Book by Michael Mark Review and Interview by Brent Ameneyro

Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet
By Michael Mark

Publisher: Rattle
ISBN: 978-1-931307-21-2
Published: August 2022
Pages: 40
Review and Interview by Brent Ameneyro

Great poetry doesn’t need to bring me to my knees in tears, but that was the case with Michael Mark’s debut chapbook Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet, winner of the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Prize. This collection floats somewhere between meditation and memory. There’s a spiritual quality to Mark’s deceptively straightforward verse. These candid poems place me undeniably with Mark’s aging parents, yet at times I’m not sure if I’m in Mark’s meditative imagination, in a synagogue, or in a monastery. I mean this all figuratively, of course, because the reader is without a doubt “in the 40-watt haze of that apartment in Queens.”

I asked Mark to join me on a Zoom call to discuss his chapbook. Talking with him is not unlike reading his work; his calm disposition and willingness to discuss our impermanence are both reassuring and spiritually stimulating. I started by asking about the last poem in the collection, “A Daily Practice,” which, to me, feels very much like a Buddhist poem. “I love that you started with the last poem in the book because that is a beginning,” Mark said, but I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that until later in our discussion.

He said that Buddhism “influences everything I do. Impermanence is so essential to this story of my mom. This is about my mom leaving, but when I think about leaving, I don’t think about it as one departure.” He went on to discuss impermanence as a poetic device within the collection, which I understood to be the varying line lengths and the wide range of poetic form. Essentially, when the reader expects to be comforted by another fairly regular pentameter line—the way one might expect their mother to remember their name or to be alive and well for breakfast tomorrow—we are given long lines that stretch to the end of the page. “Mom was quite calm,” Mark said, “but all of us were swirling around her. She didn’t appear to be suffering. The voices and the forms of the poems are meant to be disorienting, a reflection of the experience.”

There’s the monastery clearly in the title, a Rabbi makes an appearance, and there’s the mention of God, the Lord, and prayer within the collection. “Yes, you can be Jewish and a Buddhist,” Mark said, “but a Buddhist never calls himself a Buddhist. The title is just language. It is a vehicle to get from here to there.” Mark’s malleable views on religion and spirituality come through in his work. In the poem “What My Father Heard the Rabbi Say at My Mother’s Funeral,” the speaker imagines a kind of absurdist, subjective, everyday eulogy delivered specifically for their father.

And when dawn finally rises from the vast void, let not the Denny’s waitress
    ever again divide a solitary Grand Slam and maketh two.

All those hallowed summer weeks in the Catskills: bridge and rummy, cubed
    fruit, dancing shoeless in the bungalow, shall be cast upon his memory as
    an everlasting plague.

The playfulness Mark displays here subverts the reader’s expectations. The silliness of the scene at the Denny’s restaurant disarms the reader with humor and lightheartedness only to be heartbroken in the following stanza. When someone laughs, they tend to uncross their arms and inadvertently expose their heart. This is how Mark pierces into the deepest parts of his readers. The specificity of the images in the final stanza are the last blow before arriving on the final line, which is an unrestrained depiction of how grief lingers like a curse or disease.

I asked Mark about his influences, specifically if he reads Buddhist poetry. He said, “Jane Hirshfield, Ellen Bass, Jane Kenyon, Tony Hoagland – I can see Buddhism in their writing, even if they aren’t necessarily Buddhist. How they harmonize, the acceptance, the absurdity. Hoagland teaches me how to be in it and be out of it, how to be in this world and not be attached to this world.” I thought about what Mark meant when he said that, and I realized there was this constant leaving and coming back, losing and finding, being there and not being there simultaneity happening throughout the collection. The poem “Dad, Leave Mom” begins with this idea:

while she sleeps. Tape I’ll be back on the bathroom mirror, the trash can,
under the carpet’s corner, where you can’t believe anyone in their right
mind would ever look.

Mark begins the poem with what feels like a present experience, instructions to his father. But the phrase “I’ll be back” gains new meaning as the poem continues. The reader is given a collage of both near and distant memories. Memories of caring for a dying wife/mother—“the twice a day horse pill” and “pee stained sheets”—are mixed with memories from decades past—“we’ll swim in the pool, like you showed us at / Jones Beach.” Here, the reader is both with the speaker’s father trying to leave the apartment for one reason or another, and at the same time swept up in a barrage of memories—both leaving and coming back, being there and not being there. And I couldn’t help but think of the Buddhist belief in reincarnation, how “I’ll be back” gives the speaker’s mother the power to be both in this world and not, and how these poems aid in the reminder of her constant presence and absence.

In Japan, there’s a centuries-old tradition of writing jisei, or the “death poem” written in the very last moments of the poet’s life. I wondered if Mark had thought about how, although clearly not jisei, this collection captures the last moments in his mother’s life. “I still feel like I have a relationship with my mom,” Mark said. “I don’t think in terms of finality. She’s in a different state now, still moving on. Memory can do that. Poetry can do that. Death and life, right there. It sounds like death is the end, but I don’t know that it is. There is no end and there is no beginning.” I think I finally understood what Mark meant when he said the last poem in the book was the beginning. 

After I write Temporary on each sticky note
and press them onto socks, silverware, bills,
my hair, I put one on each maple tree in the yard,
and notice I don’t think of them as eternal
as much.

As the speaker makes their way through this process of marking things as “Temporary,” they struggle with placing one of these sticky notes on a baby: “Babies are so hard, I almost can’t.” It’s here in the final lines of the collection that the reader is brought back to birth. The beginning is in the end. Or, as Mark puts it, there is no end and there is no beginning. 

Michael Mark has walked the Himalayas, Wales, Portugal, and Spain with his two children. He’s the author of two collections of stories, Toba and Toba at the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum). He follows his wife, Lois, a travel writer, around the world but can always be found in Queens in his head. 

Brent Ameneyro is the 2022–2023 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, The Journal, and elsewhere. He earned his MFA at San Diego State University where he was awarded the 2021 SRS Research Award for Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice. 

17 May 2023