…from World Without
by Courtney Bambrick
In the world without numbers,
our height and weight are determined
in relation to other things:
as tall as an upended bicycle
as short as an average daffodil stem
as heavy as an empty bookcase
as light as a dry kitchen sponge.
We paint our houses elaborately.
The wealthy commission portraits
of themselves on their front doors.
"Early" and "late" are charges
that are brought before judges.
Money becomes fuel.
Sports teams no longer
win or lose.
***
In the world without paper, mail carriers
take much longer on their routes. Some days
they just sit on our porches, waiting
until we get home to deliver messages.
***
In the world without ink, we use pencils
and remember how fragile our words become after handling. We return our hands to chisels
and our minds strengthen, snatching and
gripping facts and details. Pieces not caught
are lost. Numbers and names for people
and things hover until we cut or burn them
into wood or stone that is hewn or quarried just to bear our memories.
What is your poetic aesthetic? What calls you to write poetry?
I am not sure exactly how to answer this -- I feel like I am the last person able to identify an aesthetic in my own work! But I aim for some feeling of complicating strangeness and familiarity. Awkwardly timed humor.
Ever walk into a dark room and swear that you see an intruder or a ghost or demon, but then your eyes adjust and it is just a vacuum cleaner or a jacket thrown over the couch? And you laugh out loud with relief, but also maybe a little bit of disappointment? Relief, because you don’t have the immediately accessible power to fight a demon or an intruder. Maybe bliss because you survived an imagined threat and your emotions don’t know it isn’t really real. But you also feel a sense of disappointment because there was briefly something mysterious and dangerous happening in this otherwise predictable space.
I am “called to write” because a phrase or an idea sticks in my brain for long enough that it gets in the way of other work or other ideas. Like, I sit down to grade papers or write an email and this other idea for a poem just inserts itself and I struggle to focus on anything else until it is safely dumped in a notebook. I might ignore it for a while, but it is somewhere outside my skull and I will get to it when I get to it!
What is your process like? Do you have any strategies for getting from all possible blank page to polished poem?
I don’t know a blank page. I will blabber or doodle without shame. A piece of advice that I have taken and give is to get into it before you have a chance to back out. John, we were in a workshop at Murphy Writers a year or two ago with poet Nancy Reddy who had us mark a big X on a notepage before starting to write -- to “mess up” or mark up the page so that it was no longer blank! That we wouldn’t be so precious about what we put on the page -- it already had a big X on it! I like that idea a lot. I am also a “fake it till you make it” writer -- I will discuss ideas or plans for projects before they are fully realized so that I build in some accountability for myself!
I love notebook writing which feels malleable and open -- drafty! Once I type a thing up, it feels more settled. Revisiting and revising typed up work demands an extra boldness! I rely a lot on readers to help me see what the printed words hide!
Achieving “polish” is hard! I am not great at knowing when a thing is “finished” and I do love to tinker with older work as I consider sending it out for consideration. Polish feels a bit suspicious to me. When a poem feel “finished” to me, I might rough it up or change something small to switch up the energy. This trick may be just the spark to turn the engine over, and it may not survive further revision, but it starts the process up again.
I send out submissions all the time that are not quite finished because I feel like I can never reach 100% doneness on a poem! If it feels like its parts mostly fit together, I am pretty happy! And I will revise it after a round of rejections and see what that does. A poem is a site of experimentation for me. I know how it feels to write, but I have no idea how something will land with an audience until I read or share it!
You were the longtime poetry editor for Philadelphia Stories. Has being a poetry editor influenced your work? What was your favorite part of being in this role? Anything particularly difficult?
The most difficult thing usually was convincing the managing editor to give me enough pages for all the work I wanted to include! I learned that not everything that goes into the journal had to be my favorite poem of all time -- that there is a big wide range of work that I think belongs in our pages. I had the privilege of working with a really dependable and helpful board of poets who offered their opinions on the work and shaped the decisions I made.
My relationship with editors as a poet has been affected by my relationship with poets as an editor! I take less of the administrative stuff less personally. I have declined very beautiful, accomplished poems because they were too similar in tone or style or content to other work we were considering, so I know that those decisions can be difficult! And I have praised poems that I have declined in language that might have come across as patronizing! And I have neglected to praise poems that I loved because I was pressed for time and unable to cobble together the email I wanted to write that threaded the needle between “I love this poem” and “I won’t publish this poem.”
Relationships are the reason I love poets and poetry. I have had opportunities to meet many writers through this role! When we ran contests or conferences, I was able to reach out to area writers who we might fold into the Philadelphia Stories tapestry -- and I might add as friends on social media!
I know you also have a passion for theater! Tell us a little about it! Do you find overlap between these two artistic mediums?
As a middle school and high school kid, and even into college, I felt that these worlds of writing and performing had to be separate and distinct. I would go through “writing seasons” and “acting seasons.” I felt like my creativity was finite and I could only use it for one thing at a time. I think energy is finite, but creativity or inspiration really doesn’t have to be. In college, we read Aristotle’s Poetics and I realized that both theater and writing are modes of storytelling that rely on specific unities -- the rules that the creators set out for the audiences. All of the events of this play relate to this central plot! The images in this poem reflect a central question!
Also, poetry to me, is about the pleasure derived from speech. There are words that feel good in the mouth! I refer to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” when I talk about this in classes! “A little old lady got mutilated late last night” is pure joy in the mouth! I ask students about the parts of songs that they memorize first and why it is fun to sing along to some songs and not others. At the community theater where I am a member, Old Academy Players in East Falls, I have performed in a one act play by George Bernard Shaw which was verbally exhausting! It required incredible stamina and extensive warmups! In the end, when the language worked, the jokes worked, so then the ideas worked.
I also like to read my poems in front of audiences because I can hear where they land and where the language knots up. I like to try them out a few times before I send them out.
You have a chapbook coming out with Bottlecap Press. Tell us a little about World Without!
World Without is a long poem or a sequence of poems that each offer new worlds marked by specific absences: a world without mirrors or a world without water, etc. They started as light musings, but as the collection developed, some of the concepts that occurred to me felt heavier.
I saw the Canadian movie Last Night when it came out in the late 1990s when I was in college. It was an apocalypse movie that focused really tightly on how individuals prepared for the end of the world. It tells a gigantic story in this fine, fine personal detail. It really stuck with me, clearly.
Now, several years after many of us lived for a year or more in isolation, some of these ideas feel more present. But I like the idea of these small questions or seemingly small questions of what might we do if none of us had hands! I don’t think scientifically, but more about the smaller ways I use hands: greetings would have to change. Funny now to think of the move away from a handshake during early Covid. I imagined that shoulders and chins would be more expressive.
I wrote “In a world without sisters” during a time when I saw very little of my sister and was seriously thinking that I could lose her. She is now much healthier and I see her pretty regularly, thank goodness. In thinking of a world without sisters, I considered where I would be without my two brothers -- who are sarcastic and funny and goofy and who seem to occasionally surprise themselves with their own emotions. So, what started as a sort of general “what if” developed into something much more personal and surprising to me.
Where can readers read more of your work? Keep up with you on social media? Buy your book?
My poems appear or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Mom Egg Review, Landlocked, Clockhouse, Pinhole, Thimble, SWWIM Everyday, New York Quarterly, Invisible City, and more. My poem “Flesh & Fat & the Universe” was on Healing Verse: Philly Poetry Line, a really special project of former Philadelphia poet laureate Trapeta Mayson. My chapbook Rape Baby, a runner up in the 2013 Pavement Saw competition, was published as “Caring for Your Rape” at The Fanzine. My chapbook Gargoyle was a semifinalist in Iron Horse Literary Review’s competition. World Without is now available from Bottlecap Press.
I use @courtneybamboo or @courtneykbamboo on most social media platforms -- but I am pretty inconsistent. I try to highlight Philadelphia artists and events as I become aware of them! There are oodles of worthwhile events going on all the time. Philadelphia area poetry is an embarrassment of riches. I am so grateful to all the writers who share their work and their enthusiasm in this area. And right now, I am particularly grateful to you for these questions, John!
Courtney Bambrick teaches writing at Thomas Jefferson University’s East Falls campus in Philadelphia. She was poetry editor at Philadelphia Stories until 2024. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Spotlong, Mom Egg Review, Landlocked, Clockhouse, Pinhole, Thimble, SWWIM Everyday, New York Quarterly, Invisible City, and more. Her poem "Flesh & Fat & the Universe" was on Healing Verse: Philly Poetry Line. Her chapbook Rape Baby, a runner up in the 2013 Pavement Saw competition, was published as “Caring for Your Rape” at The Fanzine. Her chapbook Gargoyle was a semifinalist in Iron Horse Literary Review’s competition. Her chapbook World Without is now available from Bottlecap Press.
John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he works as a licensed clinical social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM and several of his poems were chosen to be exhibited in Princeton University's 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices art show at the Lewis Center for the Arts. He has been nominated 3x for a Pushcart Prize and serves as the Local Lyrics contributor for The Mad Poets Society Blog. His debut chapbook Roadside Oddities: A Poetic Guide to American Oddities was released in early 2022 and can be purchased at www.johnwojtowicz.com. John lives with his wife and two children in Upper Deerfield, NJ.