The Kiss

by Brian Turner

  Philip Metres: Writing about intimate moments is as fraught as any self-representation. Now more than ever, with the avatar-level self-fashioning of social media, it’s easy to slip into creating a mere performance. Just as, when you were young, your bedroom moves were all imitations of what you’d seen on-screen, in films or videos. You’re there but you’re not there, not in the vulnerable place. You have to write past the performance and into the vulnerable place.

  Sholeh Wolpé: I think when a piece of writing about an intimate moment does not work, it is because it lacks authenticity of experience. You can either translate an intimate experience, or you can re-create it. Translating a moment means: You are intellectually and factually accurate. You recount what happened. How you felt or what you saw. However, re-creating a moment for the reader requires marriage of fact with imagination. Did it feel cold? Then it was cold—even if it was eighty degrees and sunny. Was there a breeze? There was if you felt it.

  3.Among all of the kisses captured or explored in literature and art, is there one that you would point to as the North Star of them all?

  Camille T. Dungy: I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about this question. It’s a good question. I do love (in a tear-my-heart-out kind of way) the scene between David and Joey in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. The intensity of emotion Baldwin describes in that early scene shadows the entirety of that novel. But that turns out not to be a happy kiss. I wish I could bring my mind to settle on a happy kiss.

  There is an amazing and beautifully intimate scene in the forthcoming novel An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. The kiss(es) in this particular scene I have in mind is one that I have been thinking about since I first read it. It’s a kiss that I’m glad to know someone in the world has experienced. And it’s a kiss that helped to make fictional characters feel to me like people who exist in this world.

  Philip Metres: I love the curves of Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss, that sense of twining and twinning. You can almost see the DNA helixing through them.

  ROMEO: Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again.

  Major Jackson: One of the ending lines in Dorianne Laux’s poem “Kissing” states: “In a broken world they are / practicing this simple and singular act / to perfection.”

  4.What does it mean for a reader to experience the joining of two worlds, as the depiction of a kiss suggests? That is, what can we, as readers, glean or experience in the literature of intimacy?

  Benjamin Busch: A moment of verse or prose that seeks to inspire human intimacy is an attempt at transference, a hope that another mind will be lit. That’s the work of a messenger. I’m offering my dream to yours, hoping that your imagination and memory enter it, subvert it, subsume it and leave it behind. I want the reader to take my place. I want my words to be the reason that happens.

  Sholeh Wolpé: Stanley Kunitz says, “Words are so erotic. They never tire of their coupling.”

  Camille T. Dungy: One of the things that is so tricky about describing kissing is that fine line between voyeurism (and its even less couth cousin, pornography) and what this project is working toward. When we write the kiss, when we read the kiss, we want to be welcomed into the wonder of the beauty of a world that is at the very center of the created creation. I once heard Jericho Brown say that he is a manifestation of the living God and so when someone touches him, when someone loves him, they are in touching God.

  Those are my words for Jericho’s, but the sentiment struck me to the core when I heard him speak it. One of the things that poetry can do is give sound to the inarticulate voice of creation. When we kiss, when we touch each other with love, we are touching the skin of creation. It’s a gorgeous thing, this liminal space both great art and great intimacy bring us to live inside. It can be easily corrupted, and it is hard to watch someone else enter that space without wanting a fig leaf or some sort of mediation, because it can be so pure and so fundamentally perfect it practically sears. But if the writing is good, the reader can be present—not just as voyeur, but as participant.

  Major Jackson: Intimacy abounds in the natural world; our carnality however, is conjoined with our ability to assign meaning, and it is our imagination and intelligence that I find the most erotic. More than appeasing our appetites for titillating details that may or may not arouse, pulling back the sheets so to speak on our most private moments gives us a fuller portrait of our humanity. Somehow, too, we are wrenched toward a greater enlightened space when we can do more than delight in the sensuousness of human contact. We are gifted a storehouse of images that models closeness and affection. Who couldn’t use more of that in their lives?

  5.When writing about intimacy, is it crucial to have an element of the subversive included in the meditation?

  Nickole Brown: Many contemporary artists might consider an element of the subversive necessary to make a kiss effective in literature, but I don’t agree. Shock and surprise and irony work at times to make such a sentimental and over-used topic new, but it’s not the only way. For me, I prefer something more vulnerable—deep attention and a raw, muscular kind of seeing to defamiliarize those things we’ve all seen depicted too many times. I also think it’s worth mentioning that saying a thing plainly and with your heart is worth the risk . . . Listen. We’re human beings, all pretty much wired the same way. We yearn for companionship, for love, and need to be touched. You can subvert that all you want and it may get your readers’ attention, but my guess is it won’t stick, that they won’t turn to that poem or passage again in a time of need. I’d rather encounter a weaker poem keenly felt than a clever one that leaves me cold.

  Benjamin Busch: Intimacy is all subversion. Your sense of independence, your lone identity, is partially destroyed by that kind of invasion of privacy. Beyond that, in writing about it, readers take our words and construct their own version of our confessions. There should be a law . . .

  6.What makes a kiss profound? What makes it unforgettable?

  Major Jackson: A kiss is profound when it feels most singular—like a new planet being born.

  Camille T. Dungy: I read/heard once that new atomic studies suggest that when you come in close contact with people in particular kinds of ways certain parts of your atomic matter leave the atoms that make up you and enter the atoms that make up them. But not really. The parts are still whole within themselves, they just stretch out and are also whole within the other. After hearing/reading this, I began to understand why some people I have loved still feel like they are a part of me, even when we have not been a part of each other’s lives for a very long time.

  Philip Metres: A kiss is a mere touch of the lips, but it’s the electrical field of the body and mind electrified that make it memorable, that scores it into memory.

  7.Is there a connection between lyric suspension and an unforgettable kiss? That is, when the world sloughs away and time is upended, life swirling around a moment until all that seems to exist is the kiss and the singular moment of it—does this point us toward the eternal, the spiritual, the sublime?

  Benjamin Busch: We kiss each other mouth to mouth. It’s a connection at the source of sound, where our language is spoken, where we eat and breathe. A deep kiss is an attempt to join another person at their most vital point. I don’t know what gets at eternity, I’m not sure what counts as spiritual, but the sublime is at work in a kiss.

  Major Jackson: Time is held at bay when one is kissing, properly. The demands and facts of our life seem to disappear and two people are their own purpose, far away from the banality of existence. Such transcendence is achieved by other means but every kiss is an echo of the very first human kiss, ancient and long-ago.

  Sholeh Wolpé: I once kissed a man in an elevator at a writers’ conference. The trip between the first and twelfth floor is continuing. My knees went limp and gave way. I would have collapsed had he not held me tight against himself, not relenting a second of that kiss which—if I close my eyes right now—is still happening, there in tha
t elevator, moving up, never stopping.

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Kim Addonizio is the author of several books of prose and poetry, most recently Mortal Trash, a collection of poems (W. W. Norton, 2017) and a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin, 2016).

  Kazim Ali’s most recent books include Sky Ward, Resident Alien, and Wind Instrument. He teaches at Oberlin College. A new collection of essays, Silver Road, and a new collection of poems, Inquisition, will both be published in 2018.

  J. Mae Barizo is the author of The Cumulus Effect (Four Way Books, 2015). A prizewinning poet, critic, and performer, recent work by her appears in AGNI, Bookforum, Boston Review, Guernica, and Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Bennington College, the New School, the Jerome Foundation, and Poets House. Recent collaborative work includes projects with artists such as Salman Rushdie, Mark Morris, and the American String Quartet. She lives in New York City.

  Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (BOA Editions, 1997), Small Gods of Grief (BOA Editions, 2001), winner of the Isabella Gardner Prize; and of A New Hunger (Ausuable Press, 2007), selected as an ALA Notable Book. Her next book will be published by Four Way Books in early 2019. The editor of four anthologies and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, she teaches at the Solstice Low Residency MFA at Pine Manor College.

  Kurt Brown’s (1944–2013) first book of poems, Return of the Prodigals, appeared from Four Way Books in 1999, and More Things in Heaven and Earth (also Four Way Books) in 2002. Fables from the Ark, which won the 2003 Custom Words Prize, was published by WordTech. Future Ship (Red Hen Press) came out in 2007, followed by No Other Paradise (also from Red Hen Press, 2010). Tiger Bark Press published Time-Bound in 2013, and I’ve Come This Far to Say Hello: Poems Selected and New in 2014.

  Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, studied literature at Oxford University, was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson, and worked for ten years at Sarabande Books. Her first collection, Sister, was published in 2007 by Red Hen Press, and Fanny Says came out from BOA Editions in 2015. She was an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for four years until she gave up her beloved time in the classroom in hope of writing full-time. Currently she is the editor of the Marie Alexander Series in Prose Poetry and lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, North Carolina.

  Benjamin Busch is a writer, filmmaker, and illustrator. He served sixteen years as a Marine Corps infantry officer, deploying twice to Iraq. He’s been a stonemason, sculptor, cartoonist, carpenter, and for three seasons he played Officer Colicchio on the HBO series The Wire. He’s the author of the memoir Dust to Dust (Ecco, 2012) and his essays have arrived in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, River Styx, Michigan Quarterly Review, and on NPR. His work has been featured in Best American Travel Writing, notable in Best American Essays, and awarded the James Dickey Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in the North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Five Points, Epiphany, and Oberon, among others. He teaches nonfiction in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, and lives on a farm in Michigan.

  Brian Castner is a nonfiction writer, former explosive ordnance disposal officer, and veteran of the Iraq War. He is the best-selling author of All the Ways We Kill and Die (Arcade, 2016), and the war memoir The Long Walk (Anchor, 2012), which was adapted into an opera and named an Amazon Best Book. His journalism and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Wired, VICE, the Atlantic, the Boston Globe Magazine, River Teeth, and on NPR. He is the co-editor of The Road Ahead, featuring short stories from veteran writers, and his newest book, Disappointment River, will be published by Doubleday in the spring of 2018.

  Tina Chang is an American poet, teacher, and editor. In 2010, she was the first woman to be named Poet Laureate of Brooklyn. She is the author of the poetry collections Half-Lit Houses (Four Way Books, 2004) and Of Gods & Strangers (Four Way Books, 2011). She is co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (W. W. Norton, 2008). Her poems have been published in American Poet, McSweeney’s, the New York Times, and Ploughshares, among others. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, and the Van Lier Foundation, among others. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and was also a member of the international writing faculty at the City University of Hong Kong, the first low-residency MFA program to be established in Asia.

  Steven Church is the author, most recently, of the nonfiction books Ultrasonic: Essays (Lavender Ink, 2014), One with The Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters Between Humans and Animals (Soft Skull Press, 2016), and I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part: On Work, Fear, and Fatherhood (Outpost19, 2018). He edited the anthology The Spirit of Disruption: Landmark Essays from The Normal School (Outpost19, 2018) and is both a founding editor and nonfiction editor for The Normal School: A Literary Magazine. He coordinates the MFA program at Fresno State University.

  Adam Dalva is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program, where he was a Veterans Writing Workshop Fellow. He was an associate fellow at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and a resident at the Vermont Studio Center. Adam teaches creative writing at Rutgers University. His work has been published by The Millions, Tin House, Guernica, the Guardian, and others. He is also a dealer of French eighteenth century antiques.

  Mark Doty is the author of nine books of poetry, including Deep Lane (W. W. Norton, 2016); Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (Harper Perennial, 2009), which won the 2008 National Book Award; and My Alexandria (University of Illinois Press, 1993), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the T. S. Eliot Prize in the UK. He is also the author of three memoirs: the New York Times-bestselling Dog Years (HarperCollins, 2007), Firebird (Harper Perennial, 2000), and Heaven’s Coast (Harper Perennial, 1996), as well as a book about craft and criticism, The Art of Description: World into Word (Graywolf, 2010). Doty has received two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize.

  Andre Dubus III’s books include the New York Times bestsellers House of Sand and Fog (W. W. Norton, 1999), The Garden of Last Days (W. W. Norton, 2008), and his memoir, Townie (W. W. Norton, 2011). His most recent book, Dirty Love (W. W. Norton, 2013), was a New York Times Notable Book selection, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a Kirkus Starred Best Book of 2013. His new novel, Gone So Long, is forthcoming. Mr. Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches full-time at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Fontaine, a modern dancer, and their three children.

  Camille T. Dungy is the author of four books, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017). Her debut collection of personal essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W. W. Norton, 2017). She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009) and co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology (Persea, 2009). Her honors include an American Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, a California Book Award silver medal, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Dungy is a professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.

  Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957. His latest collection of poems is called Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (W. W. Norton, 2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (W. W. Nor­ton, 2011), The Republic of Poetry (W. W. Norton, 2006), Al
abanza (W. W. Norton, 2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (W. W. Norton, 2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (W. W. Norton, 1996), and City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (W. W. Norton, 1993). His honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple, was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona, and has been issued in a new edition by Northwestern University Press. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

  Dave Essinger’s recent fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry appears in various literary journals, and his new novel about ultrarunning, Running Out (2017), is available from Main Street Rag. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is a fiction reader for Slice magazine and general editor of the AWP Intro Journals Project. He currently teaches creative writing and edits the literary magazine Slippery Elm at the University of Findlay in northwest Ohio.