↧
A short interview with N.W. Lea
↧
Sarah Mangold, Electrical Theories of Femininity
The Machine Has Not Destroyed the Promise
Around 1800, the costumed nightmare on the sofa. Dead brides
and mountaineers. For me they are grammatical. Frontier cleaners.
A circle of tickets this freckled body. But I should be untrue to
science loitering among its wayside flowers. Pulled out and shut
up like a telescope. Let us try to tell a story devoid of alphabetic
redundancies. Immortality in technical positivity. If motion
caused a disagreement of any kind we are regarding the same
universe but have arranged it in different spaces. That is to be
the understanding between us. Shall we set forth?
I’ve long been an admirer of the work of Washington State poet Sarah Mangold, so am thrilled to finally see the publication of her second trade collection, Electrical Theories of Femininity (San Francisco CA: Black Radish Books, 2015). The author of a handful of chapbooks (including works self-published as well as works produced by Little Red Leaves, above/ground press, dusie, Potes & Poets Press and g o n g), her first book, Household Mechanics, was published in 2002 as part of the New Issues Poetry Prize, as selected by C. D. Wright. Electrical Theories of Femininity, much of which saw print in earlier chapbook publications, is constructed as an extended suite of short poems and prose-poems writing “the history of media archeology” to explore the place where human and machine meet. In an interview posted in issue #6 of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics, she describes the collection as one that “contains three recent chapbooks, plus the shorter poems written around the same time as the longer sequences. There is a bit of connecting sections and selecting what fits and doesn’t fit to make a ‘book.’” She later writes that “For Electrical Theories of Femininity I had three chapbooks to incorporate plus individual poems which led to more movement and structural overhauls compared to the one long poem and several shorter poems in Household Mechanics.”
In poems such as “How Information Lost Its Body,” “Electrical Theories of Femininity,” “Every Man a Signal Tower” and “The First Thing the Typewriter Did Was Provide Evidence of Itself,” Mangold explores how systems are constructed, manipulated and broken down, even as she manages, through collage and accumulation, to move in a number of concurrent directions. Through the collection, the “Feminism” she writes about articulates itself as a series of conflicts, observations and electrical impulses, such as in the opening of “An equally deedy female”: “She gathered up the scattered sheets / a non-geometrical attempt to supply information // about what was far and what was important / bringing it down into life [.]” Throughout the collection, Mangold’s language sparks and flies, collides and flows in poems that fragment the lyric into impossible shapes.
Setting the Landscape in Motion
As soon as the incoming stream of sounds
gives the slightest indication
consider the real act of moving
when we figure time as a line or circle
when mechanical gesture takes the place
when automatic operations are inserted
into the automatic world
vowels are uninterrupted streams of energy
and thought is a movement
from acoustic signal to the combination
of muscular acts
saints and pilgrims
sewing machines and machine guns
made their appearance
This is as much an exploration of perspective, authority and various forms of both real and imagined power, composing her mix of fact, language, theory and obvious delight in regards to sound, shape, meaning and collage. As she writes in “I expected pioneers”: “What people forget about the avant- / garde forwards and backwards. The Pre-Raphaelites wanted / to bring the background forward. The tyranny of perspective / they wanted all views at once [.]” Further on in the collection, she opens the short prose-poem “Mothers Must Always Prove Their Readiness” with this dark bit of information: “Most missing girls are dead girls.” Mangold’s poems might be filled with an unbearable lightness and sense of serious play, yet remain fully aware of, and critique, what women are still forced to endure.
Custodians of a Fractious Country
They are depicted with great scientific suit sleeves
A single faculty, dandelion, don’t get him started
She’s on pasting chunks of text, sewing collars from the wool of country life
Repeated tones: white bread letters accent
philosophical hedgehogs
But for Spencer evolution was going somewhere
His requests to see the surface tailored but unobtrusive opened my jaws rubbed my neck
Riots erupt
The improbably handsome
A welcomed guest
Insincerity in a culture brings to mind the most mysterious numbers
Three volumes of German-language units to say: (blanche your beans, then ice them)
Her parcels supplement mules with shows of sincerity still in combat
He saw American movies fell for them
You nervous this one is dancing Be a woman
You’re not striving to think of Darwin but he’s thrown in
My stomach was pages and gaiety
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the ottawa small press fair, spring 2015 edition: june 13
the ottawa
small press
book fair
spring 2015 edition
will be happening Saturday, June 13, 2014 in room 203 of the Jack Purcell Community Centre (on Elgin, at 320 Jack Purcell Lane).
contact rob at rob_mclennan@hotmail.com to sign up for a table, etc.
"once upon a time, way way back in October 1994, rob mclennan and James Spyker invented a two-day event called the ottawa small press book fair, and held the first one at the National Archives of Canada..." Spyker moved to Toronto soon after our original event, but the fair continues, thanks in part to the help of generous volunteers, various writers and publishers, and the public for coming out to participate with alla their love and their dollars.
General info:
the ottawa small press book fair
noon to 5pm (opens at 11:00 for exhibitors)
admission free to the public.
$20 for exhibitors, full tables
$10 for half-tables
(payable to rob mclennan, c/o 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9;
send by June 1 if you would like to appear in the exhibitor catalogue.
note: for the sake of increased demand, we are now offering half tables. for catalog, exhibitors should send name of press, address, email, web address, contact person, type of publications, list of publications (with price), if submissions are being considered and any other pertinent info, including upcoming ottawa-area events (if any).
And don't forget the pre-fair reading usually held the night before, at The Carleton Tavern! (readers tba); also,
BE AWARE: given that the spring 2013 was the first to reach capacity (forcing me to say no to at least half a dozen exhibitors), the fair can't (unfortunately) fit everyone who wishes to participate. the fair is roughly first-come, first-served, but preference will be given to small publishers over self-published authors (being a "small press fair," after all).
the fair usually contains exhibitors with poetry books, novels, cookbooks, posters, t-shirts, graphic novels, comic books, magazines, scraps of paper, gum-ball machines with poems, 2x4s with text, etc, including (at previous events) Bywords, Dusty Owl, Chaudiere Books, above/ground press, Room 302 Books, The Puritan, The Ottawa Arts Review, Buschek Books, The Grunge Papers, Broken Jaw Press, BookThug, Proper Tales Press, Phafours Press, and others. happens twice a year, founded in 1994 by rob mclennan and James Spyker. now run by rob mclennan thru span-o. questions, rob_mclennan@hotmail.com
free things can be mailed for fair distribution to the same address. we are unable to sell things for folk who can't make it, sorry. also, always looking for volunteers to poster, move tables, that sort of thing. let me know if anyone able to do anything. thanks. for more information, bother rob mclennan.if you're able/willing to distribute posters/fliers for the fair, send me an email.
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rob mclennan and Christine McNair interviewed by Jen Tynes, Horse Less Press
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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Barbara Henning
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book was Smoking in the Twilight Bar. I wrote these poems when I was living in Detroit in the late 70’s, early 80’s. Lewis Warsh published the collection as a United Artist book. A first book is important because it is first, and this book helped set me on my path of writing. I started writing these poems because I had visions of my past as ghostly, almost as if past events were ongoing in the present. I could walk into a room and experience my past self as a shadow. I wrote many of the poems about moments and places where that feeling was strong. Others were about the Cass Corridor in Detroit and a group of on-the-fringe friends. “The Twilight Bar” was a neon sign inside a club (Alvin’s Finer), a place where we used to hang out, dance, read poetry and commune. The sign came from another more local bar that had closed long ago. That more local place was what I had in mind for the poems. The poems were narrative and somewhat surreal in overall effect. When composing these poems I went back and forth between lined verse and prose poetry, ending finally with prose.
My new book is A Day Like Today (Negative Capability Press 2015). These are lined poems and they were composed initially as journal entries in 2012, responding and arising from events in my life and world/national events. There was a particular procedure used for researching and collaging text from The New York Times into the poems. These two projects, my first book and my last book, are very different and yet both used events from my life, as part of the process.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I grew up in a household where I never witnessed my parents reading anything other than the local newspaper. My father had a GED and my mother was the only one of nine to graduate from high school. But there were a few books in the house and my mother took my brother and me to the library every week; I developed a relationship with books and words. As an adolescent, I was a voracious reader of 19th century novels. For some reason, even though as a child I read mostly fiction, I first became a poet. Maybe it was something as simple as praise by a teacher in high school. I loved the way words could evoke and transform mood, and I always loved Emily Dickinson’s quirky poems.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I invent projects pretty quickly, but sometimes they are elaborate and last for a long time. This last project for A DAY LIKE TODAY took three years to complete. I constantly revise and tinker and invent ways to interrupt and question my own facile thinking.
4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Often I begin projects in journals that culminate into a series of poems. Sometimes there are ten poems. Sometimes the work becomes a novel. Sometimes a collection of 100 poems (A Day Like Today).
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love giving readings. They inspire me to write and revise.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
At one point in my career as a poet I was very interested in Jacque Lacan, Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva. Why was I reading them? I felt there was some secret that they knew about life and language. Of course, I am writing to understand my life/our lives, see more clearly or less clearly or just differently. My writing is experiential and my reading is part of my experience, so ideas and categories and the language of others segue into mine. I was very taken at another time with writing by Mikhail Bahktin; I suppose that over the years, I have become more dialogic, sometimes allowing the many voices of consciousness to speak together. Also, I’m always hoping to learn something new about myself and the world I live in, through my poetic projects.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Various roles. I don’t have a “should” about this. Maybe a slogan: “Do no harm.”
Maybe another slogan: “Be wise. Be wary. Be wild.”
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I share my work with a couple of friends, but usually after the work is very close to being completed. Is that essential? No, but it can be helpful.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Once when I was in an art colony for the summer, a visual artist friend, Georgia Marsh, and I made a pact. We weren’t going to worry about our careers. Instead, we were simply going to live as long as we could and keep making our art.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I have written several collections of poetry and three novels; now I am working on another novel. It has seemed natural to go from one to the other. I like story and I like language. Sometimes the material I am gathering starts to look like story and then it becomes a novel. Other times, a poem. In the novel Thirty Miles to Rosebud, I took earlier poems, rewrote them as prose, and then worked them into the story.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I work whenever I have time, intermittently everyday. Usually when I am revising a work, I am also writing a new journal to work with later. I tend to do a lot of my writing work in the evening.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
My writing only gets stalled if I don’t have enough time because I have to teach too much and my rent is too high. There are unlimited possibilities for writing. Someone asked me last week how I can be so productive. My answer was, I spend a lot of time alone.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smell of cigarette smoke. I grew up with two parents smoking Pall Mall cigarettes. That smell permeated everything. Probably the reason I now see a pulmonologist. Well, also the smell of Old Spice in the bathroom after my father went to work.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I have been practicing yoga for about 20 some years. Over the years, I’ve also learned to also consider writing as another type of meditative practice, something I do to understand, express and create my life, and therefore, not dependent on “inspiration.” There is a kind of clarity of vision that also comes from meditating and practicing asana. That also influences my writing. Everything in my environment (including nature, music, science, visual art, books) becomes part of my consciousness and thus part of my writing.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
It’s been quite wonderful to have communed and collaborated with so many poets and artists: Lewis Warsh has been very important in my life and work, as inspiration and a dear friend. My visual artist friend and collaborator, Miranda Maher, the poets at St. Marks Poetry Project, the Belladonna women, my friends from POG in Tucson where I lived for four years, and so many others. I’m very thankful for the writers on my shelf, on the sidewalk and in my address book. It’s also great to have the internet and the minute-by-minute research possibilities.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Finish the novel I’m now writing. Open my writerly shoulders into urdva dhanurasana. Live into the future for as long as I can, as gracefully as possible with my lover, children, grandchildren and friends.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Maybe a musician. I play the harmonica a little bit and I wish I could belt something out, but as of now, all I can play is “Summertime,” and even then I’m out of tune.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I have a mind that’s always working. My youthful mind needed to find a language art form so I could slow it down, figure it out and revel in the nuances between the phrases and words.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Elena Ferrante is quickly becoming one of my favorite novelists, especially her Neapolitan Series (3 books), starting with My Brilliant Friend. The narrator tells the story of her life, growing up in Naples, with her best friend, how they try to make sense of the violent oppressive life around them, the narrator managing to slip away (somewhat) with education, while her friend becomes tangled in her childhood. The world gets wider and wider as the narrator becomes more aware. It’s a gripping story of a girl/woman adapting to and banging against her feminine identity and location.
The other contemporary author who I adore is Roberto Bolano.
Films – a month ago I saw Whiplash written and directed by Damien Chazelle. It was horrifying and beautiful. One of the other films that stays in my mind from the last few years is Melancholia by Lars von Trier. I can still see that planet spinning toward earth.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
↧
↧
A short interview with N.W. Lea
↧
Sarah Mangold, Electrical Theories of Femininity
The Machine Has Not Destroyed the Promise
Around 1800, the costumed nightmare on the sofa. Dead brides
and mountaineers. For me they are grammatical. Frontier cleaners.
A circle of tickets this freckled body. But I should be untrue to
science loitering among its wayside flowers. Pulled out and shut
up like a telescope. Let us try to tell a story devoid of alphabetic
redundancies. Immortality in technical positivity. If motion
caused a disagreement of any kind we are regarding the same
universe but have arranged it in different spaces. That is to be
the understanding between us. Shall we set forth?
I’ve long been an admirer of the work of Washington State poet Sarah Mangold, so am thrilled to finally see the publication of her second trade collection, Electrical Theories of Femininity (San Francisco CA: Black Radish Books, 2015). The author of a handful of chapbooks (including works self-published as well as works produced by Little Red Leaves, above/ground press, dusie, Potes & Poets Press and g o n g), her first book, Household Mechanics, was published in 2002 as part of the New Issues Poetry Prize, as selected by C. D. Wright. Electrical Theories of Femininity, much of which saw print in earlier chapbook publications, is constructed as an extended suite of short poems and prose-poems writing “the history of media archeology” to explore the place where human and machine meet. In an interview posted in issue #6 of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics, she describes the collection as one that “contains three recent chapbooks, plus the shorter poems written around the same time as the longer sequences. There is a bit of connecting sections and selecting what fits and doesn’t fit to make a ‘book.’” She later writes that “For Electrical Theories of Femininity I had three chapbooks to incorporate plus individual poems which led to more movement and structural overhauls compared to the one long poem and several shorter poems in Household Mechanics.”
In poems such as “How Information Lost Its Body,” “Electrical Theories of Femininity,” “Every Man a Signal Tower” and “The First Thing the Typewriter Did Was Provide Evidence of Itself,” Mangold explores how systems are constructed, manipulated and broken down, even as she manages, through collage and accumulation, to move in a number of concurrent directions. Through the collection, the “Feminism” she writes about articulates itself as a series of conflicts, observations and electrical impulses, such as in the opening of “An equally deedy female”: “She gathered up the scattered sheets / a non-geometrical attempt to supply information // about what was far and what was important / bringing it down into life [.]” Throughout the collection, Mangold’s language sparks and flies, collides and flows in poems that fragment the lyric into impossible shapes.
Setting the Landscape in Motion
As soon as the incoming stream of sounds
gives the slightest indication
consider the real act of moving
when we figure time as a line or circle
when mechanical gesture takes the place
when automatic operations are inserted
into the automatic world
vowels are uninterrupted streams of energy
and thought is a movement
from acoustic signal to the combination
of muscular acts
saints and pilgrims
sewing machines and machine guns
made their appearance
This is as much an exploration of perspective, authority and various forms of both real and imagined power, composing her mix of fact, language, theory and obvious delight in regards to sound, shape, meaning and collage. As she writes in “I expected pioneers”: “What people forget about the avant- / garde forwards and backwards. The Pre-Raphaelites wanted / to bring the background forward. The tyranny of perspective / they wanted all views at once [.]” Further on in the collection, she opens the short prose-poem “Mothers Must Always Prove Their Readiness” with this dark bit of information: “Most missing girls are dead girls.” Mangold’s poems might be filled with an unbearable lightness and sense of serious play, yet remain fully aware of, and critique, what women are still forced to endure.
Custodians of a Fractious Country
They are depicted with great scientific suit sleeves
A single faculty, dandelion, don’t get him started
She’s on pasting chunks of text, sewing collars from the wool of country life
Repeated tones: white bread letters accent
philosophical hedgehogs
But for Spencer evolution was going somewhere
His requests to see the surface tailored but unobtrusive opened my jaws rubbed my neck
Riots erupt
The improbably handsome
A welcomed guest
Insincerity in a culture brings to mind the most mysterious numbers
Three volumes of German-language units to say: (blanche your beans, then ice them)
Her parcels supplement mules with shows of sincerity still in combat
He saw American movies fell for them
You nervous this one is dancing Be a woman
You’re not striving to think of Darwin but he’s thrown in
My stomach was pages and gaiety
↧
Liz Howard, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent
Standard Time
Reality appears within itself:
a bunny turns to expose a growth
irregular as an asteroid with a faint pulse
Exiting a space formerly occupied
by her right eye, there are sciences
that claim to be natural though nothing is
A false creek of straightened hair
where Galapagos is a seismic multitude
keeping time outside of traffic
Getting ready for the world atomic tour
28 neutrinos from beyond the solar system
in an ice cube a mile under the South Pole
Let the RICO of heaven come clean
the mind’s eye an antique stethoscope
constantly blindsided
Fifth station of the cross, the backyard
stricken thermometers of botany
cattails and long grasses gone yellow
Either by diesel or the particular season
we find ourselves in a sonar encampment
of suffragette terns so delicate and forgetting
What little there is beyond impermanence
conspires with a half a mind on the original
to sew us closed
Toronto poet and AvantGarden Reading Series co-host/organizer Liz Howard’s long-awaited first poetry collection is Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2015), a “wild, scintillating debut” that includes her bpNichol Chapbook Award-shortlisted Skullambient(Toronto ON: Ferno House, 2011). Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent is a collection of powerful and deeply personal lyrics composed out of a richly textured language, one that revels in sound and collision, comparable to the work of her mentor, Toronto poet Margaret Christakos. Pulsing and gymnastic, her poems work to examine and articulate a variety of cultural collisions—including gender, aboriginal culture and environmental concerns—much of which is set in and centred around her home country of Northern Ontario: “Spent shale, thigh haptic fisher, roe, river / delta of sleep-induced peptides abet our tent / in a deep time course, in Venus retrograde // we coalesced into the Cartesian floral pattern / of heritage where I hunt along a creek as / you pack bits of bone away within a system” (“Terra Nova, Terraformed”). The poems hum and thrum and sing, resonating against a backdrop of refusal, decay, stone and totems, Canadian Shield, thieves and “a system of rivers.” “[T]he account of a body in trouble could be / so beautiful,” she writes, in the poem “Epilogue.”
Every Human Heart is Human
Ministry of the shaking dress
I could call this
a streamlet a better
coordinate, simply
lamprey
in the trafficking
style no matter
any purple sky
or blue vapour
render pine
became women
working the real
number is even
higher
when I was
out already
cunting in the fields for that fallow
had escaped me
in some marsh
of insufficient housing
laughin
all the time Christ thought me
a fossil
I, Minnehaha, a small LOL
fiction antecedent
to quarry a nation
I gave you this name then said
Erase it
Structured in four sections—“Hyberboreal,” “Of Hereafter Song,” “Skullambient” and “Hyperboreal”—the poems speak of Anishnaabe culture, western philosophers, and the desecration of nature. As she writes in the poem “Foramen Magnum”: “what else is a river but the promise of a text [.]” She describes the collection in a recent interview over at Jacket2:
Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent is a text that has taken the entirety of one meagre lifetime to write, what book hasn’t? It is an extensive rewriting of the thesis that awarded me the tenuous title of Master and an edited revisitation of earlier work. It is a book, a unit, although it appears to be composed of individual poems, evidenced by unique titles, I intend for it to be experienced as a cohesive work. There is generous crosstalk between “poems,” recombination, ideas/words/phrases coming back from the death bed of prior reading. This is intended to highlight the phenomenological aspect of reading; it is so multiple. Delicately, the reader has an exquisite charge to answer: what is the nature of this cross-contamination? Here, this here where all are invited, contains the urban, the boreal forest, Descartes, Wittgenstein, Plath, Stein, Keats, Anishnaabe cosmology, lumberjacks, punk rock, autobiography, the tension between unintelligiblity and TMI, poverty and science. It’s a party, a séance, a powwow, a wake. It is the most earnest and joyful thing I have ever done.
Her poems are rage and force and declaration, and even reclamation, pushing back against the breakdowns of family, culture, ecology and the individual, written out of a fierce optimism and refusal to back down. As she includes in her “Notes” at the end of the collection:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellows 1855 epic The Song of Hiawathaappropriated and confused Anishinaabe history and mythology and inserted/naturalized a colonial presence within Anishinaabe cosmology. It is a textual assimilation of Indigenous rhythmic oration into a bombastic trochaic tetrameter, itself borrowed from the Finnish national epic Kalevala. Minnehaha, a creation of Longfellow, was the spouse of Hiawatha, whose death set the stage for the reception of settler influence later in the poem. “OF HEREAFTER SONG” is something of a translational détournement of The Song of Hiawatha, an intertextual recombination, filtered through the sited embodiment of myself and subsequent readerly selves; it engages the systemic tentacles of assimilation as they unfurl within and possibly enclose the contemporary New World. I am both settler and Indigenous, the text may contain the sweet horrors of my diary, a girlish self-narrative that arose from the once-irreconcilable. Language is also thrifted from ecological reports on the Lake Superior region, in which the original text is set, and sociological reports regarding the injustices lived by many Indigenous women, men, and two-spirit persons. These injustices are an inevitable extension of the ideologies inscribed in Longfellow’s poem. “OF HERE” is a linguistic performance that seeks to display/acknowledge its own implication in the effects of assimilation while simultaneously revealing those ideologies that underpin the assimilative program as it operates to this day.
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Profile of Aaron Tucker, with a few questions,
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Rachel Loden, Kulchur Girl
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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Chelene Knight
1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I don’t think it was the book itself that changed my life, it was the journey getting to this point. Before the idea for Braided Skin even emerged, I wasn’t really taking myself seriously as a writer. I had little to no writing experience besides writing small articles for a local parenting magazine (I taught myself to write freelance articles out of pure desire to just be writing something, anything). I found that I wasn’t using any of my ‘voices’ when I was writing articles so it feels completely different now with my creative writing, poetry in particular because now I am saying the things I’ve always wanted to say, and completely uncensored. It’s freeing. It’s satisfying.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
As a child I was drawn to writing poems and short stories; this came naturally. I’ve always had characters floating around in my mind because when I would read novels as a young girl, I would get very attached to the characters. They became a part of me. I would wonder about them and ask questions about the missing pieces that the book itself didn’t provide. I wanted to provide these missing pieces. I would write as a response to these questions in my head. As I got older I tried to write short stories again, but somehow they always managed to turn into poems because there was a strong emphasis on bold imagery and music in what I wrote. There was still a good sense of character in some of my pieces but I would always stray from the narrative in my writing and focus on the way words sounded together and how they looked on the page. Poetry had its arms wrapped around me, and to this day I truly enjoy this embrace.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I’m a collector. I file words and phrases in notebooks and draw from them later. Then, before anything even hits paper, I write in my mind first. Things marinade in there all the time, so I always seem to have something in stock. Sometimes people who meet me for the first time, find me to be quiet, or non-social because everyone around me is talking and engaging with people, while I sit there, in silence, but I’m writing in my mind. Just writing. When this ‘mind writing’ happens, I give in to it completely. Then everything comes fast. I edit and revise quite a bit and go purely with a mix of gut instinct and feedback from my writing workshops. Each piece has its own formula, but most of my first drafts are no where near where they end up. I’m a vicious reviser, I rip things apart, move things around and I don’t apologize for it later. I LOVE when I get constructive feedback and get to hear other experienced writers tell me what doesn’t work in my piece because then I get excited about all the possibilities for revising. I don’t take it personal. I think a poem is done when you feel it is, no editor or mentor can really do this for you, they can only guide you to that point, but polished work as an end result is one of the most satisfying feelings a poet can have, well in my opinion anyway.
4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
A poem almost always begins for me, as a word or phrase I’ve heard in passing, or read somewhere. These words or phrases can spill over to me from overhearing a conversation, watching a movie, listening to music etc. I will usually jot it down or just say it over in my head multiple times until I can get it down on paper later. I think I always have a larger project in mind but this doesn’t always show up as a clear vision. Most times I will see a thread throughout a few pieces and then the idea for a larger projects shows itself.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
My very first reading took place in 2013 as part of The Writer’s Studio student readings and I was terrified. When we speak about ‘stepping out of one’s comfort zone’, I saw doing readings as exactly that. Over time, and with many readings under my belt, I found it became a very important part of my creative process. I like the atmosphere of being around other writers and knowing that the audience truly wants to be there, and wants to hear what the reader has to say. When it comes to poetry, it is so important to hear it read aloud, to listen for those subtle things one just can't get simply from reading it on the page. The reading is an experience all in its own and it’s one I feel has become a necessity in my writing world.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
The only concerns I have currently, are to do with how certain poems are perceived by people who do not read poetry. Most people assume that all poetry is personal and that the writer is the poem, and the poem is about the writer, but this is not always the case. In my book, I write in various ways and forms (rant, prose, story, lines, erasure etc) and even though some poems are drawn from personal past experiences, many of the pieces have nothing to do with my personal life but instead are based on characters I have created. We poets can wear masks too and we can write stories through verse, and we can paint pictures, and have backstory, slight narrative, climaxes, arcs, you name it. I worry that some people will not get this, but I also know I can trust in my work, and know that it will do what it needs to, and to remember to give myself the strength and breathing space to step back and then come to the table ready to answer the inevitable! I am always looking to answer questions about missing things, missing information and things in history that do not get shared the way they should.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Fantastic question. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about roles, and the ones I play in my daily life and how we define them. Do we update these definitions and descriptions frequently enough? I think we need to think about this more. In the writing world, the obvious role of a writer is to share stories, by any means necessary, and I’ve repeated that very line in multiple ways throughout many of my pieces. We as writers tend to be lumped in these very general categories riddled with stereotypes (like all poets are broke and all fiction writers are sitting pretty on a pile of cash) and I think our role should also be to cross borders and break barriers with words. Our role should be to educate, create new ways to share stories and write stories, and with that, realize that every thing is story. Poem, novel, memoir, essay. Stories, opinions, voice and information. I have a very good feeling about the writer’s role in today’s society, and how it’s evolving.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
This depends. If I am writing poetry and the editor is not familiar with or doesn’t have a lot of experience with modern forms etc, then I would of course find working with them difficult. It is important to remain open to other’s opinions, but also to remember to stay true to the core of your pieces. I think if you can create a clear, unobstructed line of communication with the outside editor, then there is always a way for both to relate and to have each other’s opinions voiced and heard.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
From the mouth of my then-ten-year-old daughter: “Just do your writing and stop waiting around.”
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I think I tend to blend the two together more often than not. A lot of my newer pieces are short fiction mixed within a poem. I love the idea of bending, mixing and merging genres. Genres are shifting and weaving more and more. Poetry comes easy to me but, if I do write short fiction it will be very ‘poetic’. This very concept of poetic fiction reminds me of Jamaica Kincaid’s work. Within Kincaid’s fiction, are these long, soft and flowing ribbons of imagery, rhythm and repetition; three strands, forming a ‘braid’. At times she strays from narrative and focuses on character description and inner thoughts which then lead the reader into this poetic land of dense and vivid images, sometimes very unexpectedly. I am drawn to this genre-mixed style of writing and I try and emulate this style within my own writing, and hope that readers pick up on that, and welcome it.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Ah how I love routine! I would say I am probably the most organized person I know, when it comes to the daily stuff. I start my day at an average time of 7 a.m. (sorry, but I am not one of those get-up-at-5 a.m.-to-write kind of writers) I do breakfast for my daughter and I, then head to work. I have a lot of outside responsibilities, volunteer work and everyday life stuff to take care of (as we all do) so I have categorized reminders in my phone to keep me on task. If I wasn’t organized, I would be completely overwhelmed and probably wouldn’t write, or make time for events like readings and book launches. It is important for me to attend events not only to support my colleagues, but also to keep that sense of community that us lonely writers so desperately need. When it comes to writing, I try to allow myself the freedom to write. I am not one of those people who can write at a scheduled time. I can edit and revise on schedule, but not write. I always say the writing comes when it comes, you can force it if you want to, but I don’t.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing gets stalled, I put it away and work on something else. I really don’t like forcing the work. The writing will suffer, and it will show. If I am super stuck during the revision stage, I have a few key people I turn to. Sometimes I just need a fresh eye to find what I couldn’t find.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
In all honesty, I am still trying to figure out where exactly “home” is.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Living in BC I guess I should say that nature influences my work, but it doesn’t really. I tend to look for things between the cracks, things no one blinks an eye at, the forgotten. Music plays a huge role in my writing, especially that of Lauryn Hill, Nina Simone, and more similar songstresses. I also watch a lot of documentaries and these types of movies also force me to create.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I constantly quote Toni Morrison. Her writing always inspires me to create something. It’s usually a line that strikes me, and I’ll write it down for later use. When it comes to poetry tend to like rhythmic poets who can tell a story and then make you figure out how it ends. Writers that make you think. For this, I celebrate Dionne Brand and Patricia Smith. It is also important for me to read new and emerging writers that I workshop my writing with. We all become familiar with each other’s stuff, and this is integral to learning to look at writing openly and objectively.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Over the past two years I’ve been setting writing goals for myself such as doing more readings, publishing in literary magazines, publishing my book, speaking on a panel, and getting the cover of a newspaper and being on the radio. In the past two years I have achieved every last one of those goals and that is huge for me. The next big goal I would love to achieve is to judge a poetry contest. You never Know!
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Had I not become a writer, I know I would have been somewhere in the Culinary field. I trained as a Chef 15 years ago, worked in a few restaurants and really loved what I did. But the writing bug couldn’t be silenced no matter how much anyone tells you it can, it just can’t. If you are so passionate about something that it takes over your thoughts everyday, you should probably turn up the volume on that, and start listening.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I had this need to be heard, but I was always afraid to speak up, share my opinions etc. I knew I wanted to write, I knew I should take some classes, be around other writers, hone the craft. It was my daughter (who was 10 years old at the time) who said, “Just do your writing, and stop waiting around.” Simple. Straight forward. Blunt. But those words from her mouth held such power and after that day, I followed her advice, didn’t give up, kept at it. I haven’t looked back since.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I recently read Kayla Czaga’s For Your Safety Please Hold On and I really loved it. She has this way of using repetition to create a unique musical-vibe in every poem. I’ll probably read it again very soon.
As for film, recently I have been re-watching my favourite movie (which I guess is still technically a book) The Color Purple. I always consider that movie to be like a long poem. I remember watching it multiple times when I was younger, and feeling such a strong connection to the characters. I try to re-watch it often because there is something about that movie that sparks new writing, every single time.
20 - What are you currently working on?
Right now I have finished the first draft of my second manuscript, Dear Current Occupant which is a mix of letters, prose poems and sonnets written in the voice of a young woman. She writes letters to all the occupants of the 20-30 houses she’s moved in and out of as a child. It is loosely autobiographical, and it has some really different styles so far. I am excited about this project, as it has forced me to do some digging into my past, and it is almost like I am re-learning about myself. Another life changing journey is being had, and I kinda like it.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Susan Paddon
Susan Paddon was born and grew up in St. Thomas, Ontario, attended McGill and Concordia in Montreal, and lived overseas in Paris and London before settling in Margaree, Nova Scotia. Her poems have appeared in Arc,CV2, The Antigonish Review and Geist among others. Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths (Brick Books) is her first book.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book has helped me move through a lot of grief. I wrote it after the death of my mother. I am currently working on a novel. I am working with a lot more characters than I did in my first book and the work is very different because I am telling these lives in a different form. I suppose, however, like in Two Tragedies, my current work does offer a series of snapshots – no, perhaps, it’s not snapshots. Maybe, I could say that before I was writing in snapshots, but I am now working in my novel with a series of short home videos (not my own).
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I have always been attracted to poetry. I do write in other forms but for this book, poetry seemed to find its way into my vision of how to tell it. That was the voice that came.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I think I usually have ideas that develop very quickly, but it is the finishing – the fine-tuning – that really takes the most amount of time. Sometimes an early draft will resemble the finished work and other times, maybe only a line will remain. I make copious notes on anything that can be written on.
4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I think for my current project, I do have a few smaller ideas that have come together – found their way into this novel. And they keep coming, which is good and not so good. I need to say stop at a certain point because not every new direction is a good one. I often get a line in my head or a situation that I want to explore and the work is trying to get to and from that place.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I just finished a tour for Two Tragedies. It was an amazing experience. I was really nervous about doing so many readings but in fact, the experience made me way more comfortable with sharing my work and saying, yes, this is what I wrote.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I have no idea what the current questions are. I try to question time (how it is changes – particularly, how it is different when you know you have a limited amount left), faith, mourning, public and private death in my work. I think those were my main thoughts writing this first book. I will never forget being in a grocery store line with my mother when we saw a magazine with Farah Fawcett on the cover. The caption said something like, “Only Days to Live!” My mother was also dying.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think I write because I can’t not write. I don’t write to publish, although, when it happens it can be wonderful. But what is the role of the writer? Maybe to take us somewhere we couldn’t get to on our own that day. That hour. Maybe somewhere we know well, or have never seen before. When I read, I want to be taken somewhere and to feel like I know that place for the time I’m there. The place can of course be just a new emotion or way of seeing.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Both. Barry Dempster was a fantastic editor. Stephanie Bolster was also instrumental in getting this book out of my head and onto the page. Of course, I think we are always afraid of being told that something we love has to be let go. But it is also so amazing when someone inspires you into writing something better.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Do your best. I find that very comforting.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
It changes. Generally speaking, I like a clean house and to work at the kitchen table. I covet beautiful desks, but I never use them. One day I’d like to have a huge set of drawers for all of my files and notes. I need to be alone (or if I can’t be alone, I should be in a café with strangers.) I like music. Background music. Too much coffee doesn’t work. Wine usually puts me to sleep. Food doesn’t really work either – while I’m writing, that is. It isn’t good for me to depend on anything that could run out (like almonds, say) or that I could over do it on (like almonds, say).
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
A walk. A playlist. A drive. I always write while I drive. But of course I can’t write anything down until I stop, so I have to go over it over and over again until I have the line or the idea memorized.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Hmm. I don’t understand certain fragrances – like where they come from. My grandmother’s china cabinet, for instance, that I have, still smells like her old house. But what made everything smell like that? I can’t identify the smell. What the heck does it smell like? I live in Cape Breton now. Home smells like fir trees and wood smoke. We have a puppy. Her smell now also reminds me of home.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
“La Traviata” by David W. McFadden is one of my all-time favourite poems. For me, film, painting, photography and music all influence my work. I wrote my first book listening to Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis 2” on repeat.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Robert Altman, Raymond Carver, Chekhov, Paul Thomas Anderson. “My Heart is Broken” by Mavis Gallant. Anne Carson. Sharon Olds.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Make a stained glass window.
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would love to be a potter. I also wish that I had some carpentry skills. I really admire people who can build what they can imagine.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I just started doing it and never stopped. You don’t need fancy equipment or expensive insurance. I get a lot of pleasure out of trying to write what I can imagine.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Johanna Skibrud’s Quartet For the End of Time. I saw Charadeon a flight recently and thought it was fantastic.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on a novel.
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the return of rob mclennan's poetry workshops: May-June, in our wee house,
The workshops are scheduled for Wednesday nights (with one Monday): May 6, 13, 20 and 27; June 1 (Monday), 10, 17 and 24.
$200 for 8 sessions.
for information, contact rob mclennan at rob_mclennan@hotmail.com or 613 239 0337;
An eight week poetry workshop, the course will focus on workshopping writing of the participants, as well as reading various works by contemporary writers, both Canadian and American. Participants should be prepared to have a handful of work completed before the beginning of the first class, to be workshopped (roughly ten pages).
Previous participants over the past few years have included: Amanda Earl, Frances Boyle, Roland Prevost, Christine McNair, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, Marilyn Irwin, Rachel Zavitz, Janice Tokar, Dean Steadman, Nicholas Lea, David Blaikie, James Irwin and Marcus McCann.
For those unable to participate, I hope to run another workshop later in the fall, and still offer my ongoing editorial service of poetry manuscript reading, editing and evaluation.
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Lance Phillips, Mimer
Wouldn’t measuring, with index finger and thumb, the slight wall between the anal cavity and the vaginal cavity of a woman require a more fixed and intimate understanding of not only the body, but possibly the methods one has of imagining space? Circling this line of thought down to a moment of establishment in the ear ever so long ago would have the effect of a cold towel on him as he sits with legs and arms crossed, breast folded into knees so that making himself small would in turn enlarge everything which is not him.
I’m curious about the floating, meditative, lyric accretions that make up North Carolina poet Lance Phillips’ Mimer(Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015). This is his fourth poetry collection, after Corpus Socius (2002), Cur Aliquid Vidi (2004) and These Indicium Tales (2010), all of which have been published by Ahsahta Press. The prose poems and lyric fragments that make up Mimer manage to hold together so easily and seamlessly that it would appear that Mimer is less than a poetry collection than a single, extended, fragmented lyric, composed across an enormously broad canvas. His “Author Statement,” included as part of the press release, includes:
I think of the book as a collection of parables, but in the sense that Crossan uses the term, as disrupters. Parables are meant to attack the status quo, to enact the “kingdom of heaven” on earth, to speak metaphorically. A parable is an orgasm, or so I take it to be, which allows the body to arrive at its own disruption. Those disruptions present authentic reality.
Constructed in four sections, two of which, themselves, break down further into poem-sections, there is something of the collage in his lyric mediations, playing off each other like cards, not entirely sure where they are headed, but seeking out and searching, constantly, for comprehension. This is a book that can be opened at any point to begin reading, and read in any direction. Through the prose-poem, there is something in Phillips’ work of Phil Hall’s bricolage and lyric koan, approaching wisdom through accumulation, consideration and the pause, itself on the very edge of hesitation.
He was dumbfounded at the minutiae, at the sheer will of that process which seemed to force his hand with regard to the graph. Prius, he could call his mind there in the diffuse light. Primus, which painted the walls and added grain to the floorboards; Primus, the sense made of the marks on the graph, the sense of imagining to speak; Primus, whatever animal heart was a scourge to him in his socks and deep in memory. Goose-pimples all the while he was repositioning the graph on the ceiling and all the while he wrote Primus over the outline of his body as a continuous barrier, dipping and rising in small letters and touching the horizon of skin just as a hand in the sea.
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kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Their Biography: an organism of relationships
Although Kevin McPherson Eckhoff has been praised as “the onanism of the literary world,” there is much we are still decoding about his possible past of villainy. A man who is as complex as an algorhythm can only be understood and analyzed through close observations of semiotics (and the endeavor of shopping for attractive shirts of the spectacle variety). It would appear that his features evoke emotional, confessional lyrics that reveal the depths of a sensitive soul… or is this mere performativity?
For his fourth book, British Columbia poet kevin mcpherson eckhoff’sTheir Biography: an organism of relationships (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2015) is less a composition by the author than a selection of invited submissions on and around the author by a multitude of others. Deliberately twisting ideas around “identity or relationships or language,” the collage aspect of the collection writes “about” the author as a collaborative and deliberately contradictory “memoir.” What becomes interesting through the process of going through Their Biography: an organism of relationships is just how much the structure instead opens up a different kind of portrait: one created less out of facts than through, as the title suggests, a series of relationships. This portrait portrays a writer deeply engaged with writing, his community of friends, family and contemporaries, and the notion of “serious play,” one that a number of his “authors” reflect in their individual chapters. There is such a generosity present throughout sixty-two chapters of anecdote, illustration and pure fiction. At the end of the collection, as a “Table of Contents,” he includes a full list of “chapters” and their authors, including what appears to be family members included alongside well known Canadian poets such as Gregory Betts, Eric Zboya, Vickie Routhe Ness McPherson, Al Rempel, Amanda Earl, Laurel Eckhoff McPherson, Rob Budde, Jeremy Stewart, Jonathan Ball, Claire Donato and Marlene Martins McPherson, among others. Some pieces are incredibly playful, deliberately inventing facts around the fictional character “Kevin McPherson Echoff,” while others are a bit more straightforward, suggesting the use of a more literal narrative of facts. What becomes clear, and quite compelling, is the ways in which the portrait makes itself directly impossible through the collage, and reads akin to a biography of a character that, in the end, becomes entirely separate from the British Columbia poet. This is a highly entertaining and imaginative book, and after a while, it might no longer matter if this character is real, or has anything to do with the the author himself.
When I first met Kevin McPherson-Eckhoff I was in a costume and he didn’t recognize me. I met Kevin McPherson-Eckhoff coming out of the grocery store and noticing that we had both shoplifted. It was then that I knew what the word hemorrhage really meant, and how to spell it. I first met Kevin McPherson-Eckhoff while taking dancing lessons; he was the only one to ask if I knew how to samba. At that time I didn’t know that he would one day be a U.S. congressman, and treated him like any other samba. When I first met Kevin McPherson-Eckhoff he was carried by a circus man and in turn he carried a trapeze artist, which means we must have been at a circus. It wasn’t until later that I recognized the glimmer of terrible audacity in his buckling knees, but when I did, the realization drove me to Vancouver. When I finally meet Kevin McPherson-Eckhoff after all these years he will just be getting off the plane from the Deep South and I imagine his thick accent perfuming our cab ride to the dog food plant. I met Kevin McPherson-Eckhoff when I was a child and he was an elderly gentleman who taught me how to read and introduced me to the wide world of daredevil listening. It was then that I became a follower Marxism-Leninism against his wild gesticulation. The day before I met Kevin I had a dream in which two jigsaw puzzles (one alive and one dead) and two glass suitcases (one clear and one frosted) told me to make a clearing in a field in which they could birth the future. I assume these were Kevin McPherson-Eckhoff and Jake Kennedy, though I could be wrong. It wasn’t until later that I realized how literal the prophecy was. I met Kevin McPherson-Eckhoff lying naked in the middle of the highway, but when I offered him a lift he spat in my eye. At the time I didn’t realize that was just his way of speaking. When I first met Kevin McPherson-Eckhoff it was a cold day in the spring and a deer stood in our path, casting aspersions our way. It was then that I realized what kind of metal Kevin was made from: an aluminum alloy with 5% bronze. I met Kevin McPherson-Eckhoff while we were both in the middle of something important, but it wasn’t until later that I realized it wasn’t that important.
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Why Poetry Sucks, fitzpatrick and Ball, eds.,
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Sandra Doller, Leave Your Body Behind
So there he sits, condensing away. Condensating. Every vowel so purpose, so dirty hole. Who are the ones that shake it loose my way. Shake some action, my feet. Like a radio stop. Here we are at at the bridge again. I had nothing specific in mind. When I asked you to hold the bag. Nothing in particular when I put it in the park and walked up the see saw under the armpit border in another country in an orphan train. I’m getting loose away from it like all those slut shamey bypass pills. You should be paying me not to procreate. If I popped you’d be sorry then. I believe so much in shame. It’s just sluts that don’t exist.
I’m stunned by San Diego writer Sandra Doller’s remarkable Leave Your Body Behind (Los Angeles CA: Les Figues, 2015), a book described as a mix between novel, memoir, exploratory essay and prose poem that, through the combination, manages to become both none and all of the above. Powerful, unrelenting and entirely physical, Leave Your Body Behind pushes and thrashes through an accumulation of short sections in which she “actively relives, revives and revamps her own memories.” Through the space of the book she explores memory, space and accountability, utilizing the structures of fiction, non-fiction and poetry to blend into something fluid, that exists impossibly easy and wonderfully complex. As she writes: “That Amy Tan really knows how to stay on track. If I could whip up something like a room, and a mother, and some situations, I’d really have something to share. As it is, I only have this little observation to offer, petty as it is. I hope you will accept it in the true and conflicted heart wrenching manner it is offered. Proffered.” Part of what has appealed for some time about Les Figues is its ability to refuse what many consider “bookstore designations” for its titles, including “literature” on the back cover instead of, say, “fiction” or “memoir,” either of which would have been an incomplete designation. Remember when Vancouver writer Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo first appeared as “poetry,” and later, once the film adaptation was released, was reprinted as “fiction”? For certain works, the declaration can appear to be rather arbitrary.
Does work equal energy? Apart from physics. Work is demand. Energy is forgive. Energy is something you want and want to keep. Work is something you trade. Take my work, leave me my energy. College is made of people. People require energy which is work. You have to get rid of some things. Give up things. Spend your money. College gets a negative w-rap. Things that are similar are not things. There you could say stop asking me taking me. Now: you say, please ask me take me. Now you are lucky to get suck work. You are lucky to get work. You are lucky to give away your energy to people or things. You give it almost for free. Now. There is nothing similar. Not anymore. It’s a dirty word. Get burned. Stay bad.
Editrice of 1913 Press and 1913: A Journal of Forms, Doller is the author of four previous works—Oriflamme(Ahsahta Press, 2005), Chora (Ahsahta Press, 2010), Man Years (Subito Press, 2011) and Sonneteers(Editions Eclipse, 2014)—all of which display an engagement with a blending of forms and shapes and movement. In an interview posted in 2014 at Entropy, she writes:
Lately, I’ve been using this Lyn Hejinian quote for almost everything—from thinking about poetry & dance, to answering this question—so I’ll pop that in here. It’s from The Language of Inquiry...which bears reading/re-reading, yes/wow:
“The language of poetry is a language of inquiry, not the language of a genre. It is that language in which a writer (or a reader) both perceives and is conscious of the perception. Poetry, therefore, takes as its premise that language is a medium for experiencing experience.”
Poetry is so many things—political speech, resistance, music, comedy—and has different roles in different contexts. In Slovenia and Russia and Mexico and Canada, in my limited experience, poets seem to be treated differently than in the US, where to say you are a “poet” to a non-poet listener is like saying you’re an anarchist who lives in the desert in a tent made of decomposing trash, by choice.
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Lance Phillips, Mimer
Wouldn’t measuring, with index finger and thumb, the slight wall between the anal cavity and the vaginal cavity of a woman require a more fixed and intimate understanding of not only the body, but possibly the methods one has of imagining space? Circling this line of thought down to a moment of establishment in the ear ever so long ago would have the effect of a cold towel on him as he sits with legs and arms crossed, breast folded into knees so that making himself small would in turn enlarge everything which is not him.
I’m curious about the floating, meditative, lyric accretions that make up North Carolina poet Lance Phillips’ Mimer(Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015). This is his fourth poetry collection, after Corpus Socius (2002), Cur Aliquid Vidi (2004) and These Indicium Tales (2010), all of which have been published by Ahsahta Press. The prose poems and lyric fragments that make up Mimer manage to hold together so easily and seamlessly that it would appear that Mimer is less than a poetry collection than a single, extended, fragmented lyric, composed across an enormously broad canvas. His “Author Statement,” included as part of the press release, includes:
I think of the book as a collection of parables, but in the sense that Crossan uses the term, as disrupters. Parables are meant to attack the status quo, to enact the “kingdom of heaven” on earth, to speak metaphorically. A parable is an orgasm, or so I take it to be, which allows the body to arrive at its own disruption. Those disruptions present authentic reality.
Constructed in four sections, two of which, themselves, break down further into poem-sections, there is something of the collage in his lyric mediations, playing off each other like cards, not entirely sure where they are headed, but seeking out and searching, constantly, for comprehension. This is a book that can be opened at any point to begin reading, and read in any direction. Through the prose-poem, there is something in Phillips’ work of Phil Hall’s bricolage and lyric koan, approaching wisdom through accumulation, consideration and the pause, itself on the very edge of hesitation.
He was dumbfounded at the minutiae, at the sheer will of that process which seemed to force his hand with regard to the graph. Prius, he could call his mind there in the diffuse light. Primus, which painted the walls and added grain to the floorboards; Primus, the sense made of the marks on the graph, the sense of imagining to speak; Primus, whatever animal heart was a scourge to him in his socks and deep in memory. Goose-pimples all the while he was repositioning the graph on the ceiling and all the while he wrote Primus over the outline of his body as a continuous barrier, dipping and rising in small letters and touching the horizon of skin just as a hand in the sea.
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12 or 20 (small press) questions with Jared Schickling on Delete Press
Delete Press publishes work by established and emerging poets. We ask ourselves the question: what does it feel like to be set on fire with an odorless accelerant? We respond by building chapbooks that are letterpress printed and handbound. Anti-gravity ephemera is also floated.
Jared Schickling edits Delete Press and eccolinguistics, and has served on the editorial board of Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetry & Poetics / Literature & Culture, among others. He is also the author of several books, recently Two Books on the Gas: Above the Shale and Achieved by Kissing (Blazevox, 2014), ATBOALGFPOPASASBIFL (2013) and The Pink (2012), The Paranoid Reader: Essays, 2006-2012 (Furniture Press, 2014) and Prospectus for a Stage (LRL Textile Series, 2013). He lives and works in Western New York.
1 – When did Delete Press first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?
Crane Giamo, Brad Vogler and I started Delete Press in 2009 when we were all living in Fort Collins, Colorado. We’ve done ten paper chapbooks since then, and the only thing that’s really changed for us is the medium. Crane is the press’s bookmaker (I edit, Brad is webmaster) and as his skills have crystallized the intricacies of the objects have changed. As this has increased the cost and amount of time between each book, Brad and I decided to launch an e-book series. We’ve published four titles so far. We also have our own projects, aspects of Delete—Crane is the proprietor of the letterpress Pocalypstic Editions, Brad publishes Opon, an online journal of long poems and process statements, and I do eccolinguisticsin the mimeograph tradition. One thing I’ve learned is the importance of distancing yourself from the presswork—it’s the only way a writer will trust you and the only way to properly present another’s work. Another is what it means to arrive at that point where all involved will trust that someone else’s idea is a good one, what it means to build something with people you admire.
And also this: produce, produce, produce, be irreverent, and keep promises no matter how embarrassingly long it may take.
2 – What first brought you to publishing?
As far as Delete is concerned, a desire to be of service publishing great work and the belief that this could be done with Brad and Crane.
3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?
To change the face of literature.
4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?
I think we’re unique. After all, we’re not doing what other wonderful operations are.
5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?
To be honest, my primary concern in this regard is to make sure we’ve made something that when read brings pleasure. The rest seems to take care of itself.
But certainly digital transmissions and friendships are the most effective way to get the word out. That’s difficult too, though, as it requires a fair degree of diligence keeping up with what’s what. Basically, I participate in various forms of reading and listening and that natural curiosity makes the connections I cannot.
6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?
I stay utterly faithful to the work. In the case of small press poetry, submitted materials tend to arrive in rigidly precise form. The editing in that regard has much to do with finding the correct shape and feel of the book object or page, or screen, the space around the content. I certainly have made my fair amount of text edits, though. But even there, it has tended to be in response to some imposition of format.
I am presently editing a book in which the next-to-last line of the manuscript needed to go. I deleted it and explained politely to the author why it was necessary. I was right, and the author was agreeable. It’s not always so easy.
That’s another thing I’ve learned—more often than not (no one is perfect), trust your editor.
7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?
Editions of Delete Press paper chaps have ranged from 40 to 120 copies. The e-books have gotten a few hundred downloads each. 300 copies of the eccolinguistics mailer go out periodically, for free.
8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?
I think I mentioned my wonderful experience working with Brad and Crane, so I won’t say too much. Really I would just like to see them more. We live in different parts of the country now.
9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?
Utterly. I primarily edit my work.
10– How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?
Well, I’m not against it in principle, but one who goes that route needs to be very careful. The offending person’s stature in the poetry market must be such that the ego can be overlooked. In the case of coterie, I think a shared critical apparatus has to be there or else the cliquishness doesn’t make much sense.
I suspect that self-publishing through one’s own operation didn’t always carry such a stigma, when the technology and means of distribution were more prohibitive of an over-saturated field of publishing writers and when the aesthetics we’ve inherited were just beginning to take shape. Perhaps it is that the vast good and cheap publishing opportunities for poets today means the expectations for model behavior have changed.
11– How do you see Delete Press evolving?
I don’t know. To be honest, Crane’s bookmaking abilities have reached a point where we are reassessing what the chapbook line should be. I suspect that we will also be doing full-lengths in the near future. Brad is pondering a new website. Delete Press has changed and will change again, I know that.
12– What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?
I’m proud that we’ve sold out of most everything. That might sound superficial, but it’s not. The generous response from readers has helped confirm my faith that, contrary to a popular belief, people actually doread poetry.
But you have to be realistic about it. I wouldn’t say we’ve been overlooked—we’ve been too busy making and publishing to notice in any case. You have to be tactical in your methods and output depending on the work you are publishing. And you have to be willing to accept anonymity.
For me the frustration is with trickle-down poetics. I’m not looking for laurels but I wish the embalmed would get out of the way. I just read a rather smug response by Ron Silliman to the identity politics happening in poetry lately. The gist of his blog screed is that humankind is headed for a cliff of epic proportions, so there’s no sense getting riled up. Plus, he says, if the targets are institutional then they’re misguided. Hell, even the police are our friends—verbatim! We’re just too far gone for any of that to matter, says Ron Silliman. The problem is that unless he’s rapture-bound, which he very well may be, who can say, then Silliman is as stuck here in the only place we got as anyone.
The life of poetry and of literature is always small press. Always. Chris Fritton printed these wonderful broadsheets for the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair that are tacked to my office walls: “Small Press / Everything for Everyone Nothing for Ourselves.” The words are Mike Basinski’s, or so I hear. An original Basinski gifted me is tacked next to one of the broadsheets. I kind of live according to that advice.
13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?
Frankly, I didn’t have any. I read voraciously and saw all manner of things. But later on, dirty mimeo, Fuck You, The Marrahwanna Quarterly, the Aldine Press, Grove, stuff like that.
I did learn a great deal from Stephanie G’Schwind at the Center for Literary Publishing at CSU, where I interned, and from David Bowen of New American Press, whose Mayday MagazineI helped launch (issues 1 and 2). I learned a great deal about what not to do as an editor and publisher at Alice James Books. That shouldn’t be taken the wrong way, as AJB is very good to their authors and their own venerable history doesn’t need me.
14– How does Delete Press work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Delete Press in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?
Well, at one point I think Compline, LittleRed Leaves, Punch Press, and Delete considered getting a small corner of AWP. That was maybe five years ago, I don’t remember. I still dig what those three are doing.
But honestly we at Delete are omnivores. I know I am. Ugly Duckling Presse is stellar, of course, and I am particularly fond of their translation series. michael mann’s unarmed is a powerful little journal. One of my most cherished possessions is a tiny, nondescript, side-stapled bit of ephemera from Luc Fierens and François Liénard, PAPER WASTE SHOOTING! Boaat Press’s Some Simple Things Said By and About Humans by Brenda Iijima is a book whose physicality furthers what’s there in the poem. Projective Industries, Further Other Book Works, Cuneiform Press—there are some master bookmakers out there, all specializing in poetry.
15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?
We don’t organize launch readings or sell wares at book fairs as we don’t have any stock to speak of. All the books are gone. I’ve organized readings, but not for Delete. Readings are very important.
16– How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?
We advertise on the Internet and otherwise read it. Reading is essential to a publisher, for all the obvious reasons and more.
17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?
Generally speaking, yes. We are fluid and keep ourselves open to what comes in. We like adventurous work and we know we want it when we see it. We are in every way an experimental bunch. We also solicit most projects that we end up taking on.
18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.
PORCHES by Andrew Rippeon
Dancing in the Blue Sky: Stories by Geoffrey Gatza
ROPES by W. Scott Howard and Ginger Knowlton
All of these literary works advance an internal poetics while stimulating the senses. Each of them invokes their respective traditions while managing to transcend lineage and enter into dialog with a contemporary moment.
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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lance Phillips
1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The publication of my first book made me feel lucky and connected, however tenuously, to a world I’d been away from for a long time but I don’t think it changed my life in any real way.
My recent work is a continuation of my previous work. The fact is the work is my life, by which I do not mean that it consumes my life but that it constitutes it. I feel lucky each time I publish a book.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’m not sure that I did come to poetry first. When I started writing I was 19 or so and I wrote fiction and poems. I felt, and still feel, a huge urge to write fiction but the words keep getting in the way; which is where poetry comes in. I guess I liked that poetry is fast and densely made. It helped that I could write it on little cards and present them to my girlfriend, who, I’m happy to say, has been my wife for the last 20 years.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
My writing accumulates, on that I can count. From there I do sometimes set certain parameters for it, working on a piece of writing for 100 days or for a full year or writing 100 small poems in a month. Once I’ve finished the project I let it sit for 9 months to a year. Then I cut what doesn’t work. I maintain the original sequence of the writing and just remove the parts that get in the way, often these are my favorite parts.
4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I tend to think of my writing as a continuous process. Given that I let accretion do its work. For me the construct “book” is rather arbitrary, usually it’s just a kind of shorthand for referring to a specific period of time.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I think public readings, usually, are an entirely different endeavor than writing. For me poetry will always happen on the page, hearing a poem read aloud is hearing a personality first and foremost.
I’ve been out of the habit of giving readings for a long time but have recently decided to try my hand at them again. We’ll see how that goes.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I like to think of my writing as praxis in the Aristotelian sense, but I do think about the notions of time and memory a lot. What constitutes our notions of the body is pretty important to my writing, and the mythologies we construct around those notions.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The role of the writer is the same as it ever was to be honest.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I don’t find it difficult or essential. It has been helpful on occasion.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Something said to a teacher of mine, Jorie Graham, by a teacher of hers, Donald Justice, which she then conveyed to me in a conference when I was 22 or 23. “You must learn to give into the destructiveness of the poem.” I tend to frame it terms of trust though. The writing will always be smarter than you, if you doubt that then you’re a fool and should leave off completely, if you accepted it then you learn to trust that the poem is right, plain and simple.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I’m up at 4:30 five days a week. I make coffee, pack my wife’s lunch and then sit at my desk, in the dark, and start typing.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
My writing has never stalled. I don’t really believe in inspiration; I believe in work.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The lilac securing the air outside my screen door at this very moment.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Visual art has always had a large influence on my work. Also, whatever I’m interested in at the moment, whether that be a book on investment strategies or a history of the mirror (just now it’s a biography of Balthus), comes to bear on my writing in some way.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
R.D. Laing, John Dominic Crossan, Flannery O'Connor, Beckett, Susan Howe; too many others to list.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Finish the memoir of my father I’ve been working on in fits and starts for the last 6 years or so.
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I’ve always wanted to be a painter.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
For me writing has always been a way to get obsessive thoughts out of my head, a way to release them into the world, a way to exorcise them.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just re-read Bolano’s 2666, and am in the midst of Dogen’s Extensive Record and Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur all of which are pretty great. I don’t remember the last film I watched.
19 - What are you currently working on?
A project about mutually agreed upon falsehoods.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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