypso had been angry and sad instead of gracious and helpful. If only she could’ve told her own story instead of being ventriloquized through Homer. If only women wrote epic poems (which, of course, they do but are rarely associated with). If only Ophelia had lived. And, yes, I was also thinking through a variety of heartbreaking “if onlys” in my personal life that fueled an early identification with the figure of Calypso when I went back to the poem in 2016. A year later, Emily Wilson released her fantastic translation of The Odyssey. Her use of plain language and the elements that some people have called “feminist” inspired subsequent drafts of the book, and snippets of her language appear throughout the Keşke poems (as do the other, older translations, notably Fagles’s).
I am indebted to Madeline Miller for giving all of us permission to simultaneously love and roll our eyes at Homer, and to Wilson for using language to lay bare the more troubling aspects of the interpersonal relationships The Odyssey codes over with triumphalism and hero worship. I also want to mention my friend and mentor, Professor Beth Piatote, who has written, published, and staged an indigenous re-telling of Sophocles’ Antigone. In her Antíkoni, the protagonist fights to have the bones of her ancestors returned from a museum, linking classical literature to the contemporary struggle over the return of sacred relics to the indigenous tribes from which they were taken by non-indigenous people. It’s a brilliant indigenizing of the Western canon. A lot of talented people are doing a lot of compelling, urgent work, and I find this hugely inspiring.
I am drawn to second person’s compelling slippage between internal and external address. The “you” is both intimate and other, insider and outsider.
PG: Beyond the classical allusions and references, your poetics is intertextual also in the sense that it incorporates quotations from a considerable number of US poets, especially female poets Rosmarie Waldrop, Fanny Howe, Laura Moriarty, Brenda Hillman, Kathleen Fraser, Joan Retallack, and Julie Carr. Intertextuality of your work seems to be more a matter of dialogue with your contemporaries or at least near-contemporaries. In literature, as in life, one is never alone?
JR: A poet is always and never alone! But I also have a less poetic response to your comment. During the writing of the first draft of the book, I was making my way through that doorstop anthology Postmodern American Poetry, edited by Paul Hoover. I was reading this on the beach, taking long swims, and coming back to shore and writing drafts of poems. I was scribbling down fragments from poems in the anthology in my journal and collaging those pieces into my drafts. I’ve always been drawn to collage form, a technique I relied on in my first book of prose poetry The Rainy Season Diaries. A lot has been written about collage, aesthetically and politically. I don’t need to repeat that. I do like polyphonic, dialogic texts, though. Sometimes I think of the whole poetic tradition as one big, never-ending dinner party that I have invited myself to. The bits and pieces of others’ work that make their way into mine are about signaling where the conversation had been before I sat down, and perhaps some gesture toward what I hope my contribution to the conversation is. It’s about gratitude and exposing our affiliations, inspirations—paying proper respect to our mentors and teachers (even the ones we’ve never met). And, of course, this dinner party will keep on going, even after I’ve left the room.
PG: The poems in Keşke are also interlingual, or perhaps translingual. Specifically I’m thinking about your frequent use of Turkish language—not only names of people and places, but also various expressions, proverbs, quotations. In most cases these Turkish elements are integral to the poems’ composition; the poems would not have existed without them. What does this strategy mean to you? Is it an escape from linguistic singularity? A tool for communicating experience/identity? An estranging, even anti-absorptive device? A form of education for the (presumably non-Turkish-speaking) reader?
JR: There’s a complicated relationship to language and identity here. I am not Turkish and I am not a Turkish speaker. There are issues around power and culture and appropriation—what does it mean to invoke a language that is not your own? We are living through some important cultural conversations about authenticity, voice, power, and narrative. So I want to be clear that Keşke does not attempt to claim any ownership over Turkish voices or Turkish language or Turkish identities. I am not claiming a language or an identity. I was, however, deeply immersed in the Turkish language at the time of the book’s writing. I was in formal language classes, learning vocabulary via the daily emails from Turkish Word of the Day (which became its own theme and motif in the book), and I was surrounded by Turkish speakers speaking to me in Turkish. As someone fundamentally curious about, in love with, and fascinated by language and words, it makes sense, I think, that these concerns would appear in the book. I’ve also long been interested in the idea of the “translingual,” particularly for people working with languages that they have incomplete or fragmented knowledge of. In my doctoral dissertation, and a subsequent article, I wrote about the African American poet Harryette Mullen’s fragmented use of Spanish in her book-length poem, Muse & Drudge. So, on the one hand, the accumulation of word pieces that the book deploys reflects the reality of my lived experiences during that time. For instance, there are quotations of things that people actually said to me in Turkish (some of which are left untranslated). Then there are moments in the text where I deliberately wanted to play with the multiple opportunities across languages. Let me give you two examples:
From “Keşke XIII:”
receive in —her
şey “you”
fail— say all right
say please (48)
Here the break between the first and second lines plays with the English pronoun “her” and the Turkish word “herşey” (hair-shay—the sound is important). Herşey means everything. And Turkish people use “şey” as a filler word in conversations (similar to um, ahh, you know, like, so, etc. in English). But an English reader might look at şey and see/hear “say,” which is invoked in the subsequent say all right / say please. The lines then are doing several things simultaneously. You can the read lines in different ways if you know the Turkish words (the promise of the interlingual, no?). You can read: receive in her / say you / fail—say all right / say please. Or: receive in every / thing you fail—say all right / say please. Or: receive in her / everything you / fail—. say all right / say please. Or: receive in her / umm you fail—say all right / say please. Or all of them at the same time. And the words all right and please in italics are also references to a couple of the most common words in Turkish I said on a daily basis (and probably among some of the most common words for any language learner). And the “shay”/“um” can also represent the cracks and pauses and breaks a bumbling language learner inevitably makes when trying to speak. So, those are other hints in the poem that something interlingual is at work.
Another place of interlingual wordplay is in “Keşke XX:”
—keşke— winds
trades
hard rock for—
—tune still fate—
kader : beni buraya kader getirdi (73)
Here, if you know that kader means fate in Turkish, you can hear the wordplay between fate (in English and Turkish) and the break in for / tune, which if you read the word across the break as “fortune,” you have an engagement with the related concept of fate. There’s also wordplay in English here too. I hope readers hear the double meaning of winds / trades as both “trade winds” (the noun) and “winds” and “trades.” When trades is read as verb and for as a preposition, the lines change. The images of hard rocks, tunes, and fate/fortune should also remind readers of sirens, whose songs were said to hypnotize wayward sailors and send them to their deaths by dashing their ships into the rocks (also in The Odyssey). Kader and the phrase that appears after (my fate brought me here) came straight from a daily vocab lesson from the Turkish Word of the Day email listserv, which always included a sample sentence for each word. I enjoyed (over)reading into these emails when whatever vocab word and sample sentence seemed to be commenting on or reflecting some particular experience of mine at the moment. Were you spying into my life and soul, people who work at Turkish Word of the Day?!?!
PG: The theme of abandonment dominates the volume, especially through its focus on Calypso, the lustrous muse (in Robert Fagles’s translation), but also through the recurring word keşke (meaning in Turkish “if only” or “I wish”), as well as numerous references to longing, loneliness, memory, absence, migration. The other dominant theme—a kind of countertheme, even—seems to be language itself, especially the limit of meaning and expression. For example, how is Hamlet’s response to Polonius (words, words, words), which you invoke more than once in the text, instrumental to your book and your entire poetics?
JR: Ah yes, the theme of ineffectual men! Hamlet, paralyzed with inaction and indecision. Odysseus, unable to save himself from his calamities without the intervention of (primarily, notably) goddesses (and hence the book’s epigraph by Spicer). Odysseus, who claims to be homesick for hearth and home (and wife!) in Ithaca, yet somehow stays with Calypso for seven whole years, and only leaves after—she—builds his fucking raft, gives him wine, robes, and more. These are men who seem only capable of various acts of abandonment (sure, Odysseus makes it back to Penelope but he left his family for TWENTY YEARS). My therapist could tell you how I feel about clever, charming, wordsy men who end up leaving😉. And ones who benefit materially from my support and assistance before they do so too!
But abandoning the theme of men for a moment, the season when I’m writing this book is a moment of intense feelings of abandonment, loneliness, and alienation. The coup attempt heightened my feelings of outsiderness as an immigrant in Turkey (even as I felt curiously closer to Turkey and Turkish people than those witnessing these events from outside of the country and who really had, in my opinion, no idea what was going on or what it was like to be t/here). And there was a sense of order being abandoned in the reckless violence of terrorist attacks and, conversely, this incredible tightening of law and order from the government that was deeply, deeply divisive. In those uncertain weeks after the coup attempt, many of us felt estranged and lonely. There was nowhere to go (at least in the direct aftermath). I missed my family. I ended up in a remote part of southwestern Turkey that summer and, until I eventually found an amazing transnational community there, I was terribly alone. No one spoke English. We didn’t know what was happening with the country or what the future would look like. Loneliness was everywhere for me. Those moods and tones necessarily made it into the book. For a while it felt as if all I had were words. I had my books. I had emails and text messages from friends and loved ones. But I also had this heavy absence of words. I was thinking through the possibilities and limitations of language and languages from a variety of vectors—as expressions of affection and care, as political tools, as weaponry of various sorts, as poetry, as poetic linkages of affiliation and community (as per your third question), as tools of survival. I was tired of empty words and empty promises but also ravenously hungry for meaning. Perhaps this is what Hamlet is trying to tell Polonius. But whereas Hamlet can’t get himself out of his angst and grief, except through violence and death, I channeled that hunger into wishes and longing spun from sea foam into lyric and epic: still air spins / epic from ruin (“Keşke I”).
Sometimes I think of the whole poetic tradition as one big, never-ending dinner party that I have invited myself to… And, of course, this dinner party will keep on going, even after I’ve left the room.
PG: Could you discuss the structural principle that governs the title sequence? Its twenty-five sections are very striking visually, with scattered words and crumbling syntax; Mia You describes them wonderfully as a shimmering new landscape of shifting lines and columns. I’m reminded of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, but in this case you are not drawing from an existing text; “Keşke” is not a documentary poem. Rather, your strategy seems closer to composition by field, with its attention to breath and rhythm and its openness to the creative process, which also implies a certain provisionality.
I drafted these poems in a notebook where the pages are about 6 x 5 inches. In the original drafts I was constrained by the size of the notebook page. As I transferred the poems from my notebook into Microsoft Word (usually at the end of the day), I was paying particular attention to spacing, word and line placement, and white space. The white space of a notebook is very different from the white space of a word-processing page. A few things were important to me in the composition process: First, I was trying to capture the undulations of waves and air. How can I use space to shape the page into crest and trench, inhale and exhale? Many times, lines would come to me while I was swimming in Olympos Bay, on the southwestern Mediterranean coast of Turkey. I wanted to also capture the rhythm of my breathing during these daily swims, namely, the four-count breath. Second, I was also conscious of the collage material and how to create a simultaneous connection-disconnection reading between the collaged lines and the rest of the poem. Third, in places I tried to use space on the page to create multiple opportunities for reading—both with and against the horizon line of the traditional poetic line. I tried to create opportunities for vertical as well as horizontal reading and was conscious of wordplay and how arranging words and the spaces between them could open up different meaning(s). Finally, I was conscious of using space to emphasize certain words or moments in the poem. It was important to me that, in places, —she— and —keşke— occupy more space on the page and are not swallowed up or blown/washed away by the other lines of the poem. In these senses, yes, I am (re)working ideas of field composition and breath in the tradition of Pound and Olson (in some ways, all contemporary American poets are working with the inheritance of Pound and Olson, even those who reject them), but I would hope my version is more radically feminized than anything those two dudes could’ve ever imagined😉.
PG: Lastly, I want to ask you about one specific formal construction in Keşke: the use of dashes around a single word, especially around the pronoun “she” (so it appears as —she—). Next to the title word, this seems to be the most important word in the book, and of course it stands for the protagonist. As an academic you have always been interested in questions of form, even at the most minute level (you are after all a co-editor of Forms of Migration, an anthology of global perspectives on im/migrant art and literature). Would you like to comment on this particular artistic choice?
JR: I like those long dashes. They are Cheshire cats; they point in two directions simultaneously (since you brought up Forms of Migration). By this I mean that they, typographically, point to both connection and separation. Like a link in a chain, the dash connects two clauses or two words in a sentence in places where words themselves are somehow inadequate to the task (and there are so many and interesting reasons why words might fail or be insufficient!). But they also separate. The dash is a pause or a break. In literary terms, we might call it a form of caesura. My good friend, the brilliant poet-scholar Heather Yeung, has written and spoken about caesura. She says, amongst other fascinating things, that caesura “might at once mark violent rupture and give a breathing space”. —she— connects and disconnects. —she— is violent rupture and space of breath. —she— is terrible god and beautiful (“lustrous”) goddess. —she— is rock and wave. —she— is the pause before a breath or wish and the long exhale. —she— is hesitation and propulsion. —she— is fragment and shore.
Jennifer A. Reimer, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Oregon State University—Cascades, holds a PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. She has numerous scholarly and creative publications. As a scholar Reimer writes about poetry, race, gender, and migration, and she serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Transnational American Studies. As a poet she’s authored two collections: The Rainy Season Diaries (Quale Press, 2013) and Keşke (Airlie Press, 2022). The Turkish translation of The Rainy Season Diaries was published by Şiirden Press (Istanbul) in 2017. Jennifer has lived and worked in Cyprus, Turkey, Denmark, Austria, and the Spanish and French Basque country. She currently lives in Bend, OR, with her husband and their two cats.
Piotr Gwiazda is a writer, translator, and scholar. His recent scholarship appears in Delos, Criticism, Lana Turner, The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem, and the TLS. He teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.