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Profile of Henry Beissel, with a few questions
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A short interview with Allison Green
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Notes and Dispatches: Essays reviewed at Maple Tree Literary Supplement
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Julie Carr, Think Tank
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Kettle boils, boils now
Maligned and languishing in an upstairs room: a lacrimal dimple
trips the obscene
Honk geese: soprano duck, duck
hobbles, belly first, a girl-falcon spins
rebuffs the rough draft
Too long, my husband’s sweater
Sleeve. My patience no: threads of what
warms a baby’s unrivalled calamitous
hour. Full sob
transpires to rust the pendulous rug
long in arms, short on time
Old devotions
now gone to
sorrow: cap’s cracked and leaking
door doesn’t open: exit through mirror, o
the plumbing
fails
Denver, Colorado poet Julie Carr’s most recent poetry book, Think Tank (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2015), is constructed out of an accumulation of stand-alone fragments that articulate how one navigates through the chaos, grief and beauty of living. Composed as a series of short sketches, the poems of Think Tank also include some three-dozen lines incorporated into her text, and a list of those lines and their source authors exists at the end of the collection: César Vallejo, John Ashbery, Inger Christensen, Erin Mouré, Lisa Robertson, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles and Stephen Ratcliffe, among others.
There is a darkness in Carr’s work I’ve seen throughout her published work, one that exists not in isolation, but as part of a much larger canvas. Carr doesn’t shy away from violence, death or other subject matter, but an element that requires acknowledgment and examination.
Tim was in the pool when another boy drowned. A very quiet
disappearance
All the adults thought the others were watching. This sense they would
not easily give away
Biting the nail that secures the hand, staring into dead time
I’m afraid to speak so full of blood, but there’s no way I’m anything
sweeter or other or bland
Babies sleep hugging animals. At the doorway: endlessness
I like very much that Carr works on books as projects, as units of composition, each one existing for and as an entirely different purpose, something that doesn’t become clear until one begins to experience more than a couple of her poetry titles. Recently, Essay Press produced The Silence That Fills The Future, an online pdf publication that explores some of her current works-in-progress, including “The War Reporter: On Confession,” “By Beauty and by Fear: On Narrative Time,” “Spirit Ditties of No Tone: On Listening” and “Eight 14-Line Poems from Real Life,” each selected from a different project-in-progress. The diversity of her projects is quite striking, and the chapbook-as-‘sampler’ allows a compact glimpse into the range of her range of current projects, even before the consideration of her overall published works-to-date: a list that includes two critical studies and five poetry collections prior to Think Tank. As she says of her book-length process in a recent interview posted at Touch the Donkey: “One day perhaps I’ll write a book of discrete poems – what Spicer called one night stands. But for now, this is how my mind works.”
One to two to one to two to one to two to one
runs regeneration’s
math.
There, the door opens for: sun, road, behold
five—a raw ladder of kids
Apples, potatoes, pigs, and birds. Bread, milk, sugar, and eggs:
Feed my kids. The cow feeds my kids. The truck. The flame feeds
my kids. The bag feeds my kids. Plum and butter and nut and hen:
nothing so kind as a warehouse
There is something of the critical study to her poetry books, working through a series of observations and ideas using the machinery of language to articulate a series of unspoken theses, anywhere from “how does one survive this” to “what can be done differently,” among so many others. Hers is a poetry composed as a search for meaning, through all the mess and beauty of everything and everything else. As she writes toward the end of the collection:
I want your voice in my poem, which is like I want your body in my own,
but no milk
All readers and non-readers desire that pouring
These experiences are absolutely unwriteable which is why I am putting
them here
Fruit’s nothing, the side lamp slumps
This was not a life time spent reading clouds
Books said something, said, “God too must with me wash his body”
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Tour de blogosphere: A Special Guide to Ottawa’s Literary Blogs : rob mclennan
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12 or 20 (second series) questions with TC Tolbert
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?
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I grew up Pentecostal.
The Holy Spirit would sometimes send people running up and down the aisles (unclear if they were pursuing or being chased), it might make their bodies convulse. There was a kind of inspired and terrifying celebration that undulated between laughter, pleading, weeping, and cheers. But those most filled with God could be identified by how they were filled with language. To speak in tongues was to be spoken through – a language both intensely private and necessarily shared – glossolalia – a kind of benevolent wildfire on the tongue – to receive the most excruciating, exquisite untranslatable articulations as a gift.
I suppose I came to poetry first to speak my body out of and into existence. I write to speak in tongues and to prophecy. To know something I can’t know. To surrender. To be a good-bad body written into. To be read. To be a good-bad body gone bad-good.
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?
4 - Where does a poem 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?
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
In Queer Space, Aaron Betsky says, we make and are made by our spaces. In this way, where I read a poem (and by where I mean the physical location - which includes the architecture and the bodies the poem interacts with and the spaces made by the poems around it) shapes how I read the poem. And since I also believe what Stein said (There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistence.), every reading is different. And so I don’t think of them as readings, so much, because I think that implies something stable about the text that I want to avoid. I get much more excited about what can happen when people gather in a room and trade noises. I absolutely love the collaborative process of showing up. Of creating installations.
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?
In the early 70’s, gay and bisexual men began using a hanky code to signal to other men what they were into (SM, fisting, oral, anal, etc), what they were looking for (tonight I want someone to hold me, or would anyone be willing to piss in my mouth?), and how they identify (bottom, top, or switch). This is known as flagging. Not only a way to clarify and communicate desire, but a public acknowledgment of a possibly dangerous combination of attraction and identity hidden in plain sight (queerness was, and often still is, met with social and individual violence). As a trans and queer writer, I say. And then: this is different, I think, than a writer who happens to be trans or queer. I am particularly interested in flagging and how this relates to language, audience, and accessibility. Can the subversive still be subversive if it passes into the realm of widely legible? How do we share the obscured, public confession? How are intimacy, desire, and connection wielded in common space? What passes as a body? What is the desire of form? What does it mean to be out?
Pema Chodron says, Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are. How passing, for me, can be both a protection from violence and can perpetuate violence. A necessity and necessarily enigmatic. I write to experiment with passing, with being a self I can know, with flagging, with turning on. I think of the textual body as a gendered body. My trans(gender) body is an unreliable text. The narrative is ruptured. Trust may be built or it may be broken. The veneer of coherence and safety completely gives way. Kathy Couch says there is a difference between props and objects. She says, prop is a shortened form of property and we never expect our property will teach us anything. A poem isn’t exactly a performance. I hope it’s not a prop, either. But there’s an audience. And I worry about showing off instead of showing up. A reckoning with the ambivalence of form. And people are objects, too. Surrender and struggle with constraint.
As a body in a person, as a poet, as these lines in this order – white skin and male passing privilege, breasts I used to bind but no longer want to, soft belly, hips that could easily carry children but never will, facial hair that refuses my jaw while absolutely flourishing on the underside of my chin – I’m continually interested in the architecture we find ourselves in. At what point does construction become didactic? What is the space between container and constraint? What happens when we try, and is it possible, to subtract formula from form?
Also, there is generosity. And this is different, I think, from being nice. I want my work to be inhabited by vulnerability, experiment, risk. I want to be visible. A kind of accessibility that has more to do with being encountered than being understood. I want collaboration. And failure. And delight.
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?
For me, the worst that could happen to poetry would be that any given poet’s work (whether it be poems, criticism, or some combination there of – I inherently consider poetry to be political and personal, even though I recognize the shortcoming in that) the worst that could happen would be for poetry to end at the page. How do we compose in the moment? If attention is action? If one wants to undermine systemic violence, racism, capitalism, and/or compulsory heterosexuality through syntax or some other poetic project, one shouldn’t be a dick in real life.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve encountered challenges with everything I truly care about. It’s an incredible gift to be read closely, carefully. I’m blessed. I’ve experienced all of these things.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“I know I’m in real trouble when I start to judge my insides against someone else’s outsides.” – said to a friend in Chattanooga at an Al Anon meeting.
Annie Dillard said: “How you live your days is how you live your life.”
John Cage said: “It’s lighter than you think.”
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (your own poetry to collaboration)? What do you see as the appeal?
Relatively easy, I suppose, in that I genuinely think of genre as gender. I’m not a theorist, or rather, critique is just my affection in drag. For a few years now I’ve been working on a series of lyric essays in which I am writing my body into existence though not necessarily through content. I’m looking for a textual body expansive (and constrictive) enough to inhabit. I want to live (t)here. For now, I find that space in hybrid forms. Utilizing elements of poetry, research, and personal narrative, I think of these essays as embodied meditative investigations on the trans body – my trans body – and its relationship to architecture, intimacy, and public space. They are, to me, genderqueer bodies, much like my physical genderqueer body – nonlinear, dynamic, a kind of textual bricolage, sometimes awkward or halting, passing as narrative at one turn, then full of ruptures in logic, vulnerable and visible and joyously so.
I not only think of the lyric essay as an assemblage in artistic terms (utilizing some found text and placing it in new contexts) but also as an extrapolation of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblage and “nomad thought” as open-ended - that parts of one body can be placed in a new body and still function. I’m especially curious about order and organization, when a piece of text is relevant, which component parts impact the entire body. When is the range of motion extended (or impacted) by relationship? What is a component part? What is a (w)hole?
I definitely think of these pieces as collaborative. I need you to help me make sense of them. This is similar, I think, to how we collaborate to create meaning from each of our gender expressions and identities, trans or not. But public space is often a dangerous place for trans and genderqueer bodies (most specifically and brutally, the bodies of trans women of color): what could be collaboration, or celebration, becomes violence, oppression, and control. My hope is that reading (and writing) these essays is a practice in shifting that dynamic. That we can play, be curious, wander among tangents, delight in the previously undefined, decorate, find connections where they are not obvious, unhinge our expectations, say yes to what we don’t yet know, investigate the relationship between proof and prose.
In this way, I want to celebrate trans and genderqueer bodies – how we pass and sometimes don’t, how we spill over, slip, call out, miss the point. Much like J. Halberstam, I believe failure on one level creates a grammar of possibility on another. But this failure is different, I think (I hope), from being sloppy. Or careless. Or lazy. Lisa Kraus, a dance critic and former dancer with Trisha Brown, says that rigor is no longer about the pointed foot but about the precisely timed collision, the exact harnessing of weight falling through space. These essays, I’m afraid, won’t defend anything or even prove a good point. They bump into things. They might make illegible what was just starting to come into focus. The appeal is that they are rigorous in their failure – I hope.
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?
Right now my days aren’t nearly as regularized as they have been at other times in my life. (That’s both true and not true.) My days begin with a banana and peanut butter. And that’s how they’ve begun since 2002.
For 5 years I would get up every morning and do my “morning pages” based on The Artist’s Way. Like so many constraints, this practice taught me the kinds of boundaries I need to feel safe enough to let go.
(I might be in a period of letting go.)
(I might always be in a period of letting go.)
(To always be anything may be a way of not letting go.)
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I get out of my own way and get out in the world. I get off the internet. I go for a hike.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Icy hot. Salmon patties. Mentholatum rub.
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?
Modern dance. The body. The body in relationship. The body in nature. Architecture.
The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Button says: The significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are different people in different places and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be. I look at my house, my relationships, the things I’m writing, my body. These are synonyms. And I wonder how non-trans people (and other trans people) experience these things. Is your body an architecture? Is your name? What are you constructing now? Can you visit it, and therefore, can you leave?
Also: Compositional Improvisation (which is different from, although related to, Contact Improvisation). (Although neither of these are comedic improv, all three are grounded in the practice of paying attention to exactly what is happening right now and figuring out how to say yes.)
Compositional Improvisation (a phrase coined by Katherine Ferrier and the Architects) explores intersections of text, body, architecture, space, collaboration, and attention in order to expand the range of what is possible for composition – specifically composition with the body. I think of all of this as just another way of saying “being alive.” It is built on the chance, (Soma)tic, conceptual, and collaborative techniques of poets, dancers, and musicians from the last 60 years and emphasizes composing (individually and collaboratively) in the moment to create dynamic, rigorous, complex, and fully realized pieces without rehearsal or planning.
For me, it’s a practice in embodied consciousness that is experimental, risky, playful, vulnerable, and radically open - an opportunity to experience Jack Halberstam’s“queer art of failure” (as if I somehow don’t have enough of that in my life!).
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
All of them. I mean that.
The fact that people write, and dance, and put paint on things, and grow gardens, and create exquisite compositions out of a few vegetables and grains (I know absolutely nothing about food). That fabrics are dyed. Stones are laid side by side and rooms are arranged. Re-arranged. That there is singing.
I’m housesitting for a friend right now and all I can see when I look over my computer screen is 5 pieces of telephone pole stood upright – no longer useful for keeping words off the ground but somehow this little pile of desert sand is now a yard.
Malebranche said that Attention is the natural prayer of the soul and as long as something singular can become multiple, I feel ok about the world. CA Conrad is right: It’s all collaboration. I need all of these others to collaborate.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Honestly, I’m both audacious and naïve enough to attempt just about everything I’ve wanted to do. That doesn’t mean I always get it right, just that I’m fool enough to try. I’m happy to sleep in my car and/or camp all summer if it means I can go wherever I want to go. And so I do. Most of my “to do list” is more interpersonal right now – practice more intimacy, ask for help when I’m scared, be more vulnerable with my mom and dad, stop trying to prove my self worth all the time, let myself be seen...
I hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2001 (yep, all of it, with my dog, Isabella) and I’d like to do another long trail. I’d like to run a marathon. I’d also like to travel internationally but I’m not that interested in being a tourist so I’m still trying to figure out how to navigate that desire. I like doing things that scare me. I recently fell in love again and it had been almost 4 years since I dated anyone so this feels scary and exciting. (and may be small.) (but also may be huge.)
One time, when I was on staff training for Outward Bound, we did this reflective activity where we had to identify our gender, race, religion/spirituality, sexual orientation, name, and one life goal. Then we had to give up one of those identities. Then another. Then another until we were left with just one identity. In my life goal section I had written, “publish 3-5 books.” I got rid of that rather quickly. The thing I couldn’t part with was my name. But that wasn’t true for anyone else. For them it was “to be happy” which, as it turned out, was a completely allowable life goal.
I want my life to be meaningful. I want to contribute to more tangible and intangible goodness in the world.
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?
My first answer would be a dancer. I also always wanted to be on Broadway. But I think I’m cheating. When you say, “what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?” I think you are asking me to consider what would I do if my art were more objectively measurable.
I’d be a doctor for Doctors Without Borders. Or I’d help build houses for Habitat for Humanity. My life isn’t over so I still may do one. Or both.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Well, I tried to do something else. I mean, I was in my last year of undergrad getting a degree in English Education – I was just about to start student teaching and was well on my way to becoming a high school English teacher. It was 1998 and I was a 23-year-old white, Pentecostal woman. I was married to a pretty great guy and I was about to become the first person in my family to earn a college degree. Still living in my hometown - Chattanooga, Tennessee - I had never really spent time outside of the south.
That spring I took a feminist theory class. Even though it wasn’t a required text, my professor gave me her copy of This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. In my first poetry class, we read the poem “Fiddleheads” by Maureen Seaton. Both This Bridge and “Fiddleheads” did something with language that I needed. They exhilarated me. Made me feel less alone. These were women’s voices, queer voices – marginalized and fierce. They held me accountable. Showed me how silent I was becoming (had become, had been forced to become, had been expected to become).
Both of these said: OPEN YOUR FUCKING MOUTH.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Citizen by Claudia Rankine and New Organism: Essais by Andrea Rexilius.
I wish I watched more films than I do. I don’t know if this is a great film but it’s a film I can’t stop thinking about – particularly the opening sequence – Melancholia, directed by Lars von Trier.
20 - What are you currently working on?
Becoming better friends with god.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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Pete Smith, Bindings with Discords
Evensong [Coventry Cathedral]
In this place, this slow mausoleum
space held by cold stone & glass
angles criss-cross
into shifting
open-occult wings.
Where sunlight strikes
air bleeds multi-coloured psalms
and when, in service, the choral voice
raises William Byrd, feathered
quavers trace the arcing roof,
fan
a rainbow of harmonic hope
then fall to ground, flame-tongued.
Profound expectations fibrillate
the hearts of the faithful. Some glimpse
doors in stone & burning air beyond; some
fixate on the eagle rooted
to the lectern’s edge, freedom tethered
in its held wing,
law nailed
in its
claw
Kamloops, British Columbia poet Pete Smith’s latest offering is Bindings with Discords (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2015), a book uniquely influenced by British experimental poetry as well as a variety of Canadian writers, especially those around the Kootenay School of Writing. Born and raised in England, Smith emigrated to Kamloops in 1974, where he was able to slowly start interacting with a number of Canadian poets and their works. As he writes as part of an interview forthcoming at Touch the Donkey:
In Britain, no direct engagement beyond being a consumer of mags which provided different sets of outlook: Stand– toward Europe largely; Agenda– Poundian modernisms; Grosseteste Review– openings toward USA, combo of projective & objective ‘schools’ filtered through a very English light.
Attended readings at the then Cariboo College where I heard but didn't ‘meet’ Birney, Newlove, Bowering et al. (A long parenthesis, 10 to 15 years, takes me into a North American cult/church community where I become an elder & preach regularly – until finally reading my way out of that wilderness – picking up while there some useful self-discipline for essay writing & a preachiness in my poems that I have to guard against).
Real connections began on three fronts in the 1990s: firstly, through the Internet & an email I sent to Nate Dorward I connected up with British & Irish poets I felt at home with & led to the publication of the first Wild Honey Press chapbook; through Nate again I learned of a reading at the ksw whose venue I failed to find then but, thanks to Rob Manery, found it for the next time; the Kamloops Poets Factory where Warren Fulton’s energies created a local scene & we brought in some good writers to read & conduct workshops (my contributions were all through the ksw connection: Mike Barnholden, Aaron Vidaver, Ted Byrne on one occasion; Lissa Wolsak & Lisa Robertson on Easter Sunday, 2000 – Lisa read from The Men. Not so many personal meetings really, lots of recruits I bring in from my reading, not in order to name-drop, but to share my experience in a particular text-world. Exploration & celebration.
Smith’s poems favour a kind of narrative and tonal discord, pounding sound against meaning and sound in a way reminiscent of some of Ottawa poet Roland Prevost’s recent writing. As Smith writes in the poem “From the Olfactory”: “Swamped by irritants / air-borne and scoped / he defended a weakened immune / system, set about mopping up / incontinent emotions, / secured HQ in the lachrymal ducts.” Composed over a period of some twenty-plus years, the collection is constructed into two groupings each made up of three sections: “Part One: Pointes & Fingerings,” that includes “One-Eye-Saw: ‘in the sure uncertain hope,’” “20/20 Vision” (an earlier version of which was produced as a chapbook through Wild Honey Press in 1998) and “Evacuation Procedures,” and “Part Two: Three Fancies in the Key of BC,” which includes “Strum of Unseen” (an earlier version of which was produced as a chapbook through above/ground press in 2008), “48 Out-Takes from the Deanna Ferguson Show” and “Mother Tongue: Father Silence.” Perhaps due to the extended composition of the collection, Smith’s variety of structures holds the book together incredibly, shifting his punctuated collage-works from short fragments to prose poems to poems that break structure down altogether. Interestingly enough, Smith’s writing comments on the visible absence his writing creates, as he publishes quietly, nearly invisibly. In “48 Out-Takes from the Deanna Ferguson Show” he writes: “Let me introduce you to my anthology. Your absence will guarantee you pride of place.”
one: desire & music are a vortex
two: the rhythm the rhythm the rhythm
the rhythm three: dithyrambic
celebration collapse
bottom fish sit this one out
on top of the news
four: slow dance among the picnic debris
lives measured out in steps
portraits of soles on the move
& at rest
waltzing through wilted lettuce
crusts of cheese
crumbed stones of bread
dancing away from stilled life (“Third Movement”)
There’s an incredible density to Smith’s work, one that comes across as a narrative collage, excising unrequired words for something built as both incredibly precise and remarkably open to a variety of possibilities. In his review of the Wild Honey Press edition of 20/20 Visionfor The Gig, Nate Dorward wrote:
The wit catches the ear: not the deadpan standup comedy sometimes the fate of the New Sentence, but a mode of inquiry into poetic style and into cultural authority. There’s a wish to avoid “the poet shrunk to a witness”, reproducing the personal, religious and social nostalgias on offer: “technes create / instant nostalgia, break you and your dear ones / into timed fragments: zoom, smile, cut; / in your pram with soother, in your graduation / gown, in your senile frame with demented smile.” High prophecy may be unavailable, but one can be “eloquent” in “disbelief” […].
There is much going on here, in a poetry that builds upon responses to writers, writing and artwork, including photographer Fred Douglas, poet Deanna Fergusonand the late poet, artist and musician Roy K. Kiyooka. Binding, as he tell us in the title, with discords: one can’t be any more direct than exactly that.
Bamboo-heart, water-heart teach us the meanings of friendship. Between heaven and earth, a journey to share – everyday home. Be with until public law– BC Security Commission, March 4 1942 – states you are decreed nisei, sundered by stained metalblade of fear-hatred-greed. “Relocatable persons” are asked to be rootless, artless, homeless &, best self, lifeless. Everyday home claps you into its pure bamboo, empty water jail. Be your own best friend – a shade yellow, simulacrum/b of white (boss) man – bereft of former chums.
claw metal clap (“Mother Tongue: Father Silence)
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Profile on Chuqiao Yang, with a few questions
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Oana Avasilichioaei, Limbinal
The lines were drawn without our consent. This is an empty statement, for the drawing of the lines did not require our consent. We shored the river but turned away when we realized our subjectivities were seeping into it. We fought unfairly. Overgrown like wedges of land covered in weeds. With our jugular appendages, we intoned coarse sounds. Ventured to look past our moss-ridden thighs. Mostly, our soundings were futile, husked. But there were moments of lucidity, even resonance. Then our hands would reach out to touch each other’s throats as though in recognition. Or acknowledgment. Petals of thought blew gusts around us. Small creatures guarded our solitudes. Which churned in the cavern of our guts. The vastness of our intention was a material we could not fathom. We asked questions that had no answers and as such perpetuated into quarries of language. (“Line Drawings”)
Montreal poet and translator Oana Avasilichioaei’s new collection, Limbinal (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2015), is built as a series of lyric explorations of borders and partitions, attempting to articulate the no-man’s land between fixed ideas, solid objects and a variety of poles, from geography to genre, even moving into footnotes and beyond, into the margins themselves. As she writes near the beginning of the opening section, “Bound”:
The geography keeps shifting into bloom and decay, thus daring to future. Periphery disrupts the dialogue. Floundering, wet lines linger. Fish bend the river into its undulations, spring curves. Will these trajectories double back, mislead us? We leave unnoticed through a back gate to make a country elsewhere. We pass the perennials and smile softly. What is our spatialized intention?
The author of four previous poetry collections—Abandon(Toronto ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2005), feira:a poempark (Toronto ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2008), Expeditions of a Chimæra (with Erín Moure; Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010) and We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012)—as well as five translations, Avasilichioaei’s work has evolved into a series of inquiries on how and where multiple sound, language, meaning and ideas overlap, shift and blend, allowing the borders to shimmy and bleed, and somehow illuminate the differences through highlighting the similarities. Her prose is incredibly fluid, even liquid, managing to easily flow and shape itself around a variety of thoughts and ideas.
Silken Shore
Lake asleep in a dusking leaf, the hair of a peasant I killed awaits to strangle me. Its ridicule on this final step feverishly summoned, the mane’s adroitness won’t pass down to my successors.
I am a flamed wheel, visible to those who have enemied me for a long while.
Somewhere, in the pleasure of the great distance, a vaporous flag ascends and descends; soldiers bloody their nakedness, hands grasping convulsively; sky, unused to incidents of this kind, blooms too soon.
We can’t expect hospitality, though we wear melancholy’s gloves. We trench in, we are the despotic fanfare of a blind platoon. We refuse sleep.
Tears march embittered through the snows. We watch them approach, soldier the urge to run off with a shadow, this night on the eve of a new flag.
Constructed in ten sections, the book includes “Itinerant Sideline,” a section composed entirely of photographs, highlighting Avasilichioaei’s engagement with the between-space, and the space that connects two opposing or conflicting spaces. A further section, “Ancillary,” is a translation of the only poems Paul Celancomposed in Romanian, composed between 1945 and 1947, during Celan’s own evolution. As part of her notes at the end of the collection, Avasilichioaei writes: “[…] Paul Pessach Antschel became Paul Celan during his years in Bucharest, having first attempted to translate himself into Paul Aurel and Paul Ancel. Written in one of his adopted languages, in the desolation of the war, a war he survived in a Romanian labour camp while his family died in another, these poems are thresholds, existent and impossible, invented and possible. Limbs disarticulate and wander their syntax in the estranged language, lose control of their articulations, stir in the aftermath of an inhumane civilization.”
Poem for Mariana’s Shadow
Love’s mint grown like an angel’s finger.
You must believe: from the soil sprouts an arm twisted by silences,
a shoulder scorched by the glaze of smothered lights
a face blindfolded with the black sash of sight
a large leaded wing and a leafed one
a body wearied by rest soaked in waters.
Look how it floats amid the grasses with outstretched wings,
how it mounts the mistletoe stairs towards a glass house,
in which, with enormous steps, rambles an aimless seaweed.
You must believe this is the moment to speak to me through the tears,
to go there barefoot, be told what awaits us:
mourning drunk from a glass or mourning drunk from a palm—
and the maddened weed falling asleep hearing your answer.
Colliding in the dark the house’s windows will clamour
telling each other what they know, but without discovering
whether we love one another or not.
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↧
Julia Bloch, Valley Fever
ALLISON CORPORATION
Outside the city is a thick line of thinking
and outside that line of thinking is a strip
of water and outside that strip of water
is a muscle. Lengthen the muscle.
Show restraint and perfect tension. That is
Allison Corporation.
California is not new.
California is not new.
California is not new.
This is a poem for you for you
for spontaneous flight
Because we live underneath some helicopters.
I’m rewriting the plan.
I’m rewiring the plan.
And outside that muscle is fat and bone
and a car that carries the body elsewhere.
We love the drones.
We love that they all have heads and
arms to fight with. All their
arms are united. You were not
born in California but neither was I.
I am angling at the surface larger
than your actual face, a not
corporate body. This is a love poem
and I did not do any research.
Philadelphia poet, critic and editor Julia Bloch’s eagerly-awaited second poetry collection is Valley Fever (Portland OR/San Francisco CA: Sidebrow Books, 2015), a book that appears three years after the publication of her Letters to Kelly Clarkson (Sidebrow Books, 2012). There is a precision to Bloch’s dense lyrics that is quite compelling, one that is constructed out of an accumulation of sharp sentences that accumulate, despite the appearance of narrative disjunction that exist between those sentences. As she writes to open the poem “FOURTH WALK”: “Don’t believe in writing as possession. Don’t / believe in bylines like slimming wear.” It is as though the sentences in her poems less leap from point-to-point than somehow float across and even through their own trajectory, seamlessly incorporating a wide array of ideas and fragments together into a single thread. As she writes to open “VISALIA”: “An allergy to / bone, this weather. / That’s how deep.”
Bloch’s short lyrics have an incredible compactness. To call her poems “quirky” or even “surreal” might do them a disservice, but both elements exist in Valley Fever, alongside a deep earnestness, a wry self-awareness and an engaged critique of everything she observes. As she writes to close the poem “UNSEASONAL”: “Once someone said love / turned off like a faucet. // I didn’t want this / to be that kind of party.”
HOSPITALIST
New definitions of
doing poorly dewing
up on the face.
Not always facing up,
not always aware
of corners, sad
and lite-jazzy.
Aristotle says
thought by itself
moves nothing. No one
decides to have sacked Troy.
All the sounds are in miniature
but the room is large
in ruined light.
Constructed as a collection of short lyrics, Valley Fever presents a curious shift from the epistolary poems that made up her first collection, Letters to Kelly Clarkson. Given the book-as-unit-of-composition element of that prior work, it is tempting to read this new book not as a grouping of stand-alone poems but as a thoughtfully-conceived single work, and perhaps the real answer might be that this exists as a combination of the two. Somehow, her poems encompass an expansive curiosity, a healthy distrust of what she sees and knows, and manage to include just about anything and everything you can imagine, in a series of poems sketched as notes towards understanding how it is one can live, and be, better in the world. As she ends the poem “RIGHT OVARY, LEFT OVARY”: “I want to know all the things. / I want to know all the gods.”
LISTENING TO PAUL ZUKOFSKY PLAY PHILIP GLASS
On Locust Street with its low steps
I thought I saw a pastel hotel
settle its elbows onto the walk.
When I talk to you sometimes my tongue
bubbles out of my mouth—I wanted
to say forth but it doesn’t march, it starts
and stops. The mouth rooted and frothy, lit
with an everyday flavor. The string skips. Paul
Zukofsky’s violin stutters. L. says a way
not to feel nervous is to look at the eye.
Hopefully there is a salted sea when you
look there. Horses marching
under their hands. It’s never
going to happen.
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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Claire Caldwell
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Writing and publishing a book was a lifelong dream, so I've been savouring the achievement. Having a book has definitely made me busier with literary things, and I've been lucky enough to travel around Canada and to the States for readings. The opportunity to connect with other poets across the country has been wonderful.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
It's funny; fiction was definitely my first love, as a reader, and I wrote a lot of stories as a kid. I think I came to poetry through the music I listened to in high school—Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Ani DiFranco. And then I read Eliot's "Prufrock" for the first time and was like, "how do I do that?" We had a Collected Poems lying around the house and I read it cover to cover, and after that there was no going back.
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?
If I'm in the right mood, I can write and shape a poem into its close-to-final form in one sitting. But the "right mood" comes out of a longer, looser process of jotting down notes, reading, taking long walks, letting things percolate.
4 - Where does a poem 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 like to gather images and scraps of lines and let them sit together for awhile. When they start rubbing off on each other, I can usually get going. I take this approach with larger projects, too. Though hopefully the poems I'm working on now will eventually be part of a book, they need some time to get to know each other before they build the house they're going to live in.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I used to get really nervous, but now I love doing readings. I like connecting so directly with an audience. And the more readings I do, the more I "hear" my poems as I write them. I think there's a literal component to voice in poetry--how do the words feel in your own mouth? Also, I often find that poetry readings, whether or not I'm on the bill, can spark creativity. You know when a poet just kills it and the room feels electric? That's contagious, I think.
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'm curious about how poetry can connect people to the world around them in ways other media can't. All these massive, scary things are happening to our planet and it can be hard to grapple with that, emotionally, without just shutting down. I'm trying to figure out how poetry can bridge that emotional gap.
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?
Writers can have lots of different roles, but I think ultimately writing and reading are acts of empathy. So as long as a drive for connection and understanding is at the heart of what a writer's trying to do, there are endless ways to occupy that space in society.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential! Paul Vermeersch edited Invasive Species, and his sharp eye, keen insights and experienced hand challenged me to make the book better. Maybe I'm biased, since I also work as an editor, but I believe getting an outside perspective from someone who can read your work on its own terms while offering constructive feedback is invaluable.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Kevin Connolly told me, "writing is action." It's both true and a good reminder to stop dicking around.
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've struggled to figure out a consistent routine with a full time job (and a long commute), but I try to carve out weekend mornings and early afternoons for writing. A typical workday usually begins with peanut butter toast and an hour or so of reading on public transit.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When I'm stuck, I'll listen to a podcast, start a sewing project, play guitar, work out, bake muffins, clean the bathroom.... Getting away from the blank screen/page for a bit and doing something with my hands usually helps take the pressure off and get thoughts flowing.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My dad's beef stew, a smell I love and miss, though neither my brother nor I eat meat anymore.
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?
Right now, nature and life sciences probably have the biggest influence on my work. As I mentioned above, music was my gateway drug into poetry. At various times, visual artists like William Kurelek, Georgia O'Keefe, David Blackwood, Joseph Cornell and Tom Thomson have also influenced me.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
One of my most beloved poems/performances is this recording of bpNichol reading "Friends as Footnotes," from The Martyrology.
There are too many writers to name, working in poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, but here are a few: Dara Wier, Sue Goyette, Elizabeth Kolbert, Roxane Gay, Jenni Fagan, Claudia Rankine, Dorothea Lasky, Galway Kinnell, Karen Solie.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a book for kids.
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?
If I had more of a mind for hard data, I'd love to be some kind of scientist/biologist--maybe an animal behaviourist. I love the idea of working outside, and I spent many summers at a canoe tripping camp, so being a wilderness guide could also be appealing.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I did all kinds of arts as a kid, and by high school I had narrowed things down to fine art, music and writing. I was pretty good at drawing and playing guitar, and I still love both, but for whatever reason, when I tried to create original work in either medium I got stuck. Writing came naturally, so I stuck with it.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I'm in the middle of Kenneth Koch's Rose, Where Did You Get that Red?It's a really inspiring and insightful book about teaching poetry to kids. The last great film I saw was Timbuktu, a feature about the Islamist occupation of that city/region. One thing I loved about that film was the treatment of subtitles. So many different languages are spoken in the film, but not every character understands every language, and depending on the POV of each scene, certain lines aren't translated for the viewer, either.
19 - What are you currently working on?
A smattering of poems, just trying to gain steam after a hectic winter. Since it's poetry month, I'm following along, somewhat, with the daily NaPoWriMo 2015 prompts for inspiration/motivation.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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Rita Wong, undercurrent
both the ferned & the furry, the herbaceous & the human, can call the ocean our ancestor. our blood plasma sings the composition of seawater. roughly half a billion years ago, ocean reshaped some of its currents into fungi, flora & fauna that left their marine homes & learned to exchange bodily fluids on land. spreading like succulents & stinging nettles, our salty-wet bodies refilled their fluids through an eating that is also always drinking. hypersea is a story of how we rearrange our oceanic selves on land. we are liquid matrix, streaming & recombining through ingestic one another, as a child swallows a juicy plum, as a beaver chews on tree, as a hare inhales a patch of moist, dewy clover. what do we return to the ocean that let us loose on land? we are animals moving extracted & excreted minerals into the ocean without plan or precaution, making dead zones though we are capable of life. (“BORROWED WATERS: THE SEA AROUND US, THE SEA WITHIN US”)
Vancouver poet Rita Wong’s fourth poetry collection, undercurrent(Gibson’s BC: Nightwood Editions, 2015)—following monkeypuzzle (Vancouver BC: Press Gang, 1998), forge (Nightwood Editions, 2007) and sybil unrest (with Larissa Lai; Vancouver BC: Line Books, 2008; New Star, 2013)—is, as Wang Ping informs on the back cover, a “love song for rivers, land, and sentient beings on earth.” Constructed out of lyric fragments, prose poems, memoir notes and extensive research, undercurrentis an extensive pastiche of the story of numerous bodies of water, and our relationships to them. Writing in, around and through the lyric flow, the poems exist, in part, as an extensive call to action against an increasing level of human carnage inflicted upon the earth and its inhabitants: “midway at midway, sun glares plastic trashed, beached, busted / bottle caps, broken lighters, brittle shreds in feathered corpses // heralded by the hula hoop & the frisbee, this funky plastic age / spins out unplanned aftermath, ongoing agony” (“MONGO MONDO”). Unlike a number of other British Columbia poets writing on the dangerous effects of capitalism, Wong’s undercurrent, much like Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars (Talonbooks, 2014), allows her subject matter to be the focus, existing not as victim but as robust character, describing a series of affronts, assaults and toxic tales, as well as positive stories on the beauty and power of the undercurrent. As she writes:
after eighty destructive years
industrial blockage of salmon habitat
we celebrate this uncanny return in the city:
salmon to Still Creek in 2012
alert, adept swimmers
kindle, perpetuate, astound
with sleek scaly stamina
miraculous as the salmon that grace Musqueam Creek
with each year’s turn around the sun
an unbroken vow between relatives
Composed as collage, this is the story of water.
In spring 2014, canoeing in the gentle River of Golden Dreams near Whistler, BC, I fell in when we snagged on a branch and suddenly tipped over. The shock of cold water awoke me into vigilance. Wearing a lifejacket did not eliminate the fear I felt as the river enveloped me completely, reminded me of its power.
Ironically, I cannot swim, though I have taken lessons over the years, and continue to try learning in an on-again, off-again way, as skin and health permit. Having addressed barriers to swimming in the city one by one – finding an ozone-purified pool instead of a chlorinated one, getting prescription goggles, practicing kicks, etc. I have improved but still find myself woefully clumsy and tense in the water, as it conducts so much sound and stimulus, thicker than air. How can someone write a book with and for water, and not swim? Very humbly and respectfully, I would say. It’s not so much that I fear the water, as I fear my own inability to manoeuvre in it, based in part on my reluctance to relax, the resistance to submit to the water’s own dynamics for more than a few breaths. This is partly what I mean when I say that I am still learning water’s syntax. I mean that in a much larger way too, though. One water body flows together with other water bodies, a whole greater than its parts. “What you cannot do alone, you will do together.”
Thanks to the river’s prompting, I will return to the swim lessons when the time and conditions are right. In the meantime, even for those who don’t swim, water rules! Our cities and lifestyles are built upon it, whether we know it or not. Try going a day, or three, without water. Water gives us life. What do we give back to water?
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Ongoing notes: later May 2015
Like a lot of my stories, that one just followed one momentary thought—What am I doing here, putting odd sentences together and creating some little piece of nonsense, when people are dying on the other side of the world and our government’s going to damnation? It’s something that a lot of artists, I’m sure, feel at one time or another, that they’re wasting time or doing something frivolous. So instead of answering myself and ignoring it, I wrote it out as a little thought. I didn’t know how much value to give to that story, but I showed it to a very serious critic and she liked it, so I decided it passed.
There’s been a ton of activity around here lately, or perhaps there hasn’t; perhaps my time full-time with toddler has shifted my perspective. Who knows? I bake, I wander with wee babe to the park, and the occasional reading even happens. Currently I’m in the midst of a slew of new above/ground press publications for the upcoming semi-annual ottawa small press book fair weekend, on June 12 and 13: might we see you there?
Rose turned eighteen months last week. Her big sister Kate gifted her a “Flash” mask, which means, of course, there can only be blurry photos.
Prince George BC:Rob Buddewas good enough to send me a copy of Kara-lee MacDonald’s Eating Matters (Hobo Books, 2015), a chapbook of poems exploring eating disorders and the social pressures/expectations of women. The collage aspect of the collection, very much composed as a single project, is rather interesting. Some pieces might be less effective than others, but the variety and scope of the structure makes the read more than worth it. To see how one might get a copy, check with karaleemacdona@gmail.com
The hardest part is knowing
that she should know better.
It isn’t as if she isn’t educated—
as if she isn’t well-read. She can tell you
what de Beauvoir says,
what Butler says,
what Bordo says.
At the end of the way,
—theory fails
to account for disjunction
between bodily urges and
rational thought.
When the late hour and quiet house
have broken her resolve,
she responds predictably.
A trip to the kitchen before
inducing in the bathroom.
Running water to mask
the sounds.
Philadelphia PA: From Brian Teare’s Albion Books comes Jean Valentine’s small chapbook friend (2015), a collection of lyrics that appear to reference her prior poem for Adrienne Rich, a piece that shares a similar title. An award-winning New York City poet, Valentine is the author of numerous books, and winner of a wide array of awards, from the Wallace Stevens Award and the Shelley Memorial Prize. The short poems in friend are carefully composed and packed tight, while still allowing a particular looseness to breathe between her lines.
MY WORDS TO YOU
My words to you are the stitches in a scarf
I don’t want to finish
maybe it will come to be a blanket
to hold you here
love not gone anywhere
Perhaps extending from that previous piece, these poems explore the attachments between people. She writes of loss and love, and even deeper bonds, such as the final stanza of the poem “AFTER: ISN'T THERE SOMETHING,” that reads:
I want to go back to you,
who when you were dying said
“There are one or two people you don’t want to
let go of.” Here too, where I don’t let go of you.
Toronto ON: The recently-launched Toronto chapbook publisher, WORDS(ON)PAGES, released a small handful of chapbooks this past spring, including Daniel Scott Tysdal’s THE DISCOVERY OF LOVE (2015), “COMPOSED ON THE OCCASION OF THE PUBLICATION OF THE DISCOVERY OF LOVE, WHICH MARKED THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PASSING OF THE GAY MARRIAGE ACT ON JANUARY 18, 1979.”
The discovery? Yes, ma’am, I remember,
clear as day. I was searching the Good Book
for a verse that would really stick it to
the homosexuals. You see, that was how
I thought back in ’77. It was late, which
I don’t remember so much as know. I still
don’t sleep well when travelling, even
though that night I was in Dade Country, only
an eight hour drive from my own bed [laughs].
Dade’s where they were passing that law,
you see, to help the homosexuals. Or stop
hurting them. [Pauses] I don’t recall.
Either way, the lot of us Pastors and Deacons
were madder than mules chewing bees
[laughs], ready to bring down all the light
and fire of the Lord on those heathen
councilors in Miami. And then it
happened. [Pauses]. This I remember
as clear as day. I saw that word and I felt
God’s own great hands wrap me up like
a blanket round a baby and for the first
time I truly felt [pauses] Him, [pauses]
I mean us, us, the power He granted us
with this one word that changed the whole
ballgame: love. It was right there in John’s
First Epistle: “We love because He first loved
us.” I couldn’t believe we had missed it!
Lord forgive us, for centuries! [Laughs.]
Lord forgive us, for centuries! [Laughs.]
And the scriptures were just stuffed with
it. Mark 12:31, “Love your neighbor as
yourself.” Romans 13:8: “Let no debt
remain outstanding, except the continuing
debt to love one another.” (“1. THE FORMER PASTOR MAYHEW RAY”)
Subtitled “EXCERPTS FROM AN ENDLESS ORAL HISTORY,” Tysdal’s five-part poem exists as both celebration and historical warning, utilizing real events for the sake of a lyric-through-accretion. Tysdal’s published poetry to date, which include a small handful of trade collections and small chapbooks, are each constructed in unexpected ways, utilizing collage, the idea of the archive and folded materials to produce highly inventive and incredibly powerful works that, in themselves, question the possibilities of what poetry could be. What is a poem? Tysdal’s work continues to challenge the idea of simply what is possible.
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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Madhur Anand
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The only big change I’ve noticed is that lately I am much less obsessed with reading and writing poetry and a little more obsessed with reading and writing prose.
The most recently written poems in the book arose out of a forced, but necessary, confrontation with my own scientific research. I seemed to have avoided doing that for a long time, but I’m glad I finally did it.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
As I have elaborated on elsewhere [http://ifoa.org/2015/five-questions-with/five-questions-with-madhur-anand], I got hooked on poetry when I discovered it was a way to inject a perpendicular mode of being and thinking into my life’s dominant, and sometimes predictable, course. Though I enjoyed fiction and non-fiction very much, they seemed either too acute or too obtuse at the time for this particular purpose.
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?
The writing is sometimes quick and sometimes slow. First drafts are almost never in their final shape. Some methods of writing, perhaps because of the extremely concentrated focus or constraint they demand (such as with ‘found’ poems, villanelles, and sestinas), can lead to almost final first drafts.
4 - Where does a poem 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 thought, a concept, a memory, a theory, striking language -- all usually in reference to beauty, loss or fascination. My first book was a combination of poems written over many years, but there were common themes (biology, complexity, critical transitions). In the process of editing, and after choosing my title, many new poems were inspired. So, in the end, it was a bit of both.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I haven’t done very many public readings, so I don’t know yet. I certainly find it enjoyable and inspiring to attend readings by other poets.
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 am concerned, perhaps preoccupied, with the relationship between science and poetry. We don’t have a sufficient theory to explain this relationship. I am also concerned with the role of constraint in poetry. A large number of the poems in the book are written in syllabics. Though obviously intentional and strictly self-enforced, I don’t fully understand how this kind of constraint works, and the need for it, fundamentally. My book also has a couple of villanelles and several found poems. These are other forms of constraint, and some of them have been written about in fascinating ways (see for example the essay entitled “Life Forms: Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina” and “DNA Structure” in the book Unified Fields edited by Janine Rogers). But I want my understanding of this to go beyond metaphor.
The questions I am trying to answer in my poems are the same questions that appear on the NASA poster hanging in my little boy’s bedroom: “Life: What is it? Where is it? How do we find it?” NASA is still asking these questions, and I think we all should be too, constantly.
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?
“Writer” is such a broad category; all writers won’t have the same role. Poets are still (as Shelley once articulated) the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. This ‘legislation’ is not only restricted to human-human interactions but potentially many other undiscovered laws of the universe.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. I’ve loved every editor I have worked with (and there were many). Dionne Brand, poetry board member at M&S had the job of doing the final edit of my book, and what she asked of me, what we did together was marvelous and well, essential.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Read this:” [insert any brilliant work of poetry or prose that I have not yet heard of here].
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 have no daily writing routine. I have a full-time job as a professor of ecology and three young children. I write when I can. I have more of a yearly routine. Every year I try to do at least one intensive thing for my writing such as a retreat or a workshop.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Better writing (that is, I read). Or I go for a walk.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
North Indian spices. Smoke from making chapatis because we don’t have a range hood. Johnson & Johnson baby lotion. Vick’s Vapour Rub.
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?
I think that most of the time books come from other books. Many other forms (disciplines) influence my work, but most of all, science.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
At the back of my book you’ll find the names of all the writers who have indirectly or directly mentored or helped my work in some significant way It’s a very long list that includes Don McKay, Paul Vermeersch and Phil Hall. These individuals, and their works have been influential. As for other writings, it’s harder to say. There are so many. But an early influential event was picking up a copy of Robyn Sarah’s book The Touchstone at Paragraphe Bookstore in Montreal when I was just starting to take my writing seriously over 15 years ago. I would visit bookshops in every city I travelled to (mostly to give scientific talks) and pick one or two poetry books from among the selection offered. That was my poetry education. I was also influenced early on by the work of Wislawa Szymborska. I have subscribed continuously to Poetry magazine since 2003. I love that magazine, and it has helped to expose me to a diversity of contemporary writing.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Publish a second book of creative writing.
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?
Given that I have the two professions I adore most, am committed to, and am constantly reinventing, plus a rather full family life, I can’t even imagine any other occupation. When I was 17, I turned down an offer from McMaster University to do an undergraduate degree in their highly coveted “Arts and Science” program. I choose pure science at Western instead. But I always wondered about that path not taken. I am thrilled that I did not end up having to make the choice between art and science in my life.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
The love of it.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
A Room on the Roof by Ruskin Bond. The last great film was probably something from years ago such asThe Five Obstructions by Lars von Trier. I can’t recall any more recent films worth mentioning right now (sorry, great films!).
19 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on numerous things in my scientific profession -- see
(http://www.uoguelph.ca/~manand/Madhur_Anand/Welcome.html).
I’m also helping to raise 3 kids and piecing together various sets of ideas and materials for what could be my next creative writing project (or not).
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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12 or 20 (small press) questions with Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr on Commune Editions
On the press, from communeditions.com
Commune Editions began with Bay Area friendships formed in struggle: the occupations in resistance to UC tuition hikes in 2009-11; the anti-police uprisings after the shooting of Oscar Grant that continued with the deaths of Mike Brown and Eric Garner; and the local version of Occupy, referred to by some as the Oakland Commune. In these moments, the people committed to poetry and the people committed to militant political antagonism came to be more and more entangled, turned out to be the same people. This felt transformative to us, strange and beautiful. A provisionally new strain of poetry has begun to emerge from this entanglement with communist and anarchist organizing, theorizing, and struggle.
This work inspires us. Because there was no existing venue attuned to these changes, we decided to start one. We committed first our own work to this project, and brought our experience with other presses. We hope to publish poetry for reading and writing explicitly against the given world, always aware that it begins inside that world—and to put this work in dialogue with poetries from other countries and from other historical moments, times and places where the politicization of poetry and the participation of poets in uprisings large and small was and remains a convention.
We are curious about, but not overconfident regarding, the capacities of art. Poems are no replacement for concrete forms of political action. But poetry can be a companion to these activities, as the “Riot Dog” of Athens was a companion in streets. A dog, too, might start barking when the cops are about to kick down your door. Perhaps that’s it, for now, what we’re doing, what is to be done, with poetry. Some barking. Some letting you know that the cops are at the door. They’ve been there for a while.
We have plans to publish two or three books a year for as long as these specific orientations seem magnetic. We have our list for 2015-2016 and are not presently reading manuscripts. But we will be. Check back here for details.
Commune Editions is published in partnership with AK Press and distributed in the US and Canada by Consortium.
1 – When did Commune Editions 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?
Commune Editions began as a press in 2013. It was Joshua’s idea, originally, and he approached me and Juliana about it. But in many ways the project began much earlier, with the politicization of the Bay Area poetry scene over the last five years or so, beginning with the antipolice and student movements of 2009 and 2010, and continuing with Occupy in 2011. Commune Editions is, in some sense, a formalization or recognition of a process that is much larger than us, and which involves the integration of somes Bay Area poets and their projects into a much larger political milieu with other urgencies and animating concerns.
Our goals remain fairly consistent, even if we’ve come to understand that realizing them is more difficult than we first presumed. We want to act as an outlet for poetry that is uncompromising in its opposition to capitalism and the state, patriarchy and racism, and to do so in a way that creates connections between poets and political radicals. We’ve learned, I suppose, that this makes a number of poets very uncomfortable. No matter how many times we explicitly state that we’re uninterested in telling poets what to do or how to write, nor possessed of any strong convictions that what we’re doing is of crucial importance for the struggles to which we’re committed, we seem to be responsible for all manner of guilty or resentful poet-feelings. We’re not sure why that is, but perhaps this is a role someone has to play.
2 – What first brought you to publishing?
I had always assumed that it was dauntingly complex. But I came to know some people involved with subpress, and that made it seem more plausible. About that time I had gotten a job with a regular salary, and a friend (Michael Scharf) asked me if I wanted to start a press (this would be In Girum). He seemed relatively lacking in trepidation, which I admired. And so, armed with the desire to be (or at least appear) as dauntless as the subpress folks and Mike, and armed with a few extra dollars from my job, I entered the fray. I was fortunate that just around this time I went to a reading, I forget, someone famous, and the opening reader really knocked me out; that was Jasper, who at that point I didn’t really know. But his manuscript, Starsdown, would be the first In Girum publication.
3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?
“Small” publishing is just the way that literature other than the realist novel circulates. Its role is to distribute the literatures that do not have a lot of national or international reach but that a certain smallish group of people want to read. Responsibilities, I’m not sure about. But it does a fairly decent job of publishing a lot of books. The harder part is just finding them or knowing about them.
4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?
Well, I don’t know that we’re unique. I’m sure there are other presses that define themselves in a similar way. I suppose that the way we’re beginning the press, publishing our own books first and defining our vision for the press in that way, with our three books, is a bit different. We’re being honest, in that regard, about the kind of work we want to see, and our commitment to a certain poetry that’s rooted in our experiences, convictions, and friendships. We don’t claim to be committed to a pseudo-objective notion of “the best,” and there are many books we consider quite good which would nonetheless not be right for Commune Editions.
5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?
I’m not sure I understand this question. Mailing? I don’t think we have any particularly innovative ideas for publicity; we’re a mix of social media mentions and conventional circulating of review copies. I think the question of whether there is some untapped audience that might pick up the books — this seems to me to verge on the metaphysical. Mostly poetry books seem to overflow the banks and move into new meadows because they orbit around a social matter with particular charisma in that moment. I think the most effective way for us to get books out into the world is to continue our engagement with the world that interests us, with readers who do not necessarily identify as poets but who are interested in, and engaged with, the political antagonisms that write us.
6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?
Light touch. Although if asked, some of us will give insane large feedback. But I also see that more as “discussion” and comes out of “admiration.” But I can’t imagine accepting a book and then being like you have to cut this or that.
7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?
We are an imprint of AK Press, an anarchist publisher which has distribution through Consortium. We are printing our books in runs of 1,000 or 2,000 this year. We also produce chapbooks in very small batches through a local printing collective, Loose Dogs, and distribute these 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?
The three of us edit as a team, though each book project has a de facto lead editor who takes a book through the production process. We also have a design editor Tim who is awesome, and another friend who helps with the website. It’s hard to find the balance between wanting to share work, people’s shifting schedules, the efficiencies of having someone in charge. Often the work falls to whoever has least to do that week, in a sort of hydraulic model, which means that the press has the function of making sure that we are all busy all the time, that no one ever has a down week. This can be a bit maddening, to be honest, but it’s what needs to happen. It’s really worth underscoring how much friends help us in small but repeated and generous ways: letting us use a print shop for proofs, helping us cut and bind galleys (and teaching us how to do these things!), just, you know, folding chapbooks. Thanks to Chloe and Ian and Tim and Bruce and Jenn and lots of other people.
9 – How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?
Of course. I have had entirely new thoughts enter my brain because editing is about reading people’s 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?
I don’t see any reason for us to be anxious about publishing our own work. There isn’t that much difference between what we’re doing and what we might do otherwise: publish our books with the presses that our friends run. The poetry community we operate is largely based on direct, personal relationships, for better or worse. If you define the self a bit more broadly, everyone is always already self-publishing, and if the work is good it will get read.
11– How do you see Commune Editions evolving?
If all goes well it will evolve until it is no longer a poetry press but an actual commune. That may sound flippant, so perhaps there is another way to put it. The press arose from a concrete situation, wherein the particular contours of a shifting social antagonism — for which the Oakland Commune was briefly a living emblem — led the poetic and communist/anarchist communities of the Bay Area, already overlapping, to become entangled. The press is an expression of that entanglement and that antagonism, and will evolve alongside it. We’re one of the many things that you can do from within such a situation. We hope this will happen on expanded grounds, and happen in relation to similar entanglements and antagonisms in other places.
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?
How to make cheap galleys is my biggest frustration. Along with how to use Mailchimp.
13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?
Oh, I don’t know. Of course it is easy to name the small presses that have been inseparable from own developments as people. We mentioned subpress. I have a special place in my heart for Edge, and Black and Red, and North Point, and Broadside, and AK Press. One of the things that communists and anarchists in the US have had in common with poets is that they are mostly going to be proceeding within the assumptions of collective, local publishing. It’s like, who weren’t our models?
14– How does Commune Editions work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Commune Editions in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?
This is probably already answered in #11. We’re resistant to the idea of a literary community as some autonomous thing; one’s first relationship is always to a lived situation rather than to other literary circles. Many many many of the people we love sometimes make poems or other kinds of writing, but that doesn’t mean they and we are poets any more than the fact that we often wash dishes makes us dishwashers. All of that said, we feel pretty attached to a lot of presses, either because we see them trying to attune themselves to the same situations that we ourselves struggle to grasp, or because they do things that are beyond us. We are especially grateful for presses that do work in translation; we have done some of that, with more coming, but we’re limited in what we know and what we can do — thus very grateful for that work happening.
15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?
Readings are one of the ways that literature circulates. I’d go for important.
16– How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?
We have a website and we sell books there. We use facebook and twitter, and we try to release digital versions of everything we publish. The internet is an interesting topic, but I’m not sure our internet use is all that interesting. It’s largely a mode of distribution for us.
17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?
Not currently. We probably will at some point. We are looking for the end of the world as we know it, and aren’t looking for improvements.
18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.
We’d like to answer that question next year! Our first three are by us; we’ve probably talked about them enough, and there are blurbs here: http://www.akpress.org/catalogsearch/result/?cat=0&q=commune+editions
Next year we are publishing Cheena Marie Lo, David Lau, and Ida Borjel (in translation). We’ll have a lot to say about them when the time comes.
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Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall, a Selected Collage
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prose in the park + the ottawa small press book fair!
Prose in the Park: June 6: the first of what suggests as an annual event, comparable to when we used to have Word on the Street in town (remember those?). Big, medium and small publishers will be displaying and selling their wares, and a number of authors will be reading throughout the day. And of course, Chaudiere Books will be there as well (thanks to Marilyn Irwin...).
the ottawa small press book fair: June 12 (pre-fair reading) and June 13 (fair itself): co-invented by myself, I've been running it twice a year since it was founded way, way, way back in 1994. Quite honestly, the best of the small press. If you love great writing, small publishing and a whole ton of local materials that you might not otherwise be aware of, this is your event.
And then, of course, Congress is happening right now at the University of Ottawa, which also includes a book fair.
We live in glorious times, I'd say.
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dusie : the tuesday poem,
The series aims to publish a mix of authors from the dusie kollektiv, as well as Canadian and international poets, ranging from emerging to the well established. Over the next few weeks and months, watch for new work by dusies and non-dusies alike, including Steve McOrmond, Lily Brown, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Beth Bachmann, Harold Abramowitz, Sarah Burgoyne, David James Brock, Elizabeth Treadwell, Shannon Maguire, Mary Austin Speaker, Victor Coleman, Charles Bernstein, Jennifer K Dick, Eric Schmaltz, Kayla Czaga, Paige Taggart, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Lillian Necakov, Liz Howard, Jamie Reid, Jennifer Londry, Rachel Loden, a rawlings, Jenny Haysom, Jake Kennedy, Beverly Dahlen, Kristjana Gunnars, Eleni Zisimatos, Pete Smith, Julie Carr, Natalee Caple, Alice Burdick and Phinder Dulai.
A new poem will appear every Tuesday afternoon, Central European Summer Time, just after lunch (which is 8am in Central Canada terms).
If you wish to receive notices for poems as they appear, just send me an email at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com.
If you wish to receive notices for poems as they appear, just send me an email at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com.
So far, the Tuesday poem series has featured new writing by Elizabeth Robinson, Megan Kaminski, Marcus McCann, Hoa Nguyen, Stephen Collis, j/j hastain, David W. McFadden, Edward Smallfield, Erín Moure, Roland Prevost, Maria Damon, Rae Armantrout, Jenna Butler, Cameron Anstee, Sarah Rosenthal, Kathryn MacLeod, Camille Martin, Pattie McCarthy, Stephen Brockwell, Rosmarie Waldrop, Nicole Markotić, Deborah Poe, Ken Belford, Hugh Thomas, nathan dueck, Hailey Higdon, Stephanie Bolster, Jessica Smith, Mark Cochrane, Amanda Earl, Robert Swereda, Colin Smith, Sarah Mangold, Joe Blades, Maxine Chernoff, Peter Jaeger, Dennis Cooley, Louise Bak, Phil Hall, Fenn Stewart, derek beaulieu, Susan Briante, Adeena Karasick, Marthe Reed, Brecken Hancock, Lea Graham, D.G. Jones, Monty Reid, Karen Mac Cormack, Elizabeth Willis, Susan Elmslie, Paul Vermeersch, Susan M. Schultz, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, K.I. Press, Méira Cook, Rachel Moritz, Kemeny Babineau, Gil McElroy, Geoffrey Nutter, Lisa Samuels, Dan Thomas-Glass, Judith Copithorne, Deborah Meadows, Meredith Quartermain, William Allegrezza, nikki reimer, Hillary Gravendyck, Catherine Wagner, Stan Rogal, Sarah de Leeuw, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Arielle Greenberg,lary timewell, Norma Cole, Paul Hoover, Emily Carr, Kate Schapira, Johanna Skibsrud, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, David McGimpsey, Richard Froude, Marilyn Irwin, Carrie Olivia Adams, Aaron Tucker, Mercedes Eng, Jean Donnelly, Pearl Pirie, Valerie Coulton, Lesley Yalen, Andy Weaver, Christine Stewart, Susan Lewis, Kate Greenstreet, ryan fitzpatrick, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Lina ramona Vitkauskas, Nikki Sheppy, N.W. Lea, Barbara Henning, Chus Pato (trans Erín Moure), Stephen Cain, Lucy Ives, William Hawkins, Jan Zwicky, Rusty Morrison, Jon Boisvert, Helen Hajnoczky, Steven Heighton, Jennifer Kronovet and Ray Hsu.
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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Anne Champion
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?
My first book, Reluctant Mistress, didn’t significantly change my life. The process of writing it taught me a lot, both about myself and about craft. Publication was simply a goal completed that allowed me to move on and dedicate my energies to other projects. The best part of publication was having readers who fully understood my work. I’m so humbled and grateful for the warmth of the poetry community—that simply means everything. It gives my life a sort of fulfillment that I never dreamed I’d have.
My new collection set for publication by Noctuary Press, The Dark Length Home, is a collaborative collection that I wrote with the incomparable Sarah Sweeney. It was an experience I treasure. I generally have a plan as I sit down to write a poem. I know what images I will focus on, I know what story I want to tell, and I have a general idea of how it will end. With Sarah, we alternated line by line. I had to let go of control, and it was exciting. Poems would take turns I didn’t expect, and I had to adapt to tones and voices that were not my own. I’m really proud of how we navigated the process, and I think it pushed me in new directions.
I’m working on other collections, and I always want to challenge myself in terms of topics that I obsess over and formal constraints. I am trying to do something new with each one. At some point in time, I started to feel like I was writing about the same thing repeatedly, and I needed to challenge myself. I definitely think I’m doing that with my new work.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I actually came to fiction first. I wrote stories from the time I was a child and I studied primarily fiction through college. However, at some point in my college experience, poetry simply started to become the genre that spoke to me most forcefully, moved me most emotionally, and served me as a writer. Once I started writing poetry, I stopped writing everything else. I still read all genres of writing religiously, but poetry allows me to express what I want in a variety of creative ways.
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?
The initial draft work comes quickly to me. I’m usually struck by an image, a line, or a concept and it harasses me until I begin to interrogate it through writing it down. I’ll shape it into a poem fairly fast. However, the revision process is often long, tedious, and torturous. I have a group of writers that I bring drafts to and rely on for revision advice. I’ll often play with various forms and structures, going back and forth between new and old drafts. Sometimes the revision comes within weeks, sometimes I keep tweaking a poem for years. Some poems I finally abandon and throw away. Regardless, the final draft rarely looks like the original.
4 - Where does a poem 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?
Within the last few years, I have focused on making a book from the beginning. It seems that, in terms of both getting a manuscript published and in reader’s experience of the work, it’s best to have a cohesive collection. My first two collections (one which is unpublished), did not really begin as a “book” per se, though I tried to structure them so that they look at specific themes. In writing them, I was simply writing poems about all different things that inspired me. Now, I generally start with a vision for a book, and focus my writing on exploring that vision.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Public readings are necessary to the process, as they get your writing out in the world and allow you to expose it to new people. I enjoy performing in front of crowds, so I’ve always enjoyed readings. However, after my first book, I did so many readings that I had to take time off from it—I got very burned out, and I just wanted to hole myself away and focus on new work.
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 don’t have specific questions, but I do have obsessions that I’ve been exploring for years. Some of my obsessions include female sexuality, feminism, sexual liberation, abuse, war, race, and oppression. In terms of questions, I always think of my poems as interrogating a wound.
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?
In many cultures, poets are revered. When I was doing activist work in Palestine, Palestinians would always tell me that I was a messenger for God, because “a poet speaks God’s pain.” I found this sentiment lovely (though it certainly put a lot of expectation on my work!)
I think writers are important in that artists play a role in creating culture, reflecting cultural values, and capturing the sentiments of a historical moment. No matter what you are writing, you are writing in the context of culture and history; thus, we have a very important responsibility to respect that and reflect deeply upon the issues of our time. We need to be creatures of empathy and morality, though we may not be perfect ourselves—in our writing, we should be striving for the better world.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It’s essential for any writer to work with other people. Many people think of it as such a solitary profession, but I really don’t think it should be. Our work is not read in a vacuum, and it shouldn’t be written in one either. We need an audience and we need feedback to perfect our craft. I’ve never had a bad experience working with an editor. In fact, I quite like my editors!
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I saw Michael Cunningham speak when I was in college. Someone asked him what advice he could give to young writers. His answer was simple: “It’s going to take a really, really long time to see your work in print. You are going to be rejected a lot. You have to be really patient and really determined to keep trying and keep writing.” It seems like common sense, but I really took it to heart. I don’t let rejection bother me. I just keep focusing on trying to make my writing better and make my projects become something I’m personally proud of. Even if they never see the light of day, the process of writing is still very fulfilling to me, in and of itself. I want my work to be read, but I don’t make publication a measure of my happiness as a writer. When I have success, I consider it a bonus to something that I already love, something that is a major part of who I am.
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 don’t really have one. As a professor, I try to sneak in writing whenever I can. I dedicate myself most to writing when I have time off. I don’t think a writer needs to write every day to be a real writer; part of being a writer is experiencing life and processing the world mentally and emotionally.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I go to books of poetry that I know have powerfully moved me. When I re-read books that changed me, I usually feel inspired immediately. Or I look for new books of writers who are exploring themes that I’m interested in. Whenever I find a poem I wish I wrote, I get very excited about going back to writing and experimenting on the page.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I don’t think I’ve fully figured out what home means to me. I feel at home in a lot of places. I feel most at home when I’m traveling far from home. (Though I miss my cats!)
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?
I know a lot of writers that dabble in other arts or use other arts for their inspiration. For me, personally, books really do come from books. I love all forms of art and I try to expose myself to it as much as possible, but they rarely explicitly influence my work. Whereas writers influence my work constantly. I wouldn’t change or experiment if it were not for what I’d seen other writers do. I get most inspired while reading.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
There’s so many!! This is always the hardest question because I want to rattle off a long list. Sylvia Plath is really my backbone as a poet. If it were not for her, I would not be a poet. She showed me how to write about rage, pain, and abuse with such musical grace, and I still think no one holds a candle to her metaphors. Anais Nin influenced me in terms of sexual liberation and feminist themes. I also love Louise Gluck, Tarfia Faizullah, Traci Brimhall, Sharon Olds, Mark Doty, Sandra Cisneros, and Junot Diaz.
In terms of my life outside of work, there are several poets who have been an incredible support system: Lisa Marie Basile, Mary Stone, and Kristina Marie Darling, to name a few. I also greatly admire their writing.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Work in a refugee camp in the Middle East.
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 be a full time activist and community organizer. That’s hard to make a living doing, but I’m so inspired by revolutionaries that sacrificed everything for social change. I was really inspired by young peace activists that I met in Palestine; they are doing such creative things! I’d love to be fully immersed in that.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I write because I have to. Words haunt me, and if I don’t get them out then I’ll lose my mind. I write to know who I am and understand the world better. I write to increase my sense of empathy for others. I write because I simply have no choice. It gives my life depth in ways that nothing else does.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I recently read Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. As an activist, I found his voice to be monumentally inspiring, full of wisdom, dogged patience, and compassion.
I don’t see a lot of movies (I’m more of a TV gal), but I really loved Selma.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on revising a manuscript called Graveyard of Numbers which is the result of a Peace Delegation that I went to in Palestine. The manuscript documents the many stories I was told by locals in documenting the horrors of war and military occupation. It also ties in issues of race and oppression in American culture.
My next manuscript, which I’ve started the process of writing, will be Odes and Persona poems to famous historical women. So far I have poems to Annie Oakley, Amelia Earhart, Judy Garland, Sylvia Plath, Harriot Jacobs, Anne Frank, and others. I hope to have a broad range in terms of race and sexuality, including transgender women and men.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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Noah Eli Gordon, The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom
A FACT CUTS ITSELF IN TWO on the landing below the Book of Dreams. Becomes part flowering muscle, half a piece standing in for the Queen. But what of the magistrate, up in arms & waving from the margins where there is endless commerce & an amaranth on the sill? & the window itself? Its hypotheses & electronics? The white wires will stand for science, lines in the author’s poker face taken on faith. Betraying the historical underpinnings, a pin pulled outside of Alexandria. (“THE LAUGHING ALPHABET”)
Colorado poet, editor and publisher Noah Eli Gordon’s ninth poetry collection is The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom(Brooklyn NY: Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015), a collection, as his notes at the end acknowledge, “composed and revised variously between 2000 and 2013.” Given the amount he’s published over the past decade—including Figures for a Darkroom Voice (with Joshua Marie Wilkinson; Tarpaulin Sky, 2007), A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues, 2007), Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007), The Source (Futurepoem Books, 2011) and The Year of the Rooster(Ahsahta Press, 2013), as well as the work-in-progress “The Problem”—it’s curious to interact with a collection of his that include some of the first writing of his that I really connected with, discovered via his chapbook Acoustic Experience (Pavement Saw Press, 2008). Gordon appears to work on multiple projects concurrently, which means that some of the work in the current collection might even pre-date a couple of his entire already-published poetry books. Going through the poems that make up The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom, and being aware of so much of his other poetry books have been constructed as book-length projects, this collection almost appears as a collection of stray poems, composed over an extended period as comparatively stand-alone pieces that simply accumulated. The linkages between the poems are there, both in tone and structure, even amid the variety of prose poems, short sequences and tight lyrics. Jack Spicer referred to such disconnected or stand-alone pieces as “one night stands,” and Gordon, now, has a collection of such, akin to Toronto poet and BookThug publisher Jay MillAr’s Other Poems (Nightwood Editions/blewointment, 2010), or Vancouver poet George Bowering’s book of magazine verse, In The Flesh (McClelland & Stewart, 1974), which itself riffed off Spicer’ own “Book of Magazine Verse” from The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Black Sparrow Press, 1975). In his “Afterword” to the collection, Gordon writes:
This is where the poem begins: the Word Kingdom. When I was about twenty, I remember sitting in my room one night, annoyed with something my housemates were up to, and a bit bored with whatever my other friends were doing. It was one of those evening[s] where you just feel aimless, off-balance, agitated. There was something gnawing at me, but I didn’t know what. Then, out of nowhere, a procession of sirens passed by my house. I mean there were fire trucks, police cars, a few ambulances, lots and lots of noise—sudden, alarming noise; then, nothing. It was dead silent for maybe a second or two before the sirens picked up again. This time they seemed to come from every direction, as though they were surrounding the house. But the pitch was off, all wobbly, a weird vibrato, like electronics trying to run on nearly dead batteries. The sound wasn’t coming from the sirens at all. It was an animal sound. It was every dog in the neighborhood at once attempting to imitate the noise. It was the word kingdom. None of them could do it quite right, but damn were they going for it. It felt simultaneously sad and triumphant. It was the exact moment I decided to be a writer. I’m not writing the noise of the sirens, nor am I writing the noise of the dogs. I hope my poems take root in the silence after the two have sounded: mimetic chatter and babble paradoxically from intellection to imagination. The word kingdom in the Word Kingdom.
The collection reads as though Gordon, over the years, has been utilizing short lyrics as a way to sketch out a series of commentaries on contemporary poetry, and this is simply the accumulation of pieces that could easily have been written as short essays. These are notes on form, structure and subject, playing off a level of cultural expectation in poetry, with the occasional playful jab or exploration at elements of his contemporary field, as a number of his titles suggest, such as “A THEORY OF THE NOVEL,” “FOR EXPRESSION,” “QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY,” “AGAINST ERASURE,” “ARS POETICA,” “ANOTHER COMMENT ON THE TEXT” or the three poems titled “BEST AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL POETRY.” I find it curious that Gordon has chosen to explore ideas of poetry through the form of the poem (much in the way that Stephen Brockwell and Peter Norman once collaborated in a conversation on the form of the sonnet through the form of the sonnet, or Mark Truscott’s short prose pieces on poetic brevity). His is a call to action, attention and an engagement with form over fashion, such as in the poem “EIGHT MEDITATIONS ON ENORMITY, PETRIFACTION, AND WORK,” that includes: “But wasn’t there much left to learn from the old ways? / Hadn’t we heard a literal train of thought approaching from / the past?” In a field of poetic discourse that is too often far too unpoetic and staid, Gordon’s notes on form are a welcome relief.
CONTINUED ETHICAL ENGAGEMENT OF THE NARRATIVE TRADITION
Concise articulation wasn’t what we’d wanted, exactly.
I’m not so sure the line matters. I’m not so sure
the line matters. You don’t just get on a motorcycle and become
a kind of historical category. First, they considered founding
a unified artistic school with a coherent program. Them, the sun
again disappeared over hilltops. Was this the extension of power
by an expansionist idea about the world being purely internalized?
Think: childhood but with the irony, an unattainable condition
in which we collectively float. It takes at least as much scrutiny
as standing on one shore and looking at another. Instead, we spend
a lot of tie staring at ink stains. Call it disregard for whatever
one proposes as the latest craze of substantive adherence
and simplistic acquiescence to wallpaper wallpaper wallpaper.
Look imaginatively at a pineapple and disappear. Look imaginatively
at a pineapple and disappear. The poem isn’t interested in helping you.
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