Paperback: 101 pages
Publisher: Mayapple Press (2015)
Purchase: @ Mayapple Press
Review by Margaret Stawowy
To read Jessica Goodfellow’s poetry is to step into an elaborate internal landscape.
In this, her second book of poetry, Goodfellow presents poems of disquietude using language that is, in turn, commonplace and precise, often with startling implications. Unassuming and familiar, one senses integrity in her work that never draws attention to her apparent gifts.
Throughout Mendeleev’s Mandala, Goodfellow focuses on a multitude of seemingly minor dissonances that may not have any effect on greater outcomes whatsoever; on the other hand, they might indicate the beginning of a larger looming threat, as one senses in “The Problem with Pilgrims”:
The problem with pilgrims is, when you tell them nothing has been lifted up and placed down a quarter inch to the left—it’s just a visual illusion of forgiveness—they smile as if they don’t believe you, and then forgive you for your lie. When they walk out the door, everything slides another quarter inch to the left.
So, does that quarter-inch make any difference? And if it did, could anything be done to change the outcome? In “Three Views of Mars,” a child’s uncertain reply could also indicate various conclusions:
I’ll say to my son, “Do you see the big red star? and he’ll answer, “I don’t know.”
He’s three; “I don’t know” could mean”Yes,” or “No,”or “I have my eyes closed
like last time.” It might even mean he is already night-blind, the first symptom of
retinitis pigmentosa, the disease blinding his father.
Mendeleev’s Mandala contains further poems about sight impairment, but not all of the impairments concern actual vision. Section three contains a series of poems titled “The Girl Whose Favorite Color is Eigengrau. . .” in which Goodfellow explores not only blindness, but also philosophical uncertainties. Eigengrau is the color that a sighted person sees in complete darkness due to action potentials sent along the optic nerve. Therefore, it is a color of sight, not blindness, but for Goodfellow, it is also a color of a sighted person with urgent, often abstract queries that would hardly trouble the sight-challenged. One of her poems is titled “Pity Not the Blind Man Who Has Married the Girl Whose Favorite Color is Eigengrau.” The irony is, it is the sighted narrator who struggles with darkness, not the blind husband of whom she writes.
The titular poem “Mendeleev’s Mandala” also contains references to blindness. Mendeleev, the scientist who formulated the periodic table, had a father whose loss of eyesight changed his family’s trajectory. Written in a series of four eight-line parallelograms, this poem addresses Mendeleev’s ability to perceive the defining characteristics among the elements that organize the building blocks of matter itself.
. . .he would reject the 4 elements
of water, earth, air, and fire to insist on an order
no one else noticed. Like a secret 27th letter of
the alphabet, a chemical koan. . .
Surprisingly, Mendeleev claimed that the organization of the periodic table came to him in a dream. Goodfellow, like Mendeleev, is an intuitive, except her focus doesn’t address chemical elements, but elements of verity and illusion: Can the defining qualities of these opposites truly be discerned? Furthermore, how does one know which is which, and why should we care? Her work has been compared to Donne’s, but I see qualities that bring to mind the transcendence of Dickinson. There is a lightness, but also gravity, in the near metaphysical observations as well as sound repetitions and variety of rhymes, such as those found in “Possessed:”
To have and to hold--
the expression of possession is
the apostrophe’s catastrophe.
We lust to master mass
the way a grackle grooms its luster.
We thirst to tame time
despite the known futility--
our antidote’s to praise
the camera’s utility
as pixilation’s titillation
commemorates commodity. . .
Despite Goodfellow’s seriousness of subject matter, there is also a lightness and whimsy as she invites readers to share her inside jokes. Her humor is disarming, as if she recognizes that her point of view is vulnerable, possibly flawed. Not only is she a poet, but also a scientist who also holds a master’s degree in linguistics, as well as a longtime resident of Japan married to a Japanese national. Which is to say, she most certainly has been challenged to see beyond her own interpretations. Still, one of the pleasures of reading her work is to slip into her perceptions as in “Night View from the Back of a Taxi:”
The taxi slows for a yellow—no, a red light.
Color is the Babel of the eyes. For example, in Ojibwe
There’s a verb tense for what was going to happen,
but didn’t. As in, I was going to ask the driver to start homeward,
but then the light turned green. The city hides its horizons,
conceals its vanishing point. A stoplight’s
three garishly made-up eyelids are each the fracal
of a planet you cannot fall off of.
Goodfellow ends the volume with a series of poems circling back to her initial topic: pilgrims. Taken from an earlier chapbook A Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland, these poems concerning her return to Nebraska feature random patterns of numbers interspersed throughout her stanzas. One of the poems titled “5. Crop Circles5” captures the sense of a superimposed order that can only be viewed aerially, a view that may provide a sense of order, but to what end? Reading these poems, I am also reminded how the brain self-corrects, how it sees not numbers but letters spelling out words and fragments of words. It is the mind that interprets, that draws conclusions, even flawed, inaccurate conclusions. Pity not only the pilgrim, but also the person whose interpretation of seemingly straightforward evidence leads to disastrous inconsistencies.
Her final poem “6. 015Random n6umber Tab8le” begins with the epigram “We know what randomness isn’t, not what it is. –William A. Dembski.” This poem is composed entirely of numbers interspersed with the words “It is a lovely dark” and concludes with the final word: “Br12eathe”
There is the sense that because of one’s flawed humanity and perception, there will never be control over the myriad disasters that make up a life, that the final act of relinquishment is the only strategy left. Perhaps these last lines sum up the poet’s reconciliation with instability and unpredictability.
Q & A with Jessica GoodfellowMargaret Stawowy: Science and mathematics make regular appearances in your poetry. You yourself have a background and career in the sciences How did you make the jump from the sciences to literature? Or was it the other way around? Or a little of both?
Jessica Goodfellow: I was drawn to poetry as a small child. Even before I could physically write, I would ask my mother to write down my revisions of nursery school rhymes, things like “Hickory dickory dock, a chicken says cluck cluck. So if you meet a chicken, say cluck cluck.” Later it turned out that I was pretty good at mathematics, as are my father and some of my siblings, and I was encouraged in that direction, while there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm for my interest in writing. I was an obedient kid, so I ended up taking that route.
Numbers and letters I have always understood quite clearly to be symbols, so in that sense working with them hasn’t seemed all that different to me—the manipulation of symbols to convey ideas. They are just different symbolic systems capable of expressing different ranges of information.
I have written poetry most of my life, with a break during the grad school years and some of the years working in an analytical field (not sciences though, but statistical analysis), during which I found it difficult to transition between that and the verbal mindset—I don’t want to say between the analytical and the creative because there can be a lot of creativity in highly rational work. Now that I’ve left that field almost entirely, I still find the logical skills I developed then sneaking into my poetry now, giving me the voice that I have in my writing.
MS: What is it like writing poetry in English while living in a country with a language that differs so greatly from your first language? Has your life in Japan influenced how and what you write?
JG: Recently I heard the Chilean-American writer and poet Marjorie Agosin say that though she has lived in the US since the age of 16, she continues to write in Spanish and very much feels her inner life to be in Spanish (or something to that effect—I’m paraphrasing). I related strongly, as my inner life continues to be in English and that is what I write in. I have a deep love of the English language while my feeling toward Japanese is that it is useful and often interesting (especially the kanji, or logographic characters borrowed from Chinese), but I don’t have a strong emotional bond with it. Sometimes thinking about words in Japanese does stimulate ideas for poems, in much the same way that learning the etymology of English words does. And I do have a list of interesting Japanese words and customs that might be woven into poems someday.
Because I live in Japan, bits of the culture and language show up in my poems from time to time, often as metaphor, but as of yet I have never set out to write about my experience of living here. My inner life has simply been more interesting to me up until now, though of course there are bits of Japanese influence in my inner life from my experiences here, so they’ll appear. But what I’m more likely to write about are, for example, feelings of alienation, which can be exacerbated when living abroad but are not unique to that experience, or I’ll write about other emotional or cognitive experiences that may result from living in Japan, but which are also universal conditions. At least that’s what has interested me in the past. Who knows what I’ll do in the future.
MS: Tell us about your use of numbers that make up a majority of the text of poems from a Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland.
JG: I wrote this poem when my children were very small. I was working on a report for work with a baby on my lap and a toddler standing next to me banging on the number pad of my keyboard as I worked. I got tired of deleting his insertions, so I decided to just continue with the report, and remove the unwanted strings of digits later, after the kids were put to bed. However, when I came back that evening, I found it was difficult to find the numbers interspersed with the text; my eyes just glossed over the extraneous numbers as I re-read the report.
I thought that was interesting, that the random numbers were just absorbed and disregarded by my brain, and that got me to thinking about how oblivious we are to the chaos and randomness that governs so much of our lives—how we gloss right over it, ignoring it, and then when it rears its head in some kind of inescapable misfortune, how shocked we are by it, how unwilling we are to give up our notion of ourselves as in control of our lives. And I wanted to write about that. Using random numbers in the text seemed like an apt way to represent that, and having them increase in frequency as the poem progressed serves to heighten the tension, and to show a given individual’s increasing awareness of randomness, how frightening and overwhelming it is to recognize.
I used a random number generator to select the digits, and in the beginning I also used a random number generator to dictate which lines and words to place the random digits in. But then I noticed that it was easier to read, less obtrusive for the reader, if the digits fell at syllable breaks, so I started to mess with that a bit. Also, zeros looked too much like the letter O, so I had to be careful where they appeared. So the positioning of the numbers is not as random as I had first intended to make it.
MS: Your poetry constantly calls into question the solidity and reliability of the observable world. Why is this an important theme for you?
JG: My own comprehension of the world has shifted dramatically a number of times in my life; my entire paradigm has slid along an axis, or even fallen right of that axis. I’ve never felt comfortable with any subgroup that insists their worldview should be adopted by everyone, even though that was part of how I was raised.
The key word in your question is observable; the observer effect, noted in diverse fields such as physics, cognitive research, computer programming, says that the act of observing a phenomenon can change it. Voltaire said, “Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.” I am a crooked machine viewing the world through my broken lens but unwilling to blame the world for being broken—because while it probably is, likely it’s in a way different from how I see its brokenness. So even my observation that my personal paradigm has shifted is questionable, and is a belief that I am unwilling to require of others.
Which isn’t to say that I don’t trust my own senses. I do, but I also realize that my senses are always being given new information, new stimuli, and I must adjust my worldview to accommodate that. I don’t like being told that the answer is known, static, because that presupposes that any new observations I have are invalid and should be ignored unless they happen to bolster the predominant theory. I’m not sure I’m being coherent about this topic; my views on it are still under construction.
MS: What are you working on now?
JG: I am currently finishing up a manuscript about a controversial mountain-climbing accident resulting from a horrific storm on Denali that claimed the lives of seven climbers, including my 22-year-old uncle. The poems in the book are about the accident, about how the bodies were never recovered, and about how this has affected my family and continues to affect us today. I was two years old when the accident happened, and don’t have any first-hand memories of that time, but our family’s silence surrounding my uncle and his tragedy have had far-reaching implications for me and my siblings. I hope my manuscript will speak to other families who have built a screen of secrecy and silence around their own tragedies and losses.
Publisher: Mayapple Press (2015)
Purchase: @ Mayapple Press
Review by Margaret Stawowy
To read Jessica Goodfellow’s poetry is to step into an elaborate internal landscape.
In this, her second book of poetry, Goodfellow presents poems of disquietude using language that is, in turn, commonplace and precise, often with startling implications. Unassuming and familiar, one senses integrity in her work that never draws attention to her apparent gifts.
Throughout Mendeleev’s Mandala, Goodfellow focuses on a multitude of seemingly minor dissonances that may not have any effect on greater outcomes whatsoever; on the other hand, they might indicate the beginning of a larger looming threat, as one senses in “The Problem with Pilgrims”:
The problem with pilgrims is, when you tell them nothing has been lifted up and placed down a quarter inch to the left—it’s just a visual illusion of forgiveness—they smile as if they don’t believe you, and then forgive you for your lie. When they walk out the door, everything slides another quarter inch to the left.
So, does that quarter-inch make any difference? And if it did, could anything be done to change the outcome? In “Three Views of Mars,” a child’s uncertain reply could also indicate various conclusions:
I’ll say to my son, “Do you see the big red star? and he’ll answer, “I don’t know.”
He’s three; “I don’t know” could mean”Yes,” or “No,”or “I have my eyes closed
like last time.” It might even mean he is already night-blind, the first symptom of
retinitis pigmentosa, the disease blinding his father.
Mendeleev’s Mandala contains further poems about sight impairment, but not all of the impairments concern actual vision. Section three contains a series of poems titled “The Girl Whose Favorite Color is Eigengrau. . .” in which Goodfellow explores not only blindness, but also philosophical uncertainties. Eigengrau is the color that a sighted person sees in complete darkness due to action potentials sent along the optic nerve. Therefore, it is a color of sight, not blindness, but for Goodfellow, it is also a color of a sighted person with urgent, often abstract queries that would hardly trouble the sight-challenged. One of her poems is titled “Pity Not the Blind Man Who Has Married the Girl Whose Favorite Color is Eigengrau.” The irony is, it is the sighted narrator who struggles with darkness, not the blind husband of whom she writes.
The titular poem “Mendeleev’s Mandala” also contains references to blindness. Mendeleev, the scientist who formulated the periodic table, had a father whose loss of eyesight changed his family’s trajectory. Written in a series of four eight-line parallelograms, this poem addresses Mendeleev’s ability to perceive the defining characteristics among the elements that organize the building blocks of matter itself.
. . .he would reject the 4 elements
of water, earth, air, and fire to insist on an order
no one else noticed. Like a secret 27th letter of
the alphabet, a chemical koan. . .
Surprisingly, Mendeleev claimed that the organization of the periodic table came to him in a dream. Goodfellow, like Mendeleev, is an intuitive, except her focus doesn’t address chemical elements, but elements of verity and illusion: Can the defining qualities of these opposites truly be discerned? Furthermore, how does one know which is which, and why should we care? Her work has been compared to Donne’s, but I see qualities that bring to mind the transcendence of Dickinson. There is a lightness, but also gravity, in the near metaphysical observations as well as sound repetitions and variety of rhymes, such as those found in “Possessed:”
To have and to hold--
the expression of possession is
the apostrophe’s catastrophe.
We lust to master mass
the way a grackle grooms its luster.
We thirst to tame time
despite the known futility--
our antidote’s to praise
the camera’s utility
as pixilation’s titillation
commemorates commodity. . .
Despite Goodfellow’s seriousness of subject matter, there is also a lightness and whimsy as she invites readers to share her inside jokes. Her humor is disarming, as if she recognizes that her point of view is vulnerable, possibly flawed. Not only is she a poet, but also a scientist who also holds a master’s degree in linguistics, as well as a longtime resident of Japan married to a Japanese national. Which is to say, she most certainly has been challenged to see beyond her own interpretations. Still, one of the pleasures of reading her work is to slip into her perceptions as in “Night View from the Back of a Taxi:”
The taxi slows for a yellow—no, a red light.
Color is the Babel of the eyes. For example, in Ojibwe
There’s a verb tense for what was going to happen,
but didn’t. As in, I was going to ask the driver to start homeward,
but then the light turned green. The city hides its horizons,
conceals its vanishing point. A stoplight’s
three garishly made-up eyelids are each the fracal
of a planet you cannot fall off of.
Goodfellow ends the volume with a series of poems circling back to her initial topic: pilgrims. Taken from an earlier chapbook A Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland, these poems concerning her return to Nebraska feature random patterns of numbers interspersed throughout her stanzas. One of the poems titled “5. Crop Circles5” captures the sense of a superimposed order that can only be viewed aerially, a view that may provide a sense of order, but to what end? Reading these poems, I am also reminded how the brain self-corrects, how it sees not numbers but letters spelling out words and fragments of words. It is the mind that interprets, that draws conclusions, even flawed, inaccurate conclusions. Pity not only the pilgrim, but also the person whose interpretation of seemingly straightforward evidence leads to disastrous inconsistencies.
Her final poem “6. 015Random n6umber Tab8le” begins with the epigram “We know what randomness isn’t, not what it is. –William A. Dembski.” This poem is composed entirely of numbers interspersed with the words “It is a lovely dark” and concludes with the final word: “Br12eathe”
There is the sense that because of one’s flawed humanity and perception, there will never be control over the myriad disasters that make up a life, that the final act of relinquishment is the only strategy left. Perhaps these last lines sum up the poet’s reconciliation with instability and unpredictability.
Q & A with Jessica GoodfellowMargaret Stawowy: Science and mathematics make regular appearances in your poetry. You yourself have a background and career in the sciences How did you make the jump from the sciences to literature? Or was it the other way around? Or a little of both?
Jessica Goodfellow: I was drawn to poetry as a small child. Even before I could physically write, I would ask my mother to write down my revisions of nursery school rhymes, things like “Hickory dickory dock, a chicken says cluck cluck. So if you meet a chicken, say cluck cluck.” Later it turned out that I was pretty good at mathematics, as are my father and some of my siblings, and I was encouraged in that direction, while there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm for my interest in writing. I was an obedient kid, so I ended up taking that route.
Numbers and letters I have always understood quite clearly to be symbols, so in that sense working with them hasn’t seemed all that different to me—the manipulation of symbols to convey ideas. They are just different symbolic systems capable of expressing different ranges of information.
I have written poetry most of my life, with a break during the grad school years and some of the years working in an analytical field (not sciences though, but statistical analysis), during which I found it difficult to transition between that and the verbal mindset—I don’t want to say between the analytical and the creative because there can be a lot of creativity in highly rational work. Now that I’ve left that field almost entirely, I still find the logical skills I developed then sneaking into my poetry now, giving me the voice that I have in my writing.
MS: What is it like writing poetry in English while living in a country with a language that differs so greatly from your first language? Has your life in Japan influenced how and what you write?
JG: Recently I heard the Chilean-American writer and poet Marjorie Agosin say that though she has lived in the US since the age of 16, she continues to write in Spanish and very much feels her inner life to be in Spanish (or something to that effect—I’m paraphrasing). I related strongly, as my inner life continues to be in English and that is what I write in. I have a deep love of the English language while my feeling toward Japanese is that it is useful and often interesting (especially the kanji, or logographic characters borrowed from Chinese), but I don’t have a strong emotional bond with it. Sometimes thinking about words in Japanese does stimulate ideas for poems, in much the same way that learning the etymology of English words does. And I do have a list of interesting Japanese words and customs that might be woven into poems someday.
Because I live in Japan, bits of the culture and language show up in my poems from time to time, often as metaphor, but as of yet I have never set out to write about my experience of living here. My inner life has simply been more interesting to me up until now, though of course there are bits of Japanese influence in my inner life from my experiences here, so they’ll appear. But what I’m more likely to write about are, for example, feelings of alienation, which can be exacerbated when living abroad but are not unique to that experience, or I’ll write about other emotional or cognitive experiences that may result from living in Japan, but which are also universal conditions. At least that’s what has interested me in the past. Who knows what I’ll do in the future.
MS: Tell us about your use of numbers that make up a majority of the text of poems from a Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland.
JG: I wrote this poem when my children were very small. I was working on a report for work with a baby on my lap and a toddler standing next to me banging on the number pad of my keyboard as I worked. I got tired of deleting his insertions, so I decided to just continue with the report, and remove the unwanted strings of digits later, after the kids were put to bed. However, when I came back that evening, I found it was difficult to find the numbers interspersed with the text; my eyes just glossed over the extraneous numbers as I re-read the report.
I thought that was interesting, that the random numbers were just absorbed and disregarded by my brain, and that got me to thinking about how oblivious we are to the chaos and randomness that governs so much of our lives—how we gloss right over it, ignoring it, and then when it rears its head in some kind of inescapable misfortune, how shocked we are by it, how unwilling we are to give up our notion of ourselves as in control of our lives. And I wanted to write about that. Using random numbers in the text seemed like an apt way to represent that, and having them increase in frequency as the poem progressed serves to heighten the tension, and to show a given individual’s increasing awareness of randomness, how frightening and overwhelming it is to recognize.
I used a random number generator to select the digits, and in the beginning I also used a random number generator to dictate which lines and words to place the random digits in. But then I noticed that it was easier to read, less obtrusive for the reader, if the digits fell at syllable breaks, so I started to mess with that a bit. Also, zeros looked too much like the letter O, so I had to be careful where they appeared. So the positioning of the numbers is not as random as I had first intended to make it.
MS: Your poetry constantly calls into question the solidity and reliability of the observable world. Why is this an important theme for you?
JG: My own comprehension of the world has shifted dramatically a number of times in my life; my entire paradigm has slid along an axis, or even fallen right of that axis. I’ve never felt comfortable with any subgroup that insists their worldview should be adopted by everyone, even though that was part of how I was raised.
The key word in your question is observable; the observer effect, noted in diverse fields such as physics, cognitive research, computer programming, says that the act of observing a phenomenon can change it. Voltaire said, “Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.” I am a crooked machine viewing the world through my broken lens but unwilling to blame the world for being broken—because while it probably is, likely it’s in a way different from how I see its brokenness. So even my observation that my personal paradigm has shifted is questionable, and is a belief that I am unwilling to require of others.
Which isn’t to say that I don’t trust my own senses. I do, but I also realize that my senses are always being given new information, new stimuli, and I must adjust my worldview to accommodate that. I don’t like being told that the answer is known, static, because that presupposes that any new observations I have are invalid and should be ignored unless they happen to bolster the predominant theory. I’m not sure I’m being coherent about this topic; my views on it are still under construction.
MS: What are you working on now?
JG: I am currently finishing up a manuscript about a controversial mountain-climbing accident resulting from a horrific storm on Denali that claimed the lives of seven climbers, including my 22-year-old uncle. The poems in the book are about the accident, about how the bodies were never recovered, and about how this has affected my family and continues to affect us today. I was two years old when the accident happened, and don’t have any first-hand memories of that time, but our family’s silence surrounding my uncle and his tragedy have had far-reaching implications for me and my siblings. I hope my manuscript will speak to other families who have built a screen of secrecy and silence around their own tragedies and losses.
Jessica Goodfellow's books are Mendeleev's Mandala (Mayapple Press, 2015) and The Insomniac’s Weather Report (Isobar Press, 2014). Her chapbook, A Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland, won the 2006 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Verse Daily, and NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. Jessica received the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal, as well as the Linda Julian Essay Award and the Sue Lile Inman Fiction Prize, both from the Emrys Foundation. Her work was made into a short film by Motionpoems (May 2015) and screened at the Minneapolis/St Paul International Film Festival and AWP 2015. Jessica has graduate degrees from Caltech and the University of New England. She lives and works in Japan.
