Big Mouth Feature: Carlie Hoffman
No. 11 Big Mouth will be released very soon and in preparation we decided to feature different writers and artists who are apart of this issue. We are starting off with Carlie Hoffman, who wrote a story poem "Pale.”
What was the inspiration for your poem “Pale” ?
I wrote, “Pale,” a few years ago after a spring where I was very sick, both mentally and physically. I couldn’t get out of bed. I could barely walk. The poem was a way for me to come to some kind of understanding about the experience. It was a very dark time in my life.
When you are in a writer's block what helps you get out of it?
If I’m struggling to revise or to write something new, I usually ride the train and read a book of poems. I’m inspired by poetry in translation, both the English derivative as well as in the original language. Reading words I don’t know in a language I don’t typically have exposure to in my day-to-day life helps me move my mouth and brain in new and interesting ways. I think everybody should try to read poems out loud in a language they haven’t had much close interaction with.
Other than writing, what do you like to do on your free time?
I like to go to museums and travel. I like to explore new streets in NYC. I love diners.
Why do you write?
I am still trying to understand my relationship with writing and why poetry is the form my thoughts feel most at home in. I am enamored by the relationship between mental images and language.
When hearing "Big Mouth" what comes to your mind?
When I first heard the title for this issue was “Big Mouth” I immediately, and joyfully, pictured someone blowing a Bubbalicious bubble gum bubble. All joking aside, though, the phrase also makes me think deeply about wanting to be heard, and the implications or varying degrees of backlash women deal with when we speak our minds. In my own life, I've had so many experiences where I have had to re-evaluate whether speaking up or asking for something I needed was worth the risk of vulnerability, especially when the response was cruel or inhumane. The way women get called "crazy" or illustrated as "having a meltdown" for wanting the bare minimum like, say, a partner to be respectful of the terms of a monogamous relationship, to walk down the street without being harassed, equal pay, etc. is outrageous. I love that this section is called "Big Mouth" because it feels reclamatory and celebratory.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————
Poems by Carlie Hoffman
BLOEMENMARKT
Each time I meet with God
he is still singing and jealous
of the way I’ve learned to speak
with my hands. By autumn
I am drunk in the bathtub again.
The water is warm. I think of December
and the Christmas trees sold
along the Singel, the flower market
brimming with black coats.
Like pine, I am desperate to be lit.
God tells me I am embarrassing
at love. I tell him he is lucky—
all mighty, but all voice.
*Originally published in Cider Press Review.
SUDDEN HYMN IN WINTER
Some women are all the women
you’ve ever loved at once. Somewhere else
a man chases her image with a can
of orange spray paint. Evening has already
happened. He shades the almost‑
touching, half-formed hands of Matisse’s dancers
onto the side of the train, and her light
is different now, though he knows this isn't possible,
not really. Light does not change, just gets lost
inside the greater thing. And if he could go back
it wouldn’t be to the hospital
where the sun forked through the space
his body left as he turned out of the room,
or the first kiss, but farther still, to the moment
just before, looking out at the pond in muzzled
autumn, the fish curving on the cusp
of emergency, all those rivers mapped inside them.
And they’d watch quietly until sundown,
because he doesn’t do this work for forgiveness,
but because the fact of grace
disgusts him.
He knows this much:
It was winter. Her hair was thinning. After,
for a while, it is winter all the time.
*Originally published in Nashville Review.
TO BROOKLYN AND PART WAY BACK
When I couldn’t make you love
winter I spent a lot of time underground,
riding the C train from my uptown station
down to the last stop at Euclid,
and though I disliked Brooklyn for its
other-worldness and so-far-awayness, I
liked all the different colored shoes I’d see
from stop to stop, and how the bars
hang Christmas lights year round. I tried—
packing snow in the freezer to make
things casual, and later the air conditioner
always on until the only option left
was touch, but just like thinking God
could show up in a creek styled as the heron
we followed last June, through stone and sledge
to the swimming hole, our naked backs
riddled with sun like kaleidoscopes, it was useless
wanting to perfect change
and so inexact as truth. What matters
is what we tell each other for certain:
Winter is coming. I bet my life on this.
*Originally published in The Cortland Review.
ORION
In my dream the dead have arrived
as escorts. We travel
past cold hills and wolves
wild in a deadlocked field. A corporation
of stars cracks overhead. I lean
my hand where the hunting dogs
chase the rabbit, and they tell me
constellation means assembled
for life. Then they lend me
a shovel and dissolve into night.
There is no other way back. I dig
through snow until the cold metal strikes.
