George Kovalenko's "Spooky Action at a Distance"

Thoughts on novel-writing one month out from novel-publishing.

Disclaimer: This is the second time this poem has been featured on this newsletter (for a reason I will soon divulge), and so it is the second time I will say that Substack’s formatting will inevitably cut off George’s beautiful long lines of poetry. To read the original (with lines intact), click through to this link.

Spooky Action at a Distance

​​Somehow it seems like almost every night now most everyone disappears someplace:

Portland or Hanoi or the dark side of Uranus. And it stings, remembering how
all together we passed the yard where once we prodded in the debris what we shouldn’t have,

baby fat coagulate with hornet-welts, swooning and shrieking, face down on the lawn,
flesh patterned thicker and thicker by the moment, remembering that bad ideas

are always better than the worst ones. I already miss that kind of memory,
angry and pointed enough to prick its way into the future.

When, in the thin transatlantic warble of absolute distance, you broke my heart
and insisted I quit my graveyard watch as a complete fucking downer,

I know we both felt it then as clearly as a pinkie caught between the prongs
of a string of Christmas lights and the socket’s withering white:

if time is always on the precipice of leaving us, of breaking down into particulates,
is always oil-wet light, waveform, parapet, public park, windbalm, bayside in the capital,

fourth birthday, reconceptualization, terrarium, split lip, pop music, space,
is the mid-afternoon moon—which is a bull to the cloudbank’s sheeted dodge—​​

is walking this way, talking, taking our time, is trying to recollect, is the worst
possible breath in the most beautiful mouth, is this again at three in the morning,

is deathly ill, and cool, and ankle deep, which is itself a kind of recollection
of possibility, is itself a tectonic slippage represented as the biggest mistake of all,

then, in these moments, please: let’s try again.

Remember how we used to wonder rather than know? We, wasted
on the dawn, sickled over and over again; we, torpid, mal-equipped magicians;

we, livid, caustic potion to the storehouses, hex over hex over hex;
how many times we rose and fell; we, too much even to ourselves; we and the living;

could we but remember it completely; we, dreamcrackers; we, distant,
once and again, magnificent cavalcades against the monstrous camps of our conditions.


first published in American Literary Review (December, 2018)

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I am allowing myself — and perhaps, in turn, you’ll allow me — to take a slight break from the usual traditions of this newsletter and do a few things differently today. First, I’d like to feature a poem for the second time. And second, I’d like to talk about writing a novel. I’d like to do this because, well, my first novel is coming out in, at the time of my writing this, a month, and, in the time of you reading this, a month minus one single day. And so I guess this is a bit of promotion. Promotion-reflection, I’ll say.

I announced some tour dates online earlier this week. Here is a flyer. If you’d like me to come visit your city or town or tiny little village or bookstore that is, inconceivably and yet beautifully, wedged into the third floor of some crowded, massive skyscraping building whose ground floor is a bagel shop, the smell of which — dried onion, garlic, butter on toast — snakes up through the stacks of your library, I’d be happy to. Send me a note and we can try to make it work.

But I’d also like to write about this poem because, well, when you open my novel’s first page, you’ll see these two epigraphs:

I hope you’ll understand, then, this little detour of mine.

I love today’s poem dearly. And I love the person who wrote it; he is a dear friend of mine. And I have loved the lines that serve as my novel’s epigraph ever since I first heard them:

Remember how we used to wonder rather than know?

I love, too, everything that comes before that question. This little trick that George performs for us, bookended by a classic if-then clause:

if time is always on the precipice of leaving us,

then, in these moments, please: let’s try again.

Yes! My god. Let’s try again. Please. A message for us of humility and wonder — this sense that we cannot wrangle what cannot be wrangled, no matter how hard we try, and this sense, too, that part of our experience of the world has to do with time moving, as it does, either too slow or too fast, taking lives away we love or shortening moments we wish would last forever, though nothing does.

And in between these lines? Long and winding and alternating between the ordinary and the tongue-twisting-and-turning descriptions of the world that remind us to look again? There’s poetry. A bull to a cloudbank’s sheeted dodge. Walking this way, talking, taking our time. The worst possible breath in the most beautiful mouth. Come on! Poetry, poetry, poetry. I love it so.

When I learned that this novel of mine would get published, I knew with a deep certainty that this moment from George’s poem — remember how we used to wonder rather than know — would be one of my epigraphs. I knew it because such a line is, at least to me, a question that pokes at a truth that lives at the heart of how I view the world, which is the same heart from which I write about the world. Here’s a spoiler, too: it’s also the same heart from which you write about the world, which is to say your heart. Which is to say: what we write is, in part, a kind of inside-outing of ourselves.

In this novel of mine, Pilgrims, there are two brothers, both of whom have run, in some way, away from home. Both of them spend most of the novel wondering, which is only a letter away from wandering. They wonder and they wander, and the novel moves with them. Remember how we used to wonder rather than know? I think of that most days. When I am tired of my own self-defeating attempts at certainty. When I am boggled and burdened downward by the bureaucracy of progress. When I am missing, as I sometimes feel, something of myself. Remember how we used to wonder rather than know? It’s a question that makes me so deeply sad and, at the same time, less alone in such sadness. The fact that we sometimes have to ask it is, perhaps, revealing of one of the many things that have gone wrong with the world. But the question, at least, contains an answer to such wrongness. You could wonder again.

And you could also, as George Eliot writes in Middlemarch, a novel that offered me one of the greatest reading experiences I can remember, “feel with me.” That, too, is part of wondering.

That line is spoken by Dorothea, who is sitting with her sister Celia, who is sort of confused and marveling at the news that Dorothea is going to marry someone. Here’s their exchange:

Dorothea smiled, and Celia looked rather meditative. Presently she said, “I cannot think how it all came about.” Celia thought it would be pleasant to hear the story.

“I dare say not,” said Dorothea, pinching her sister’s chin. “If you knew how it came about, it would not seem wonderful to you.”

“Can’t you tell me?” said Celia, settling her arms cozily.

“No, dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know.”

Come on! Isn’t that something? And then the chapter ends! It just ends! Book closed, chapter over. George Eliot, as she often does, offering this kind of life-altering truth right before the page turns blank. And isn’t it true? That some things are more wonderful for our not-knowing? We often make a kind of huge fuss about the necessity of art, or its purpose. And perhaps part of its real purpose, if it has one, is to live in that space between feeling and knowing, which is a space where wonder lives. To make art, to create anything, is to attempt to close the gap that Dorothea names, the gap between wanting to know and being able to know, between someone else’s experience and our own. You cannot close that gap, no matter what new toy our society dreams up, but you can play in that gap, and create in that gap, enjoying the fact of not-knowing rather than trying to solve it. When you spend time there, you learn about what you cannot possibly know: unsolvable mystery, complex locked mechanism that is each heart, each impossibly sized as a fist. She’s smiling, I think, as she says this — Dorothea is. Having come to terms with life’s impossibility. Having made a novel out of it, a poem, a painting. Just as George Eliot is, I think. The understandable frustration of being who we are — limited creatures, unable to know everything — turning, word by word, into beauty.

And that limitedness that is part of our beauty? George Kovalenko knows it, too, which is why I love how he calls us who we are:

we, torpid, mal-equipped magicians

Mal-equipped magicians, yes. That’s us. Somehow wildly unequipped for this thing called life, and somehow able, still, to make a kind of marveling and strange beauty out of it all.

I’ve had the abject pleasure of reading some wildly good books recently. Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain. Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow. Brad Watson’s Miss Jane and Last Days of the Dog-Men. In the former, Greenwell writes — of illness and caretaking and care-needing — in a kind of endless prose, this spillage of sentence into sentence, a life-blood of sorts, rhythmic and momentous and forever ongoing until it isn’t. He has a moment in that novel when, in the midst of a close-reading of a poem by George Oppen, he writes:

…though it’s also why we need poems, I think: they exist in a different relationship to attention and to time; it’s impossible for harried students worrying about exams, for harried readers checking their phones, to see and feel what’s happening in them. Whole strata of reality are lost to us at the speed at which we live, our ability to perceive them is lost, and maybe that’s the value of poetry, there are aspects of the world that are only visible at the frequency of certain poems.

And, just a few lines later:

Read it again, read it more slowly, that was the whole of my pedagogy when I taught my students, who were pressured everywhere else to be more efficient, to take in information more quickly, to make each moment count, to instrumentalize time, which is a terrible way to live, dehumanizing, it disfigures existence. But it was difficult to defend the alternative, to justify it in terms of outcomes and deliverables, costs and benefits; it was indefensible by that logic, its value lay in demonstrating the possibility of other logics, other relationships to value, I mean other ways to live. The point was to perceive reality, I wanted to tell them, to see things that are only visible at a different speed, a different pitch of attention, the value of poems is tuning us to a different frequency of existence.

I thought, when reading these lines, of what it feels like, not just to read anything, but also to write anything. If reading something involves tuning oneself to a different frequency, then writing, I think, is also a similar act of tuning. There is a radio dial inside of us. Sometimes it is tuned to static; sometimes it is tuned to the endless distraction of advertisements; sometimes it is tuned to the chatter of other voices; sometimes it is tuned through the music we make out of our own seeing of the world.

I started writing this novel amidst the throes of hybrid learning during the pandemic, feeling burnt out while trying to juggle going into a school to teach a classroom of a few kids before logging onto a call to teach a few dozen screens I struggled to shepherd from darkness into even the blurriest, patchwork light of faces. It was hard. I missed being around writers. Teaching literature felt, as it sometimes does, like teaching patience in a world where everyone’s house is on fire. And so I told myself I would write for an hour a day, after my wife went to sleep. I’d sit in a chair and I’d write. I didn’t know then that I was tuning myself into a different frequency. That I was giving myself some grace from the warbled staticky forever-chatter of the world. And that, in writing, I was also listening. I didn’t know any of that then. But I learned it. And I grew to value it. There are many secrets to this world. One of them is that some of the greatest joy comes when you remind yourself that you have yourself. Plaything of one. Cross-legged on the floor stacking Lego bricks. Sitting in a small chair and trying to make a world. Smile. You’re not always stuck. It doesn’t always get worse. You can make art.

I knew I would make this line from this poem one of my epigraphs because it was George who reminded me, so often, of the way that writing is always a kind of listening. Funny, too, how one of the first people to teach me this was my friend who is also named George, who never got tired of lobbing poems back and forth with me on porches and in backyards. You do that for long enough, and even the clay pot used as a doorstop, jammed as it was with a thousand cigarette butts, becomes a kind of poetry. And then there was George Kovalenko, and then there were the two of us, before the pandemic, sitting outside Automatic Slim’s, watching people wear their best West Village on their bodies. Sitting inside Spain Bar, eating free potatoes. Sitting in the backyard of a bar strangely called the Greenpoint Lounge although it was staunchly located in Queens, lobbing readings of Philip Levine back and forth to one another. And then there was George saying: you’ve got a minute? I’ve got a new poem. What is a novel if not that? A collection of these moments, gathered and paid attention to, not for plot or for purpose, but for the attention they pay to the world? A slowing-down? An intentionality? A way of saying I’ll try to put that down on paper, that love we had for words in the big, wide world?

Thank you, the novel says, to you, to me, to anyone, for paying enough attention to read.

And so: thank you, you, for paying attention enough to read. For tuning yourself to the strange frequency of me. It’s not lost on me. And that’s, perhaps, the greatest gift of writing. Or tied for the greatest. One gift is the gift the writer gives themselves, the gift of surprise, a language of revelation in a world of certainty, a-ha, I didn’t know, my god, I can’t believe.

And then there is the gift we give each other: the gift of attention. Like how, a month ago, I sat in a French restaurant with my friends Bud, Jimmy, and Michael, and how they invited me to this little gathering they do where they read each other’s work and talk, just talk, about it, and how they asked me to send some of my work, and how I did, and how I sat there with them, leather booth, frites dipped in jus, the restaurant slowly becoming ours, and how, listening to them having read me, I couldn’t believe this was my life. There is so much we are told about writing, I think, as we nurture our dreams to become writers. What it is and what it isn’t and what it could be. And there are so many failures of industries and systems and structures to provide people the opportunity to make art in a world that will always be a world where art should be made. But the greatest tragedy is that such failures deny people the opportunity to experience art in the way I have been lucky to: as friendship, as community, as a couple of people gathered around the same language for a little while, listening to it, reading it out loud, and wondering about it.

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1. Though there is a ceasefire in Gaza, as the Gaza Sunbirds posted, it does not mean that there is peace, and, as Doctors Without Borders stated, it does not mean that help is not needed. Consider donating to Doctors Without Borders here as they continue their work in Gaza. And please consider following and supporting the work of The Sameer Project (link here) and The Gaza Sunbirds (link here) as they provide on the ground support for Palestinians in Gaza.

2. I’ve found the reporting of Jasper Nathaniel to be invaluable over the past months, and now he is going to be reporting from the West Bank for the foreseeable future. Consider reading about this and following and supporting his work here:

Reporting Live from the Occupied West Bank

3. My novel, Pilgrims, has a cover, a release date, and a preorder link. It’ll be out November 18th. You can preorder it here. And the cover is below. For all of this, I am wildly grateful. This novel, which tells a story of monks and brothers and dogs and bread-makers and long roads, feels like a big chunk of myself. And I’d be honored if you read it.

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