2022: The Retrospective

Joseph DanteLeave a comment

It’s the end of the year and we are finally getting some cooler weather. Most of the country is not too pleased about this right now, but here in Florida, I’m very grateful. I’ve been literally sweating this whole year.

This summer, I started working on the poems that are now part of my thesis. I’ve had a structure for a poetry collection in my head for a while now, but didn’t have enough complete poems to fill it all in. In June, I was invited to do a poetry reading as part of a Pride series. I read some earlier versions of these thesis poems and met some other lovely poets.

We also visited David’s family in Texas. It’d been a while since we had seen them due to the pandemic. During the trip, I got to visit my favorite independent bookstore, Malvern Books. We don’t really have any independent books in South Florida, so I always look forward to this. They have so much poetry and work in translation. I picked up a bundle of books from local authors (Alfredo Aguilar, Laura Villareal) and discovered a new poet I hadn’t heard of (Sarah Fox). These books were among my notable reads of the year (list included below). Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to me at the time, this would be the last opportunity I’d have to visit the bookstore. Shortly after our return home, it was announced that the founder of Malvern Books, Joe Bratcher, had passed away and the bookstore would be closing at the end of this year. From the outpouring of appreciation online, it was clear Mr. Bratcher left an indelible impression on both the local and national literary community. I will miss my time spent browsing the shelves and discovering new writers there.

Alongside my writing, I also experimented with AI image generation. This was before it broke into the mainstream conversation, with everyone using Lensa to create AI selfies. For one of my classes in the fall, I created collages out of AI images that were generated by keywords I selected from some of my tweets. I used the resulting images for collages that defined the years 2020 and 2021.

I noted a contrast between the two years: how 2020 seemed to contain more apocalyptic imagery and how 2021 seemed to contain more images of lone figures in scenes of self-isolation. Perhaps not very surprising.

The one piece of writing I did publish this year was a poem that was inspired by the alien form and undulation of deep-sea life. It was published in the inaugural issue of Cold Signal, an online magazine that was initially conceived to explore the creative possibilities between writing and AI image generation. The editor of the magazine tweeted: “inspired by the shapes of siphonophores, [Dante’s poem] flows with a gorgeous and alien awareness of the beauty and communion in the colony-self, where the lines between singular and plural ebb like the tide.” The poem was nominated for a Pushcart.

While the potentially boundless creative possibilities made AI image generation exciting at first, the conversation has shifted since, with more people rightfully questioning its ethics, especially in regards to whether the sources being pulled from by the generators are stolen works from living artists. Furthermore, some have pointed out how the proliferation of these image generators undervalues the talent and work that goes into art-making. These are all legitimate concerns to have. John Chrostek, editor of Cold Signal, brings nuance to the conversation in his editor’s note for the inaugural issue of the magazine. Moving forward, it seems like the magazine will be less focused on AI image generation and more on the speculative element, exploring the relationship between the synthetic and the organic.

The end of this year started out with David and I celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary. Unfortunately, it concluded with family getting sick, some health scares. I wish everyone could be safe and well, always, but that’s not how this works. I know writers are supposed to find beauty in the ephemeral nature of life, blahblahblah, but sometimes it’s just brutal and you wish to preserve everyone and everything in a glass stasis.

I already have the beginning of 2023 partially mapped out in my head. If everything goes according to plan, I’ll be graduating with my MFA. I’ll be traveling to places I’ve never been to before. Maybe I’ll publish some writing, if the publishing gods deign it so. Maybe I won’t be as sweaty. Probably not.

At last, we’ve arrived at the fun part. This list doesn’t include absolutely everything I consumed this year, but the select media and art that at least left an impression. You’ll notice I read almost exclusively poetry and nonfiction, which isn’t surprising, considering the focus of my thesis. No notable movies included here at all (with every passing year, I seem to become less interested in watching anything for long periods of time) and most of the music I listened to this year wasn’t anything new. However, I played a lot of new games (some bite-sized, some very large and time-consuming).

Books:
The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison
Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses
Owed by Joshua Bennett
Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief by Victoria Chang
The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine
Just Us by Claudia Rankine
Ceremonies by Essex Hemphill
Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
Obscenely Yours by Angelo Nikolopoulos
Pleasure by Angelo Nikolopoulos
Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry, edited by Timothy Liu
Vox Angelica by Timothy Liu
Burnt Offerings by Timothy Liu
How to Not Be Afraid of Everything by Jane Wong
Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows by Eugenia Leigh
Fantasia for the Man in Blue by Tommye Blount
The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus
Wound from the Mouth of the Wound by torrin a. greathouse
The Specimen’s Apology by George Abraham
Bestiary by Donika Kelly
On This Side of the Desert by Alfredo Aguilar
Borderland Apocrypha by Anthony Cody
Instead of Dying by Lauren Haldeman
Be Holding by Ross Gay
Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
Homie by Danez Smith
Vapor by Sara Eliza Johnson
Brother Sleep by Aldo Amparan
JUNK by Tommy Pico
300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso
What Noise Against the Cane by Desiree C. Bailey
Nightingale by Paisley Rekdal
Something Bright, Then Holes by Maggie Nelson
The First Flag by Sarah Fox
Library of Small Catastrophes by Alison C. Rollins
Girl’s Guide to Leaving by Laura Villareal
When I Was Straight by Julie Marie Wade (reread)
You’re Pretty Gay by Drew Pisarra
Heartstopper (Volumes 1-3) by Alice Oseman

TV Series:
Abbott Elementary
Call Me Kat
Heartstopper
Home Economics
Rutherford Falls
Girls5Eva
Hacks
The Owl House
The Dragon Prince
Aggretsuko
Grace and Frankie
The Great British Baking Show

Video Games:
For the King
Rollercoaster Tycoon 3: Complete Edition
Psychonauts 2
Horizon: Forbidden West
Kirby and the Forgotten Land
Unpacking
Little Misfortune
Lost in Random
Rune Factory 5
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba
Live A Live
Stray
Heroland
The Jackbox Party collections
Ooblets
Mythic Ocean
Cult of the Lamb
Kaichu
Moon Hunters
Butterfly Soup 2
Hypnospace Outlaw
Kirby’s Dream Buffet
Deception IV: Nightmare Princess
Pokemon Violet

Music:
Dance Fever by Florence + the Machine
The Gods We Can Touch by Aurora
Hounds of Love by Kate Bush
Wolfmother by Wolfmother
“Romance with a Memory” by Oliver Sim
“Too Precious” by Em Beihold

Recommended Reading #9

Joseph DanteLeave a comment
  1. “I Want to Discard Beauty” by Hiwot Adilow
  2. “Lullaby at Overtoun” by Adam Gianforcaro
  3. “Ceftriaxzone” by Rob Colgate
  4. “This Room Will Still Exist” by Aldo Amparán
  5. “Elephants Born Without Tusks” by Alison C. Rollins
  6. “In the Chapel of St. Mary’s” by Donika Kelly
  7. “Quiver” by Paisley Rekdal
  8. “Phlebotomy, as Told by the Skin” by torrin a. greathouse
  9. “[I have slept in many places…]” by Diane Seuss
  10. “We Were Three” by Rachel McKibbens
  11. “Annihilation” by Sara Eliza Johnson
  12. “Learning the Limits of Nonviolence” by Stef Rubino
  13. “If You Knew Then What I Know Now” by Ryan Van Meter
  14. “Spiderweb” by Mariana Enriquez

Who Are You, What Is This?

Joseph DanteLeave a comment

I used to chronicle my life compulsively via an online journal. In it, you’d find: complaints about high school and college, thoughts on books I was reading (in addition to the ones for school) and movies I was watching, photos with friends who deigned to give me the time of day, and inside jokes that I’ve long forgotten the origins of. This journal was semi-private in that we had to be “friends” first for you to read it and leave comments. The writer Sarah Manguso discusses her obsessive tendencies to document everything in her life in Ongoingness: The End of a Diary and how a certain event (in her case, motherhood) put a freeze on this compulsion. I feel like I used to be obsessive in this same way, but I can’t really pinpoint any one event as to why the compulsion stopped. Maybe it was because everything started moving too fast for me online, too fast to process. Maybe it was because everything and everyone became too scattered in the digital ether. Regardless, the obsession has not been the same. I still jot down notes to myself, mostly lines for future poems, but I don’t really journal much anymore. Manguso used to be scared that she would forget most of the events in her life and that motivated her compulsions, but I don’t have that same fear anymore. I know I’ll forget and that’s okay. Maybe that’s just getting older, that particular acceptance.

This month, my university hosted a reading with Sarah Manguso that I got to attend. Manguso is a writer who started out as a poet, branched out into lyrical and fragmented nonfiction, and is now writing novels. Her cross-genre work has been helpful in how I think about my thesis, which experiments with form and has a lyric essay at the heart of it. She discussed her frustrations in finding the appropriate mode that fits with the project she envisions, and I often find myself similarly frustrated. I got her to sign her newest book. One of the few things I find invigorating at the end of the world: being among writers and people who still believe in writing.

Even though my online journaling has been much more infrequent in recent years, I feel as if most of my writing has been a kind of journaling. Through it, I’ve been able to chart my changing tastes and moods, my affinities. My literary experiments reflect the current obsession I want to contain in a certain space during a certain time. This has definitely become even more apparent through my thesis writing, which relies on the epistolary and the confessional.

A project that I’ve shelved but may return to after graduation: a sequence of poems (or one long poem?) that is part erasure and part revising of old journal entries. This concept may end up proving more self-indulgent than useful in the end, but who knows. Of course, the “who knows” is always what makes it interesting.

The 2020/2021 Memory Jar Project

Joseph DanteLeave a comment

Contents (from left to right, top to bottom):

  • Omamori charm of Sakuna from Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin
  • Katamari face mask from my sister
  • Christmas cats pop-up gift box also from my sister
  • Folded-up letter of acceptance to FAU’s MFA in Creative Writing program
  • Schedule of orientation for FAU’s new graduate students
  • Postcard from a hypothetical trip to Venice (friend did not actually go to Venice during the pandemic)
  • Unsettling Furby pin from my sister that says “I SEE YOU”
  • Business card from FAU’s University Center for Excellence in Writing, where I currently work
  • Plastic train ticket to Hogwarts and Ravenclaw coin as party favors from party I did not attend
  • A small book arts project I put together in my nonfiction class, featuring parts of a lyric essay I wrote

Other contents not pictured:

  • Actual jar
  • Big empty space within jar (to show off all the lost potential for memory-making during the pandemic)
  • Our vaccination cards (we need this handy always now, so they can’t remain in one place)

P.S.

I think the memory jar project is going on an indefinite hiatus. Maybe I’ll bring it back in some form eventually. I would like to, however, keep a more regular journal of my life because of how it helps me both remember (I’m remembering much less now) and cohere the chaos (a bit, anyway). But, most importantly: it brings me joy to do all this. It’s silly how often I forget this.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.

Anaïs Nin

2021: The Retrospective

Joseph DanteLeave a comment

I’ve gotten in the habit of reviewing the previous year’s retrospective to see what and how much has changed. Since the onset of the pandemic, I think it is fair to say that our sense of time has changed considerably. We find ourselves asking more and more: Did that really happen this year? Wait, was that just last month? Surely that can’t be right. Is anything happening or is everything happening? And with these questions come an accumulative dread.

Just at the beginning of the pandemic I started graduate school. Around the same time, David and I were also considering moving. This all seems like a decade ago.

I’m also in this frame of mind right now because we are just coming off the winter holidays and the new year is almost here and everyone is testing positive for COVID. I was sick on Christmas day, although I tested negative. Our families couldn’t celebrate or see each other. The year is 2021 and not 2020. Somehow, we are going into 2022.

Despite this fear always weighing on us and altering our interactions, I taught for the first time in-person this fall. Although I always wore a mask in the classroom, very few students did and our school couldn’t really do anything to enforce it. Florida, the notorious devil-may-care state (an understatement), makes working in education – and teaching things about empathy, for example – all the stranger. I felt awkward at first, standing up there by myself and trying to be engaging, but I’m grateful for my previous experience teaching remotely, and of course, having David to bounce ideas off of.

Fortunately, since going back to school in-person, I’ve also had the opportunity to meet a lot of the wonderful people in my program and at the Writing Center. I’ve formed bonds with some excellent writers and teachers who make me think in new ways and whose perspectives I appreciate. It isn’t an overstatement that some of the feedback I’ve received from my cohort has altered the way I think about and approach writing and literature.

In addition, in the spring semester, I took an Imagining Race class that was truly enlightening. It made realize the noticeable gap in my education. Prior to this, it wasn’t ever required in any of my classes that I read, for example, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, or the work of Toni Morrison (a real travesty). Exploring the American literary canon of Black writers with a historical framework, I learned so much about our country and the pervasive, multigenerational consequences of racism.

Previously I was in the MA program in English at my university, but I was emboldened to apply to the MFA program in Creative Writing. Creative writing is where my passion lies, always has been and always will be. This year, I was accepted into the program, and now I’m taking writing workshops for the first time in more than a decade. I’ve missed it.

However, despite being in grad school and starting my MFA, I didn’t have the greatest year of reading, if I’m honest. Most of my favorites came from the Imagining Race class that I took in the spring and the poetry books I read on my own.

This was a better year for my writing. In particular, I explored the genre of the lyric essay and its possibilities. I have ideas for my MFA thesis that involve this form.

I have a bigger memory jar to open soon. It contains things from both 2020 and 2021, which seems fitting, given how time isn’t time anymore. It is compressed and it is sprawling. The disappearing pandemic years. After this, I think I’m going to retire the memory jar project – not because I don’t enjoy it anymore (I love reviewing and remembering), but because collecting these jars takes up a lot of space. I will try instead to document my year next year instead in the spirit of how I obsessively chronicled my days in high school. More regularly at least, even if it’s more bite-sized.

Here is the everything that defined my year, eclectic and omnivorous as always:

Books:
Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison
Beloved by Toni Morrison (reread)
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain
Select Shakespeare plays I hadn’t read previously, such as Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure
Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
The Next American Essay edited by John D’Agata
The Lost Origins of the Essay edited by John D’Agata
Witch by Philip Matthews
Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman
Soft Science by Franny Choi
Corporal Muse by Allison Joseph
Luster by Raven Leilani
Reconstructions by Bradley Trumpfheller
Nocturnal Omissions by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard and Eric Norris
Find Me by Andre Aciman
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Outline by Rachel Cusk
A House Is a Body by Shruti Swamy
Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar
All About Love by bell hooks

Movies:
13th
Arrival
Benjamin
Geography Club
Wolfwalkers
Raya and the Last Dragon
Soul
Luca
Onward
Cruella

TV Series:
The Hollow
Bridgerton
The Great North
Disenchantment
Community
Hot in Cleveland
Superstore
Special
Rutherford Falls
The Chair
The Great British Baking Show
Broad City
Aggretsuko

Video Games:
Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time
Calico
Dreams
Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale
Cake Bash
Final Fantasy VII Remake
Setsuna: Of Rice and Ruin
Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate
Paper Mario: The Origami King
Beglitched
A Mortician’s Tale
Doki Doki Literature Club
Our Life: Beginnings and Always
Hades
Pokemon Unite
New Pokemon Snap
NEO: The World Ends with You
Boyfriend Dungeon
Deltarune – Chapters 1 and 2
Black Book
Pokemon Brilliant Diamond
Monster Rancher 1 and 2 DX
Kitaria Fables
Wytchwood

Music:
Champion by Bishop Briggs
Heaven and Hell by Ava Max
Effet Miroir by ZAZ
Mini World by Indila
If You Leave by Daughter
Arrows by Fleurie
Lost on You by LP