Making Sure Poetry Still Matters

Because big-name publishers generally publish poetry only from big-name poets—Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award winners, Poets Laureate—the job of publishing less and not-at-all big-name poets falls to smaller, nonprofit presses often associated with universities. They focus on the quality of the poetry itself rather than its marketability, and they have managed to keep poetry flourishing despite a mostly indifferent culture.

Couch has worked as a maid, waitress, schoolteacher and obituary writer, and is now the managing editor of The Sewanee Review. She has been writing for 15 years. “At the most,” she writes in an email, “I publish about four poems a year in magazines that maybe a half-percent of Americans even know about.”

Houses Fly Away collects the best of that work and forms it into a treatise against the separation of body and soul, past and present. As Couch explains, “I try to create a world in these poems where nothing ends, where all parts of a life—childhood, romances, my dream of being a backup singer—go on and on. Loss, grief, regret, all that bad stuff, dismantles and then defines us, making us more of ourselves over time.” Thus the final line of “What the Dead Say” reads, “What you have now forever you will have.”

Couch says that while she “grew up believing the body, this span of life we’re given, is just a cage for the spirit, and death sets the spirit free to go to heaven,” she no longer thinks that way. “In these poems,” she says, “I’m trying to show that the body and the soul can’t be separated so easily in life or in death.”

Which doesn’t mean, however, that the soul is content, even when the body is sated. Toward the end of the book’s first poem, “Beast,” the speaker, who is warm, fed and rested, remarks:

To taste the shape of that—enough—to mouth its escape and take one more breathas it struggles, wings against the teeth.

Whether futile or not, the poem says, the soul will strive for more than the body can offer.

Couch admits that her philosophy is not yet fully formed. “I’m still working it out,” she says, “through imagery, music and a kind of logic, and I hope to map a country of the afterlife that I can believe in.” In “To Be Fire,” a poem that might be Couch’s manifesto against the separation of self and world, the poet writes, “I wrote water to be water.” She ends, “I write field to be a field.”

Andrew Kozma, like Couch, has been writing for many years. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Florida and recently earned his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where he is the nonfiction editor of Gulf Coast. He’s also a staff writer for RevolutionSF, an online science fiction magazine.

Also like Couch, Kozma shies away from traditional dichotomies. City of Regret, in fact, is largely the story of a speaker’s attempt to connect with his dead father, while at the same time beginning a new romantic relationship. As Kozma explains in an interview, “The main theme involves communication, with both the living and the dead. Once a person is dead, there’s no more real communication, even though it may be the death that brings up all the questions you suddenly want answered. With the living, open communication is hard to achieve because people are, generally, so self-protective.”

In Kozma’s book, the speaker is on both a physical and metaphysical odyssey through his “city of regret.” The first poem, “Dis,” begins,

My father said I would not find him here,but I’ve 2 coins for passage, 3 boiled ox bones, 1 cup blood.Hell is a room the size of the world… .

But while the speaker’s journey maps the stages of regret, the poet deliberately avoids closure. As Kozma explains, “Instead of a path with a definite end, I see the book as more of a circle: the end doesn’t bring acceptance, which might be the normal psychological model, but a temporary deferral of feeling.”