print version
download audioMICHAEL MCGRIFF | Levis Remembered
A Reading by Michael McGriff
captured September 25, 2013
Katherine Bassard: Good evening, everybody, it looks like standing room only. What a wonderful, wonderful crowd out tonight. My name is Kathy Bassard, I’m chair of the Department of English, and it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the 2013 Levis Reading Prize celebration. As you know, the Levis Reading Prize is awarded in the name of the late Larry Levis, the distinguished poet and teacher who was a VCU professor until his death in 1996. The award was created to encourage poets early in their careers by recognizing the best first or second book of poetry published each year. Tonight we celebrate this year’s winner, Michael McGriff, and his collection, Home Burial.
Before we begin the festivities, I want to thank the Prize’s sponsors, including: the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU, the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences, and last, but not least, the family of Larry Levis, who are instrumental in seeing that this prize continues. Let’s give all the sponsors a hand.
I would also like to extend a much deserved thanks to this year’s Levis Fellow, MFA student Lena Moses-Schmitt. I want to thank Lena for her tireless efforts in helping coordinate not only this event but the entire prize as well. We had over 150 entries and undoubtedly we will receive even more for next year’s award.
I should note that this year the Prize committee would also like to recognize the outstanding books of the additional finalists, Catherine Barnett for her collection, The Game of Boxes, Traci Brimhall for Our Lady of the Ruins, and Matthew Dickman for Mayakovsky’s Revolver, [and Eduardo C. Corral for Slow Lightning].
Indeed, Michael McGriff, you had some steep competition, but we’re very excited to have you here tonight. So, without further ado, please welcome Gregory Donovan, who is the director of the creative writing program, who will begin this event with a few reminiscences of Larry Levis.
Gregory Donovan: This event is designed not only to honor our prizewinner, but also to memorialize our beloved colleague and friend, Larry Levis. And so it’s my job every year to invoke the spirit of Larry Levis to this occasion.
Husbandry is a word that is rarely used these days, primarily now only in relation to farming and agriculture (if even then), but otherwise it has largely fallen into disuse, or is used only on occasions when someone, perhaps in a poem, wants to marvel over its antique and penny-pinching tone, or wants to sneak in a kind of pun or witty connection to the fact that the word contains within it that other more charged and familiar word, husband. As you probably know, husbandry means “the care, cultivation, and breeding of crops and animals,” or it can also mean “the management and conservation of resources,” and it carries with it the idea of frugality and efficiency, as well as the notion of taking up the responsibility for a household, or especially for a plot of land. Husbandry is something that farmers and ranchers do, and they know a lot about it. They have a relationship with the land they work, and that relationship is definitely something like a marriage.
Larry Levis grew up among the vineyards and orchards of the central valley of California, on the ranch his father owned and where Larry worked as a boy, tilling the ground and picking the fruit that grew up out of it. His father knew a lot about husbandry, and he tried to teach his children about that as well, including his youngest child, his son Lawrence Patrick Levis. Larry worked alongside Mexicans, legal and illegal, men who were fond of him and made fun of him and helped to raise him and to make him the man and poet he ultimately became. Nearby was the small town of Parlier with its small string of shops on its one dusty main street where he would go sometimes when he wasn’t working to hang out and shoot pool, a very small town where there wasn’t much for him to do, and where he found himself on one side of a divide that he despised but could not make disappear, a divide that separated the owners of the land from those who only worked that land and who owned very little. You can still encounter that divide even now if you care to visit the place, although the family-owned farms—and even the families who once owned them—have now begun to disappear from that place as large agribusiness corporations have moved in and bought up all the land to create larger and ever-larger operations that often can be quite irresponsible and destructive and which it seems no regulation can quite control.
Agribusiness is not husbandry. And even the Levis family ranch has now been sold and is rapidly disappearing into that corporate maw.
When I visited the Levis ranch summer before last with my wife, Michele Poulos, who is creating a documentary film about Larry Levis, we saw that the Levis family home is beginning to fall apart, and even the family’s swimming pool has been torn out. That pool was the site of one of the family’s most often-told stories. Its small, concrete oblong had once been filled every summer with what they called freshwater (as opposed to irrigation water)—freshwater which came from a very deep well and which could be shockingly cold. Once, a priest who was visiting them decided to take a dip in the pool and later he was found floating there in the cold water, dead from a heart attack. After Larry’s death, I went to visit his mother and we sat there beside that very pool, quietly reading from Larry’s writing, including the essay about himself he wrote for the Contemporary Authors: Autobiography Series, which contains a section he titled “Laughing in Spanish,” which begins this way:
“That land! It was a kind of paradise preserved, held intact, by the toxic perfume of malathion and sulfur, insecticide sprays, fertilizers, and by the people who worked on it, who were Mexican if they were older, Chicano if younger, who spoke Spanish mostly, and who were underpaid.”
Larry had every reason to think, as he grew up, that his family ranch was, as he wrote in that same essay, “a place that seemed to exist, the fields and vineyards and even the sky over it all, in some motionless and unchanging moment.” Yet the death of his father, and much later of his mother, brought on the possibility of the death of that place, at least as a Levis family place. Not long from now, no doubt, the house in which he grew up will be bulldozed and that specific, hypnotizing and magical entrapment in which he grew up and which he saw as timeless will, in some sense, have finally disappeared—except in his poems. Although Larry’s ashes, like his father’s ashes, are scattered there on the family place among the nectarine and peach trees, agribusiness does not have time to care for such things, or to husband them.
It’s appropriate that I would be talking with you about the importance of place to certain poets and poems, especially this evening, because the poetry of Michael McGriff also characteristically responds to the significance and mythology of place. As McGriff has stated in interviews, he finds meaning in the place where he is from, which in his case is the rural logging town on the Oregon Coast called Coos Bay, a place where, as he has put it, “the people and the landscape seem to be soaked in meaning. I just keep coming back to the same images, the images that haunt me. Charles Simic said somewhere that we all have a set of our own ‘epic images.’” For McGriff, those are the images we find threatened and yet preserved in a poem such as “The Cow” in his book Home Burial. For Larry Levis, the images of the childhood he spent in California on the family ranch had become “epic” in that same sense, and they are central in his book Winter Stars, and they appear in all of his later books as well. Perhaps it is especially true of writers who may have spent much of their childhoods growing up in the quiet and solitary isolation of rural places that a certain kind of intensified philosophical meditation, and a certain source of threatened yet inescapable identity and personal mythology, might be formed during the long hours spent alone in such places. William Wordsworth knew something about that and recalled it in his work The Prelude, which he referred to as "the poem on the growth of my own mind.” Turned inward, a poet may achieve a certain sophistication and depth of speculation in such solitudes. Certainly, I don’t know that I will ever encounter a more sophisticated and bravely speculative mind than that of Larry Levis, who took pride in his rural background.
I do know that one of the things that Larry and I shared in common was having spent many mesmerized, stone-bored hours riding around on a tractor, tilling the ground on a family farm—mine was my grandfather’s farm in rural central Missouri where he raised grain crops and cattle. And when I think of husbandry, I think of my grandfather, and in particular, of one occasion when we were walking back to the house after a day of eating dust and wrestling with cattle, catching them in a chute with a neck yoke so we could spray their eyes with a purple medicine that was supposed to prevent a disease called pinkeye, and as we walked under an old peach tree, my grandfather stopped short, motioning for me to look up into the tree. “See that?” he said. “It’s blossoming way too early. That tree will be dead by next spring.” I would have blindly walked under that tree and made no notice of anything at all, and in that moment I realized that he had a level of awareness of his land that escaped me, and that inside his head was a wealth of knowledge I would never have, knowledge that would die with him when he died. That was the sort of story that Larry and I sometimes would exchange over dinner, a story about the evanescent and always threatened knowledge of place, a story about the death of the family farm and its patriarchs and matriarchs, a story about the insidious current of death and mortality that inescapably runs beneath the idea of all ownership and even all husbandry.
Perhaps now I have provided you with enough information that you will have a better understanding of all that Larry may have been pondering, perhaps prophetically and certainly ominously, in his poem “The Poet at Seventeen,” focusing in particular on all that lurks in the background of his phrasing, especially as when he writes that on weekends he “drove / A tractor through the widowed fields.” I have always noticed that adjective “widowed,” and I’ve admired all that it mysteriously stirred up tonally and mythically, yet among its stirrings may very well be that idea of husbandry, and that the fields were now un-husbanded, perhaps because the poem’s narrator, who seems, of course, to be Larry himself, did not and could not ever truly care for the land the way his father did. Perhaps it’s also a glancing reference to the fact that his mother continued to live on the land and to oversee the work done in its “widowed fields” as a widow herself after Larry’s father died in 1981 (when Larry was still in his thirties and before he had published Winter Stars), a woman who continued to live on the ranch until her own death in 2003. Perhaps also, we see the future prophesied, not only the death of a “life like that” which “seemed to go on forever”—phrasing that of course calls our attention to the fact that it will not go on forever—but also we see foreshadowed in the poem’s ending and the “way they always seemed afraid of something” not only the deaths of the parents but also the unspoken yet ever-present threat to their way of life, and perhaps even the death of the Levis family farm itself. Of course, that threat spreads out from the poem to include all of us in its chilly embrace, all of us who may be deceived that we ever actually own anything, when all of us are merely transient visitors to seemingly unchanging landscapes that nevertheless will themselves one day vanish.
[“The Poet at Seventeen,” Winter Stars, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985]
Thank you. And now, David Wojahn will introduce our speaker.
David Wojahn: Thank you, Greg. Thank you, Kathy. Before I talk to you about Michael McGriff and his powerful collection of poems, Home Burial, I wanted to speak a little bit about the Levis Reading Prize itself and offer some thank-yous—additional thank-yous—to the people who were essential in making this year’s award possible. This is the sixteenth annual Larry Levis Prize reading. Its intention, as you know, is to honor an outstanding first or second book of poetry published in the previous year, and it is also intended to honor the memory of our late colleague here at VCU, Larry Levis, who is by any estimation a major American poet, one whose influence continues, steadily, to grow.
And because this award is given to a published book and each year presses submit upwards of two hundred collections to the competition, and because the majority of those books have already won a first book award, in which as many as 2,000 manuscripts have been submitted to that contest, the competition for this prize is always exceedingly great. So the first people that we need to thank are our MFA students, who, through a very exacting process, screen the books and select the four finalists for the prize. The English Department’s poetry faculty acts as the final judge, so a big shout-out needs to go to my colleagues, Kathy Graber and Greg Donovan, who has done so much to preserve and enrich Larry Levis’s memory—and also to our recent Larry Levis Fellows, both Lena Moses-Schmitt and last year’s fellow, Katelyn Kiley, and also, especially, our graduate coordinator, Thom Didato. They all see that this whole thing runs smoothly.
And the Prize wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the support of the English Department, our chair Kathy Bassard, the support of John Ulmschneider in the University Libraries, the support of the College of Humanities and our dean, Jim Coleman, and finally, the family of Larry Levis, particularly Larry’s sister, Sheila Brady, for their help in funding the prize.
And last but not least, I want to acknowledge the incomparable help of Blackbird editor Mary Flinn, who has carried the torch of the memory of Larry Levis in indispensable ways and who is, as we all know, the heart and soul of Richmond’s literary community.
So now to Michael McGriff, whose Home Burial is a haunted, urgent, and absolutely spellbinding collection from start to finish. You know, almost a hundred years ago now, the word surrealism was coined, and when the surrealist artists and poets began issuing their various manifestos, readers were told that the methodology of surrealism, its fervent belief in dreams and chance and paradox and serendipity and those liminal states between waking and dreaming, would lead people to a state of perfect freedom—to a kind of bliss. Breton defines surrealism as “the road to the absolute.” The point of the movement was to find another world. The trouble is you have to find that other world in this one, and this is a world that cares nothing for perfect freedom and is interested in bliss only if it can be dispensed via a consumer product, ideally an expensive one, whether legal or illegal. So an artistic movement that began as a deeply hopeful, embracing one became instead something different. Surreal is now one of those cant words like Kafkaesque and irony that pervade our vocabulary because they seem to speak not of human potential but of human misery, of the contradictions and injustice that bewilder and enslave us.
I think that one of the tasks Michael McGriff sets for himself in Home Burial is to restore to the method of surrealism some of its original sense of wonderment and mojo. Like his two great mentors, the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer and our own James Wright, McGriff seeks, almost shamanistically, to find that other world in this one, even as he knows this world is, as often as not, a place of violence, hopelessness, and terrible economic injustice. His poems are set in a locale that is all too real: in the mill towns, depleted farmlands, strip malls, and rural poverty of the Pacific Northwest where he grew up. It’s not Starbucks country, but the country evoked by the great Raymond Carver a generation ago and which hasn’t changed a bit in the time since. It’s a sunless place of dead-end jobs, substance abuse, and 911 calls. There are lots of dark nights of the soul in this countryside. In one poem, McGriff writes,
In the first dark hours
of the Year of the Rat.
I’m tuned in to AM 520
and, depending
on how intently I stare
into the black blooms of the sky,
it bounces either
to a high school football game
or to the voices of rage,
of plague and prophecy.
And, almost miraculously, through his skill with metaphor, through his emotional honesty, through his attentiveness to those moments of numinosity that can be revealed even within such times of personal crisis, McGriff is able to drown those terrible voices out, and even to be, as the final poem of his collection suggests, “reborn.” It’s a difficult and vexed rebirth, one where you step out of your body and break into blossom, but it also makes you close Home Burial with a sense of elation that you don’t find in poetry collections these days.
Michael McGriff is the author of another collection of poems, Dismantling the Hills. He has cotranslated the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer’s collection The Sorrow Gondola and edited a selection of the sadly underrated poet, David Wevill. He’s also a founding editor of a wonderful publishing house called Tavern Books, devoted to issuing poetry and translation and printing out-of-print poetry collections. He was born in Coos Bay, Oregon, he has published poems in many significant poetry journals, and he has received grants and awards such as the Stegner Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. It’s a great pleasure tonight to introduce you to Michael McGriff.
Michael McGriff: Thank you so much. I’m gonna be a good citizen of the reading and make sure I don’t go too long. I submitted a—I’m a big MythBusters fan and I wrote facetiously to them, saying, “It’s true that if a poetry reading goes on for more than forty-five minutes, everyone spontaneously combusts—confirm or deny?” And they never emailed me back, you know? It was a great tragedy.
I’m so honored to be here for so many reasons. Thanks to the English Department, to the MFA students, it’s a—it’s a real honor to be . . . this award is so unique in the whole country and, you know, I’m basically just half a generation older than the MFA students, so it’s really my peers who are, people I don’t know, who are reading my book as a total stranger, taking the work on its face value, and saying let’s bring this, let’s bring this guy. And that, that really means a lot to me. You know, you have, I have lots of friends and they say, “Oh, it’s great.” Or my mom thinks I’m a good writer. But this is, it’s especially meaning, and it’s more meaningful I think than, you know— it’s more meaningful than a lot of things, to be recognized by people who are virtually your own age and who see something of value in your work, and then to have that echoed by the faculty here at VCU. And I just think y’all have such a great ecosystem. It’s so obvious that the students are completely happy with the faculty and that the faculty’s completely happy with the students. And we were out, we were out last night, you know, with the beer, and with some, with some grad students. Some DJ music was thumping. And we were talking about Rimbaud, and devotional poetry and, and it was just—the essays of Marilynne Robinson—and we had this amazing conversation, and I could see into the past two or three years of these students and I could see into the conversations that they’ve had with each other and with their faculty, and it seems like an amazing place, so I’m jealous, I’m jealous for you, if I could get another MFA I would come back here. But really, it’s great.
And it’s a special honor for me to be recognized with the Larry Levis Prize—the Reading Prize. Larry Levis is one of my super gods. His book The Dollmaker’s Ghost is a touchstone for me, and two major events in my poetry life happened. One was going to community college and discovering Neruda through a teacher, and the other was being in an undergraduate poetry workshop with Dorianne Laux, who loaned me a crumpled-up copy of the Dutton edition of The Dollmaker’s Ghost,which totally changed my, my life. And I love this thing David St. John says in his afterword of the Selected that “Levis manages to wear his wisdom like a shrug, not like a prophet’s mantle.” And I would, I would swap out the word “wisdom” for “genius.” He’s just a great poet. It’s really meaningful for me. And I didn’t even know I was up for this prize, because my publisher submitted this book. And, you know, I get the email open and there’s an email from David Wojhan, and it just says, “Larry Levis Prize.” And I thought, I wonder how I got on this spam list for VCU, you know, and I’m not even—I’m, I live on the West Coast. Like, you got it, you know, so. It’s really great, and I just can’t thank you all enough for having me here. So, in MythBusters spirit . . . I’m from a small town in the Pacific Northwest, as David mentioned, Coos Bay, it’s about fifteen thousand people there and my family’s been living there since, middle of the nineteenth century, which, on the West Coast, is very old. And we’re, you know, historically all millworkers and diesel mechanics and loggers and fishermen, and I’m gonna open tonight with my poem tonight “Coos Bay,” which will give you a sense for the place.
[“Coos Bay,” Dismantling the Hills, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008.]
I’ll move on into this book that you’ve given the Larry Levis Prize here, Home Burial. It starts out with an epigraph from Jason Molina, who’s one of my, he’s on the list of my other super gods. He’s a young, young musician, he just passed away, he was thirty-nine, he’s an amazing, amazing writer, and not by, he’s a good writer for a songwriter—he’s a great writer. He’s been a great inspiration to my work, and the book starts out with this epigraph: “Here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws.”
[“Kissing Hitler,” Home Burial, Copper Canyon Press, 2012.]
And this next poem is called “Catfish,” and for those of you who’ve done any catfishing, you may well be familiar with the lore and the pseudoscience, if you can even call it that, of what catches a catfish. And when I was growing up, people would say you put WD-40 on night crawlers and, you know, you can’t go wrong. And, so, the truth is you just go out and you just, drink a few beers and put something in there, and they, they eat it. But there’s a whole—these whole mythologies that get passed down from generation to generation. That’s how this poem opens.
[“Catfish,” Home Burial, Copper Canyon Press, 2012.]
This poem is one that David referenced in his introduction, “Year of the Rat,” and one of the graduate students was telling me last night, “My students wanted to know the—the mystical meaning behind ‘Year of the Rat.’” And it’s, well, the poem was written during the Year of the Rat. So, um, sorry.
Audience: Thanks for answering.
MM: You’re so welcome! Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the right answer, it’s ‘D.’
[begins reading]
—Oh, I’m gonna, before I read this poem, there’s this very sad—if you all have seen Friday Night Lights?—they go out and steal that big bundle of copper wire, commercial wire. There’s this very sad sort of process for this and often involves meth addicts where they steal wire or rip it out of a house and they burn all the plastic coating off, which you can imagine takes about half your lifespan away, breathing that stuff. The metaphor for how sad that is can’t be overstated.
[“Year of the Rat,” Home Burial, Copper Canyon Press, 2012.]
I’m gonna read this—I don’t think I’ve ever read this poem before. I mean, I’ve read it because I wrote it, you know, it’s kind of a silly thing to say. But it’s called “Invocation,” and I wanted to read it, I wanted to read this, we were talking, Christian and I were talking last night about the devotional poem, the religious poem, we got on talking about Marilynne Robinson’s great book The Death of Adam, which is about, to simplify it, spirituality in the secular age, or in the fetishes that go along with both sides of that. But this, this poem is called “Invocation,” and I use this in the religious sense. Poem to a higher power, I guess.
[“Invocation,” Home Burial, Copper Canyon Press, 2012.]
I read this poem today called the “The Cow.” I’ll, I’ll read that now. I was—I’m fascinated with this kind of painting I don’t know the name for. So if any of you all are art history majors, it’s a folk—folk American painting, it’s a two-dimensional representation of bucolic life in America. Everyone, the animals in the house are disproportionately engaged on the same field. So please, let me know.
[“The Cow,” Home Burial, Copper Canyon Press, 2012.]
And, I would like to read a couple poems from, a couple new poems, and also some poems from this book called Our Secret Life in the Movies, which I’ll give you the ten-second summary of this book if I can. My coauthor, Josh Tyree, who’s here tonight, drove down from Washington DC, so thanks Josh, for showing up, bringing your mom—it’s great to have another mom to tell me I’m a good writer in the audience. And the rumor is that she likes this book quite a bit, so I’m quite, quite pleased. But it’s called Our Secret Life in the Movies. Josh and I watched forty-three cinema classics, cult and cinema classics, and we each wrote an autobiographical sketch based on these movies, so the book is paired sketches, forty-three of them. Starts with World War II, ends with 9/11. And the bulk of the book is, sort of the Thatcher/Reagan, trickle-down mayhem of growing up poor in the 1980s in rural America. So these are a few sketches from that and I’ll just read my, my half of the prepared pieces. So, Josh, here you go.
[“Department of Propoganda,” Michael McGriff, unpublished 2012.]
[“Lottery,” Michael McGriff. Originally published as “Winter Lottery,” The Rumpus. 23, March 2012.]
[“Thin Air,” Michael McGriff, unpublished 2012.]
[“God of Childhood,” Michael McGriff, unpublished 2012.]
So this book goes sort of like that, after all these movies. We end the book with the sketches of Andrei Tarkovsky, who was under the Soviet thumb, so it kind of ebbs toward this Red Scare in America. That’s the idea, anyway. And I’d like to read a few new poems and we’ll close this out with maybe a Tranströmer translation. And a poem by David Wevill. These are some new poems, I’ve been under the intoxicating spell of the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos, who’s on my list of super gods with Larry Levis and others. And Yannis Ritsos is an incredible poet, he’s written thousands of pages of poetry. He wrote, I think, nearly seventy books in fifteen years or something when he was imprisoned in Greece. But I’m particularly drawn to his short poems. So I’ve been writing these sort of in, in the, I don’t know. You know, he’s just, he’s just telling me what to do. And, so I’m trying to listen.
[“Flat Light,” Michael McGriff, unpublished 2012.]
[“Inventory,” Michael McGriff, unpublished 2012.]
I have great mentors, Joseph Millar and Dorianne Laux, and they’re always saying if anything good happens to you in the poetry world, you gotta, you gotta write a poem. So when I got this, the email from David, I wrote this poem. And then I called, I called Joe Millar because he said, “Did you write a poem?” And I did. So I was accountable to the rules here. Near Dingle Creek—this is in Oregon, in the south eastern corner—is the Steens Mountains. And the Steens Mountains are the only place in America that’s more than a hundred miles away from a Walmart, a Starbucks, and a McDonald’s. It’s the only place, the only place in America that fits that parameter. So I use that, use the word parameter to kind of echo this place.
[“Near Dingle Creek,” Michael McGriff, unpublished 2012.]
In 2008, when the bottom fell out of the universe, the last remnant of industry in my hometown was the rail yard, and the rail service stopped running, which you can imagine is the main way to get lumber out of, out of, it doesn’t go by port, out, out of town, so it was a major devastation. And this poem was called “New Year.”
[“New Year,” Michael McGriff, unpublished 2012.]
[“Opening Gambit,” Michael McGriff. Published in Poem-A-Day. 15, March 2013.]
I think I’m gonna, I’m gonna skip the David Wevill poem and just read you one more, but I do want to mention David Wevill. I’ve done this book of his essential poetry translations and short fiction. And David Wevill is an amazing poet who suffered from a few things. One, he’s not a self-promoter. Two, he’s never lived in a country where his books have been published. He was a Canadian born in Japan before World War II. As the war broke out, he fled back to Canada, went to high school in Canada for a bit, went to Cambridge in the UK, published some, you know, four, critically acclaimed books, two books in the Penguin Modern series, then went to Austin, Texas, in ’69, which was an outpost, and his books then were published in Canada, as he lived in Austin. Very private man, and I think a genius in his own right. So I would encourage you to investigate his poems. David Wevill. A fine poet.
I’ll finish tonight by reading this poem “Sleeping Beside White River.” And again, I’d just like to say thanks for having me here, and what an honor it is to have my name, you know, resting beside Larry Levis’s for a short while. It really means a lot to me. This poem “Sleeping Beside White River”—Mount Hood Oregon is a glacial mountain in Oregon. And the White River is on the east side, and the water is a milky—it’s milky. It’s so strange, and if you’ve been to a glacier, anywhere where there’s glaciers, it’s like milky blue, but it’s especially milky, and it’s so cold and so clean. And I wrote this poem about it, called “Sleeping Beside White River.”
[“Sleeping Beside White River,” Michael McGriff, unpublished 2012.] 