Spotlight: Derek Berry

Derek Berry on “Android Boy Builds A Body”

This poem, one of a series featuring the eponymous Android Boy, questions the relationship between the body and the mind. In this poem, intelligence is divorced from the body, operating in the realm of Internet persona, whether modified or wholly fabricated. Unlike many Internet users, whoever, the speaker is not human, but instead a form of artificial intelligence.  In the Android Boy poems, the speaker explores what it means to be human and what it means to be not-human, what it means to exist in the periphery consciousness.

This poem focuses on how Android Boy might approach desire, especially with the ability to use bodyless avatars in earlier iterations of AOL chat or messenger apps like Grindr. How might one understand sexuality and sexuality without a body with which to enact related acts? Would artificial intelligences, then, seek to construct a physical form? How else might one understand the body except to possess one? Android Boy considers these existential questions, and in turn, I hope that the reader will reframe their understanding of human sexuality. If, for example, we consider online personas, on which we are pretending to be what we are not, then are the stores we tell to confirm our own humanity anything more than faulty code? Do we consider the chemical impulses born in the brain more sophisticated than those that might navigate the actions of a robot?

There is hubris in the construction of a body, like someone attempting to build a house and instead building a house fire. We know this from pop culture, from Frankenstein to Ex Machina, but I find particularly interesting the questions that might arise from an artificially-intelligent robot building their own body. This will become a more concrete reality as machine learning progresses, but what will the machines learn? What will they learn from us? Will they peer down upon their human predecessors with pity—human cruelty & human want—and will they then instead learn to become something better? Perhaps manifesting desire in the body was the first mistake, the creation of a vessel that would carry our mistakes forward into history. 

Spotlight: Issa M. Lewis

ISSA M. LEWIS ON “BURNING DAY”

I was inspired to write “Burning Day,” which is appearing in Issue 11 of Split Rock Review, after moving to a small town in west Michigan. I grew up in a sprawling city, so burning leaves by the roadside was simply not done. Once I moved, I realized it was an autumn tradition in rural areas!  Usually on Sundays, my neighbors would pile up all their dead leaves near the roadside and burn them down to ash.  This made for many hazy drives down my smoky street!

Witnessing this ritual several times a season made me think about the ways in which we, as human beings, seek to control both our physical and emotional environments.  Obviously, in forests, leaves stay where they land and rot in their own time, enriching the soil over a long period of time.  But on our own properties, we push them away and burn them—more efficient, perhaps, but still an imposition on nature’s schedule. Similarly, many times we rush to heal after emotional pain, much sooner than we’re really ready.  We purge ourselves of the memories that cause us pain in the hopes that we won’t have to think of them again.  However, the ash pile still remains as a testament.

I find that some poems need time to ripen; I may have an idea and even start jotting down drafts, but never fully complete it until much later.  “Burning Day” is one of these poems that was originally composed years ago and has seen several iterations.  The last two lines are honestly what I stuck with between drafts—that was what I knew I wanted to keep, the emotional center of the poem. Every couple of years I’d revisit it, hoping to find exactly the right trajectory to land me at those lines. The imagery of a rural Michigan autumn was built out around them to emphasize our connection (and sometimes disconnection) with our land and ourselves.  Finally, roughly eight years later, this poem finally emerged!  

My thanks to the editors of Split Rock Review for the opportunity to join this splendid edition—and right in time for autumn!

Spotlight: Claire Scott

Claire Scott on “Night Ride”

As a writer, I enjoy weaving the real with the non-real, creating something new that speaks of both. My poems grow from seeds within me. Some are watered by life and some by imagination. “Night Ride” is a combination of both. The inspiration came from a friend who told me that once her mother had woken her at night to go for a car ride. I found the story intriguing and mulled it over for several weeks. I grew up with a depressed, often suicidal mother. I could imagine my mother taking me with her on a night ride to prevent her from hitting a tree or driving off a bridge.

As an adult, I realized how tragic my mother’s life was. She was a brilliant woman who struggled with mental illness and alcoholism. In the last stanza I tried to show how empathy allows understanding and possibility. I would like to think the mother in the last stanza is reaching out to her mother’s experience, rather than taking a night ride with her young daughter. I feel writing by the light of a poem keeps my heart open and allows great sorrow to roll through.

Contributor Spotlight: Holly Painter

HOLLY PAINTER on “CRYPTIC CROSSWORD IX”

When I moved to Auckland, my partner’s dad tried to teach me how to do cryptic crosswords. 

At 22, I’d done my share of American-style crosswords, and I wasn’t bad at those: I could usually get through most of Wednesday’s NYTimes puzzle, though Thursday’s was a step too far.

But the British-style cryptic crosswords are another beast entirely. Each clue is one part definition or synonym and one part wordplay clue, involving anagrams, spoonerisms, sound-alikes, containers, and bits and pieces. Both parts of the clue generally point to the same answer, but you have to think sideways, and often the two parts in concert form some distracting, irrelevant image. 

So, for example: “Quarrel twice with bird (7).” Here, we’re looking for a kind of bird. Two synonyms for quarrel – spar and row – give us “sparrow.” Not, perhaps, the most quarrelsome of birds.

Take another: “Ginger Spice will request a mother’s ID (8).” To request a mother’s ID is to card a mom. And “cardamom” is a spice in the ginger family. Geri Halliwell is only there to throw you off.

Add to all of this lateral thinking the wordplay indicators and common abbreviations relating to geography, sports, drinking, chemistry, the church, measurements, and so on, which solvers keep tucked in their memories, and you can see why I was “in a jumble” (an occasional anagram indicator). 

Every week, when we met for lunch, my partner’s father would bring a stack of photocopies of the week’s crosswords from the New Zealand Herald. They were blank copies, scanned before he’d done them, in an afternoon at most, often in less than an hour. His own father, who was pushing 90, mostly deaf and starting to lose his memory, could knock out the cryptic in minutes. He’d been doing them for half a century.

I was lucky to crack a few clues, and I never finished a full Herald crossword.

What I did do was notice that the clues, lyrically deceptive, often read like poetry. And I tucked that away where I should have been storing my list of abbreviations of British military ranks.

Years later, when my son was born, I started doing cryptic crosswords again, and I finally got the hang of it. I remembered what I’d noticed before, and though I was too tired to write poems, I was awake enough to compose clues as I was burping him and endlessly walking him. When he finally slept, I’d jot them down, and after a few months, I had a slightly larger baby and hundreds of clues that I began to assemble into poems in two parts. The clues made up the main poem and the answers formed a haiku, often on a different topic.

The act of writing these interlocking poems calls on all the different parts of my brain that I began exercising ten years ago in New Zealand. I’m still not a fantastic solver, but as a cryptic crossword poet, I’m in my “first abridged textbook (5).