Of Tyrant by Leah Umansky Review by Shannon Vare Christine Interview by Tiffany Troy
Of Tyrant by Leah Umansky
Review by Shannon Vare Christine
Interview by Tiffany Troy
Publisher: Word Works
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
ISBN: 1944585745
Pages: 80
A Review by Shannon Vare Christine
As another election season and cycle loom, a forthcoming work by Leah Umansky, Of Tyrant (expected release May 1, 2024), becomes ever more necessary and urgent. While tyrants rule in the public arena, pushing their weight and brute force around, bending others to their will, there are also tyrants in many people’s private lives. To the unknowing eye, these tyrants can appear undoubting, charming, and even well-meaning. However, Umansky makes the case that we must be aware of these taskmasters who appear in family and friend circles, and we must likewise actively push back against their stronghold, lest we become a “controlled earthquake of dread, of fragmented haunting, / Of dense, hard gray stone.” While this is the first mention of becoming stone, this is a precursor to later poems that employ this image. After all, these absolute rulers would like their subjects to remain silent, still, and subservient. The speaker of the poems in this volume observes daily life, as “I look up from my felt-life to my real life.” In a series of vignettes, she recounts what she witnesses when women, in particular, grapple with existing “in that fog of must.” Obligatory behaviors and attitudes are taught and habitually reinforced to women at the youngest ages, leaving them vulnerable to oppressive authority figures. We all are responsible for interrogating, “…what lies outside our power; outside the woman; outside the people that protect themselves from their selves,” or else we run the risk of contributing to this power cycle.
Umansky achieves this collective voice of questioning by utilizing a variety of poetic forms, such as line breaks, word etymologies, and font styles, in addition to the layout of the words on the page and the page orientation. While each poem is told from the same speaker’s viewpoint throughout, these stylistic choices create the impression that we are overhearing individual conversations told through multiple voices and perspectives. In this way, we can listen to first-person accounts of interactions between a mother and child, a Lyft driver and a passenger, commuters on trains, and ultimately the speaker’s reactions to current events on the news. This underscores the message that “Every one of us is important,” however, your gender, class, and status in life play inordinately large roles in your experiences and opportunities. This phrase is repeated three times in close proximity one to the other. While on a first reading, this may seem a means of emphasis, upon further consideration, this appears doubtful. The speaker needs to share this idea conveyed by her Lyft driver, and then twice more as she convinces herself of this truth, but even the final mention is tinged with disbelief. Within the beginning poems of this book, we can hear the searching tone and questions that the speaker poses, as the political and personal increasingly intersect.
The word stone appears once more as the title of a poem, alongside “Burn.” When read side by side, these two poems are in conversation:
STONE BURN
My chaos is a bag of stones. I turn to stone when he is on fire. I to live
will coat this in stones. I turn. in the dark
where hate
I stone. I roll my stone. I palm my stone. I serve my stone. is the only fuel
to light the darkness
The stage has been set. This set has been staged. This set has been stoned the darkness
Traditionally, each poem can be read individually, with its themes and imagery developing line by line. Nonetheless, when read as companions, there is a depth that emerges. “Stone,” is structured in prose stanzas which are broken with white space, commands, and later on with prepositional phrases. This is a stark contrast to the skinny single stanzaed “Burn,” whose crisp rhythm mimics the sound of sparks and flames. The position of the line, “to light the darkness,” feels fueled by the oxygenated open space on the left. Towards the end of “Stone,” wordplay is used when the speaker states: “…slaughter is close to water, is close to laughter, is close to aught.” Will humans destroy each other, laughing, unnoticing their folly until it’s too late? The corresponding line placement in “Burn” describes the darkness as having a “mouth / spitting / its tar.” Perhaps this personified hatred is the catalyst for humanity’s self-destruction, as it swallows us: “its greed / seething / for us / all,” and “All of you will have to leave something to someone.” What will we be able to bequeath to others, when there isn’t any joy or love in existence left to share?
These very questions force the speaker to ruminate on the state of the world given people’s actions. Umansky skillfully uses enjambment to allow for the stream of conscious thoughts to flow, to mimic a natural mental process. This also provides the opportunity for multiple meanings and layered reads all depending on how the reader breaks the lines. “This armor / is a doorway / of darkness / holding back / light / is a lick / away / from logic” can be read with the typed line breaks or as two separate thoughts. The speaker works through their reflections on why people turn to hate, or away from love. Can these opposites, light and dark, exist simultaneously and despite themselves as linked binaries?
A much-needed pause arrives within “God Is God and the Universe Is the Universe.” This poem serves as a hopeful respite and an invitation to consider the “and maybe” possibilities the speaker proposes. The poem’s repeated opening two words shifts after ten lines to the phrase “and maybe I will” which allows the speaker to reclaim her power and assert what she is capable of controlling or changing. As the poem moves towards its conclusion, the speaker revises her perspective once more, as she ponders “and maybe I will see with these eyes / that this country is good / that people are good.” Most importantly the speaker realizes that she has value beyond what society and the media would like her to believe, and so she moves forward ready to fight back against the patriarchy, police brutality, ICE detainees, and any other of society’s ills. In this way, this entire book is an act of rebellion and a record of what occurred during this time, while reminding us that “the past isn’t dead” and “the tyrant is everywhere.” Once we acknowledge his constant presence, we can move towards focusing our energies on small actions: shared conversations, giving grace, and extending kindness, until it becomes “wild and holy, wildly holy, like it’s pushing up and out of you: a sprout.”
The Whistling Air of Despair Will Not Stop Us:
A Conversation with Leah Umansky about Of Tyrant
Tiffany Troy: How does the first poem, “Two Lives,” set up the collection that is to follow? To me, this poem immediately sets up the speaker as a traveling voyeur, who takes inspiration from found objects and overheard conversations, and the centrality of the woman and girl as a kind of pedagogy across generations, and “speaking up” as a counter to the tyrant’s oppression.
Leah Umansky: Thank you for the question about the first poem. It took me many tries to pin down which poem should be the first and I think this one is the perfect one. It’s also one of the first tyrant poems, so to speak, that I wrote. I often take notes on my cell phone – certain images or overheard phrases that strike me – and sometimes they enter poems, and sometimes they don’t. When that poor mother said, “You have to use words,” to her daughter, I felt both fury and pride. Yes, teach her what you know, to be strong!
At this time, our democracy was already starting to look bleak (this was before 45 was in power) and the tyrant was on my mind. I think the poem sets up the book on a path of both resistance and hope. Immediately, the thread of gender is apparent, as you say, the pedagogy across generations, but also the importance of words, of speaking up, and of language. It goes back to the question, what is political? Art is. Words are. Maybe even teaching is.
TT: The speaker in Of Tyrant, like yourself, works as a teacher and is focused on showing “the way our need makes its home” and going back to the question, “What is political?” What role does pedagogy play in this poetry collection? In what ways are you teaching the readers to see the tyrant figure as a mirror of American society and themselves?
LU: Yes! Exactly. Well, I think when you’re a teacher, you’re always a teacher in some capacity. It’s kind of the obnoxious thing about being a teacher because at least for me, it’s something that is innate. I’m always trying to teach someone something, whether it’s a student, a friend or a family member. It can be simply sharing a poem with them, or suggesting a book to read, or even just trying to inspire others. A lot of writers I know, who are also teachers, often say they keep these two lives separate, but I don’t. My teaching informs my writing and my writing informs my teaching. I’m always trying to inspire people and honestly, I’m always being inspired; I just have to sometimes train myself to stop, look and notice it. I also think the role of a poet is often to teach, whether you’re teaching yourself something, or teaching the reader something. Poets teach us to look, to feel, to see and to think. They help us make meaning and see meaning.
I am teaching the reader how to see the tyrant and how to see that each of us have the capacity to be tyrannical. Each of us have the capacity to live with hate and darkness and cruelty but we have to choose not to. In many of these poems, I’m teaching the reader to see another way out, to see hope, to see love, or to see each other in a loving way.
You know, when I teach 1984 to my tenth graders my starting assignment every year is a personal writing response: what’s a stronger emotion – love or hate? The tyrant would say hate. He knows people love to hate and that hate has anger and anger has strength and energy. I’d like to think most people would say love. I would say love. It’s easy to hate someone. It’s hard to love someone else, to love yourself, even. You have to be vulnerable, sensitive and loving. I want us to live in a loving world. Every poem I write is a love poem. I’ll say that till the day I die.
TT: Many poems, like “Two Lives,” from Of Tyrant feature transportation—a taxi cab, a Lyft, or a subway ride—how does travel make its way into your poems? Do you write as you travel?
LU: This is an odd occurrence and you’re not the first to ask me about this motif of travel. What’s funny is I don’t travel on a regular basis. I’m lucky enough to walk to work and so when I do actually take the subway, a cab, a Lyft etc, I really pay attention. Honestly, I think I made a conscious decision a long time ago to be really honest in my work and really capture my life as a woman, my life as a New Yorker, and my life in the 21st century. It’s something I really admire about poets like Frank O’Hara, for example. I’m originally from Long Island, and I grew up there, but I’ve been living in the City since 2004 – I think this year marks 20 years, if you can believe it! I decided I wanted to include cross streets and names of friends in my poems. My writing life is very diary-like, an index of my days. Maybe the traveling is what pushes forward the urge for community and citizenry in the book.
I think travel is a wonderful part of one’s life and I’ve always been taught to be grateful for the experience of travel. When I travel, I try to be observant. I try to marvel at what I can. New Yorkers think we have it all, but there is so much happening all around us. This is a long way of answering your question – no, I don’t write as I travel. Again, I sometimes take notes in my phone – usually as a text to myself. I have a HUGE text thread with myself. It pains me to say that, as I’m a big notebook person, and I love annotating and letter-writing, but in the last 7-10 years, I’ve turned to taking notes on my phone – it’s faster. I used to have notebooks full of notes I’d write down on the subway, at a museum, at an event, but now I mostly use my phone. It’s faster, it’s neater. I don’t love my handwriting. I mostly sit down to write once a week, before my weekly poetry workshop. Occasionally, I’ll get an urge to write a poem outside of that schedule and I’ll listen to my instincts and sit down to write.
TT: After taking notes in a phone or notebook, and writing the poem before the weekly poetry workshop, what happens next? Can you speak about the process of sequencing and putting together the collection?
LU: I love putting together a collection because it’s a wonderful way to feel your own strength, your own power. It is empowering! At first, I thought the book was going to be in sections, with tyrant poems and then monster/myth-making poems, and then I took that out. In one version, I took all the titles out, so the book read as a continuing narrative, but I think my editor Nancy White was right – the titles make the book work.
Sequencing was hard. It always is. I will say, I know what poems are intense. I know what poems riff off of one another, and I know how to build that tension, that passion, that hungry rage. I also love a good crescendo in a song. I love the breakdown of a song. There’s a lot of lyricism and musicality in my work and I knew I wanted to take the reader to a place of anger and horror, and then show them the light, the hope, and the other side of darkness.
The really angry poems are in the first half of the book. The second half is about figuring out what to do with that rage; how to reason with it and how to reason with one’s self to persist, resist and most importantly, hope. When I wrote the last poem, I knew the book had an ending. I also knew I wanted the “Alternate Ending of the Tyrant” poem at the end, too. Then, weaving together the second half was pretty instinctual.
TT: You spoke earlier of the different themes that the two parts of the book carry. Turning to craft, Of Tyrant features a wide variety of poetic forms. For you, does form come before content, or vice versa when you write?
LU: I really rely on my instincts. I know that’s not the answer you want, but I very rarely start with form. On occasion, I’ll say to myself, okay, let’s write a sonnet, or let’s try for a ghazal, but typically, form just happens for me. I usually have a sense of the line and the emotion I’m trying to capture once I start writing. I know when I want a piece to be lyrical and full of breath that I want a poem that uses the whole page. I know when I want to layer and layer and really add tension to a poem that I want a prose poem. This book has some of my first ‘longer’ poems and that’s because there are many poems of high intensity and anger where each line is 1-2 words – those poems go down the margin, over several pages, and force the reader to speed.
Often, what happens for me in terms of form is that I tend to turn to them when I’m sort of stuck. They help me get out of my own way a little bit. For example, when 45 became President, I was so disappointed, and angry. There were moments when all I could do was write about him and the way he was appearing everywhere.
TT: Not at all, learning about your writing process is very insightful. Some poems are also inspired by other poets. Can you speak about poets who have inspired you as you worked on Of Tyrant?
LU: I love talking about poets. So many poets have inspired my work in this collection. I’ve always been inspired by political poets, especially because I never thought that I would write political poems. The power of the ‘I’ is something I really admire. I teach a recurring virtual workshop on that topic at Poetry School in London. I was always taught that you should avoid the ‘I’ but I disagree. It’s where so much strength is. I would say some of my favorite political poets are Carolyn Forche, Martín Espada, Ilya Kaminsky. I’ll never forget reading “The Colonel,” years ago. It’s a poem I teach every year in high school. It taught me how important it is to use your voice, especially in a poem. That ‘I’ is sometimes all we have. Martín’s poems are some of my favorites – I love the way he captures snapshots of memory, family and the real world. I’m also obsessed with Deaf Republic – what a book! It got me to think more creatively about what a political poem can look like.
A few years ago, I saw John Murillo read for the first time and he read that famous poem of his from Poetry Magazine, “Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds.” I was struck by its circuits, its imagery and the humanity in it. I was mesmerized and immediately started using it in the classroom with my students but I think those circles, the sonics stayed with me.
Other poets that have inspired this book are the ones that, as I said earlier, include friends, conversations and daily moments in their life like Diane Seuss, Dante Di Stefano, Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Marie Howe.
I think all poetry informs other poetry.
I wanted to write poems that took your breath away and I don’t mean in awe but poems that left you gasping, dizzy or fearful. I love that Tiana Clark poem on Poetry Unbound, “My Therapist Wants to Know about My Relationship to Work.” That poem leaves you exhausted between its pacing and its piling on.
I remember when I first read Stanley Kunitz’ The Portrait – I was like, oh my god!
TT: I am wondering if you could share tips as a poet who works with poetry as a visual form—in thinking about erasure, collated poems, and lists—for beginner poets who want to incorporate current events into their work.
LU: I love this question! Honestly, I encounter this all the time when I have consultations with writers – I think with most things it’s about giving yourself permission, saying “I’m confused about X going on in X and I overheard so and so say X to so and so, and I’m going to include it in this poem.” But sometimes, that is too hard. When I’m stuck, and frustrated, but I need to get something out of me and into a poem, that’s when I turn to form. It helps sometimes to give myself a ‘limit.’ For example, I’ll say, okay, I’m going to only write 14 lines.
For example is the poem “Stun,” towards the end of the book. It was originally published in Minyan Magazine, earlier this fall, soon after the conflict in Israel and Gaza. It’s one of a few poems I wrote and honestly, I’ve been really confused, and stuck and just frustrated with the whole thing. I thought I was done with “Tyrant,” poems and then I had an argument with my parents about Israel, I had a bizarre conversation with my dentist about it during a cleaning, I had a phone call with a friend who wouldn’t stop talking to me about it even though I said I didn’t want to talk about it, and then I had a really wonderful phone call with another friend who actually heard me talk about my confusion and frustrations, and then I sat down to write that week and looked at some of my notes on my phone and was just stuck. Nothing came. Then, I told myself, I’m going to write 14 lines and just see what comes. I was really pleased with the poem – it’s horrifying – and at the last minute asked Nancy White to put it at the end of the book, right before it went to print. The limit of the 14 lines got me to get that knot out of me.
Sometimes, another limit I give myself is to use a note as an acrostic. This book has a few of those. It was, at the time, the only way to release my anger about 45. For example, “What Even Matters Anymore” was inspired by an SNL skit about jeopardy and the former president and how nothing matters anymore in society because he can/he did/he does basically anything he wants. Google it. The skit is hysterical but it’s also really messed up – that’s how satire works. I was just so angry. I sat down at my desk one day and saw that note I jotted down and just wrote it vertically down the page and started writing.
I love erasures. I’d like to do more. I plan to create more visual poems this summer. I’m a visual poet. I created the cover’s collage, too. I wanted something dynamic and rushing.
I digress. My strongest advice is not original: stay brave and trust your gut. There are no rules. It’s something I really work at in my life but especially in my writing life as a poet. When something tells me, one word lines, I just type as fast as my mind can move. I go for it.
TT: In closing, do you have any thoughts you would like to share with your readers of the world?
LU: You mean other than, PLEASE VOTE IN THIS ELECTION? Just kidding but no, please vote. Your voice matters.
I’d like to tell readers to believe in themselves and aim high in your creative pursuits. You’ll never know unless you go for it. And to be kind to others. Kindness goes a long way. The only way to fight the Tyrant is with love, hope and community.
Leah Umansky is an educator, curator, collagist and writer in New York City. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, Of Tyrant, (Word Works Books May 2024) and two chapbooks, Straight Away the Emptied World and the Mad-Men inspired Don Dreams and I Dream. Umansky earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work can be found in The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, USA Today, POETRY, and American Poetry Review. She has taught workshops to writers of all ages in such places as The Poetry School (UK), Hudson Valley Writers Center, and Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Visible Ink Program. She is currently at work on her fourth collection, a book of poems on wonder, love and joy. She can be found at http://www.leahumansky.com @lady_bronte on twitter or @leah.umansky on IG
Shannon Vare Christine is a poet, teacher, and critic living in Bucks County, PA. She is an alumnus of The Community of Writers and Tupelo Press 30/30 Project. Her poems are featured in various anthologies and publications. Additionally, her poetry reviews and literary criticism were published or are forthcoming in The Lit Pub, Cider Press Review, Sage Cigarettes, Compulsive Reader, The Laurel Review, Vagabond City, and Tupelo Quarterly. Archived writing and more can be found at www.shannonvarechristine.com, her periodic newsletter, Poetic Pause, and on Instagram @smvarewrites.
Tiffany Troy is author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Assistant Poetry Editor of Asymptote.
20 March 2024
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