Interviews 2020 (9-16):
Samaras, Bouwsma, Pierce, Sahni, Crowe, Fitch, Ramspeck, Loyd

The Shore Interview #9: Nicholas Samaras

Questions by Ellery Beck, Interview Editor

EB While the individual topics of your poems vary, there is a similar tension and sense of exile appearing throughout your work. What influence has your fairly nomadic lifestyle had on your poetry and how do you continue to find new methods of examining similar losses?

NS I like the phrase “nomadic influence” and there was nothing “fair” about it. But, in retrospect, I admit that explains much about me, both in terms of language and in terms of now-instinctual response. I grew up multi-lingual, learning to differentiate between languages, words, and even dialectical and regional accents, even within the same language, from the city-speak of Athens to the village dialect, from far-northern England (my favourite accents) to East Anglian roots, from German barbed consonants to Austrian musicalities. For me, the best American accent comes from Ohio, although my favourite American accent is Californian. I’ve long seen how languages and accents are deeply affected by land that people live on for generations and the weather under which they breathe.

After living through ten countries of governments and societies, what I filtered were the views on how dialectical and regional accents were rife with variety, texture, colouration, nuance. All of that has filtered into my writing. Much of what friends have called my uniqueness of phrasing and vocabulary has been due to my transliterating phraseology from one language to another. In America, you turn the light out; in Greece, you close the lights. Americans ask where you’re from; Greeks ask where were you born. The Middle East and Asia have completely different societal reactions to the body, to linguistic utterance, than does, say, British culture. Thus, I’ve learned how to resonate with the cultures of language. There are multiple shadings of approach to language and societal considerations, class structure and financial strata: my work weaves in between the weft. I’ve spent my life translating from experience into verbalising and understanding. I constantly seek new methodologies to wring nuance and relevance out of experience.

In similar ways, I value authors who spend forty years striving to extract the marrow out of an experience. Here, I think of the example of Tim O’Brien whose life has been spent on wringing meaning out of war. My own being a life of exile has always placed me in the role of the outsider, the kid who’s new in class, the kid who “used to be here” last year. Thus, my childhood was both fleeting and reinvented every year. I’ve spent a lot of focus in my work, detailing the nuances from what was said and what was meant. My writing always goes for the deeper meaning and deeper insight. Any new methodology of gaining further insight, seeing different facets of the “jewel” from a slanted perspective lends a greater value to the diamond. I strive to make every individual poem such a diamond.

And here, I appreciate the insight from Agha Shahid Ali, whose illuminative work on the ghazal form of poetry is pure excellence. His book, Ravishing Disunities, is a killer title that could easily describe my life with all the breathtaking disunities I lived through. In speaking of the ghazal, which I encountered while living in southern Turkey, Ali observes that “Each couplet must be like a precious stone that can shine even when plucked from the necklace, though it certainly has greater luster in its setting.” I always value his observation, when considering the individual poem and its setting into a collected manuscript. Those are nuances I write about and teach my writing students. They are ongoing, new methodologies I work with like clay to fire the finished setting, context, and jewel.

EB I’d love to ask a craft question next: could you tell me a little about the role of ritual in your poetry? Each of your poems in this issue of The Shore gorgeously employs ritualistic elements, such as the patterning in “Among the Red and Yellow Tulips of Boston Common” and this lovely gnomic gesture at the end of “Directions for the Kidnapped Child at Three Years Old,” “You’ll breathe when I tell you to breathe.” How do you decide when and how often to use elements such as these?

NS Honestly, my genesis for writing is music. I began as a four-year-old singer in Foxton, England and then in Patmos, Greece, my carrying snippets of songs and languages with me through continents. My cadences were nursery rhymes, television theme songs, and church hymns from my father. In my writing, I am always seeking music, refrain, the turn of a phrase. My favourite part of my father’s church hymnology and divine liturgy is the anaphora, with the depth of its multiple meanings. I love gnomic poetry and wisdom literature—which is, for me, a pinnacle to achieve and work with. In my writing, I strive to craft each poem with its own language and phraseology. In one of the five high schools I attended, I learned the craft of woodworking: you spin the lathe and touch the blade to the timber, trusting the form that emerges from the pressure of your hand. I equate that to the writing of a poem: different craft technique for the poem as it emerges on the page, different shaping choices—one choice for the poem to turn this way, another choice for the poem to turn another way. For me, the poem becomes a sculpture, a shape, with sonic resonances. In many ways, each individual poem suggests its own form to me, sometimes demands its own form to me. Many times, I follow the suggestion, the musical phrase of the poem as it emerges and hums.

EB In a time where traditional methods of education may not be available, what advice do you have for poets actively trying to improve their theory and craft?

NS The easiest and best advice is to read everything, even (or especially) if it is not related to poetry. I’ve found that the broadest readings enrich the best writers. It’s less about education than it is about self-motivation and an internal curiosity.

EB Are there any magazines or journals you’re currently enjoying?

NS There are too many magazines and journals that I deeply enjoy and appreciate. But I can suggest one, prime magazine: World Literature Today, whose international focus on writing I deeply appreciate. They do well to bring the world inside.

EB Please speak to how two poems in The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other in meaningful ways.

NS I always enjoyed David Dodd Lee’s work. His poem, “After Receiving a Bill from the Water Department That Wasn't Mine,” deals with observation, the pairing of cause and effect, and relational consequence, with his killer ending, “All of our deaths take place to scale.” In similar fashion, I appreciate Ned Balbo’s “Night Sky of Another Earth,” which employs similar approach of observing and noting change, illumination, to culminate into a final revelation and resonance that lingers. This, to me, is what I appreciate in good writing: revelation and resonance. For those of us in exile, and for those of us not in exile (but still outsiders, observing—as writers are, definitely), it’s always about noticing, remarking, and concluding. In this way, we deepen and grow.

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Nicholas Samaras is from Patmos, Greece (the “Island of the Apocalypse”) and at the time of the political Greek Junta (“Coup of the Generals”) was brought in exile to be raised further in America. He has lived in Greece, Asia Minor, England, Wales, Brussels, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Germany, Yugoslavia, Jerusalem, thirteen states in America and he writes from a place of permanent exile. Currently, he is writing a poetry textbook, and critiques client-poetry by appointment.

The Shore Interview #10: Julia Bouwsma

Questions by Ellery Beck, Interview Editor

EB Your poetry in this issue of The Shore engages both forms and modes, such as your duplex “Letters were once bodies, are bodies now” (a form invented by Jericho Brown) as well as your “Pastoral in the Anthropocene.” What benefit do you find in experimenting with more complex forms and modes and what advice do you have for poets looking to do so?

JB My grandmother used to tell a story about how she once allowed my mother and uncle (who both swear this never happened) to throw mash potatoes at the ceiling to see if they would stick. I try to embrace this kind of open trial-and-error approach when writing in different forms and modes, and it’s the process I’d probably advise to other poets. If I’m interested in a form or mode, then it’s only natural that I’ll try to write. How else can I really understand it if I don’t explore it kinesthetically, if I don’t get a chance to enter the form and crawl around inside of it? My best experiences with form usually come when I focus on the process over the product. Sometimes the poems land, and sometimes they don’t. But even when they don’t, I always learn something from the practice. “Letters were once bodies, are bodies now” was the result of this kind of playing around. After reading The Tradition and seeing Jericho Brown discuss his process in coming to the duplex, I just wanted to try to write one myself so that I could better understand the inner workings and intricacies of the form (and also because I’d recently been exploring sonnets). I’m also fond of writing multiple poems in a single mode in order to create a series—something that occurs in both of my two books—and have recently been toying around the with idea of the pastoral in this regard.

EB Your writing often uses intricate research, a great example being your book Midden. This work acts as your retelling of Malaga Island’s history, a history that took exhaustive research to write. When researching, how do you handle running into dead ends?

JB The typical approach to research, the way we’re first taught in school, is to identify our topic, find out as much as we can, and then demonstrate our new knowledge as comprehensively as we can. When I began to explore the history of Maine’s forcible eviction and erasure of an interracial community of forty-seven people from their home on Malaga Island in 1912, I quickly learned it was a story that had been buried for roughly a century through shame and fear, one that many still regard as “a story best left untold.” As a result, the Malaga archive is a fragmented archive—riddled with inconsistencies, inflammatory and false rumors, name changes, and both oral and documentary silences. There was no way to write the story of Malaga well without negotiating this fracture. Through the process of writing and researching the book, I came to realize that what I didn’t and might never know, and why I didn’t know it, mattered at least as much as what I did know. I had to learn what the silences had to tell me. Rather than thinking of the parts of the history I couldn’t pin down as dead ends, I started to think of them as places where I had to learn to actively listen to, and eventually converse with, silence. Poems are made by tensioning language (the power of the said) against silence (the power of the unsaid), so I tried to apply that same logic in my approach to the research and writing of the book as a whole.

EB While each of your poems in this issue of The Shore appear to be fairly simple formally, you employ strategic line and stanza breaks and maintain incredible line tension. I particularly love the long, steady lines with meditative couplets in “Study in Epigenetic Memory III.” When writing, how do you determine what form the poem will take?

JB Determining a poem’s form is mostly an intuitive process for me—part stumbling, part intensively focused listening. I’m always looking for the organic form, the form that fits the poem’s subject so innately it could be magic. When you find it it’s like a fairly tale: the glass slipper, the perfect bed. Sometimes I instinctively make the correct formal choice for a poem right away, but often this is a process of writing, allowing the poem to rest and cure, and then coming back to it later. It can take a while for a poem’s true shape to show itself. And I’m willing to be quite drastic about it, to tear a poem open completely and re-write it in a wildly different form if need be.

I also think whatever I’m reading at the time play a factor. When you read a book intensely, its music lodges in your head (and of course the joy of this is one of the reasons we read). When I sit down with a book of poetry, I’m always hoping that the poems that affect me most will find their way under my skin and that aspects of them will indirectly erupt out into my own poems. And form is of course one of the ways that can happen. The poem you mentioned, for example, was written during a week when I was reading both Rick Barot’s The Galleons and Erica Meitner’s Holy Moly Carry Me, two books that use couplets in incredible ways, and I was actively thinking about how well-suited the couplet is for more meditative poems, how the couplet helps to keep the line taut even as the poem’s thought process wanders.

EB Are there any magazines or journals you’re currently enjoying?

JB Let’s see… I love The Adroit Journal, Winter Tangerine (though they’re currently on hiatus), Muzzle, The Offing, Tinderbox, BOAAT, Grist, Anomaly, and Waxwing, to name a few off the top of my head. Of course there are many more…

EB Please speak to how two poems in The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other in meaningful ways.

JB Two beautiful poems from issue 5 that particularly struck me are JK Anowe’s “A Road’s Guide to Kill” and Jenny Irish’s “In Texas There Are Tours of Things That Aren’t There Anymore.” These poems are quite different formally—Anowe’s is set in sparse and searing couplets, Irish’s is a lush prose poem—but both poems seem to be meditations in the crux of transition. Anowe’s is set in a car as it “breezes / towards another city that knows me // not by my scent or face, my fate / nor sweat, but my fear.” Irish moves through time from childhood memory to events that occurred a century ago to “the closer past” where the speaker recalls when she was “caught in a current, I submerged, scuffing over river rock, skin stripped back…” In both of these poems I see the speakers working through layers of memories, loss, connections to place, each of them paring back the past in their own way (“I peel black clot off a knee-wound / to reveal another day, violent red,” writes Anowe), sloughing off the dead skin to expose what Irish calls “the pain that accompanies love: swallowed stones, lodged fish bones…”

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Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, farmer, freelance editor, critic and small-town librarian. She is the author of two poetry collections: Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). She is the recipient of the 2018 Maine Literary Award; the 2016-17 Poets Out Loud Prize, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver; and the 2015 Cider Press Review Book Award, selected by Linda Pastan. Her poems and book reviews can be found in Grist, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, River Styx and other journals. A former Managing Editor for Alice James Books, Bouwsma currently serves as Book Review Editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact and as Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, Maine.

The Shore Interview #11: Catherine Pierce

Questions by Adam Weeks, Social Media Editor

AW Your poetry often engages with the concept of place. This can be dealing with a variety of ideas about what a place can be, how it’s inhabited, affected or changed, as well as how it can be a body or a moment. This is especially true in your poem, “Dear Place, I Ask So Much,” in which the speaker instructs, “Canyon me. Ravine me. Redwood me,/roots deep to the wet center.” How do you work to explore place as this multifaceted and complex concept when writing your poetry?

CP I’ve always been deeply, intensely impacted by place, and so I don’t think it’s so much that I’m working to represent the complexity of place as it is that the complexity of place works on me. Emotionally, mentally, physically, so much of who I am is bound to place, whether that’s the natural world or a particular museum or cabin or grade-school classroom. I’d say that many of my poems start from the complexity of place and then spin out from there as I try to untangle those different threads of feeling and association.

AW Both your work in The Shore and your most recent book, The Tornado Is the World, utilize series of poems, such as those revolving around topics such as storms, travel, and games. How do you approach writing series? How do you then approach compiling a full collection, such as your forthcoming book, Danger Days?

CP I’m a big fan of writing series. For me, a series is a fruitful way to do a deep dive into something I’m obsessing on (as in The Tornado Is the World), but also to get my creative engine running again when I’m stuck. That was the case with the games poems in the last issue of The Shore—I’d come across these little books, reproductions of 19th century children’s game guides, in a bookstore a while back and had bought them, hoping to someday use them for a series. They sat on my shelf for a while, and then last fall, when I’d finished Danger Days and was casting around for something totally new, I turned to them.

Sometimes, as in The Tornado Is the World, it’s clear that a series is central to the book from the outset. Other times, though, it doesn’t work out that way for me. Danger Days does have a short series in it, called “From The Compendium of Romantic Words,” that I wrote as an exploration of language and the associative reach of individual words. But I’d also written another, much lengthier series that didn’t ultimately end up in the final version of the book. It just didn’t end up fitting with the book’s tone and concerns, and so finally—after trying to shoehorn it in for a while—I let it go.

AW Your work ranges from the heavily lyric to narrative, often within a single poem. Your poetry also engages with vivid and inventive imagery to create new meanings in your work. What kind of research do you do to discover these interesting topics and vivid images contained in your writing?

CP Research is essential to my poems, but I’m an armchair researcher, to be sure. Often I’ll read an article or news story online that sparks something, and within half an hour will have a million tabs open—for one poem I finished recently, I went down research rabbit holes at the OED, the Audubon Society, Wikipedia, several weather sites, the New York Times and the Cornell Lab bird site. I love so much the language of science and nature—so often, that vivid imagery is built right into the names of things.

AW Are there any magazine or journals you’re currently enjoying?

CP So many! It’s hard to single out just a few, but the new issues of Pleiades and 32 Poems recently arrived in my mailbox and they’re both stellar.

AW Please speak to how two poems in The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other in meaningful ways.

CP I really loved reading Brooke Sahni’s “The Sensuous Woman by J” and Caroline Shea’s “Ode to the Lady Detective” back-to-back. In addition to the way both poems make compelling use of space and breath, they’re both so moving and evocative in how they illuminate the dangers and conflicting expectations women navigate. I also love how both poems include first-person narrators who offer a sort of counterpoint for the fictional characters they’re describing.

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Catherine Pierce's new book, Danger Days, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in October. She is the author of three other books of poems, most recently The Tornado Is the World (Saturnalia 2016). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series and elsewhere, and has won two Pushcart Prizes. A 2019 NEA Fellow, she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

The Shore Interview #12: Brooke Sahni

Questions by Tyler Truman Julian, Review Editor

TTJ Your chapbook, Divining, just came out from Orison Press, and you’ve had many individual poems and short stories published across both print and web-based journals recently. Could you tell me a little bit about this chapbook and your work in general? What themes and ideas do you like to explore in your work?

BS I’ve always enjoyed writing both poetry and fiction. Unlike fiction, my chapbook, Divining, is heavily rooted in my experience, using my two cultural identities, Sikhism and Judaism as springboards to talk about the divine in all its forms—from nature to sexuality to language itself as a means of conjuring the ineffable. On one hand my short stories feel very separate from my poems—none of my fiction directly explores my religious/cultural backgrounds—but on the other hand, I do find that both my short stories and poems tend to lean toward girlhood/womanhood themes; I am very drawn to coming-of-age motifs and theology, and philosophy, so I do find commonality across my writing, though it’s never conscious—I guess they’re what you’d call my writerly obsessions!

TTJ I’m wondering how you take those themes and give them shape in your work. For example, your poem, “The Sensuous Woman by J,” was published in our most recent issue, and though narrative in many ways, it employs a rather disjoined structure, one that uses the space on the page. When you write, how do you decide what form a poem should take? Does this poem stand out from the rest of your work or reflect your usual style?

BS Pretty much through all my of formal schooling in writing, my poems were always oriented on the left margin. My cohort in my MFA was much more experimental with form and for the longest time I just didn’t “get it.” Then it just kind of clicked—how a disjointed form can add a layer of meaning to a disjointed content. “The Sensuous Woman by J” depicts a group of girls who are sort of “rocked,” knocked off kilter a little bit by this new sexual knowledge—this “bible” if you will. In this moment, there is a disjointedness of self before the putting back together. I’ve begun to play with form more, but still feel like it’s a little out of my element!

TTJ What I’ve seen of your work is often rooted in a speaker’s desire to come to understand herself better, almost like a coming-of-age. Do you rely on your own memories and sense of self for the content of your poems or do your ideas come from somewhere else? To borrow a phrase from poet Richard Hugo, what are your triggering towns?

BS I agree that there is a desire to understand. I always come back to the term “meaning-making” because that’s what most of us are doing and the ways in which a human makes meaning are infinite. Divining tries to gently push back on formal religion being the only or the primary way of making meaning. There are endless ways. We do it all the time and that act, in my opinion, is always holy. Girls finding a sex book in a dresser has its own power and holiness. But back to your question—I used the term “springboard” above because for me, that’s what it really is. Though my poems in Divining talk a lot about my cultural backgrounds, experiences that have happened, I spend little to no time thinking back on specific memories, but rather an image—girls finding a book where a tiger goes down on a woman, which did happen to me as a kid—and I instantly start thinking about how a few poems back I talked about the Torah or the Guru Granth Sahib, these literal religious texts—and I ask myself how do I write a poem that illuminates the religiosity in a completely different context, a text some people might call mundane or even profane. In the case of Divining, most of the poems were written in order, where I was attempting to write poems that all built upon one another, or at the very least were heavily in conversation with one another. This project, now that I’m thinking more about it, was very much about the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane; the goal of merging the two (the Torah next to a sex book; the Sabbath next to the ritual of masturbation or going out into the woods, etc.).

TTJ Are there any magazines or journals you’re currently enjoying?

BS For me, summer is mainly about novel reading. Three of my favorite writers all had new books come out this summer: Lidia Yuknavitch’s Verge; Catherine Lacey’s Pew; and right now I am in the middle of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands, which I am loving.

TTJ Please speak to how two poems in The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other in meaningful ways.

BS I was drawn to Kristi Maxwell’s “Moons” and Catherine Pierce’s “The Elements.” In the latter, Pierce captures this elemental ceremony amongst girls, and in “Moons,” the poem zooms out to a larger cosmic order, where things are a little ruined by light pollution. I can see the girls in “The Elements” growing up and coming to see beauty and corruption in the “invented light” Maxwell depicts.

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Brooke Sahni's writing has appeared in magazines such as The Missouri Review Poem of the Week, Spillway, Cave Wall, 32 Poems, EcoTheo Review, River Styx, Southwestern American Literature and other publications. Her poetry chapbook, Divining, is the winner of the 2019 Orison Chapbook Prize.

The Shore Interview #13: Melissa Crowe

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Guest Interview Editor

TNS Let’s talk about one of your poems that appears in this issue of The Shore. In “America you’re breaking” you experiment with varied punctuation and caesura. This is a departure from your collection, Dear Terror, Dear Splendor, which uses horizontal white space sparingly, and only in select poems such as “The Uncles”, “Some Say the World” and “Dear Terror, Dear Splendor.” What do you feel the removal of punctuation adds to the craft of a poem, both generally and in the case of “America you’re breaking?”

MC You’re right—lots of my poems are tidy in their shapes. On the page as in the world, I’m drawn to straight lines and perfect corners. I’m one of those nerds who straightens other people’s picture frames, and I always describe my dreamhouse as “foursquare.” Neatness in a poem can communicate care, especially in free verse where we don’t signal our poetic intentions with strict meter or rhyme scheme. I also find that, during composition, simple constraints—lines of a consistent length, a regular stanza pattern—give me something to work with and against, a productive tension as I make decisions. Right hand to Frost, I’d say I struggle to make choices in the complete absence of constraints, everything being possible.

But at some point I began to see emerging poets, many of them my students, treating the page as an open visual and sonic field, and it hit me that tidiness isn’t the only way of taking care—the mindful use of what you’re calling horizontal white space can be a precise way of directing the reader’s eye, controlling the unfurling of information, and conducting the music of the lines, and sometimes that orchestration makes punctuation unnecessary or even distracting.

I think caesura, with or without punctuation, can communicate rupture, disjunction, and hesitation but also the speaker’s urgency, their insistence on language in spite of whatever forces might try to halt it. This was true when it came to writing “America you’re breaking,” which for me feels like both an elegy and a Dear John letter. Early on I knew I was going to say things I didn’t really want to say—that maybe it was too late to redeem this nation, that it might be better to just let it sink. I was reckoning with a lot of rage and love and grief. Doling out the thing in small pieces seemed the best way to communicate that painful ambivalence.

TNS Your poetry tends to lean heavily on a narrative structure that invokes memories and images deeply connected to reality, yet the subject matter and the nature of the poem itself retains its closeness rather than making the reader a mere voyeur. This is especially true for “I cry each time we say goodbye because I know I’m always sending you to war.” How do you walk the line between intimacy and narrative, and how did you do so in this poem?

MC I’m for sure trying to create a sense of intimacy in every poem I write, and the story isn’t so much the goal as the method. Imagine yourself on a date—how do you come to know the person across the table? How do you fall in love? You tell each other the sweetest, smallest, profoundest, most evocative details of your lives. You tell each other stories, but not because you came to the restaurant to hear a story. In so many of my poems I’m using this kind of direct address—talking, hands clasped, across the table—but the connection that’s dramatized isn’t the only or even the primary one I want to conjure.

Maybe it’s this: the poem’s speaker wishes to establish (or enhance or test or torque) a connection with the person to whom she’s speaking, but the poet has something else in mind. I may be talking to my lover or my child or my father or my friend or myself, but I’m not doing it in private; I’m doing it artfully (or trying to!), on the page. I’m essentially staging this intimacy for the reader to witness. But I guess I hope that the fact that I’ve cast you as someone with whom I’m already intimate makes you my intimate—if I go all in, if I don’t flinch. The poem’s “you” is certainly, at first, a character you’re overhearing me talk to, but then, suddenly, maybe you are the lover or friend. Suddenly I’m holding your hand, asking you to lean closer, to attend and abide me until we understand each other in a way that’s electric.

I guess a particular hypothesis guides my work, though I’m not usually aware of it—that a poem can make us feel, not just in the space of its unfolding but elsewhere, too; that we can be tenderized and galvanized and lit up more or less ongoingly by poetry. Anyway, I’m striving for it.

TNS How do you see the role of the domestic sphere in your work? How does it interact with your own feminism and the subject matter you tend to focus on?

MC Well, I write about family a lot. Dear Terror, Dear Splendor is a book with two subjects, more or less—my own upbringing and the raising of my child, so it’s full of grandparents and uncles and my parents and my siblings and my spouse and our kid. If it is that I’m constantly trying to create this close, hushed space in which I address some beloved other, I’m also drawing everyone who reads my work into that circle, trying to make them kin. For me, then, a poem—like a home—is always a private and public space, charged with intimacy and with politics, constructed as apart-from-the-world but actually made of world-stuff.

Just now I’m thinking of my book as a dollhouse, one of those ones with the big hinged door on the front, so when you open it you can see all at once into every room, and none of the little figures inside can ignore how exposed they are, how implicated in the larger goings-on. There’s a poem in my book in which the speaker breastfeeds an infant while the Twin Towers fall on TV—the fantasy of a safe “inside,” of any kind of protective domesticity, is challenged in that moment. Likewise, when it comes to a poem like “I cry each time we say goodbye…,” the speaker addresses her spouse, talks to him more or less directly about his profound sorrow, and the intimacy of the direct address may suggest she regards this subject matter as private, but she doesn’t configure his pain as privately produced. The world, which the domestic sphere can’t keep at bay, makes him sad, she insists—and it makes her sad, too. They’re in it together; we all are. I see this understanding as feminist, particularly if we understand feminism as an uncompromising commitment to equity that’s intersectional, to an undeniable interconnectedness we ignore at our collective peril.

TNS Are there any journals or magazines you’re currently enjoying?

MC Yes! There are tons! Waxwing, for instance, has long been a favorite, and I read every issue. And I can’t wait to see what Dorothy Chan gets up to over at Honey Literary. But a journal that’s recently come to my attention and seems worth recommending is Guesthouse. The design of the thing is just gorgeous, really clean and engaging. Jane Huffman is the editor-in-chief, and the current issue—which has a focus on the pandemic—was edited by Diane Seuss, with beautiful poems by Rosebud Ben-Oni and José Olivarez, and collaborative work by Traci Brimhall and Brynn Saito. The whole thing is like this field of rabbit holes I’m so, so happy to keep falling into.

TNS Please speak to how two poems in The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

MC The Autumn 2020 issue is a stunner, and as I read it, I kept seeing connections among so many of the poems. I was particularly struck by Taylor Byas’s “Sleeping Weather” and Emma Aylor’s “Daydream,” which both use rain to establish tone and seem to attempt a kind of conjuring—specifically the conjuring of intimacy.

In the first line of “Sleeping Weather,” the phrase “commits to reopening” lets us understand a lot about what’s at stake. This intention to reopen is attributed to the sky but calls up, for me, both the language of pandemic mitigation and the language of relationship, the very human drama of whether or not to be vulnerable, available to others. Quickly we’re in a neighborhood, which stands for at least the possibility of community, but Byas presents it as a set of adjoining compartments, houses that wall us off from one another. The speaker hears a neighbor’s sneeze and its blessing, evidence of bodies in relationship, but at a remove. Likewise, her mother calls from “two states away.” We’ve got these barriers to intimacy that are only partially overcome, such a masterful setup for the poem’s second half, which feels like a deluge of longing, desire for “a body’s dip on the other side,” for a “hand breaching the imaginary / line down the bed’s center.” That imaginary line! That’s the thing that keeps us apart, and this is a speaker “clamoring” for a love that cares as little for imaginary lines as a rainstorm does. It’s a yearning for wildness, I think, for less polite observance of the boundaries that keep us alone. Oof. I love it.

Aylor’s “Daydream” starts with a simple declaration that gives us the whole history that precedes it—“It finally rained.” We know all we need to about the days or weeks of dryness before the storm. Everything the speaker can see from her window is empty or too far away to touch, so I read the drought as emotional weather, too, and the rain, then, has the potential to move the speaker in more than one way. But she tells us it only makes her need more, that “only the water / and the crows move.” Why? Wait for it—the last couplet is like a magic trick, makes the hair on my neck stand up. The speaker goes to bed alone and “wakes with your hand in my hair”—first time a “you” appears in the poem. Part of the power here, of course, is the ineffable—that thing only poetry can do, where we can have a real, literal hand in that final line but also not, where I can feel both that hand and the painful weight of its absence. I mean, maybe this is a poem where an actual “you” shows up on the scene just as the speaker is waking, “finally,” in the same way the rain arrives. I’d be more apt to read it this way if not for the fact that the rain is treated not as a relief but as a thing that fails to sooth or satisfy the speaker. In what sense, then, does she wake with “your hand” in her hair? I don’t know, but it breaks my heart. It’s a beautiful, haunting little poem.

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Melissa Crowe is the author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), and her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, POETRY, Seneca Review, Thrush and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals. She’s coordinator of the MFA program in creative writing at UNCW, where she teaches poetry and publishing.

The Shore Interview #14: Joely Byron Fitch

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Blog Editor

TNS Let’s talk about my favorite poem of this issue of The Shore, “Virginia Woolf ’s First Novel Is Called The Voyage Out.” The poem begins traditionally, but as we move down the page we see more white space, more unconventional separations using parentheses, long dashes, commas and colons rather than periods. It’s not a surgical removal of punctuation, but a dissolving of the barriers between sentences, until the poem feels like one sentence that never ends. How do you think this craft choice among others creates tension in the poem, and how does this tension lend itself to the form and subject you chose?

JBF I love this question, and your language of “a dissolving of the barriers between sentences” is so wonderful and feels very true to what I was trying to do in the poem, but hadn’t articulated that way, and am glad now to have that particular phrase for. I was definitely leaning hard on the stanza-meaning-little-room etymology here, and was thinking about these short-lined quatrains as embodying or enacting the “little rooms at sea” of the ship’s cabins in the Woolf quote I keep circling back to in the poem, which ends an early chapter in the novel, and reads in full: “They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each other's faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say.”

I'm still enchanted and mystified by this quote, and something about these ordinary mysteries—of how we can be so close to other people but also experience distances in moments of intimacy (and vice versa), of how thoughts can or can’t travel through the space between us, of what it’s really like to be alive at any particular moment—are for me the tension at the heart of the poem, or the collection of distinct-but-densely-interrelated tensions. And honestly these are my forever-questions or fascinations (and related, perhaps, to some of Woolf ’s, which might be why I’m so obsessed with her). I think the way the speaker’s reverie here keeps wandering and then returning—into and away from the scene she’s inhabiting with this other person, and towards and away from the pieces of literary language that keep breaking in—was my attempt to render the expansiveness of thinking, but also its limits, or the way any moment is filled with echoes of other voices. The move towards breathlessness at the end, and that endless-sentence quality you mention, are also nods to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses, which I read quite early and which was actually key to my really starting to learn how to write as a teenager—which is to say there’s an essay (and/or book) I’ve yet to write about how vexed I feel about having learned my “feminine writing” from men… but we’ll save that for another day.

TNS How did you come to write about The Voyage Out? How do you think the ideas in the novel and this poem interact with each other to drive the poem?

JBF I read The Voyage Out in a class at Hampshire College on Woolf & Shakespeare, taught by the very brilliant L. Brown Kennedy, almost ten years ago. Apparently, it’s stuck with me! Brown encouraged us to think about the texts as being-in-conversation in a way that was aware of, but also free with, historical chronology—so she was inviting us to look at Woolf as a reader of Shakespeare (which of course she was), but also to imagine Shakespeare as a reader of Woolf, or to ask what that might mean, or to hold the texts up to the light together and see what shimmered.

I was eighteen years old when I was studying all this, so when I first read a line of Woolf ’s like “the sight gave rise to reflections”—describing the experience of an older woman looking at the young woman, the protagonist, Rachel, who’s fallen asleep—I felt so many complicated layers of closeness and distance and identification, feeling like I was inside and outside of the scene on the page and somehow experiencing all these interlocking subjectivities through Woolf ’s language. I guess I was feeling free, too, as I always have, to read novels onto my life—and it bothered me so much back then that it felt like Rachel had died at the end of the book because this was the only way out of the marriage plot. I’m not sure I’d read it that way anymore, and am realizing looking back at the text now how much I’m due for a reread—but I know I wanted a different ending for her; I wanted to open the front door of the book and let her walk out of it. Maybe that’s another poem—but in this one, I think I’m thinking through those tensions and complications of trying to love our dead heroines (real and fictional alike) and to actually reckon with the truths of what happened to them while also imagining different possibilities for our own lives.

TNS This poem, like Woolf ’s work, explores femininity, sexuality, the self, and the idea of separation both psychological and physical. Are these themes something you tend to explore in your other work?

JBF In a word, yes! In more words— what it means to write the self, to write the self-in-world, and where the (dissolving? nonexistent? certainly extremely permeable?) barriers fall between those things are questions at the heart of my still-very-much-developing poetics. Whether, or how, to think of the self—at least as applied to myself—as gendered is also one of the enduring questions, even though I do read this poem of mine as one that embraces femininity and even rejoices in asserting a woman’s voice.

There’s a quote I met earlier this fall and continue to feel uncannily seen by—Alicia Ostriker writes in her book on women’s poetry in America (mostly 20th-century), Stealing the Language, that “to be a creative woman in a gender-polarized culture is to be a divided self.” I find that so striking and still so true in many ways, even though obviously a lot’s also changed—most of it, I’d say, for the better, even though varying kinds of gender-based oppression are still very much with us—since she wrote that in the 80’s and I think there are so many women and also non-binary writers now finding new ways to explore wholeness and fragmentation and finding new possibilities of expressing selves. (It feels important too to note I’ve been reading the Ostriker because of a wonderful class I’m in now on Women & Poetry, taught by my professor Alexandra Teague, who also has poems back in Issue 1 of The Shore; see the archives!)

Reading that book, as well as thinking further through a number of texts by women poets, has made me realize that so many patterns and fascinations that had felt specific-to-me are actually shared or can be traced historically, and I also just really couldn’t believe I’d written the lines “so here I’m both / the poet and the neighbor / and the woman” before encountering that articulation of Ostriker’s. I was intentionally attaching more than two options to that “both,” and I’m still thinking through (or looking for ways out of) so many of my own internalized divisions and dualisms. I’m thinking also about how I meant for those lines and the above “wall of some other / poem” to be legibly waving at Lucie Brock-Broido’s “Autobiography,” from her first book A Hunger, and have realized since that my allusion was maybe too subdermal and I could’ve made it louder. But now anyone who reads this gets to know!

TNS Are there any journals or magazines you’re currently enjoying?

JBF Also yes, absolutely—although I never feel I’m keeping up with journals as well as I should be because I’m, like, irrationally trying to read all of Woolf ’s extensive diaries… etcetera. I’m so excited about so many things journals are doing right now, though, and it’s cool also—even though I am forever a total print person who wants to stand in libraries and smell books and think about palimpsests and materiality—to see what online journals are doing with web-space that feels innovative and fun and like new possibilities for poetry are opening up on our screens.

Territory is a great example of that to me; every time I visit their website I feel like I have entered a new world where I want to spend a long time hanging out and exploring. I feel similarly about Prac/Crit, although I don’t think they’re publishing that one anymore (sadly!), but the archives of it are really worth taking a look through. Their “Deep Note” feature where poets make an annotated version of their own poems is so fascinating to me, and a really beautiful window into process—a skeleton key of sorts. Also Moss, which is regionally-focused and publishes writers from the Pacific Northwest, is very cool!

TNS Please speak to how two poems in The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

JBF I’ve been thinking a lot lately about questions and two questions that appear in poems here are really speaking to me. In “Sleep on the Floor,” Jill Mceldowney asks: “what would it be like if we taught each other to be gentle?” I love thinking about this question against another, from Samuel Adeyemi’s “Unfiltered,” which asks: “if the poem is too confessional, / what will become of my body?”

In The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser says: “As for the answers—But even they have come as questioning.” These questions feel like answers to me, or like questions that get me closer to a truth—or a question I’ve been trying to ask, too, but hadn’t met the language for. How can we teach “each other to be gentle?” What does happen to the body of the “I” being filtered through a “confessional” poem, even if the poet aims for an “unfiltered” rendering of something lived, felt, true? These poems seem to me to be asking in different-but-also-related ways: What does it mean to write a love poem? How do we build a language that can contain truth and ambiguity—or where are the structures to best contain gentleness? Is there a tender way of looking, of addressing? Both of these poems are dense with beautiful lines I’m so drawn to lingering in, and both, to me, strike a delicate balance between expansiveness and specificity.

“Sleep on the Floor” is anchored by a lyric voice looking for a language to account for the wonder and slipperiness of attachment, beginning with forgetting and unknowing and then sifting through striking images to land in a declaration of presence. I’m most intrigued by the enigmatic and yet vivid language here: “Our sky does not have to be the sky // that dissolves… even though / I would break /the good dishes with you, my good wrist for you.” I love that little sonic echo of “dishes” turning into “wrist,” and the way these hypothetical broken dishes are mirrored in the glass that appears near the end of the poem. “Unfiltered,” a self-aware sonnet also thinking through questions about intimacy, seems to me to both embrace and to resist some of the tropes we might notice in poems about love—Spring is here; a “darling,” a rosebush, sweetness and affliction, honey and venom. Adeyemi writes into complicated questions about the nature of language and the possibilities of poetic form, but in the same breath offers us a beautiful image (I can’t get over the delightful word unweathered) and invites us to “believe it / like a litany.”

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Joely Byron Fitch was born in Ohio in 1993. She lives and writes in Moscow, ID, where she's an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho and the associate poetry editor for Fugue.

The Shore Interview #15: Doug Ramspeck

Questions by Ellery Beck, Founding Interview Editor

EB As someone with seven published collections and an incredible grasp on writing series poems, what advice do you have for writers trying to develop and continue new research projects?

DR When I first began writing poetry (at age fifty), I often found a word at random in a book then included it in my first line, letting the poem decide on its own after that what it wanted to be. If I got stuck, I opened another book and found a different word to include in the next line.

One of the early poems I composed this way was from the point of view of a superstitious speaker. Although I am not superstitious myself, I was fascinated by this primitive mindset, so over the next year I wrote (obsessively) a hundred or more poems with superstitious voices.

This has been my pattern ever since. I think of a world or a voice I want to inhabit, then I launch into that “vein,” planning very little, until I have exhausted it. Then I move on to something new.

With all of my poems, though, I try not to think too much about it. My best work arrives when I let the works create themselves.

So what advice would I give? First, keep in mind that most of the advice we receive about our writing describes what works for the person who is giving it. It might not work for us.

Second? Find something at the core of what inspires us as a writer. For me it is animism. Then keep searching for new ways to explore every aspect of it.

Third, don’t fall into the trap of believing that revision is the only way to arrive at quality poems. My experience with writing poetry and teaching poetry is that the very best poems often arrive surprisingly quickly (unlike with essays). If this is true, maybe it’s better to write a LOT of poems quickly. Doesn’t that increase our odds of arriving at something special?

This last point, I know, might not sit well with many poets, and surely won’t work for everyone. Still, it’s worth considering.

EB Your sound and syntax gorgeously carries the reader throughout your poems—do you have any advice on how to make your words work for you not only on the page but in spoken work as well?

DR I believe in the power of incantation in poetry. I like the feeling of summoning an elevated and musical language, of imagining that this isn’t ordinary speech I am creating but something buoyant.

I also like, though, conversational poetry, poems with the rhythms of real speech. Indeed, poems that become so dense that they no longer feel “human” lose my interest very quickly.

The key, then (like most things in writing poetry), is figuring out how to have it both ways. For me, that doesn’t mean thinking consciously about repetition and parallel structures and having a higher proportion of stressed syllables to unstressed syllables. For me, it means listening for the “pounding pulse” of the words as I write, a pulse that feels elevated but not strained. I speak my poems aloud as I compose, tasting them in my mouth while also feeling them in my fingertips.

EB How do you accomplish the same line tension many poets achieve while using conventional punctuation?

DR Probably I shouldn’t admit this, but I never think about “line tension” as I write. Indeed, I worry that thinking about such things would be a sure road to writer’s block for me. I find that the more conscious I make the process, the less creative my efforts become. This also, by the way, connects to some reservations I have about creative writing classes that focus exclusively on the workshop model. Yes, individual poems sometimes get better in workshops (though not always). Poets, though, mainly get better (in my experience) by finding new ways to expand their creative powers (rather than by improving their analytical powers).

As for my lack of punctuation in the poems in Issue 8, this is new for me. Why have I started? My reasoning is that the conventions of punctuation reflect the “civilized mind” while I am trying to represent the “primitive mind.”

EB Are there any journals or magazines you’re currently enjoying?

DR I have long been a fan of The Southern Review. Here, for example, is the opening stanza of a poem from a recent issue. Sjohnna McCray writes:

When I was younger, everything was sensual.
Loneliness was in the fingertips
and traced the coolness of the wall
next to the bed as if it were a face.

I find these lines strange and true, elevated and conversational, surprising and familiar.

EB Please speak to how two poems in The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

DR When I think about poets who articulate an expanded vision of the self, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” comes to mind: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Two poems from Issue 8 that explore the “self” jump out at me as particularly intriguing.

In Eileen Winn’s “When I Peered Past Doubt and Knew Myself,” the poet takes the idea of “identifying” through a series of inventive and insightful permutations, asking us to work through the complex and playful metaphors to arrive at what it means to celebrate and transcend conventional ideas of the self.

In Iheoma Uzomba’s “A Recollection of Self,” the “I” is once again the subject of inquiry, this time with the speaker seeing and claiming the self in connection to the natural world of ocean waves. Still, the speaker isn’t simply comparing the self with the ocean but claiming the ocean as part of the larger self, which seems a particularly Whitmanesque move (showing connections rather than divisions). As another famous Whitman quote goes, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

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Doug Ramspeck is the author of seven collections of poetry, one collection of short stories, and a novella. One recent book, Black Flowers, is published by LSU Press and was a finalist for the UNT Rilke Prize. Individual poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Slate, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, and many other literary journals. His short story “Balloon” was listed as a Distinguished Story for 2018 in The Best American Short Stories. He is a three-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. A new book of poems, Book of Years (Cloudbank Books), will appear in the summer of 2021.

The Shore Interview #16: Jennifer Loyd

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS “Some Mothers Are As Lighthouse to a Ship” seems especially focused on the role women play in their own personal lives, as mothers and daughters and caretakers and survivors, and how those roles can conflict with the needs of the self. I know that in your other work you often try to encounter the intersection between our private and public voices, but what role do you think feminism and women’s societal roles play in that intersection? How do you explore it in this poem?

JL In this poem, I’m thinking about how the “stories” we tell (and are told) create our world. By “stories,” I’m referring to the broadest context, one that includes societal and cultural norms: jokes, advertisements, philosophy, doctrines, laws, etc.) All of these factors shape us. Beginning in childhood, they give us the frames that teach us what to see and how to see it. The broadness or narrowness of our vision begins here.

Some frameworks, such as feminism, broaden sight and show women that they have the right and/or the ability to do anything. Others, such as the book of Genesis, can unsubtly give the impression that a woman’s appetite is dangerous (Eve and that apple), or by the sin of omission can call into question a woman’s existence. When the writers of the bible do not name Eve’s daughters—women who, by the story’s own rules, are founders of the human race—people who are told these stories cannot see the full picture of humanity.

Additionally, in this poem, I’m thinking about the stories Rachel Carson’s mother might have told her. Stories about a girl’s appetite, her sexuality, her value, and how those stories might have intersected with public narratives about women. On the one hand, it’s likely that both her mother and society would have told Carson that homosexuality was unacceptable, while at the same time Carson’s mother worked against societal norms (of that time period) to get and keep Rachel in college.

I wanted to explore those contradictions, how a person can want “the best” for someone they love while doing great harm by limiting their beloved’s vision and scope. This contradiction is why I’m writing towards private voices as a counterbalance to the dominant public narratives. Every woman alive is a unique intersection of the people, the roles, and the stories she has encountered. Through giving voice (real or imagined) to individual lives, we can complicate “master” narratives that would otherwise swallow difference and convert them into homogeneity.

TNS In this remarkable series of poems on the life of Rachel Carson, one of the patterns that binds the series together is the repeated use of horizontal and vertical white space, and this is especially evident in “Rachel Carson Leaves Springdale PA for the Sea” and “Rachel Carson: Juvenalia.” In these poems, the white space lends itself to parataxis, a technique that can either create new connections in a poem or mystify existing ones. What do you think this technique adds to the work done in these two poems, and why did you choose it?

JL I’ve been working on this collection (of poems revolving around Rachel Carson) for four years now. As the project has evolved, the forms have too. For example, early in its conception, I was very interested in biography, in understanding Carson’s life through documents and artifacts. But, as the collection evolved, I’ve become more interested in what I don’t, and can’t, know about Carson.

This change has influenced the form of the poems. Many of these poems, such as “Rachel Carson Leaves Springdale PA for the Sea” began as what Marianne Boruch calls “whoosh” poem—a thin-ish single-stanza column, shaped something like a candy bar. It’s a form I have a predilection for. But, as my interest in the unknowns grew, so did the poems’ interest in white space—in the questions, the lack of solidity, the room-for-the-reader that white space provides.

And your question about parataxis has parallels in biography. Parataxis is the stringing together of clauses without connecting conjunctions, as you state to “create new connections or mystify existing ones,” and, biography, I would argue, takes discrete artifacts (a letter, a photo) and places them next to other discrete objects to make new connections or meaning. Poets and biographers are both trying to uncover meaning through arrangement—an understanding that arises through relationship and proximity.

TNS What led you to write about Rachel Carson? We know her as a dedicated scientist, naturalist and writer, but you chose in this series to focus on her early and personal life. Why?

JL My interest in Rachel Carson began when I was studying horticulture (I worked in forestry and farming before I began writing). My classes in agriculture, forestry, soil science were taught by mostly men and a large percentage of my fellow students were men. We were the future golf-course technicians and greenhouse growers of the world. In all the lectures I attended, Rachel Carson was the only woman scientist ever mentioned. (And only one of two women total, the other was Vita Sackville-West, mentioned for her influence on English garden design).

So, naturally, Carson stood out to me. Over the years, when I encountered a Rachel Carson reference, I filed it away in my mind, and, increasingly, the references questioned her sexuality, her nontraditional personal life, and her relatively early and closeted death from cancer. These began to shape her in my mind as a complex and deeply unknown person. I wanted to spend time in the lesser-known (and, later, unknown) parts of her story.

As for why so much of my work explores her early life, this ties back to your first question. As a person and a writer, I am fascinated by how our world view develops in youth. Not that it is concretized by adulthood, far from it, but I think we lose some of the mental and emotional flexibility that marks childhood. Or, perhaps, it’s less that we lose it, and more that we must work to maintain it. My own upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian religion, combined with poverty and ancestral trauma, gave me such a narrow frame with which to see the world. I am always working to dismantle that frame, and I’m drawn toward people who have fought against their own frames. I believe Carson was one of those people, who fought against the frames laid upon her, with varying degrees of success.

TNS Are there any journals or magazines you’re currently enjoying?

JL Absolutely. I’m passionate about the institution of magazines and the diversity of voice and viewpoint they offer (I mean as opposed to books; because there is still so much work to do to diversify journal contributors in general). On my nightstand currently are Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review and The Southern Review. Online, I’m reading Memorious, The Offing, The Rumpus and Terrain.org.

TNS Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

JL When the issue came out, I read Jane Zwart and Su Cho’s work first. Two of those pieces “Basketball” (Zwart) and “At an Apple Orchard in Door County, Wisconsin” (Cho) resonate with each other. Lately, I’ve been alert to the presence of ghosts or ghost-like entities in poems. Both of these poems have characters that aren’t quite solid and are navigating tenuous spaces. Zwart’s basketball players exist in the nebulous space of memory; though they are taking action: reffing, dribbling, pulling-apart, they are doing so in twilight, the hour in which daylight disappears, taking the players with it. Cho’s speaker imagines her future-children running through a hay maze, navigating the predominantly white space of rural Wisconsin. They are surrounded by the giant eyes of jack-o-lanterns, but the children are laughing off this unsettling surveillance.  Reading these two poems back-to-back felt like a visitation, an inhabitation, a gentle haunting. What do these presences that are simultaneously absences have to tell us? I’m happy to sit and listen and learn from them.

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Jennifer Loyd is a 2020/2021 Stadler Fellow. She holds an MFA from Purdue University, where she was managing editor for Sycamore Review. She has also served as a senior editor for Copper Nickel. Her poems and prose, which explore the intersection between the private voice and public narratives, have appeared in The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Natural Bridge, New South, Colorado Gardener and elsewhere. For now, she resides in Colorado.