Showcase April 2023
Object & Idea
Thank you to our Patrons
Joan Frank, author of the just released novel, Juniper Street.
Robert Kirvel, author of a fine book of essays, iWater and other Convictions.
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April abounds and the sprites of May lure us onward; always enticed, forever hoping, we lurch, step by step, and look to good letters, good poems and prose, to help us stay grounded, to hear about our brethren, connect and think in ways novel to each and everyone one of us.
This week’s selections are... Jeffrey Cyphers Wright for Poetry and Lazar Trubman for Prose (Non-Fiction)! Lazar is a holdover from previous submission periods; we like the work and held on to it for the right moment. Congrats to both writers.
Our reading for this issue was once again very difficult as so many folks sent in great work! It’s been a joy. As a general announcement, please note that if you do not receive a note from us, that means we’ve kept your work for future consideration.
Showcase hopes to deliver a spot of refreshing literature and analysis, extra context that seeks to expand our vernaculars and open our minds to the minds of our creative peers…
As a reminder, we publish 1x per month on the 3rd Tuesday (sometimes a week later) and feature writers of all origins and all levels. If you missed it, here’s last month’s issue!
We bid you continue with your endeavors. Find a comfy space to maintain your practice, inclusive of writing time, editing, reading new work and thinking. (Remember to include Showcase in your occasional contemporary check-ins!). As always, pay success forward, reward opportunity with opportunity. It’s fair and the landscape improves with more voices from all walks of life.
Let’s build a positive and positively enticing writing community such that readers, casual and devoted, continue to find us and make a type of home in our midst.
In this month’s issue,
Lazar Trubman delivers creative non-fiction in narrative form which considers the affect of political and ideological persecution on relationships, on the body, between people and on the soul. Clean, direct prose delivers his message. And Jeffrey Cyphers Wright layers contradiction into a sonnet, low and high-brow references, the personal and the universal, lament and epiphany. It’s moving on several levels: it’s poignant and also effects a circular continuity of meaning. Both pieces are thinking pieces as well as feeling pieces—we like this!
We found the work compelling on many levels and hope you’ll do several reads. Close inspection is as important as the experience with all of our Showcase pieces. Read, ponder, and enjoy!
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Joan Frank, author of the just released novel, Juniper Street.
Robert Kirvel, author of a fine book of essays, iWater and other Convictions.
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PROSE
Flash Non-Fiction by Lazar Trubman
—Originally published by Showcase: Object & Idea.
OBJECT 1:
Scars
Months had passed since I was liberated from the Strict-Regime Colony in Northern Russia. I had gotten my so-so bill of health and was waiting patiently for the Soviet Immigration Department to approve my visa. One day, as I was sipping coffee at a small table outside a restaurant in downtown Chisinau, someone’s light hand touched my shoulder, “What are you up to these days, Lazarus? What are you up to?”
The voice sounded unfamiliar, as well as the short laugh. I turned around to see the man. I really hadn’t recognized Professor Florin Oliescu when he suddenly stood there in front of me. It wasn’t just his voice, but his face, pale and utterly different. And yet I still felt that I knew him. Something in his aspect could never be changed.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “they can do this to you, they and their newly invented millstones!”
I looked at him again. In reality, it was no longer a face, but two cheek-bones with thin skin over them, and the muscles that formed an expression that reminded me of Professor Oliescu, were so weak that they couldn’t hold his laugh for a long time. That’s why his laugh was too large; it distorted his face; it seemed huge in relation to his eyes, which were set far back in his skull.
“Florin!” I stopped short not to add: I was told that you were dead! Instead: “How are you?”
“I’m great, Lazarus,” he said. “It’s spring in Chisinau. Nature’s gorgeous awakening!”
I tried to make out why he kept on laughing. I knew him as a serious man, as Professor of Electromagnetics at Chisinau State University, but every time he opened his mouth, his face formed that uncanny expression of mirth. To ask seemed impossible.
“I’m better now,” he said. “Those millstones roughed me up quite a bit, but I got lucky.”
He paused, and I had a chance to take another close look at him. Actually, he wasn’t laughing at all, any more than two cheek-bones with thin skin over them are laughing.
“I’m sorry for not recognizing you at first,” I said; I felt an impulse to leave, but before I could speak, he began coughing suddenly and couldn’t stop, and when he finally did, I saw two bloody spots percolating through his handkerchief.
“Scary, isn’t it?” he said. “But not as scary as a few other things I’m hiding under my clothes.”
“We all have our scars to hide,” I said. “Some deeper than others.”
“Don’t we, buddy? Scars of the century, aren’t they?”
His skin looked as if it could crack at any moment, like old leather or clay, and he had a belly that looked like a small party balloon suspended under his thin ribs. His eyes were the only thing unchanged since I last saw him, lovely, but sunken. I glanced at my wristwatch.
“How about a drink for the occasion, my friend?” he offered. “I’m buying.”
“I can’t, Florin,” I said. “A few important things urgently require my attention.”
“Then some other time,” he said, and I knew for sure that this man was really already dead.
Maybe it was a laugh, I thought while checking the street for a taxi. Maybe he kept laughing all the time because he was still alive, despite the rumors that he had been tortured badly and died in the Colony. As luck would have it, a taxi stopped next to us, and a young couple paid and got out. I slipped into the back seat and said, “It was really nice to see you alive and laughing...”
“I have a lot to tell you, Lazarus!” he interrupted. “Enough for a thick book...”
“I’m always up for a good story, professor,” I said, “always up for a good story!”
“In the meantime, call me,” he said, stepping back from the taxi. “It is allowed now.”
I promised and gave the driver a sign to go.
We’re damaged goods, I thought, cranking up the window and closing my eyes, but he was right; we survived, and it’s rubbish that we are dying. We’re just getting awfully tired and more often than not need bypasses, transplants, and blood transfusions. And when none of those helps, when we run out of the last ounce of strength, we move aside. In silence.
IDEA 1:
Jack Kornfield says, “Evil, to the extent that it exists in the world, lies in our inability to bear our own pain.” In other words, we are all suffering so much that we try to ease our misery by pushing it onto other people. I thought about his assumption or belief before writing this story. Is it true? Does such a thing as pure evil exist? It became important to have a clear answer. Florin’s tone of voice, his laugh, or what I thought it was, had told me what was missing in Jack’s words: hope. Hope cannot be tortured, taken away, diminished…well, maybe diminished somewhat. A fellow prisoner, an academician in his previous life, once famously said in an un-academic style, “Friends, there’s always light at the end of the tunnel; it’s just the f…..g tunnel never ends.” A week after this hopeless announcement, he cut off four of his right-hand fingers. Next day he was executed by a firing squad. I still, after so many years, remember his face, the color of it, and I placed it next to Florin’s face, and that comparison guided me till the end of the story. It’s quite possible that I missed something, maybe because of the word restriction or my faded memory. But time is of the essence, I don’t have much of it and I still have quite a few stories to tell.
INTERVIEW 1
Showcase: We’d love to hear how you conceived of the piece. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it? What led you to the structure, how time works in the piece? And the ring, can you unpack what this might mean, why a ring? Finally, the message, the protagonist’s ambivalence…what is going on there?
Trubman: The plot of this story, as well as dozens of others, came to me thirty-seven years ago, in 1986, after Gorbachev came to power and began liberating political prisoners. I, as well as many of my colleagues and friends, had been arrested and thrown in the Colonies of Strict Regime all over the former USSR. But I only had a chance to write about it in 2017, when I finally retired and decided to devote my time to writing. I didn’t need much inspiration: very little had been written about the sixties, seventies and eighties in that part of the world, Brezhnev’s time, deadly like a marsh. And, after all, I owed it to those who didn’t survive or did, like Professor Oliescu. His survival was a miracle, short as a life of a burning match, but he wasn’t broken. That’s what I wanted to convey to the reader, that alone.
The significance of Florin’s face… It told me more about his journey than his body. After all, the body is innocent, the body is the species, the face is the person.
Even though I survived the same horrors as Florin, I looked at him, or at least I tried, with the eyes of a detached observer. No prisoner had the same experiences inside the Colony, everyone had a different story to tell. His story was written on his face - that’s why I had spent so many precious words describing it, that’s why I declined his invitation for a drink. He couldn’t tell me more than I already knew.
This story is about cruelty. Cruelty of the time, of the place, of the humans. The conventional explanation is that people are able to do terrible things to other people only after having dehumanized them.
The truth is that almost anyone is capable of being cruel under the right circumstances. A lot of awful things we do to other people arise from the fact that we don’t see them as people. But there is another side of that coin: a lot of really terrible things we do precisely because we recognize them as people. And an ideology that dehumanizes the victims and an unlimited power is not required. What happened in camps and colonies was degrading and humiliating. The prevailing thinking was that we deserved it. It was about the pleasure of being dominant over another human. Not an animal. You can’t humiliate animals, and there is no pleasure in it.
Cruelty is not an accident or an aberration, but something central to who and what we are, and there is no quick fix for cruelty. I think some of it is born of dehumanization, some out of a loss of control; some out of an instrumental desire to get something you want—power, money, etc., etc.
So, as I’ve said before, under the right conditions, most of us are capable of doing terrible things. You and I would be completely different people if we lived in Nazi Germany, where the entire society had been led into a moral abyss. From afar, we look at that moment of insanity and say to ourselves, “I would’ve never participated in that!” But I don’t think it’s that simple. I think almost any of us could have participated in that, and that’s the ugly truth. In the end, it’s about us—not our ideas.
What motivates you on a craft and aesthetic level? At what point do you consider the nuts and bolts of technique, style, word choice, and other items?
I could’ve written a whole essay as an answer to this question: things like perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement; pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. And all of that is probably true, but the main motivation for me was the desire to share an experience which I felt was valuable and ought not to be missed.
Writing is hard work. Everything is important. Technique, style, word choice. Some of these things you’re born with. You are what you are. If I just wrote a long sentence, I feel that I must give the reader a break, so I follow it with a short one. Because reading is also hard work, quite possibly much harder than writing.
Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or stylewise and can you particularize your answer?
I never wasted any time thinking about it. I thank God, luck, the alignment of stars, etc., that I survived. That I was able to bring my family to America and give life to a brand-new son. That today, I can write about those darkened times, to honor the memory of my friends and colleagues who weren’t as lucky as I was.
Aesthetic or stylewise…. When you write nonfiction, personal essays or memoirs, you choose the style which fits the time. I’d say, this is the most important thing, for me at least. What is a reader in fact doing when he opens a book? He is abandoning his position of being present, since it does not satisfy him, and moving onto the plane of his anticipation: in order to experience something. Now he is suddenly back in the twentieth century, in the freaking USSR of all places, where he doesn’t want to be. I must convince him to be there. I don’t want him to just read my story; I want him to think about hundreds of things I have not even mentioned, because it is one of the main joys of reading that the reader should above all discover the wealth of his own thoughts. At least he should be permitted to feel that he could have said it all himself. I want him to feel happy. By telling the truth, in simple words. A book that turns out to be cleverer than the reader gives little pleasure and neither convinces nor rewards. Maybe it is accomplished, but still puts him off. I think of that every time I open a brand new page.
Here we’d like to understand the limitations of the piece as you see it, which can include genre or submission requirement limitations. Were you able to express your internal ideal exactly in what you meant or wanted to say?
This will be a very short answer. The genre was perfect. I had to cut the essay almost in half. The original story had 1506 words and was four pages long. Every word became golden. Some facts, travels into the past had to be omitted. By accepting this piece, you almost assured me that I somewhat succeeded. Thank you.
Are there any pieces, books, or authors to whom you’d compare your work, or that inspire you? Which of the above have influenced you and this piece in particular?
There are quite a few, but I will mention only two: Solzhenitsyn and Vasily Grossman. Grossman in particular. He began writing in the 1930s. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was engaged as a war correspondent of the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda; he wrote first-hand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin. Grossman’s eyewitness reports of a Nazi extermination camp, following the discovery of Treblinka, were among the earliest accounts of a Nazi death camp by a reporter. While he was never arrested, his two major literary works, Life and Fate and Everything Flows, were censored as unacceptably anti-Soviet. At the time of Grossman’s death in 1964, these books remained unreleased. Hidden copies were eventually smuggled out of the Soviet Union by a network of dissidents, including Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Voinovich, and first published in the West in 1980.
POETRY
A Poem by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
—Originally published by Showcase: Object & Idea, and from Wright’s full length collection, Doppelgängster, forthcoming May 1, from MadHat Press.
2 OBJECT 2:
Burning Rings
Seven grackles tickle a hickory.
August unties its clown shoes.
On the thirteenth of evermore
in the year of nothing less,
I hold to you a blinding mirror
and you light me like a fuse.
Smell of old oaks in the park…
the ache of fading panache.
“Shut up and keep bailing,”
said the old salt to his mate.
You still look great
in the future we’re creating.
Embers of a carousel, we are
burning rings, forged by stars.
2 IDEA 2:
I consider myself a New Romantic poet. I feel that a persona is critical to realizing a voice and reaching an audience on a personal level. John Wieners, Elizabeth Willis, Molly Peacock, Wang Ping, Rene Ricard, Franz Wright, Bob Kaufman, Joel Dailey. I go for the grand lyric gesture.
I find motifs that fit with the persona I’m constructing. For instance, I use rock and roll lyrics, the local geography of the East Village, Flarf-related research, girlfriend quotes, and puns. Poems become avatars to carry forth some notion of who I am and where I live. By choosing pertinent signifiers, I identify with a tribe of literary desperadoes and poet maudits.
As the poet Lewis Warsh told me, many poems are “cobbled together from notebooks.” There is a collage aspect to this technique whereby you go through text and select and place a piece of it next to other chunks of text. You see what needs to go where to create that balance and resonance that makes it hum. In painting, there is that concept of keeping the eye moving roughly in a circle, so the work becomes a perpetual motion machine and you want that in poetry too.
My work abuts the rough edge between freedom and responsibility, nature and culture, independence and interdependence. It challenges conventions by repurposing them into new forms—forms born of urgency and tempered by a quest for beauty and meaning.
2 INTERVIEW 2
Showcase: We’d love to hear how you conceived of the piece. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it?
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright: The core of this poem was triggered by the smell of oak trees in a park. The smell was transportive, wafting me back to the same place but a year earlier. So the poem has the tension of a time warp, reaching into the past for something lost, but focused on the future and what we’ll find there. It is both a lament and an epiphany. A mix of silly, poignant, desperate, and determined. This poem was written after reading some haiku and some James Tate.
What motivates you on a craft and aesthetic level? At what point do you consider the nuts and bolts of technique, style, word choice, and other items?
The poems I’ve read that seem perfect are usually short and monumental, (and generally romantic). They inspire me to attempt to create such a timeless, emotionally grabbing, lyrical piece. I have a sense of what ingredients the poem needs, like rhyme, presence, resolve, surprise—especially in the sonnet—it’s kind of like a Julia Child recipe. Or a landscape.
After an initial gush of words, I try to pinpoint a standpoint and establish a sense of place. Then I follow the words as much as they follow me. I listen for the inner ear to percolate as the words and lines and couplets hubbub among themselves, sorting out their order, inviting their cousins in, trying to say something.
Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or style-wise and can you particularize your answer?
This poem is a sonnet, so it automatically comes with a built in resonance. My praxis brings together the noble haunts of the past with the snappy patter of the present and projects the future even as it confronts it. It adopts the authentic, sophisticated conversational tone of the New York School and deepens it with a formality adapted from Wyatt, Sydney, and Pope. It is deeply personal but speaks to all in a durable, low-key high style.
Here we’d like to understand the limitations of the piece as you see it, which can include genre or submission requirement limitations. Were you able to express your internal ideal exactly in what you meant or wanted to say?
Actually, the limitations of this form are also the framework that allows the poem to exist. So you have the limit of the line length but that rigor lends the work a compelling cadence and compression. The poem’s internal dialogue leads me to find a way to express the beauty in sorrow, for the ache I felt: “The ache of fading panache.”
One limitation is the page itself though, because it doesn’t convey the same timbre and sonic appeal that a listener would enjoy.
Are there any pieces, books, or authors to whom you’d compare your work, or that inspire you? Which of the above have influenced you and this piece in particular?
At West Virginia University, I worked in the library and discovered Lorca, Neruda, Paz, and Mayakovsky, Akhmotova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, and Yesenin. They shaped my imagery and Surrealistic metaphors. Dylan Thomas’s magical tongue. W.S. Merwin and James Wright.
When I got my MFA in poetry I studied with Allen Ginsberg who was very interested in meter. I had a professor who brought to life Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Philip Sydney, poets who brought the sonnet to English and created relatable personas. I’ve been working in the sonnet form almost exclusively for over three decades.
I came to appreciate the form after studying with Ted Berrigan. The story goes that Ted began writing sonnets because William Carlos Williams eschewed the form, declaiming that American poets must write in an American vernacular and style. Recently the sonnet has become popular with Diane Seuss winning the Pulitzer Prize for Frank. Also, Noelle Kocot is doing kick-ass work with the form.
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Showcase is generously supported by:
Cathy Rose, Writer.
Jane Ciabattari, Author of Stealing the Fire: Stories
Scott Archer Jones, Author of And Throw Away The Skins
Lucy Ferriss, Author of The Misconceiver
Cara Diaconoff, Author of novel, I'll Be a Stranger to You
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