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The Ghent Reader is proud to present two poems from Joseph Harrison, who read his poetry during Old Dominion University’s writer-in-residence program. The poems Frost Heaves and Air Larry appear in his first book, Someone Else’s Name, published in March of last year.

 

Quick bio: Harrison grew up in northern Virginia and Alabama. He received a bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1979 and a master’s from Johns Hopkins in 1986. He most recently served as a poetry advisor in the Advanced Writing Program of the School of Advanced Academic Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Baltimore. His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines, including Antioch Review, Boston Review, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and Yale Review. They have also been included in The Monitor Yearbook of American Poetry 1996 and The Best American Poetry 1998.

 

Frost Heaves

In a quirky corner of New England,

Between two pummeled spines of the Green Mountains,

You'll find a town and college, Middlebury,

That once were haunts of the poet, Robert Frost.

He's honored ways some dead would find offensive.

Just read the markers on the road to Randolph

Where the new writers come and go like leaves:

You cross the Robert Frost Memorial Bridge,

To see, on the Robert Frost Memorial Drive,

The Robert Frost Interpretive Nature Trail,

The Robert Frost Memorial Wayside Area,

And then a crooked stick-sign, with crude letters,

Warning of shocks from shifty weather: FROST HEAVES.

 

And who could blame you, pseudo-memorialized

So comically in every wrong direction

Like any Vince Lombardi or Joyce Kilmer?

Or should we rather blame that side of you

Who packaged your keen words like maple syrup,

Dripping with smug provinciality,

Sticky with rhyme? As if you never contrived

To warp the ripe world through thin panes of ice,

Or plotted the marshy ground in fours and fives

Crisp to the cut of your long whispering scythe,

Or started the couple arguing on the stairs,

The narrow, clumsy, stoic will defied

By love's white backward gaze of grief at loss

Till call by liquid call the songbirds changed,

Or hid the goblet behind the children's playhouse.

 

And now it seems you've gotten me lost again

Although I thought I knew these woods by heart:

Splashes of yellow and alizarin,

Pulse of magenta, every fist in flame.

Something coaxes the trees to dress themselves

In the last colors of the alphabet

Then strips them in the nick of the hard north wind,

Something crisps the trail, ices the bridge,

Encrusts the plaque in the wayside area

And hoists the pavement buckling it like clay.

Long after your crumbling image is forgotten

(Beside the hero on inauguration day)

Frost will wrestle stone from underneath

And crack our polished, placid surfaces,

Wrenching apart the road we thought we'd taken.

 

 -Joseph Harrison, Someone Else’s Name (2004)

Air Larry

 

                (Larry Walters flew a lawn chair attached to helium

balloons to a height of 16,000 feet, into the jet

lanes above Los Angeles; he named his craft

"Inspiration I.")

 

When the idea came

It seemed, at best, a dicey thing to do:

You rig your vehicle, give it a name,

Straighten a line or two,

 

Then, confident you've given it your best

If not that it will carry you aloft,

You put it to the test

And it just takes off,

 

Lifting you over the trees

And up the sky

Easy as you please,

Till soon you are really high,

 

Your neighborhood, turned miniature, is gone,

And you wonder how,

Up here all alone,

To get the hell down, now

 

That the transcendental imagination

Has proven it can indeed

Surpass your wildest expectation

And raise you higher than you need

 

Or want to go,

For now that you are "there"

All you know is how little you know,

And that here in the upper air

 

It is very cold,

A disenabling extremity

Your clumsy calculations should have foretold,

And, triggering all your anxiety,

 

You hear, then see, roaring across the sky

As dots in the distance streak into form,

The gargantuan craft come cruising by,

Perfectly uniform,

 

Built for speed and altitude,

So effortless in shattering sound itself

That next o them your vehicle looks crude

And fatally flawed, just like yourself,

 

Painfully ill-equipped to play the hero,

And actually beginning to freeze to death

At a temperature far below zero

Where the thin air burns each breath,

 

And you realize you must, not a moment too soon,

Jettison all original intent

And pop your own balloon

To undertake the perilous descent.

 

-Joseph Harrison, Someone Else’s Name (2004)

 

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PROFILED

The Ghent Reader posts profiles and interviews with writers who have a connection to Hampton Roads. This issue the Ghent Reader focuses on Joseph Harrison.

Joseph Harrison: A writer and a Southerner

By Deb Markham

 After 25 years of perfecting his poetry, Joseph Harrison, 47, published his first collection of poems, Someone Else’s Name, last spring. The wait was worth it. Critics heaped praise on his work.  They lauded him for his sense of place, his use of form and rhyme, and his evident love of language.  From The New York Times to London Magazine, Someone Else’s Name received glowing reviews. 

It’s not like he and his work have been sitting on a shelf for a quarter century. His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines, including the Antioch Review, Boston Review, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and Yale Review. They have also been included in The Monitor Yearbook of American Poetry 1996 and The Best American Poetry 1998.

He was born in Richmond, grew up in northern Virginia and Alabama. Although he never took part in a formal writing program, he went to Yale for his undergraduate degree and John Hopkins for his master’s degree. He later served as a poetry advisor in the Advanced Writing Program of the School of Advanced Academic Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Recently, he quit teaching to read Plato’s Dialogues, sort of.  He continues to live in Baltimore.

On March 22, he read selections of his poetry to an audience at Old Dominion University.  Before that, he gave the Ghent Reader a call. Well, we gave him a call. Read on to find out what he had to share:

 

Ghent Reader: Would you say your Southern upbringing has any influence on your writing.

 

Joseph Harrison: I wouldn’t say it has any influence on it really. I guess I would say that one’s culture always has some general influence, but I don’t really -- and other people might detect influences that I myself might not detect. I was never that drawn to the Southern tradition of narrative in poetry other than Robert Penn Warren, whom I very much admired. The stuff that was self-consciously Southern poetry that I read and encountered when I was forming my taste and inclinations didn’t speak to me as deeply as some other things.

“I really think of myself as a Southerner, and as a writer, but not as a ‘Southern Writer.’”

 My dad was a very southern man and he took a lot of delight in language and the sound of words and he had a lot of fun with them.  I know I inherited what little felicity I have from him. I’m not sure that is a particularly Southern thing. I do think that Southerners are good tale tellers. I’m a story teller more in conversation than I am in poems. Poems tend to be more of a lyrical or figurative space than narrative space.

So my poems will include aspect s of narrative, but they are never straight-forward narratives. I think that generally novels do that job find.  There are other things that poems do, but those are just my personal whims, likes and dislikes. They are not intended to be prescriptive. This is a very oblique answer to your question about how being a Southerner influences my writing. I really think of myself as a Southerner and as a writer but not as a “Southern Writer.” The art, to me, is something that is not regional. It has to do more with something broader than regional.

 

GR: So what does it have to do with?

 

JH: Well, it has to do with the language, the vibrant nature of the language -- which is now spoken all over the globe -- that goes back hundreds of years. A lot of the work that I do is in traditional forms or variations of traditional forms, nonce forms that I concocted but with an eye to certain traditional model. So there is a very powerful and quite old tradition of poetry in English that’s always fascinated and attracted me long before I tried to write the stuff myself.

I think when I’m writing -- or perhaps I should say when I’m writing well -- feel that I’m a part of that larger tradition, larger trajectory, and that something that transcends regional boundaries. Also, the American poets who I have been most moved and instructed by don’t tend to be Southern poets. Wallace Stevens, the poet more than anyone else, who made me want to be a poet. I thought his poems were so amazing, and I wondered how he did what he did. How you get to the end of his poem and realize you had some kind of coherent aesthetic experience, but there was no way on god’s earth to paraphrase it.  He had done something to you that was magical and transformative. And, I was very much attracted to his poetry. Then, at a slightly later age, I was attracted to the poetry of Robert Frost. Those are both Northeastern poets.

 I do think I’ve been more influenced by Northeastern poetry in terms of American regions than by Southern poetry. Now, that doesn’t say, that being a Southerner doesn’t give me a certain different angle on those traditions; perhaps a different way of phrasing things and thinking about things.  I’m not saying that my Southerness does not in any form appear in my work. I’m sure it does. I think it probably appears in subtle ways rather than in an overt allegiance to a Southern tradition of writing. If anything consciousness of the sort of dominant narrative modes within the Southern tradition of writing may have helped send me in the other direction. But I don’t really think so. I just think I was attracted to the kind of poems that did the kind of things that I really like poems to do.  I tried to teach myself - well if I could - how to write those. The question of Southerness has never really been one that concerned me.

 

GR: But you do like to play with words?

 

JH: Oh yeah! Yeah I do!

 

GR: How do you decide form? Is it something that grows from the subject you have in mind, or do you decide on a certain form before taking on a topic?

 

JH: It’s a little bit of both of those. You want to find a form that seems appropriate to the poem and that seems to be appropriate to the subject matter. Different forms do different kind of things, so you want there to be that fit between tenor and vehicle, if you will. You certainly want to make sure you’ve got the right kind of form. You wouldn’t, for instance, want to try to do a sort of meditative reflective verse in heroic couplets. That just wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t be doing much meditating. Those you have to come up with witty barb every two lines, and that wouldn’t lead you into the minds meandering the way blind verse does as Wordsworth uses it.

“I would say that the question of form - or what form to choose - is there immediately from the first time you put pen to paper.”

I would say that the question of form -- or what form to choose -- is there immediately, from the first time you put pen to paper. I heard Richard Wilbur once say that he knew in a line and a half he knew what his form was. I think there is some truth to that. I work a lot in these little stanza forms that I make up with varying line length and cross rhymes. With those things, I feel my way toward what I want to do to the first stanza. Once the first stanza is done, then that is the form. It‘s always a very sensitive and delicate moment in the process of composition. You have to be very careful because if you don’t get it right, the poem is not going to work.  It’s very much a sense of feel and learning to listen to that voice in your head which usually has some idea where it wants to go.

 

GR: How long does it take you to get from inspiration through the first stanza and into the poem itself?

 

JH: It really varies depending on the poem. Sometimes I’ll have an idea for one, and a first line will come to me. I’ll go sit down, write that first line, and another one and another one. Sometimes I go on and write the whole poem. Sometimes I sit down and have an idea and write a line or two in a notebook and leave it. It can sit there for months, for years, before I page back through and say, “Hmmm. I kind of like that,” and pick it up and do something with it. 

It can happen very quickly, or it can take a very long time. I’ve spent months carrying the idea for a poem around in my head. I have some I’ve had for years. I’ve sat down a couple of times and made a couple of false starts. I know I don’t have it right, but that’s just part of the process and the mystery of the process. It can come very quickly, or you can get an idea – “Hey, I’d like to write about that” -- and it can take you forever to figure out – “Exactly how on earth I’m going to write about that.”

For one thing, you don’t know anything about it. Therefore, you have to find out about these strange aquatic phenomena in Mobile Bay, Ala., or about the history of this cemetery or wherever it is you’re going to write about. Not that you have to stick 100 % to the facts when writing a poem but you do want to know what you’re talking about. And be sure you know where the line is between what you find and what you make up. I’ve had some poems the day I thought of them.  I’ve had some take years to mature.

 

GR: Do you ever give up on an idea?

 

JH: I have bits and pieces of this, that and the other in the notebooks that for one reason or the other didn’t really work. I have a lot of poems that weren’t in the book that I published that may get published in some other form at some point. You do the best you can with what you have. And you keep writing. I think it was Horace that said the first thing people should do when they have written a poem is put it in a draw for seven years. If you still like it seven years from now, then try to publish it.

 

GM: Would you advise poets to do something like that drastic?

 

JH: No. It would be ridiculous. Most people want a quicker payoff. They don’t want to be told that it takes time. The fact of the matter is that, in terms of becoming a poet, becoming a serious poet, it takes a long time. A lot of people have some talent.  There are plenty of people who have something of a flair for writing and who like to read poetry and have penned some poems, and some of them show something. But there is a big difference between the people who do that and the people who really devote the work to it for years and years. Pushing themselves to get a little bit better and to get a little bit better and to get a little bit better. Sending out poems to magazines and getting rejected, and sending out to the magazines, and getting rejected, and sending out to the magazines, and getting rejected, and going through that whole process.

People want immediate gratification. Poetry is great for immediate gratification. Tell me how many art forms you can have an immediate aesthetic experience with. It’s actually possible during our distracted hurly-burly times to be able to just pick up a poem, read it, and have some sort of experience. But people want things to happen quickly. I’m speaking from experience. I’m sure somebody who wanted things to happen quickly and expected things to happen quickly.

I composed a massive book when I was in my 20. I sent it around to various bewildered editors. I had a whole book of poems. One of the poems got published. I wrote another book. The first was pretty flawed.  The second had its flaws too.  I have a certain fondness for it.  Then, eventually, my work moved in another direction than the first book, which had some form in it. The second was more experimental. (Second manuscript, I should say, because it isn’t a book unless someone has published it.)  Once I started writing Someone Else’s Name, I lost interest in some of the older stuff.  That’s just some of the things you have to go through to get there.

“It took me nearly 25 years for a book to come out. I realize most people don’t have that kind of patience.”

I’m somebody, who took a break for two to three years in the 1980s, wrote pretty much from about 1980 on. It took me nearly 25 years for a book to come out. I realize most people don’t have that kind of patience. I didn’t do things that a lot of writers do. I didn’t go to a writing program. I just went off and did my own thing in my own way. I wouldn’t necessarily advise people to follow my example.

 

GR: So, do you regret it?

 

JH: Not at all. I think that you do what you have to do to get where you need to go. I had to wait a long time, but now that the book is out I’m pleased with it. People have been very nice about it. It’s gotten some pretty good press. It exceeded my expectations of how much attention it would get and what sort of praise it would bring from people whose opinions matter to me.  That’s pretty much all you need. You get that praise and attention and you go: “Well, thank goodness the last quarter century hasn’t been a waste.” Then you go on.

I won’t pretend for a minute that an enormous weight wasn’t lifted when I realized I was going to get the book published.  Retrospectively, I felt pretty good about the whole enterprise. Had that not happened, I’m not sure what I would say…. You wouldn’t be interviewing me today.

 

GR: So, what’s next?

 

JH: More poems. I’ve been doing a good bit of reading –quiet reading - and giving public readings. I’ve also just been doing a lot of reading for my own instruction. That’s been very good. I’ve taught for many years. I’ve taken a break from teaching. It’s a nice relief to have a little more time to yourself and be able to read. I’m getting to read some of thing I should have read when I was a young man.

 

GR: Like what?

 

“You get that praise and attention and you go: ‘Well, thank goodness the last quarter century hasn’t been a waste.’”

JH: Oh, lots of stuff. The Dialogues of Plato, which are amazing. I took a course on it as a freshman. I k now I must have read it.  I sat there turning the pages and staring at it, but you couldn’t really have gotten very far with me on a discussion about what really goes on in Plato. … Once you read enough you get critical mass, it helps. When you’re reading and someone says something about “x”, it might actually be something you really read.

GR: You don’t have to go look it up or any more. You already know it... So, tell me, are you on sabbatical or something?

 

JH: Well, no, I just sort of quit. I got sort of tired of the teaching.

 

GR: Do you ever see yourself going back?

 

JH: I wouldn’t rule that out. I think it would depend on what people wanted me to teach, where they wanted me teach. I hoping I’m not going to have to go back to it just to pay bills. I enjoyed teaching, and taught for years, and had some wonderful students. There is a certain sadness at not doing it. But really, you know, I like retirement. Not that I’m really retried, but I’m taking some time to concentrate on other things.

 

GR: I have two final questions for you. The poetry group associated with the Ghent Reader, GhentPoetryCafe, has been debating a topic. I’m wondering if you wouldn’t mind sharing your thoughts on the topic.

 

JH: Not at all

 

GR: How accessible should poetry be?

 

JH: That’s a question that has always vexed poets, American poets, perhaps, in particular. It involves the whole question of audience. Some of that depends on who your audience is, and what you see your poems as doing. For instance, if your aim is to write social protest poetry, if you have a kind of definite political agenda or definite message that you want your poetry to get across. I think that it’s pretty important for it to be clear. I don’t particularly care much for that kind of poetry. John Ashbery told me that his problem with political poems is they often tell you something you already know. That often tends to be a limitation for them, but there are certain kinds of poems where accessibility is crucial.

You want the poem to be available, and immediately available in some sense, but not completely clear, I don’t necessarily think. If the reader sits down and reads your poem and comes away from it with nothing but bewilderment, they probably are not going to reread it.  I went through a phase where I realized I was making my work too hard for the reader. The reader was having to struggle a little bit, but I knew what I was doing. I knew what I was saying.

I remember at one point having a session with Anthony Hecht at the Sewanee Writers Conference. I could tell he was a little puzzled by a couple of the poems, but he was too polite to say anything about it. (He is a brilliant man; and, in the end, a very good reader of my poems.)  I could tell that I was being oblique, coded, and proud of my ability to string these things together and know that they make sense to me, but that’s not responsible to the audience. If you’re going to have an audience, you’re going to have to write stuff that people want to read. You’re going to have to write stuff that people, at least, feel they are making a start in understanding.

“In some sense, you’re writing for the ones who are no longer alive and you are writing for ones who have not yet been born.”

On the other hand, what is the audience for poetry?  As Milton said to Paradise Lost, “Fit audience find, though few.” Poetry in general doesn’t reach a mass audience. The man on the street isn’t really particularly interested in poetry and isn’t likely to become interested in poetry. Therefore, I would caution against too many sacrifices for the benefit of the general reader who doesn’t really exist. Poetry has always been really a learned art. The fully realized practice of it takes a lot of labor and schooling inside or outside institutions.

Write a poem that is completely clear and straight forward. You read it, and it says exactly what it means. Why would you ever reread it? That’s the catch, you see? That’s the accessibility problem. The poems that last longest are the ones that give us enough to go on that we can keep rereading and trying to figure out.

 I think ya’ll are wise to be discussing the accessibility question, because it‘s a crucial question. It’s a decision people have to make for themselves. And very much has to do with who you perceive your audience as being. It’s also important to remember that poems exist to be reread and not just to be read. If you make it so oblique that nobody is going to reread it, you’ve lost the game. If you make it so one dimensional that no one is going to reread it, you’ve lost the game too. There’s a balance to be struck that is very fine. Each poet has to work out where that line is for themselves.

 

GR:  Who is your audience?

 

JH: I do think of my own audience as primarily being other poets. That doesn’t’ mean I don’t want people in general to like my work. It gives me great pleasure when somebody who doesn’t read poetry comes up to me at one of my readings and tells me how much they like my poems. It’s always very satisfying. Realistically, it’s other practitioners of the art that you are really writing for. In some sense, you’re writing for the ones who are no longer alive and you are writing for ones who have not yet been born. I feel fortunate to be part of a very long and old tradition. That is much bigger than the individual people involved in it. Eventually, there is a way that itself becomes the audience you really think about. You kind of have to let the chips fall where they may with the rest of it.  It’s good to have people buy your books, though.

 

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How Accessible Should Poetry Be?

Constructed from posts on the GhentPoetryCafe board by Drew Stephenson and Stuart McCausland. Edits and additions by Deb Markham with apologies to the original authors.

The thing that always irritated me about English class, and probably turned me into a history teacher instead, was that my English teachers always seemed to have interpretations of the poems we read but couldn't (or didn't bother to) explain how they came to their conclusion.

It didn't matter if I checked out the writer's background or made what seemed to me to be clear and logical connections between symbols or important parts of the poem. My teachers would correct me with “The rice in this poem represents snow falling in the author's heart," or some such crap.  And they would say that without any inter- or extra-textual support.

Ever since, I have had little patience with an author (or artist) who flops down an arcane work and leaves no clues for the reader to follow. I understand "art for art's sake" is a valid aesthetic avenue to some, but I believe anything offered to public experience that is not accessible is masturbatory posturing. I can envision a situation where one might create a work that has meaning only to one's self, but then why put it in the public arena? Psychosis aside, I think that the only reason an artist would offer a piece to others is to affect some level of communication.

I'm not opposed to working to get to understand a piece; indeed I sometimes find the work adds significantly to my enjoyment. But the danger of an arcane piece, to my mind, is that greater work should have greater rewards. An intentionally difficult syntax or word choice that leads to the obvious and/or mundane comes across as artificial, trite and disappointing. On the other hand, working through a challenging poem that is well-constructed can transport me beyond the perspectives I know, and that is a wonderful experience.

---

As the old saying goes, "a thing is worth what you pay for it." This does not mean that I should have to work hard to interpret the Latin or Greek aphorisms in a poet’s work. It means that if I put in the necessary work earlier to learn those languages, I will bring more to the reading and consequently take more away.

Getting divorced can also be a lot of work, or raising kids, or working in a factory or on a farm. Bringing all that work with me to the poem does allow me to get more out of it, even if it's not exactly what the poet had in mind.

Asked what a certain poem meant, Robert Frost replied "What does it mean to you?" We construct meaning from both the input (the actual words of the poem) and our mind’s inner massaging and interpretation of that input. And, we can massage and interpret better if we have done our homework, either now or somewhere in the past.
When you read an arcane poem the read question is: Did this poet think about his audience?

My best friend was a writer, if you define being a writer as somebody who writes incessantly. He said he wrote because he had to. He didn’t publish anything, so he never considered “audience.” On the other hand, my journalism teacher taught us that we should write a story we would like to read ourselves. She said we were normal enough.  If we liked a story, many others would too. So, how accessible should poetry be? At least, as accessible as any song behind a good story.

 

If you would like to contribute an essay or review, please send your ideas to Ghentreader@GhentReader.com

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NATIONAL NOTES

The Ghent Reader scans the Web for national and international literary news articles. Here you will find excerpts and links to some of the articles we viewed. Send any interesting literary links we missed GhentReader@GhentReader.com.

A young Eastern Shore poet who won the nation's largest undergraduate literary prize last year has been charged with possession of marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms with intent to sell them near a school. – From a Baltimore Sun article about Angela Haley, the winner of a $56,000 student poetry prize. (Registration may be required.)

Philip Lamantia, who befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac as a young man and was one of the founding Beat generation poets, has died. – From an Associated Press story in The Mercury News.

"Everyone should read their haikus twice," says Goldsmith. "In case someone blinks." – From a San Francisco Chronicle story about Haiku poetry slams.

[Martin] Espada, a Latino poet who has published seven collections, plans to donate the money to a union for workers at Colombian Coca-Cola plants -- a union that Espada believes has been decimated by unfair and sometimes brutal labor practices. – From a Lawrence Journal-World story about what a poet plans to do with Coca-Cola  grant money.

 

How do you bring poetry to the people? Deliver it to their front doors, of course. – From a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story about how Ted Kooser plans to offer a poetry column to newspapers.

 

There will be no more plays from the pen of Harold Pinter, Britain's most distinguished living playwright. – From an article in The Guardian.

 

For those of us who truly care about poetry as a living entity, the present moment is always the best. – From a San Francisco Chronicle review of Ashes for Breakfast, selected poems by Durs Grünbein; translated by Michael Hofmann

 

"Why don't poets focus-group their poems to better reach a mass audience?" – From an Oregonian editorial by David Biespiel on the poet’s audience. 

 

When I started out, my goals were very self-involved - to get my work done and published. – From an Asheville Citizen-Times Q&A with North Carolina’s new poet laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer.

 

Patience Agbabi, a bisexual, radical-feminist performance artist with cropped hair and tattoos, has been called "the PVC poet" by the British media because of the lesbian, sadomasochistic and drug themes featured in her poetry.– From a New York Times article on one of the oldest boarding schools in England (Eton College) and its new writer in residence. (Registration may be required.)

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POETRY LINKED

We like to introduce poetry links to small-press and/or national literary reviews in each issue of the Ghent Reader. The poets and themes may not necessarily have any connections to the area. To suggest a literary review for this section, send an email to GhentReader@GhentReader.com.

When Weaver Ants Cut (A Valentine), by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Black Warrior Review)

Bahia Grass, by James Kimbrell (Black Warrior Review)

My Life as the Moon, by Brent Hendricks (Black Warrior Review)

Quarantine, by Michael Dumanis (Black Warrior Review)

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