The Synesthesiac Arts and Letters With Ashley Gamell and Maddie Oatman

Author: Ashley Gamell and Maddie Oatman

syn∑es∑the∑sia from the Greek (syn-) union, and (aesthesis) sensation; is the neurological mixing of the senses. A synesthete may, for example, hear colors, see sounds - and taste tactile sensations.


Volume 1: Best of Bread Loaf

Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, infamously known as "bedloaf" and even parodied on "The Simpsons" as a hub for self-congratulating authors, actually featured some of the country's most exciting writers this August. Poets Sally Ball and Ilya Kaminsky were two of the conference's standouts. Annus Mirabilis and Dancing in Odessa are both debut books that foretell outstanding careers to come and attest to Bread Loaf's knack for drawing together promising contemporary authors. Stay tuned for next week's fiction edition.


Annus Mirabilis, by Sally Ball
Review by Maddie Oatman

You'd be hard-pressed to meet a woman more graceful than Sally Ball. An eloquent speaker and thoughtful teacher, she crafts her sentences on the spur of the moment as seamlessly as someone who has rehearsed a speech for days. So it's no surprise that she executes her poems with even more grace. In exploring aspects of science and math in her new book Annus Mirabilis, Ball delves into the collision of knowledge and human experience. In the poem "Notebook," for example, she intertwines descriptions of nature - "The cracked sea floor / litters its horde of bones and scales / in the wind" - with a reminder of the human experience in the natural environment, "The ocean has turned/ to dust and passes over us."

Often poems turn to Newton, mathematical formulas, and physics, but far from being dry or convoluted, they manage to resonate emotionally and intellectually with readers who are unfamiliar with scientific theories. Ball inquires about the world we use to explain ourselves and our condition. She also meditates on the gaps between these explanations. How does one describe love, loss, depression and art? Just as she writes in her poem "Slope," "Knowledge like oxygen unremarkable / until it's threatened," knowing may be the most pressing and necessary human goal.

One of the book's few flaws is its ambitious inclusion of so many histories, theories and facts, which proves distracting at times, as if there are far too many scraps of knowledge to try to condense into a small collection of poetry. But this fact alone serves as a tribute to Annus Mirabilis's driving theme - that we have so much to learn, relearn and unlearn during our time on Earth. The way Ball mixes science with human caprice and reason with irrationality makes her poems essential for the contemporary intellect - if her scope is unreasonable, maybe it is justified by the vast quantities of information we are made to process day after day.


Dancing in Odessa, by Ilya Kaminsky
Review by Ashley Anne Gamell

Ilya Kaminsky, a poet prodigy at thirty, is almost wholly deaf and is further impeded by a thick Russian accent. This only partly accounts for his being on an entirely different plane than other authors at Bread Loaf. He is a strikingly large, baby-faced and relentlessly humble man who is destined to become an international giant of a poet. The otherworldly Kaminsky read from his 2004 book, Dancing in Odessa, as though it were a religious text, davening wildly and crying out desperately in an unintelligible falsetto. It was enough to convince an audience of atheist New Yorkers that God was listening.

Kaminsky, who immigrated to America in 1993, writes in English, his language general and sensuous, as though translated from a Romance language. Dancing in Odessa is a book of simple, often biblical nouns - women, grapefruit, hats and coats. Kaminsky's subject is equally fundamental - he falls into the lineage of great authors who write about hope during civilization's medieval moments of "obscenity, fright and mud." Kaminsky haunts his hometown of Odessa like a rabbi in a ghetto, blessing daily life amidst depravity. In the poem "Maestro," a child caught in a school bombing whispers, "I don't want to die, I have eaten such apples." His sentences are regularly astonishing, though he relies too heavily on his talent for matter-of-factly extending a situation into the surreal. "Once or twice in his life," he writes, "a man is peeled like apples." He is at his best when he lovingly anoints his characters with personal details: "Nadezhda, her Yes and No are difficult / to tell apart."

Kaminsky wants to portray a voyage - he points to his homelessness as an immigrant and calls upon The Odyssey (Odessa's namesake). However, the book spins like a top around a fixed point more than it travels. The very local, sometimes repetitive scope of the poems seems limiting at times. But, in the end, Kaminsky has created something more expansive than a voyage. With simple tools and with great compassion, he has made a prayer for the living.