Syracuse Lit Mag Delves into Sound, Silence, Symphony
“Usually, I fear sentimentality—the American religion is doubt, so whoever believes the least wins. But sentimentality is just emotion you haven’t marshaled evidence for. And how I feel doesn’t mean squat. It’s how the reader feels that matters.”
In an interview with George Saunders and Mary Karr in Salt Hill #32, this is Karr’s response to the question of what challenges she faces when trying to bring compassion into her work. This answer reflects the tone and contents of Salt Hill #32.
Sound is the predominate theme in this issue. In the letter from the editors, Ashley Luchinski and Erin J. Mullikin state, “Language is the music of our voices. Words are combined, phrases are born, and rhythms arise from that movement. The works featured in the 32nd issue of Salt Hill are symphonies; they are compositions speak to us through their percussive hum.” Indeed.
From start to finish the language presented in issue 32 is rich in sound. Bruce Bond’s poem “X” kicks off the issue with a mesmerizing flow, “Any wasteland will tell you, fire devours / fire to thrive." RJ Ingram’s poem “Pontius Becomes the Left” closes the issue with rhythmic word choice and impressionable imagery: “Cry myself into a mess of sparrows." And what’s in between are essays, stories, poems and artwork that all—whether through example or content—interact with sound.
Bond directly discusses sound as he pontificates how events and emotions unfurl when one is not being heard. “When a tree falls in the forest and no one / there seems to listen, it makes the sound / of no one, lays its head against its shadow / and hears the next tree fall, and on it goes."
Other pieces don’t directly address sound, but instead use language to create a profound melodic experience. Josh Bell’s prose in “The Record” is an example of this: “I will run for President on the platform of your bodies.”
At times, the concept of sound in issue #32 is approached through silence. In his poem “Year Eight,” John McKernan writes, “I spent afternoons mouthing off at a / distance // Those five older neighbor kids did not / say a single word // As they grabbed me wrapping my arms / & legs with plastic clothesline // Then dropped me in a corner drainage / ditch.”
An interesting moment in the issue occurs with the full bleed artwork. Prior to the art, readers have encountered sound addressed through both an exploration of and at times a lack of language. In Martin Klimas’s photographs, though, sound is explored through images of explosions. Klimas is “concerned with finding out what music looks like” and captures the image of colors exploding off of synthesizers. For this project, he asked musicians to create a short sound sequence, then placed a variety of liquid colors on the synthesizers and then he “puts up the volume and lets the colors explode.” The fascinating aspect of this juncture in the journal is this: here is sound literally making an explosion, yet that explosion is recorded in image and thus is a silent explosion. Klimas’s photographs are arguably the loudest pieces in Salt Hill #32, and yet they are experienced silently.
In relation to Karr’s statement that it is how the reader feels that matters, the tone of the journal evokes an emotional response from the reader as each piece has an intense, urgent, and austere tone. For example, Jenny Xie presents the reader not just with the concept of how nature and noise interact to create a soundtrack for each day, but the stark sound of her piece, the language she uses in order to understand the relationship between nature and human is what makes the biggest impact in her piece. “In front of our eyes, the wind whipped its subjects forth in tune with some strange choreography. You could walk into a name for yourself.”
Another example comes from John Colasacco’s story “The Man Asking the Questions.” The choppy pace of the piece emphasizes the strangeness of his story: two men trapped in an attic by children who occasionally check in on them. “Two men in an attic. Sickening. Each wearing the same brown hat. As if possessed….[one] goes silent again, and does not explain further; he just stares off….Downstairs…the children roar.” What Colasacco is doing here is pacing his language—the sound and rhythm of sentences—in order to further create the peculiarity of his piece.
Also in the interview with George Saunders and Mary Karr, the interviewer asks if the impulse to be funny is ever too seductive. Saunders responds that it is always too seductive. “But that just means you have to be a little skeptical of it—make sure you are using it, rather than the other way around.”
There is not one piece in this issue that strives to be humorous, and that is a good thing. Because the topics discussed in this issue are deeply serious ones. Dinah Cox writes, “What’s worst is the tornado’s near miss, the broken glass all over the greasy floor, the children crying, the dead chickens in the freezer, and the people who want nothing more than to eat them” and Corey Zeller says, “There’s a rainbow dragging from my mouth. It is getting mangy and threadbare. It drags on the floor. It gets caught on nails. It unravels and curls.” These are just two examples of how the serious subject matter. A humor piece, therefore, would have whacked stark ambiance of the issue out of balance. In fact, issue 32 is amazing because it resists humor, because it resists entertaining the reader, and, instead, concentrates on the urgency of each story needing to be told. Whether discussing feeling disembodied when in public, the multiple ways in which the feel of sex can burst inside of one, a mother with a mental illness, getting a look inside of a human body, or the ghost left behind when money is spent, the variety and creativity of the topics addressed in this journal keep the reader engaged.
Along with this, vibrant imagery is another prevalent aspect of Salt Hill 32. From Jane Wong stating “there is a swan bathing in my mouth,” to Corey Zeller writing “at the bar, I met a vein the size of a human,” the metaphors and imagery draws the reader into the topics, nudges her to think about embodiment and the meanings of the amount of space our bodies take up.
Salt Hill #32 takes itself seriously, as it should. The literary journal of the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University, Salt Hill has an impressive list of admired and well-established authors that have graced its pages such as Steve Almond, Ander Monson, Dean Young, Terrance Hayes and Patricia Smith. That said, Salt Hill is also welcoming of emerging writers and artists. Just looking at the contributors’ bios in issue 32 proves this point. While some of the bios are drenched in publishing credits, there are quite a few one-liner bios that consist of very few publishing credits, if any.
Overall, while a predominately stark sound composing this latest issue of Salt Hill resonates throughout each work, there are no essays that feel the same, no repetition in theme or topic. And, as Christopher Klingbeil writes in “from black box series of analyses,” everyone “has a surrealist poem/prose block of text trailing their wake of hurried steps.”
Upon experiencing Salt Hill 32, the reader will be thankful that the writers within its pages not only recognized those poems and blocks of prose trailing behind them, but that they sat down to write it all out. Each piece is, as promised by the editors, a symphony of its own.
