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Tour de blogosphere: a profile on me now online at Apartment613
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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dan Thomas-Glass
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Well... I'm not sure I've published a book, exactly. I've published a photo-essay-poem on a freeway, a single-poem pamphlet, a textile chapbook, and a collection of record-poems. I'm hoping to publish an actual book-shaped collection soon. What I can say is that the process of writing and rewriting a book ms has been hugely informative: it has brought my attention, ideas, and investments into sharper focus.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Walt Whitman, more or less. In 10th grade we read various parts of Leaves of Grass and it exploded a lot of things for me. I started writing feverishly, in every shape and direction I could find. I was very spongy for a long time—I tried on vispo forms, performative work, narrative, just whatever. I've often worried that I'm too omnivorous, in that way. But lately I've stopped worrying, and just let myself write.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I write a lot, and quickly. I revise a lot as well, but also quickly. I try to listen for language, then write what I hear. I'm very ear driven—a lot of the drafting process is about sound. And then the revision is often about form. Frequently I forget to think about content—about what I'm writing about. Usually I figure that out after the fact, or not at all.
It is also true that sometimes the form comes first, and those poems tend to have a different arc, and move more slowly. Some projects (like the Beatjack) are slower just because of the formal work of scanning poems and then writing into those stolen meters.
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 don't work on a book, no. I write in seasons—I've had poems organized in files on my computer by season (Fall 2012, Winter 2013, Spring 2013, etc.) for about a decade. Those seasons often collate questions, experiences, explorations for me.
Lately poems begin with being a parent, and extend to what intrudes on daily life—anything from drones to economic collapse, occupy, television, music (a lot of music), work, dead loved ones, whatever.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like readings because they bring writing into a kind of social contact that is different from other less physical forms like email or facebook. That is often generative. I try and bring my daughters, but often the time doesn't work—they're usually in bed by 8pm.
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?
How to put the blooming optimism of being a parent to two brilliant & loving daughters into conversation with the crushing horror and enduring pessimism of contemporary life.
But in a long spring poem I'm working on I just wrote
I decided—and I believe that's true, or something I'm working toward, too.
on no theory
for these words
but what small
hours unmoored
in days
reveal.
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?
To love people, to help people, to make life better than it is, to find meaning, to care without shame, to seek the edges of systems, to slow down and observe, to be honest, to connect with ancestors and long histories, to create ritual, to imagine other possible worlds.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
When I list the editors who have helped bring my projects into the world, I am embarrassed at the riches I have enjoyed: Stephanie Young, Christophe Casamassima, Ash Smith and Dawn Pendergast, and Dana Ward. Essential doesn't even begin to touch their importance to my ongoing thinking.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Not exactly advice because it isn't written in the command form, but this quote is on our refrigerator (typed by my mom some once upon a time on an index card)—
"A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depends on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving." Albert Einstein. That is the short version the internet here at work is offering me. The longer version, on our fridge, includes being drawn to the simple life, and notes that class difference is fundamentally based on violence.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
They are in different places in my brain. I write a lot in many forms for work and life—those are all often similar, and poetry is distinct from them in that it leads me more than I lead it.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
My day begins when either Sonia or Alma wakes up. Sonia usually yells for me, and Alma usually yells for Kate. We make coffee, eat, get dressed. Go to work. Sometimes when I bike to work I hear poems. Sometimes I write them down when I arrive. But being a writer who is also a parent and with a very full-time job that is not about writing per se, my routines are not centered on writing. I write when I can steal the time to write.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Some seasons and some years I write more than others. I've never worried about stalling.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Jasmine, ocean, eucalyptus, that big-street smell of lots of cars and corner stores.
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?
Music. Lots of music. But pretty much anything. I read a lot, and most of what I read influences what I write in some way or another.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Dana Ward's prose turn in his poetry since Typing Wild Speech has been hugely important for me. Brenda Hillman's poetry, its attention to landscape. Roberto Bolano's playfulness in history. Ash Smith and Anne Boyer's recent writing and thinking about domesticity and parenting in poetry, some of which is about returning to Bernadette Mayer's work. There are so many, really—isn't that what being a writer is about, reading too much?
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Visit New Orleans.
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?
I love cooking Mexican food.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don't know. I was drawn to words, as far back as I can remember.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I read too many books, many of which are great, to pick just one. I never watch movies though, so that's easy—the only movie we went to last year was Beast of the Southern Wild, and I cried. It was beautiful.
20 - What are you currently working on?
Books—Daughters of your century is a complete manuscript, and then there's another book about daughters.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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Handsome journal, volume 5, no 1
THE WORLD IS BEAUTIFUL BUT YOU ARE
NOT IN IT
Let me refer to myself in glorious ways:
colors seem brighter, the sky is a shocking blue.
I carry my stomach in this bowl
and earth is planted in my blood.
From your last letter, I gather hills.
I’m trying to keep my tenderness in check.
Trying to see what kind of grill the neighbors have
is everything I couldn’t do before.
Now brown eggs shift heavy in my palms, this bowl.
Words make their way up my thigh.
I swear very nice boy and I refer to myself.
No. The hills are holding you and I refer to myself.
Let’s be honest: I need a real man, I say out loud.
Every weakness I have settles into a tree trunk,
stays all winter. I don’t know if I mean it.
Winter has lasted five years already.
This morning I press into the edges of my stomach.
My mother makes coffee in California.
Ladies will say we are expert with machines
but they will be two bottles under sangria.
I said you could make music out of this.
Ingesting artificial palm trees, exploding.
Your letters are getting shorter. I am getting close
enough to the sun to touch the tip of its cigar.
We carry what is shocking and heavy in blood.
Music seems brighter: the sky the sky. (Morgan Parker)
After a short wait, I finally received my contributor copy of the fifth annual HANDSOME journal, produced by Black Ocean. Launched recently at AWP in Boston, this issue contains one hundred and twenty pages of strong writing, most by writers I haven’t previously heard of. I’m slowly and still working my way through learning the names and writing of contemporary American poets, but there are still only two that haunt the pages of this new issue, being Deborah Poe [author of a recent chapbook through above/ground press] and Brian Henry. A graceful journal of new poetry, HANDSOME is edited by Paige Ackerson-Kiely and Allison Titus, and published by Janaka Stucky. Another of a series of journals who publish work sans author biography, I’m left with the work itself, immediately struck by the work of Morgan Parker, Kristina Marie Darling and Sarah Goldstein. There is something of Jenny Boully’s The Body: An Essay (Slope Editions, 2002) to Kristina Marie Darling’s poem, in that the footnote quickly overtakes the body of the poem. Sarah Goldstein’s pieces in this issue are a small handful of “untitled” prose-poems, wrapping a rather straightforward lyric story with just a hint of something more, something surreal, akin to Miranda July or Lydia Davis. She says just enough in each piece, but there is so much more beneath the surface; suggested, but still hidden.
UNTITLED (PROPERTY)
The woman in the house down the road, whose phone bill you accidentally received and ripped open, fills her doorway, out of which wafts the dark smell of potpourri. You’ve seen her in the branches of the furious thickets between your houses calling her dog, thrashing like a shark in a net. You talk about the neighborhood squirrels: the big one with deep cuts on its shoulder, and the other one that made it through the winter without any fur. Large white cat in the window, large yellow dog pushing and whining behind her. “Oh, you’re so bad, you’re so bad,” she says to him. The dog always runs to you when he sees you, snapping the leash out of her hand, shoving his desperate head into your belly.
Some other pieces that struck include Jenny Drai’s poem “DER ABFLUG,” as well as Audrey Walls’ striking poem “Aquaphobia,” which ends with the lines: “You could drown in two inches // of water, my mother once warned. All you need / is someone to hold you under.” Kerri Webster has four poems in the new issue, each with the title “DIADEM,” and I wonder if these are a stand-alone quartet, or, like Noah Eli Gordon’s The Source (New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2011), part of something much larger? I would like to see more.
DIADEM
Jupiter is fucking with me. What I know
of cruelty: a world is made
we did not ask for. In the dark, boys
set the dog on fire, let it loose
in the field. What
do you believe? Chanting what
as you go to sleep? I
see: same trees. Same locust
blossoms. I walk and walk. Smoke
from the burning scrapwood
shuts my eyes.
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Noah Eli Gordon, The Year of the Rooster
OBLITERATING HISTORY IN THE PLEASURE OF HOLDING FORTH
A first line is reason enough for a second, for a segment, unisexual & solitary as an organ. Our doctor operates a mechanism & calls it anatomy. Our dancer operates in music, which is the same. Whorled, lance-shaped leaves smear the window. Windy instrument, windy agency. Active principles everywhere
charging inertia. Syntactic propositions rest a harmonious unified totality on a reupholstered couch. Smash the shell to bits & hear the ocean in this lime.
As the author tells us in the book’s acknowledgments, the poems in Noah Eli Gordon’s The Year of the Rooster(Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2013) were “composed and revised between 2004 and 2012.” Composed with bookending prose-poems sections, the core of the collection is the seventy-one page collage-poem “The Year of the Rooster,” named for the tenth of a twelve-year cycle of animals in the Chinese zodiac, alongside a shorter piece, the sprawling twelve-page “The Next Year: Did You Drop This Word.” Through the four sections, the collection works from precision to collage to excess to precision.
Merged with a cycle of five elements, the most recent cycle of the Chinese Year of the Rooster, February 9, 2005 – January 28, 2006, was known as the “wood rooster.” Those born during the Year of the Rooster are said to be brave, romantic, motivated, proud, blunt, resentful and boastful. The title section that centres Gordon’s newest poetry collection is composed as part dream, part admonition and part letter, with some sections written as a series of journal entries, directed at “Roo,” as though attempting a map in which to find direction. Some parts are even written as a series of chants, citing repeating rhythms and phrases, making parts of this collection as much for the ear as for the eye. Composed in so many directions, the title section writes across an enormously large canvas, one contained only by the bookended prose sections, holding together what otherwise might be unwieldy.
What a rooster is
stubborn alienation
fertile adornment
a common weather vane’s
most compatible match
steady indication
of which way
winds are blowing
distinctive double squawk
muffled wing beats
O my lord, revered priest, devotee
brave shame brooding
all my erect ones
how many kids
equal a kingdom
not present
a hen takes the role
stops laying
& begins to crow
O my lord, revered priest, devotee
what a rooster is
blah, blah, blah, the body
There are elements of Gordon’s previous works that explore the emergence of patterns and repetition, such as his poetry collection The Source (New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2011) and current work-in-progress, “The Problem,” both of which are constructed out of poems each with the same title. Through the repetitions emerge the small differences, the distinctions akin to a series of daily photographs taken from the same spot. In The Year of the Rooster, the repetitions aren’t so obvious, but the poem wraps around a central core, a centre, the foundational image of the Year, the “Roo,” and the polyphonic nature of multiple voices, of which the author is but one: “You & Roo’s collaborative poem / on the ills of capital / You & Roo’s condemnation of nudity / with all clothes removed // Blah, blah, blah… the body, etcetera” (p 45).
You have something to say, why not say it?
It’s nothing
They gave me a trumpet & I think of the movies
& loneliness like a bottled-up doubt
Ice on the lake
Did you mean lacking?
I’m not talking I am
After details, everything quaking
A history (if that’s the word) being opened
You don’t share a house you share
rooms, feathers, an even memory’s wake-up call
It’s stagnant
but the Rooster’s a trope, regal
without subordination & attendant baggage
Even wasps have feathers
No, too skinny
Everything skinny is ominous
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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Paula Eisenstein
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1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book Flip Turn just came out this past November. Being in the state of waiting and wanting to find a publisher and have Flip Turn published and to be recognized as a real bona fide writer is done with. Now that it has happened, I’m published, I’m a “for real” writer, I want more. I am less willing to put up with putting off writing. I’m meaner and crankier.
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
At this point in time, I don’t relate very well to those different categories. I think how I write is a blend. I do like to write from my experience, but my experience is tenuous. It is uncertain. I am uncertain. I do like strong form though what I see as strong form others don’t necessarily.
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 method that worked well for me writing Flip Turn was quickly jotting down the structuring ideas that were coming to me, in point form. Then I would fill in, or write to those different overview or structuring points. The structure wasn’t necessarily linear but to my mind formed a larger connecting/disconnected narrative. There are also times I can just go on a long writing jag and the writing will circle back the way I need it to, or it needs to, but other times I am aware I have lost track of parts.
Often just getting anything down is fine. Sometimes what I start out with doesn’t change that much, other times it morphs into something completely different.
4 - Where does fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
With Flip Turn I intended for it to be an extended narrative or book. I had an idea of beginning, in betweenness and end. The intention was similar with The Pinery Trip, a (yet unpublished) project I collaborated on with my husband (artist Larry Eisenstein), made up of pairings of his drawings with my writing. While Pinery has narrative components it’s not an extended narrative, it reads more like a book of poetry. But, again, the plan was for it to be a theme based book. I do too write little solo vignettes not intended to be part of a larger project. Or maybe they’ve just never found their sister and brother parts to make them part of something bigger. I’m working on something now, small pieces, based on a theme. Overall, at this time, I do like having a larger framework to work within.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don’t have a lot of experience giving readings yet. I’ve given some readings that I think went beautifully, that I enjoyed and felt the audience connected to. I’ve given others I have been disappointed in. I think the strength of my reading can have some influence over the audience reception. But there is also a degree of the intangible in the audience. Maybe I should try to think of that as something that could be fun.
I have a reading upcoming next week at which I hope to simply experience whatever the audience response is, to allow getting a feeling back or another take on what my writing is about, rather than pushing for a specific response.
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 wrote Flip Turn in something of a vacuum. I wasn’t engaged with; I knew next to nothing of the Toronto literary community or any other literary communities. I did have plenty of my own ideas based on having gone to University in the distant past, and also from all the thoughts and theories that sprang into my head from what I was doing at the time, which was studying contemporary psychological needs-theory astrology.
I did want to explore my coming-of-age years, to excavate them and find an underlying structure. So Flip Turn is a “true story” but not in any conventional narrative “true story” way. What I wanted to happen was for a different kind, an upside down or girl development narrative, arc to emerge.
Then, after writing Flip Turn I was reading ethicist, psychologist and feminist Carol Gilligan’s book In a Different Voice which describes the stages of young girls’ psychological and moral development as different from young boys, and it seemed to me, based on what Gilligan was describing, that what I had unearthed was the same thing.
That excited me, and yet it doesn’t appear any of Flip Turn’s readers are noticing any sort of unique arc in Flip Turn, mostly, so far readers just see it as lacking arc, which I suppose could be expected for two possibly connected reasons; if it’s a pattern that’s not all that recognizable in the first place why should it be recognized now? And/or perhaps I just haven’t conveyed the thing all that well.
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?
Yes, what writers do should be important in the larger culture. Here in Toronto we have a big writers’ scene, but it seems pretty insular; I see the same people at the different readings. Which isn’t meant as a criticism of the scene, maybe I’m asking the wrong things of it, I just wonder why it’s not more, why there aren’t more regular non-writer people attracted to it.
Flip Turn, which is set in London Ontario, my home town, received a beautiful write up in the London Free Press, by columnist James Reaney (yes, the son of). His column is called “My London.” Naturally the column’s focus was on the book’s relationship to the city, and on me and my history as Londoner.
I liked that. I like the thought of the book being about the world we live in, and in that way inviting, almost, personal participation by the reader, or a feeling of us-ness, and the writing delivering a kind of meaning to who and where we exist.
Anyway that’s how I experienced Canadian Literature as a young adult. Reading it woke me up to the idea of my being in the world and as counting as a participant in the world in this special way I wasn’t aware of previously.
Angie Abdou recently reviewed Flip Turn. Angie is a novelist, reviewer and academic. One of her focuses is sports culture. It was gratifying to be recognized in her review as interrogating “the culture of competitive swimming with great vigour and ruthlessness.” So yes, cultural critic is good too.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Last summer, prior to learning of Flip Turn’s publication acceptance at Mansfield, I asked poet and editor Joan Guenther to edit the aforementioned Pinery project. At that time, we (my husband and I) were thinking of self publishing and I felt extremely uncomfortable with the thought of putting it out there without a second set of trusted editorial eyes giving it the okay.
I think editors are extraordinary beasts, and can even be considered collaborators. I’m having a poem included in this spring’s Toronto Poetry Vendors series, and I was excited by editor Carey Toane’s treatment of the piece I submitted, which was, in the first place (despite my protestations above of not recognizing genre distinctions) more a piece of prose then a poem. Carey’s editorial suggestions, which had mostly to do with taking out its more narrative components, taught me a lot. I liked what the piece turned into, but sheepishly wonder whether it would be more appropriate that Carey get a collaborator credit rather than an editorial one.
Working with Stuart Ross on Flip Turn, I felt myself witness to a profound otherworldly experience. It seemed like Stuart simply, picked the novel up in his hands, like it was a clean wrinkled bed sheet from off the clothes line, and shook it out in such a way as to get it to smooth out into its proper form.
I love editing my own work, it’s a part of my creative process, but really, isn’t it best to get someone else to shake the thing out?
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
The best advice I’ve received was from a grade eight art classmate. Regarding our assignment, to draw from the local architecture, which I had no clue how to do, she simply recommended, “Draw what you see.” I did. I followed how I saw the lines of the house springing out in directions another part of my mind was telling me made no sense, was wrong of me and illogical; yet it worked. I drew the house and the completed work even received the recognition of getting taped up on the art class wall. My classmate’s instructions on how to draw has translated well for me as good advice on how to write.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to novel to critical prose to journalism)? What do you see as the appeal?
The way I like to write is kind of prose, kind of poetry. In terms of the reader response to Flip Turn I find myself in odd position. The novel readers expect Flip Turn to do what a regular novel does and don’t quite understand its trajectory and don’t really take into account or even notice its poetic sensibility. Meanwhile, on the extreme end of those on the poetry side of the divide, some won’t even pick the book up because it has that bad five letter word “novel” on the cover. To get back to your question, my issue isn’t about moving between genres, it’s about being between them.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I work full time at my day job. I am working on changing this to give myself more writing time. When I wrote Flip Turn, I quit my job and was able to get in a regular daily writing routine. I got my son up in the morning, took him to school, went for a swim, then came home and wrote from about 10am to 3pm, at which point, I put my writing down and went to pick up my son from school. That was a great routine.
Before daylight savings I was managing to get myself up an hour before work, and get some writing in then. I know other writers who do it that way, get up early, but I can’t say I’ve had consistent success at that yet, though I’m not ready to give up. I’ve actually accumulated a fair amount of half decent writing on my transit commute to and from work.
I’m close to temporarily reconciling myself to work more on poetic projects that don’t demand the psychic/psychological (not sure what the word for the state is) connection necessary to the holding onto or driving down into a deeper narrative theme the way I did when writing Flip Turn.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I love writing from inside my life experience. I am inspired by planets and outer space and the astrology of it too. Up until now I’ve been pretty gushy and haven’t had a lot of difficulty sourcing inspiration. I can see that possibly changing upcoming as I begin to mature as a writer and look for greater challenges.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Pine needles, pee, wet.
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?
In the Pinery Trip, Larry’s drawings came first, my writing followed. So, echphrasis, kind of sort of, because while the drawings were the starting point, the writing was also based on the shared experience of a family camping trip, so sometimes the writing was quite digressive, writing to a space connected to the space evoked by the drawing. I do get quite inspired by music, but I’m too sensitive. I have seen myself just write to the music when I don’t want to be writing to the music, so I don’t usually listen to music when I write. Nature, definitely! Science! Yes, love reading, especially about the planets and outer space, and picking up from there.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I think I am still primarily influenced by my early literature studies. I have been exposed to a lot of contemporary Canadian poets through Margaret Christakos’ Influency Salon and I feel going forward, in terms of my writing, I am still just beginning to mulch or incorporate these newer influences.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to get more highly educated. I would like to travel to interesting places and stay for a while and write in those places/spaces.
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?
Novel published? Check!
List of getting published in other venues growing? Check!
Favourite other people to hang out with, writers? Check!
Still have a full time day job? …………drats... check.
I am still working hard at claiming writer status. I have not raised my sites to occupying another.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I always liked writing. I always had a talent for it. Your question makes me think writing wasn’t all that conscious of a decision for me; more of an “it happening to me” than a “my happening to it” kind of thing.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I seem to have lost the knack of feeling the “great book” reading experience. Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle as a teenager shocked and thrilled me. It seemed I had stumbled upon a hilarious secret world and based on how everyone around me was acting or failing to act, it looked like I was going to be able to keep it. I felt the same way when I was introduced to David W McFadden’s Trips around Lake Huron and Erie during my university years.
Regarding film I do have a thing for Hitchcock. In particular I recently saw Shadow of a Doubt. I do so love Hitchcock’s attention to small town social order and how small slip by small, what is sweet and whole and right turns dark and pulls everyone into it helplessly.
20 - What are you currently working on?
As mentioned above, it seems, for the moment, because of the demands of my day job, I must focus on theme based projects without deeper narratives. I am working on something of that ilk right now, but it will need more time before I will know whether it’s working.
I’ve been attending a poetry writing workshop run by Hoa Nguyen from which I am learning new writing strategies. I had planned to attend another Margaret Christakos’ Influency Salon, a forum that helped me in developing a critical understanding of contemporary poetry and invited me to make contributions to it, but sadly, for all, the Salon has been cancelled.
Since Flip Turn is a book with an appeal to young adults I plan on doing more high school visits; I did one recently and it was so interesting to get students’ feedback. As well, I think there’s a “using personal astrological symbolism to develop your writing” course that’s been mulching at the back of my mind for some time. Perhaps it is time to let that project idea hatch.
Looking forward I am planning on finding a way to take a leave from my day job to give me the kind of time and space I need to delve into a project with a deeper extended narrative, like I was able to do previously with Flip Turn.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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Profile of Peter Norman, with a few questions,
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Jessica Hiemstra, Self-Portrait Without a Bicycle
Rachel insisted Keira Jo be swaddled, not clothed.
She’s not a doll, she said. And besides
there are rituals reserved for mothers. The gentle
first tug of naked arms through cotton, white socks
on new feet. She didn’t want her daughter dressed
the first time by a mortician, lovingly or by rote. It was,
Rachel said, the most terrifying moment of my life—
preparing to hold her dead girl, a pixie,
she said, perfect. When I stooped over the box
Keira Jo was wearing a yellow toque, swaddled
in white, an almost-child. Small red face, perfect
lips. Plutarch, in Moralia, wrote not to be born is best
of all, and death better than life, but the wisdom
of Silenus is stilled by one small mouth at the breast,
a tiny heart—that sparrow, Rachel’s thumb
clutched by a small pink hand, any flutter
however small. (“A bowl of strawberries in an empty room”)
I don’t normally favour lyric poetry so overtly narrative, but there is something about the lyric of
Jessica Hiemstra’s second trade poetry collection, Self-Portrait Without a Bicycle (Emeryville ON: Biblioasis, 2012), that immediately takes hold. Given that she is also a working visual artist (her sketches adorn both cover and inside the collection), there is something of the rough sketch to some of these poems, deceptively rough but finely hewn, shockingly precise in quick, quiet lines. The collection is made up of a series of meditative poems that focus on smallness, from matters of the domestic to language to matters-of-fact, such as the poem “Well, the cat’s dead,” that opens with “I wasn’t fond of her but one dandelion in a jar / is pretty.”
Every so often, there might be a line that rankles, such as “I felt my skin grow taut.” in the otherwise strong poem “I told my first stranger I was pregnant,” but these near-cliché lines appear to be the exception, and not the rule. With references to the art of Alex Colville, Yann Martel, grandparents and children, these are poems grounded in the immediate world, open and completely bare, following the essential lines of quiet. Composed with such clarity and soft humour, what might a writer such as Jessica Hiemstra do, perhaps, with fiction? I would worry it might read too straight, as so much other contemporary fiction, but I would read a fiction that writes as these poems do, slipping in and around a directness more direct than confession.
Mom rescued Alex Colville from the library
and we took him home, tattered and torn. A librarian
had taken scissors to him, removed the nakedness,
left the guns. Mom gathered up the loose pages,
carefully taped the women back in. Violence, she said
against love. I didn’t know what she meant. Truth
lies in juxtaposition. Painting occurs, Alex says,
when I think of two disparate elements. That night
I opened Tragic Landscape on my lap and got lost
in the folds of cow beyond the soldier, still grazing,
as though death had taken nothing. I knew the man
was dead, but I searched the painting for a sign he was
sleeping. Later that year I was censored too, my Mrs. Milling,
who took my drawing of Adam and Eve and hid it
in her desk. She said I had made them too naked. Nakedness
makes us afraid. Imagine my mother hadn’t
stitched up the book, imagine just Pacific and Bodies
in a Grave, Belsen. I spent the evening thinking
about guns, women in bathtubs, artists at war. What makes
something indecent is not skin but scissors.
This morning I tried to buy The Art of Alex Colville,
but it was too expensive. Tomorrow I’ll try eBay,
perhaps someone doesn’t know what it’s worth.
↧
Mindmade Books: Cole, Werkman, Queneau and Frey,
I received a small stack of publications from Los Angeles, California chapbook publisher Mindmade Books, including Norma Cole’s a little a & a (2002), H.N. Werkman’sTiksels (2007), Raymond Queneau’s FOR AN ARS POETICA (trans. Guy Bennett, 2009) and Emily Kendal Frey’s The New Planet (2010).
American poet Norma Cole, originally from Toronto [see my review of her selected poems here], is a bit of a moving target, rarely working the same forms twice. Her a little a & a is a polyphonic sequence of commentaries upon commentaries, a fragmented essay talking about poetry and art, storytelling, translation, myth and commodity. Composed as a fragmented piece, stretched out and sketched, it writes and translates an essay/conversation and an argument, collaged.
Become the object, love it and live it. When you look for a long time like that, do you see into or beyond? In those days we worked so hard to take the figure out.*
– But the scenario, would it identify and speak for it, something,
the present something relevant to the exhibition even at a tangent?
– You mean explain the show. Can’t it speak for itself?
– Not the point. Not explanation. Parallel play. Translation
– Libidinous.
– Rather than strictly superego, the translation as explanation ap-
proach ho hum.
– Carrousel.
– See what I mean?
*“It will have to be
something I’ll miss.”
de Kooning
The most fascinating work in the stack is Werkman’sTiksels, subtitled “1923-1929,” produced with an afterword by editor/publisher Guy Bennett. I admit to not knowing much of the history of concrete and visual poetry outside of Canada, but for some brief knowledge of Apollinaire’s work, Werkman appears to be one of the early modern producers of concrete and visual poetry, and much of this work is reminiscent of some of the works later produced in the 1960s by such as bpNichol, bill bissett and Steve McCaffery, among others. As Bennett writes to open his “Afterword”:
Hendrik Nikolaas Werkman (1882-1945) was a commercial printer by profession, but by all accounts not a very successful one. He was generally indifferent to money matters and apparently unskilled in running a business. When he suddenly needed to repay a substantial loan in the early 1920s his printing company foundered. In spite of the financial difficulties he faced, Werkman opted to look on this crisis as an opportunity for positive change: without abandoning commercial work he decided to pursue a lifelong interest in the visual arts, and he duly put the tools of his trade to artistic use. In 1923 he founded a magazine – The Next Call– that he would edit, write virtually single-handedly and print himself, and simultaneously embarked on a series of large-format abstract monographs that he called druksels (from the Dutch drukken– “to print”) which would eventually number more than 600. Both of these projects featured the innovative typographic design and printing techniques for which he has subsequently become known.
It was in 1923 that Werkman also began experimenting with the typewriter, creating a small body of predominantly abstract visual texts that he dubbed tiksels (from tikken, meaning “to type”). Whereas the pages of The Next Calland the druksel are alive with large colorful shapes and letter forms, the tikselsare graphically minimalist works whose basic visual unit is the tiny, monowidth typewriter character and whose color is that of the typewriter ribbon. Compositionally the tiksels are informed and limited by the machine used to produce them: horizontal and vertical lines and columns feature prominently, and rows of identical, repeated characters appear in nearly every piece. Far from creating monotony, these elements constitute a unifying formal grammar that gives coherence to the tiksels as an ensemble. Adding to their unique character is Werkman’s frequent use of analaphabetic which effectively removes them from the world of sound and situates them squarely in the visual realm. They were clearly intended to be seen and not heard, and this puzzles – how are we to read them, as poems or as pictures?
Raymond Queneau’sFOR AN ARS POETICA, translated from the French by Guy Bennett, is an eleven-part poetry sequence on the composition of poetry. An “ars poetica,” writing out writing out writing. He makes the composition of poetry sound like a kind of deliberate accident that somehow manages to incorporate everything.
1.
A poem’s indeed a trifling thing
little more than a cyclone in the Antilles
than a typhoon in the South China Sea
an earthquake in Anping
When there’s a flood on the Tang-Tse-Kiang
it’ll drown you 100,000 Chinese
bang
that’s not even a fitting subject for a poem
Indeed a trifling thing
We’re having some fun in our little village
we’re going to build a new school
we’re going to elect a new mayor and change the market days
we were at the center of the world now we’re near the river
ocean gnawing at the horizon
A poem’s indeed a trifling thing
Emily Kendal Frey is also the author of The Grief Performance (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011) [see my reviewof such here], and her chapbook, The New Planet, is constructed almost entirely of tiny poems with enormous punches.
SMART
Am I smart enough to be androgynous?
Constantly shitting myself in your name.
Nothing is as beautiful as what is not beautiful.
Except sheet rock.
Frey’s poems feel a blend of Sarah Manguso-esque short fiction and the short poem, managing both without being tied to either. Constructed out of sentences, her prose poems strike at the very heart of whatever question she approaches. In some thirty pages, Frey is quickly becoming one of my favourite American emerging poets, for her sharp wit, and her use of the poetic sentence to not only make, but accumulate, sense; and from those accumulations, the smartest of poems.
GODS
I make a new planet out of rice.
No one wants to live on it.
No one even seems interested.
After a while, I sit down on my planet and eat what I’ve made.
Then I go across the road and hang out with the gods for a while.
↧
Letter to Norma Cole (some notes on the prose poem)
July 17, 2012
Ottawa, Canada
It’s been two years since I stayed in the nearly-former apartment of Toronto writers Stephen Cain and Sharon Harris, after helping them move into their new house. They had a box of books they were sending to Goodwill, and I picked out a couple of items, including the anthology you edited and translated, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Providence RI: Burning Deck, 2000), along with some other titles I probably shouldn’t mention. They had too many books. I’ve been meaning to thank you, and thank them as well.
The anthology contains works by sixteen writers, which the introduction describes as a series of “Texts, interviews, critical pieces, journal entries, letters, worknotes and at least one simple list make visible and audible an openwork of embodied voices in conversation, in the deliberate breaking open of intentionalities, isolating single elements at one extremity, multiple folds, complex rhythmic architectonics in the process of being constructed and deconstructed at the other.” You translated from the French works by Joë Bousquet, Emmanuel Hocquard, Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach, Raquel and others. It would be hard for anyone to not get caught up in the lyric prose line being presented. The lyric flows like water, here; why do so many lines of prose by English-language writers fail to float so smoothly in comparison?
The activity of writing is more than activity, as you wrote in your introduction, “Writing is action, the phenomenological self entering language, already a specific set of conditions within conditions.” I would enter the language, during daily writing sessions at The Good Neighbour Café on Annette Street, just by the Junction. The cadence and the lyric of the French abstract in some of the pieces immediately struck me, especially the work of Emmanuel Hocquard, which slowly began to impact the short short stories I’d been working on, and later, the prose poems I was only beginning to compose. Here is one of those stories:
I am writing a novel called ‘James Joyce in Montreal,’ to accompany the drawing you left. Ten chapters each featuring an entirely different character, but all sharing the same, ordinary name. There are no coincidences. In Labyrinths, Borges repeated, what we seek, is often nearby.
I admired Hocquard’s series of compact, straightforward lines that accumulated to become something slightly less concrete, and yet, far more than their sum. There was something to the connections made between and amid the disconnect that was astounding.
By that point, I’d been at least half a decade reading examples of the American prose poem, something far more prevalent than its Canadian counterpart, from writers such as Sheila E. Murphy, Lea Graham, Noah Eli Gordon, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Kathleen Fraser and Rosmarie Waldrop. My own poems had been years experimenting with rhythm, sound and line breaks. I was in the midst of the “Miss Canada” manuscript, a book that stretched the length and breadth of 2010, composing poems that held and broke breath. I knew that once I had finished that collection, I wanted to move in another direction; I wanted to see what might happen if and when I stopped relying on line breaks and spacing. I wondered, what surprises might the prose poem hold? Once you learn how to do something, the painter Diane Woodward told me, move on.
Before this, I’d been intrigued by the use of the poetic line, and the sentence, through the work of Americans and Canadians alike, such as Cole Swensen, Lisa Robertson, Lisa Jarnot, Erin Mouré, David Donnell, Nicole Markotić and Robert Kroetsch. There is so much untapped potential in the sentence. How does one even start to approach the possibilities? I had long filed the prose poem away in the back of my head, waiting for other writing and editorial projects to come to maturity; to be able to bring my full attention to the form. I don’t need to completely understand a form to begin, but at least some kind of initial comprehension is required. Often, I know, the best way to understand is to simply begin. Specifically, I was struck by the way Hocquard’s prose-pieces blended elements of poetry, fiction and the short essay, opening up the form to a kind of “catch-all,” able to hold just about any idea, concept or subject matter.
ROBINSON METHOD
When Crusoe landed on his island after the shipwreck, he was not yet Robinson. He would be Robinson from the moment that, finding neither pen nor pencil in the jetsam, he liberated a cutter and some books. from these found objects would be born the method that names him.
Robinson speaks alone (V. Solitude), in words he learned while he was still Crusoe, words he arranges as memories, that is, as objects of memory-language. Robinson on his island acts like Crusoe before the shipwreck but makes the same thing resonate differently.
The island is elegiable. Cut off from the world, with the fated means that are his, Robinson will reproduce Crusoe’s world. He is a copier. And every copier, even the little classroom copier ripping off his desk partner, is an islander. Oliver Cadiot’s Future, ancient, fugitive is, just like Perec’s I remember, a splendid elegy. (Emmanuel Hocquard, trans. Norma Cole)
The French writing I’d predominantly been aware of previously had been Canadian, including the work of Nicole Brossard and AnneHébert, but remarkably little else in regards to poetry. Despite a series of translations through Coach House Press from the 1970s onward that focused on fiction, the divide between French and English Canada remains. Perhaps for this reason, it was the prose out of Quebec that resonated most, the novels of Dany Laferrièreand Daniel Paquin informing my writing far more than any Quebecois poets. It’s an interesting difference, to be influenced by the French writers of Canada versus the French writers from France. As you know, it’s an entirely different vocabulary. To understand the difference of influence might mean comprehending the mechanics of the language, and the divergence from European to Quebecois French. Something about the limits of translation or the delicacy of translating these differences. I have no idea; haven’t even begun.
Today I am not writing, I am seeing to the house of writing, and you are there, in the garden light. (Edith Dahan, from “Giudecca,” trans. Norma Cole)
In these works translated from French, there is such a lovely abstraction of subject and meaning the prose allows. It wraps around ideas as opposed to the physical. In contrast, I’ve been quite baffled reading Russell Edson, having heard he is considered the father of the American prose poem, and how much writers such as Deb Olin Unferth and Sarah Manguso (a writer I greatly admire) are influenced by his work. His poems read like short stories, known by Geist magazine and others as “postcard fiction.” Lydia Davis reads more lyric than these. Where is the poetry in Russell Edson? Whereas Unferth and Manguso have far surpassed him in quality and vigour, turning the influence of his prose poems into spectacular prose. I don’t understand the appeal. I suspect in some parts of the United States, this might be akin to a heretical statement.
This collection of yours has informed pieces of mine in various poetry manuscripts, an influence running through the length and breadth of my poetry since. Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from Francetaught me how to begin. Does that make sense? Perhaps it came at the right time. Perhaps I give the collection itself too much credit. I have been learning, learning and re-learning the sentence. There is a fragment of an interview I keep repeating, conducted by Kai Fierle-Hedrick in The Chicago Review (51:4/52:1, spring 2006), as Lisa Robertson responds: “I’m really a gentleman collector of sentences. I display them in cabinets.”
The Sentence
The sentence always translated from an other language, the sentence unfounded, the sentence of liquid shadows beyond which we do not look, writing it, (Dominique Fourcade, trans. Norma Cole)
In your collection, the distinctions between genres don’t seem to even exist. My explorations in short prose and the prose poem overlap so heavily, and yet, a line divides the two. Some have suggested my short stories might do better if I called them poems, but they aren’t poems; they’re stories. Despite their brevity, they each tell a deliberate narrative in a linear fashion. In the poems, I’m interested more in what I’ve long been exploring through the form – movement, sound and abstract, lyric exploration, composed more as an accumulation or collage. The logics needn’t be apparent and the narrative is non-existent. It might not be how I distinguish the forms generally, but its how I do for my own writing. There is no story, but instead, a series of sweeping gestures, such as this piece from the sequence “Escarpment pages,” a prose poem sequence from “If suppose we are a fragment.” The twelve poem sequence opens with a quote from Kathleen Fraser, “Dear other, I address you in sentences.”
The invention of writing
Ingrained, this resistance to struggle. Mathematical points. I repeat the arousal song of her borders, even as I step back. Sometimes I get turned around. Snow squalls, threatening daybreak. Had you ever wondered. Had she. We were marking up hours. Filament of the speed that the brain changes colour. We have not arrived. We are here. An experience of spiders. Saw you last from those uppermost branches. Or was that her. Words trickle down into feeling. New paper we press with first language, our hands.
I sound obsessed with boundaries, and perhaps I am, but as a series of guidelines as opposed to strict rules. I want to know where to blend one into the other. The works in Crosscut Universe, on the other hand, define no line at all. Have you read any of the work of Vancouver writer Michael Turner? His work manages the chimera between what isn’t entirely a poem, and isn’t entirely a story, but something else, entirely. I am seeking to open a series of possibilities. Or perhaps, I wasn’t listening in the right way until now. I’ve been interested, too, in discovering more of your own writing, the influences that some of these texts may have had, along the lines of influence I’ve seen from the Galacian in Erin Mouré’s poetry, or the French in the poetry of Cole Swensen and Rosmarie Waldrop. Perhaps I should start translating. Is it essential to know a second language to begin?
best,
↧
↧
HEADLIGHT anthology, #15-16
when all night longit pulls them down
Coming home from putting out a fire, how can they be expected to kiss the cheeks of their sleeping children and take out the leaking garbage and shuffle through the bills lying on the table and not drink the whiskey under the sink and spoon their wives while listening to their stories as well as their complaints and ask them questions and care about their answers and answer their questions and then sleep peacefully beside them without letting go when all night long it pulls them down, this threat and thrill of flame? (Hannah Rahimi, “Fragments,” HEADLIGHT #16)
One of the rare student publications I follow regularly [see reviews of various previous volumes here] is HEADLIGHT anthology, produced annually through the English Department at Montreal’s Concordia University. While I expect journals such as these to have a range of writing and quality, being a student journal, and allowing for the possibility of early/first publications for writers we might just hear some good or great things later, I’m surprised at just how little in HEADLIGHT #15 (2012) really stood out (and why are there so many blank pages inside the issue, including three in a row?). Does this say more of the writing program at Concordia, long known for producing exciting writers and writing, or the journal itself? It makes me wonder where writers such as Wanda O’Connor, currently at Concordia and producing exciting work are, and whether or not writers such as she are even submitting?
The new volume, HEADLIGHT #16, includes a foreword by Toronto poet and editor Sachiko Murakami, herself an alumni of the creative writing program at Concordia. There were some interesting pieces here, including a poem by former Ottawa poet Meredith Darling (who, for some reason, is missing a bio at the end of the collection), intriguing lyric prose by Max Karpinski, a worthy lyric piece by Mark Lavorato, and some prose poems by Jesse Anger and Hannah Rahimi. Rahimi’s striking two-part prose poem, “Fragments,” according to the note, borrows lines from Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter, including them as italicized lines at the beginning of each short section. Apart from the fact that her bio claims she moved to Montreal from Toronto in 2008, I don’t know a single thing, but would like to read more.
No Horizon
From the high backdune all I could see was a bluish field scored by a lone tanker, faring cloud-swell – the horizon snuffed by moods of slate and heron – wave and wake and stratus ambled, eliding in the break. You were scanning the shallows that gathered in rock shoals, hunting for fossils. When I asked if you could tell the sky from the water, you narrowed your eye, bowed over your reflection. I turned where beginning to ends and skipped a stone from cloud to cloud –. (Jesse Anger, HEADLIGHT #16)
And as far as Max Karpinski’s prose is concerned, part of what appeals is seeing exactly where he might go with this project, and whatever comes after. Striking prose is a rarity, I find, and non-traditional prose in Canadian journals is even rarer, especially when it’s done in an interesting way. I’m going to keep my ear out for Max Karpinski.
We map the city’s conclusions. The lines yokes us together. The shell’s whiteness contains us. Emptiness demarcates limits or infinite vastness, the texture of this white noise described in fricatives and gutturals. Phyllis your voice crackles like fireplace static. A ring like emergency broadcast frequency. A presence like the radio. The street dissolves into prairie. Cobblestone breccias translating green and yellow and softness and brown and buzz of electric towers and wires. Pages emptied and beckoning, trim like wet cement and null. Spine-hugging, the body finally collapsed and sited. Phyllis, we are the opening and nothing is beginning. We are the dead and we are breathing. We are breathing in your rooms, we are breathing in your poems, we are breathing with you all. Pages and stretched thin as bedsheets, write bodies in ink, between blots and scribbles we are breathing with you all. (Max Karpinski, “Selections from Oh?,” HEADLIGHT #16)
↧
Paul Zits, Massacre Street
The rebellion is now a thing
of the past, it is now a page
When a few generations shall come and
go our sad story of the Frog Lake
Massacre may be totally forgotten and
the actors therein consigned to
oblivion, but, these few papers, should
they by any chance survive the hand of
time will tell to the children of the
future Canada what those of your day
experienced and suffered and when
those who are yet to be learn the extent
of the troubles undergone and the
sacrifices made by those of the present
to set them examples worthy of
imitation and models fit for their
practice to build up for them a great
and solid nation they may perhaps
reflect with pride upon the history of
their country its struggles dangers
tempests and calms in those days I
trust and pray that Canada may be the
realization of that glowing picture of a
grand nation drawn by a Canadian poet
Towards the end of Calgary poet and small press publisher Paul Zits’ first trade poetry collection, Massacre Street (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2013), he includes the poem “The rebellion is now a thing / of the past, it is now a page,” centring the collection precisely there, at the beginning. Zits composes hisMassacre Streetto recreate “a poetic view of the Frog Lake Massacre of April 2, 1885,” structured from the influence of various perspectives on the Canadian historical prairie poem. Zits is working very clearly in a tradition that includes work by Robert Kroetsch, Monty Reid, Aritha Van Herk, Jon Paul Fiorentino and Dennis Cooley, each of whom managed to reenergize both history and the form of “documentary poetics.” An unfortunate result of “documentary poetics,” in Canadian writing at least, is that too many poets have composed poetry collections that merely replicate information on historical and/or literary figures and/or events without adding much of anything, whether to the documentary information or poetic structure. I won’t mention names or titles, but the offenders are many. Zits, on the other hand, seemingly takes as his models the poetics of both Kroetsch and Cooley, falling somewhere between the lyric questioning, tall tales and the perpetual return to the beginning of Robert Kroetsch, and the collage-quilt of storytelling of Dennis Cooley, most notably in his own historical prairie poem, Bloody Jack (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1984). The book is constantly moving, searching, interrupting and questioning everything that is being presented, resulting in an unsettled book on an unfinished question, and one that attempts not to assign blame, but attempt to discover the correct questions.
without giving expression to sentiments of sorrow
I will strive to push on
to the end of my undertaking
without tiring my readers
with vain expressions
____
It was in a circle
and a space in the centre being kept for dancing
and the rabbit in the pot boiling, it was all there, head, eyes, feet
and everything together
and Little Poplar was arrayed in some of Miss McLean’s ribbons, ties
and shawls
and another with my hat tumbling over the bank
and another with Mrs.. Delaney’s
and the squaws with our dresses
and before the sun went down they wrapped blankets around her
as if, coming down, she would eat the whole camp up
____
a sea of green interspersed with beautiful flowers and plants
as in the echo after every bomb, charm lying in its wake
it glided along the large rivers and lakes and desired rest
carrying white flags, fishing and waving white flags
or perhaps the pages of a blood and thunder novel
I breathed in the echo of every bomb, a prairie charm delusion
except perhaps when viewed from the deck of a steamer
____
Massacre Street is a large, complex and critical document on a messy and complicated period of Canadian history, a history that, in many ways, Canada is still working to comprehend, and come to terms with. The poems, too, are attempting to find out what happened. Through the poems of Massacre Street, Zits adds a polyphonic and critical gaze, refusing a single point of view but exploring many, and can be read as a poetic sibling to Myrna Kostash’s Frog Lake Reader (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2009), or cousin to Margaret Sweatman’s novel, When Alice Lay Down with Peter (Knopf, 2002). Through exhaustive research and a large curiosity, Zits manages to bring the material a new kind of life. Had only history been written so well before.
I fear I should have lost my small army in this
very big Country
The most applauded warrior wore
a policeman’s old tunic
on the back of which was chalked
a representation of himself
firing into a teepee of sleeping enemies
The horses also were depicted
in convenient proximity
for removal after this
glorious feat of arms
↧
Ali Smith, Artful
We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once. Books and music share more in terms of resonance than just a present-tense correlation of heard note to read word. Books need time to dawn on us, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them, because books are produced by books more than writers; they’re a result of all the books that went before them. Great books are adaptable; they alter with us as we alter in life, they renew themselves as we change and re-read them at different times in our lives. You can’t step into the same story twice—or maybe it’s that stories, books, art can’t step into the same person twice, maybe it’s that they allow for our mutability, are ready for us at all times, and maybe it’ this adaptability, regardless of time, that makes them art, because real art (as opposed to more transient art, which is real too, just for less time) will hold us at all our different ages like it held all the people before us and will hold all the people after us, in an elasticity and with a generosity that allow for all our comings and goings. Because come then go we will, and in that order.
Composed in four sections – “On time,” “On form,” “On edge” and “On offer and on reflection,” as well as the endnote “Some sources” – Artful moves through the story of a narrator in mourning, while going through her dead partner’s papers, from which much of the essay-thread of the book is built, a combination of the pieces themselves and the narrator’s own reading. Beyond that, the dead lover manages to reappear at her desk, speaking in a language that the narrator doesn’t understand, causing the narrator to rethink her own sanity. A book on loss and love and death, how does one return from the dead? Smith weaves brilliantly her fiction-as-lectures on grieving and the nature of storytelling and art, and the impossibly known and unknown.
I’ve only read two of her books previously, but there are shades here of the returned dead from Hotel World (2002), a book I admittedly had difficulty entering, and the reworkings of Ovid, as in her brilliant myth-retelling Girl Meets Boy(2007) [see my little note on such here]. The two sides of this work – a heartbreaking story of loss, grief and revitalization, and an exploration on literary creation – blend perfectly, neither side outweighing the other. Each lecture is patterned with an opening that leans more on the side of fiction, with three sections presented as papers (again, through the eyes of our grieving narrator). The essay-fiction form reminds me slightly of the essays of Alberta writer Aritha Van Herk, from whom we’ve heard so little of over the past decade or so. (A part of me tethers the two together, that she might be the ghost Ali Smith’s narrator speaks to, but I know this not to be true.) There is the series of through-lines that hold the entirety of the work together, the abstracts of her tangible arguments, the narrator’s evolution of grief, as well as Charles Dickens, both Oliver Twist and the musical Oliver!, the works of numerous poets and Greek, as language, histories and literatures.
How lost, how deeply felt these pieces are; how might they have been received as lectures? Oh, I write in my notebook, how I wish I could have been there in that lecture hall, three rows from the back, listening. I would have been happy, and mystified.
↧
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Nigel Wood
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 fact that someone wanted to publish it definitely gave my confidence a boost but I couldn’t really say it changed my life.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I started out as a teenager playing in bands and writing song lyrics, which developed into an interest in reading poetry and trying to write it. Then I spent a lot of my twenties writing autobiographical fiction (heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac and Thomas Wolfe) as well as more experimental Burroughs-influenced cut-up pieces, but gradually poetry became my main focus again.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I write fairly quickly and revise slowly, the slowness being an essential part of the process – putting the poems away long enough to gain some distance from them and be able to look at them with a more detached and clinical eye. I work from notebooks – I tend to write down phrases which I then combine with other phrases to form nodes and clusters, which sometimes form poems in their own right or sometimes become part of larger structures. So my principal mode of composition is collage, though this is probably not apparent from the finished poems, as I like to make the constituent parts fit together smoothly, with no visible seams.
Sometimes poems come into existence close to their final form, but more often I go through multiple drafts before getting to something I’m satisfied with. Writing and revising are both parts of a process of discovering where the poem’s taking me and responding to that.
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’ve always thought of myself as someone who writes short pieces to be gathered into a book but the two collections I’ve published were both written works, as is a project I’m finishing up at the moment, so I seem to have got that wrong. More and more I find it helpful to think of working towards a book – not least because I’m terrible for having lots of poems on the go at once, none of them quite finished, and having a book as the goal helps me focus my energy and attention.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy giving readings but don’t really think of them as either part of or counter to the creative process. Reading poems out loud, sounding them in the air and thinking about the relations between the printed text and its spoken performance, is an essential part of the creative process, but it’s something that’s worked out in private rather than publicly. But maybe that’s because I don’t do public readings that often.
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 think I’m trying to find answers so much as trying to find out what the questions are. Writing poetry, for me, is very much an exploratory process, a discovery of associations, connections, new semantic domains. When I was an undergraduate one of my teachers described poetry as an interrogation of language and that remark really struck me and has remained at the back of my mind ever since.
There are theoretical issues underpinning what I do but my work’s not really led by theoretical concerns. Over the last few years I’ve been trying to be more intuitive and less analytical in my writing practice. I began to feel I over-privileged the intellectual, not just in poetry, but in music, visual art, in my response to the world in general really, and have been trying to remedy this and develop a more balanced response.
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?
As for what the role of the writer should be, I’m wary of prescriptive formulations – I think it’s up to the individual writer to find and define their role for themselves. My own take on it is summed up quite well by this quote from Alan Moore: ‘I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, art, sculpture, or an other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness .... Indeed, to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness ...’
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I haven’t actually worked with an outside editor, but I imagine it would depend very much on the editor and their approach.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
The most useful I’ve heard is this from Basil Bunting:
1. Compose aloud; poetry is a sound.
2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to lose impetus.
3. Use spoken words and syntax.
4. Fear adjectives; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive.
5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shape
Put your poem away till you forget it, then:
6. Cut out every word you dare.
7. Do it again a week later, and again.
Never explain – your reader is as smart as you.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to songwriting)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’m a musician but not a songwriter so I’m not really I’m qualified to answer this – I play the bass guitar so I make up bass lines to go with stuff and come up with riffs and parts of songs but I’ve never written a whole song.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I get up around 7, make some tea, check my email, then start working – usually beginning by reviewing and revising recent material, making notes etc, then, as my brain gradually comes alive, writing and shaping new material. I don’t have a strict routine, but I do something every day, even if it’s just typing up fragments I’ve scrawled in a notebook or looking over what I’ve done the day before.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I tend to have lots of things on the go at once, so if I get stuck on one thing I just try working on something else. If I can’t get anywhere with anything I find the best thing’s to go out – get on my bike, get the blood flowing through my body and the wind flowing through my beard. Then when I come back I’ll usually be in different headspace and able to get to work.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smell of oil from the Manchester ship canal. I don’t smell it that often these days as they’ve cleaned the canal up but now and then I’ll catch it when I’m cycling by and I’ll get a pure Proustian flashback to my childhood. Back then it was filthy and stank of oil – you could smell it long before you saw it.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I’ve been thinking about this recently and I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with the idea of books just coming from other books. I think it’s easier to talk about works purely in terms of the literary influences that have fed into them because there’s something tangible to work with – you have the books, you can compare and contrast texts etc Other shaping influences are much more intangible and difficult to identify and articulate, but still very much there, I think.
A lot of my personal aesthetic as a poet is very influenced by ideas about music – not only things to do with rhythm, timing and the sonic elements of the poem, but also the ways in which different materials can be taken from different sources and made to combine and interact in new contexts, offering different harmonies and counterpoints. John Zorn and Bill Laswell have been particularly important to me in this respect, in their practices more than by any theories or statements.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
To start with the poets: Ronald Johnson, Robert Kelly, John Peck, Thomas Meyer, Charles Stein, Robert Duncan, Kenneth Irby, Robert Creeley, William Bronk, David Jones, Ezra Pound, Ken Smith, John Ashbery, Kenneth White, Chris Torrance– all people whose work I’ve gone back to many times over the years.
Others: Joseph Campbell, Georges Perec, Terence McKenna, Hakim Bey, Iain Sinclair, Julio Cortazar, Alan Moore, Jack Kerouac ... I could go on.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a novel. Record a CD. Collaborate with a visual artist. Write an epic poem composed entirely of lines from other poems. Write a graphic novel. Visit Australia. Ride a Harley down the coast from Vancouver to Mexico.
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?
I’d love to be a graphic artist of some kind – drawing comic books, designing book and CD covers, though, to be honest, I’m still trying to work out what I want to do when I grow up.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I think my desire to write came out of my love of reading, which is something I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember. One of the things I like about reading and writing is they’re both solitary activities – and as I spend a lot of time living inside my own head, that makes them perfect for me.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Christopher Dewdney’s The Natural History, Barry Gifford’s Coyote Tantrasand Don Domanski’s All Our Wonder Unavenged are all things I’ve read, loved and gone back to repeatedly in recent months. For prose, Robert Bringhurst’s collection of essays The Tree of Meaning: Language, Poetry, Ecology is a fantastic book that’s taught me lots and helped me think about and see things a little differently. Great films seem to have been a bit thin on the ground recently (either that or I’ve just been missing them). The last great one I saw was Julien Temple’s Dr Feelgood documentary Oil City Confidential.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m currently doing some final revisions to the manuscripts of a couple of new collections: From the Diaries of John Dee, a group of poems composed using phrases taken from the diaries of Elizabethan mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occultist etc John Dee, and a gathering of poems called Songs from the Celestial Abattoir (the ‘celestial abattoir’ being this planet we live on).
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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Kim Minkus, Tuft
I have visions.
I see colours as birds go.
my sparrow gaze lifts me up.
I look. out.
I don’t need much space, but I want it.
stop the keypads.
I am interested in the labour of listening.
becoming is my extravagance.
It’s interesting to see Tuft (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013), Vancouver poet Kim Minkus’ own love song to her city, existing almost as a counterpoint to the lyric of Daphne Marlatt’s Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013) [see my review of such here]. It’s also worth noting the Paul Celan influence throughout, including the Celan quote that opens the collection, “here come the colours,” and the way the shapes and sounds of Minkus’ words twist and turn, “he pecks at words / and sneaks loamy garden terms into his breath” (“Bird”), an influence that has worked its way through a number of Canadian poets, notably the work of Mark Goldstein, another BookThug author.
The animals leave the shores of the river. lope down curbs. peer into gardens. their teeth gnash and sparkle in the reflecting pools of fluorescence. the creatures that live in their fur and between their toes tangle in the alleys. the city and the animals flourish – together. coyotes, skunks, raccoons – nightraiders lull the streets luminescence. when you see the animals you forget. the city translates.
A former Ottawa resident, Minkus is also the author of two previous poetry collections 9 Freight (Vancouver BC: LINEbooks, 2008) andthresh(Montreal QC: Snare books, 2009) [see my review of such here]. Her Tuftis built out of an untitled opening sequence, and seven sections, each of which exist as a single poem-sequence: “Bird,” “TUFT,” “Laneway,” “Machine,” “24 Nonets Written After Reading Edward Byrne’s Sonnets: Louise Labé,” “Industry” and “Philomena.” Each section of the collection appears to focus on a different aspect of Vancouver, writing individual points on the Vancouver grid in an exploration of language and space. As she writes in the poem/section, “Machine,” “Take a ride through the machine of my city // each tower machine // waits for its moment,” later writing in the “Industry,” “random middles live in our cities // between difficult and capital // over that system as a whole // the best middles revert to agriculture[.]” Very much a poet aware of and responding to contemporary social justice, Minkus’ poems inTuft explore the boundaries between written language and physical space, and personal versus consumer space, such as the clutter, debris and billboards of “Laneway,” or a literary Vancouver represented by Edward Byrne, and his Sonnets: Louise Labé (Nomados) [see my review of such here]. The twelfth of these “nonets” reads:
Irreproachable those phrases in the margins
enforcing something delicious
a sweet note or sound
from my lips to your mouth
plain pitiful
a sad ending or song
give me something whole
instead of grief an exit
silence – ecstasy
Hers might be a love song, but one that doesn’t shy away from the occasional critique, writing her way across the margins, whether the billboards of “Laneway,” or in “Industry,” where she writes “honest desire strains our escalated privileges[.]”
the form of the fact
production, distribution, repair
auction houses, tamed vapor, burnt orange taxis
fixed high speed agriculture
instead of one warehouse artist
metalworkers
our gardeners are gods of war
however continue
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introduction: Stan Rogal's Brautiganesque,
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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Steven Artelle
1 - How did your first chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first chapbook was a thing called Technoccult, back around 1998. I was really happy with it, and printed about 200 too many copies. Not exactly a life-altering experience---in fact, life took over just after the chapbook, and my writing sort of hibernated for a decade while I was raising kids and paying bills. I’m still raising kids and paying bills, but I started writing again around 2007, and it took about five years before I really found my voice in what I was doing and I started to write with confidence. One of the results is Four Hundred Rabbits, the new chapbook with AngelHousePress. It’s an excerpt from a work in progress, and it definitely has plenty of thematic continuity with my earlier stuff, especially the interest in mythology and divinity intersecting with contemporary culture.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
When I first started writing, I was mainly interested in writing fiction, especially horror fiction. Some of my favourite writers included Clive Barker and Kathe Koja---writers who had a very metaphysical sensibility and who weren’t shy about their highly aestheticized, even baroque, approach to writing. Early on, if I wrote any poetry I’d often transfer the lines and images I really liked over into whatever fiction I was working on. Eventually I became less interested in genre writing, but I never lost that appreciation for energetic phrases, surprising imagery, a grand (and/or ridiculous) metaphysical scale---all natural stuff for the kind of poetry I write. It’s also a quality in the poets who first really impressed me---Yeats, Layton, Ginsberg, the Romantics (except you, Wordsworth), Elizabethan playwrights. When I came back to writing, I found poetry was the right form for me---I was more interested in what I could do within individual lines, rather than what I could do over the course of a narrative.
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?
Starting things is like pulling teeth, but once I get a good grip on what I’m actually writing, I can usually yank the entire skeleton out. Then the skeleton falls apart and I reassemble the bones until they’re a completely different shape when I’m finished. Mostly I write lines and phrases, rather than writing anything resembling a complete poem. The poem happens when I start to make connections between whatever random pieces I’ve accumulated. I feel prolific if I produce a couple of finished poems in a month, though for my recent contribution to Ottawa’s Chinatown Remixed festival, I wrote twelve poems in about eight weeks, and was happy with all of them. When I’m focused, there are bones and teeth everywhere.
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?
Often I’ll know I’ve got a poem in the works when there’s something happening between the title and the first line. Not that I always have those pieces early on, but I think if there’s no electricity in that space then a poem hasn’t really started yet. I tend to think in terms of grand unifying schemes, so if I have a tangible concept for an entire book, that helps to direct how and what I write. My short pieces definitely tend to be part of a larger project, sometimes retroactively.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I think it’s important to test stuff out loud with an audience. It’s a very different way for folks to encounter your words, and if it works in that live venue then you know you’re doing something right on paper.
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?
For me it always circles back to the nature of cities, encounters with divinity in a secular environment, wrestling with individual identity in a collective culture. I have a manuscript of poems called Metropantheon, where I’ve tried to overwrite the secular experience of cities in western culture by inventing an urban mythology, rituals, supernatural interventions. It’s about the divine origins and mythic quality of street noise, commuting, parking lots, hotels, sex, death, roller derby. My ongoing work, Four Hundred Rabbits, is about the four hundred Aztec rabbit gods of drunkenness---it’s about what happens to each of those rabbit gods after the collapse of the Aztec civilization, when they stop being gods and just have to live like the rest of us, dealing with heartbreak, mortality, the search for personal fulfillment in a fallen state. Plenty of heavy metaphysical stuff in my writing, though my aim is almost always celebratory. Joy is imminent in everything. Maybe.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think the role of the writer has been the same for as long as writing has existed---we’re scribes. In a media-driven culture, where the dominant media are visual and aural, it’s still the writer who itemizes, interprets and contextualizes, whether that process results in biography, poetry, or propaganda. I’m biased, of course, but it’s an ark for all the other arts. Imagine a cosmic cultural game of rock-paper-scissors where it’s dance-music-visual art. I don’t know which would trump the other, but writing would be the hand. If you lost one of the three elements, the game would falter; but if you lose the hand, there’s no game at all.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It’s essential. The trick is finding an editor whose criticism resonates with what you’re doing. Two different readers may offer two very different sets of useful feedback. You need to be open to making changes, but you also need to have enough clarity about your work so that you’re able to edit your writing in a way that makes it even more your own, as opposed to making changes for the sake of making changes.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I have a friend who makes farting noises when she reads something of mine she doesn’t like. I think that counts as indirect advice. I find it very useful----when I write, I’m trying to avoid hearing that noise. Makes me a better writer.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I used to move back and forth quite easily from creative prose to poetry. Now my creative stuff is exclusively poetry, while prose is for my government day job. I’m productive on both fronts, but they’re mutually exclusive.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I have no routine, wish I did. It comes and goes, and I have no clue how it works. The only consistent feature is I tend to do a lot of writing on buses. Buses are underappreciated as literary spaces. I bet there are more readers on buses than there are in libraries on any given day. Not sure how many poets there are on buses though. At least one.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Beck’s beer, the Mahabharata, Hayao Miyazaki movies, Pablo Neruda, Alejandro Jodorowsky comics, melancholy brooding.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Lilacs.
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?
Music, for sure. Screw Yeats and Neruda; I want my stuff to sound like David Bowie lyrics.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’m a big fan of Archibald Lampman. One of these days I’ll finish writing his biography, I swear. I find it hard to read any fiction---I did a PhD in English Literature and it sort of burned out my reading ability. I love Jeanette Winterson though. Also a big fan of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi---don’t get me started on that one. Otherwise I read a lot of mythology, and stuff like the Shahnameh or Nizami’s Layla and Majnun.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Visit Easter Island.
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?
Comic book illustrator. That was my aim until I was about 17, when I realized what I really liked was telling the stories, and drawing was just slowing me down.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
See answer #17. Fortunately, writing also pays the bills through my day job---see #10.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Read it a couple of years ago during the commute to and from work. Took about eight months, worth every minute. I really enjoyed The Hunger Games. I’m a sucker for dystopias.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m about 250 rabbits into Four Hundred Rabbits. Also starting to put together a few poems for a collection I’ll probably call Bone Devotional and Other Hauntings. Maybe.
[Steven Artelle launches his AngelHousePress chapbook as part of the spring pre-ottawa small press book fair at The Carleton Tavern on Friday, June 14, 2013]
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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Golden Handcuffs Review: Volume 1, No. 16 (Spring-Summer, 2013)
David Antin and the word seedy
David and I were hired in 1968 for the first faculty of the art department of the University of California at San Diego. We shared an office. I loved David immediately, especially for little significant gestures like opening his mail during faculty meetings. David immediately understood what I was trying to do with my work. He got me my first gallery show in L.A. He advised me to go to New York and suggested people who might also get my work. He launched me.
I just re-read his seminal piece on Andy Warhol,” The Silver Tenement.” David is a delight to read. One follows a mind thinking. He doesn’t claim the truth and he writes clearly, like W.C. Williams, a favorite of mine and I suspect his. In the essay he uses the word “seedy”. It’s the first time I’ve ever encountered that word in art criticism. Perfect. (John Baldessari)
A journal I’ve heard of for a while, but hadn’t seen until now is Golden Handcuffs Review, edited by Lou Rowan out of Seattle, Washington. One of the highlights of the new issue of Golden Handcuffs Review includes a short interview by Kyle Schlesinger, “50+ Years of Burning Deck Press: An Interview with Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop.” Karl and Christy Siegler might have run Vancouver’sTalonbooks just past the forty year mark, and Simon Dardick at Montreal’s Vehicule Press must be coming up to the same, but a press run by the same people for more than five decades is astounding, especially considering the fact that the press is still producing magnificent books. I just wish the interview included with them here might have been longer. British publisher Shearsman Books has just released a book-length study of Rosmarie Waldrop’s work, Nikolai Duffy’s RelativeStrangeness – Reading Rosmarie Waldrop (2013), but a study on the press is certainly warranted also. Or perhaps it has already been done?
KS: Someone told me that you have a Heidelberg press. I thought it was a C&P? Could you tell me about your equipment? Do you still use the letterpress?
KW: We started out with a 8x10” C&P that we got secondhand in 190 when all the printers were disposing of platen presses. It was motor driven, but hand fed. Later we traded it for a C&P somewhat larger, with a 10x12” bed. Finally, when we wanted to print full-length books (which meant approximately sixty-four pages), we added a secondhand Heidelberg with a 10x15” bed and automatic feed. This must have been in 1964.
But in 1985, when we had just printed five books and drove the sheets to our bindery in New Hampshire we found that they, like all the other binderies, had automated, and could no longer bind our small two-up sheets. From then on binding our books would be handwork and forbiddingly expensive.
So we came into the computer age and how make files on the computer to be printed offset.
The strength of the journal appears to be a connecting of various disparate communities, including contributions by American writers alongside those by British and European writers. This was something Nate Dorward’s late-lamented journal, The Gig, was also very good at: connecting communities of innovative language poets and poetry readers in Canada, the United States and England. British writer David Miller’s introduction to the anthology The Alchemist’s Mind: a Book of Narrative Prose by Poets [see my review of the anthology here] is included, as is Vancouver critic Peter Quartermain’s essay “Discovery Making: Robert Duncan’s Life and Work 1958-1988,” a “lightly revised version” of the introduction to The Collected Later poems and Plays of Robert Duncan (University of California Press, 2012). There is something impressive about the range of attention the journal provides, allowing for a great deal of further reading. As far as the poetry submissions are concerned, the journal appears to favour longer pieces; not necessarily a home for the short lyric, but extended stretches, including new writing by Robert Kelly, David Antin, Jesse Glass and Hank Lazer, among others. The first eighteen sections of Paul Naylor’s“Anarchelogy” are included as well, an extended sequence of short, staggered lyric that include:
10.
My daughter her eyes
not yet ‘in the buyer’s light’
every unaccounted hour
not yet tied to the scale
of waste we’re measured by –
will she find beauty
instead of truth the lie
to see her through?
11.
Dismantling thought
by thought which wills
its own esteem fails
its baleful rule orders
the parts reassemble
themselves as the new
hole defiance drops in.
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12 or 20 (small press) questions with Jess Mynes on Fewer & Further Press
“Yet, for me and my company, this is finally what matters: how you’ve come to know what you know, and how you’ve learned it. It matters to tell it, whether or not it’s understood, because it is the clearest way of respecting what has come before and what will follow.”1 – When did Fewer & Further Press first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?
-- Robert Creeley
2005 was the official incarnation of F&F. The study of it began much earlier when I was acquiring and reading any/all poetry I could get my hands on. At some point during that process I decided starting a press was the best way to help ensure the work I loved was being read.
I hoped to develop an aesthetic that extended a tradition of publishing and poetry that meant something to me. An aesthetic that connected the dots between poets working in different time periods, locales, etc., making F&F a point of confluence by developing a readership for that work. That, if anything, was my loosely defined goal.
You learn so many things by being a publisher. Let me focus on one thing that has many implications. The poetry world is tiny and at the same time the number of poets is inexhaustible. The relative ease of publishing has made poetry ubiquitous. This ubiquitous-ness makes it even more important that what you do is unique. Decide what matters to you and why, then love it fiercely and don’t worry about where it fits. Assimilation is one of the worst concerns you can have in any artistic endeavor.
2 – What first brought you to publishing?
Seeing other presses, reading other poets’ work, thinking publishing was a good way to establish my interest and intentions. It is simple and obvious to say but engaging the work of other writers in a design capacity deepens your understanding of their work and your own. It also expresses that your commitment to the poetry is not solely focused on foregrounding your own work.
3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?
small press poetry is contraband. It is a scarce commodity, so its value and mystery increase. If you don’t hear from the people working in the margins how do you know that what is going on at the center has any value? Change rarely comes from someone who is supported by the current status of things. Small presses help provide a measure; without this measure poetry would petrify and become a self affirming cycle.
4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?
There’s a lot of terrific work happening with small press publishing. At one point I had a blog for audio samples of the poets reading their work. I thought that was a great way to provide a sample of the work. The technology collapsed. I appreciate models of economic production, past and present but I hope the quality of the materials helps distinguish F&F. Quality of the materials in terms of the poets’ work and the materials used in production: coverstock, linen guts (for special editions), sewn (for special editions), customized stamps, etc. The quality of the materials expresses the reverence and care I have for the work and hopefully indicates this to the reader. If the materials and design help illuminate the text, then I’m successful.
5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new chapbooks out into the world?
Not so sure. I use email and the necessary evil, Facebook. I’m not the most proficient in this area. Last summer I participated in a small press publisher talk and one of the questions from the audience was, how did we as small presses compete with publishers like City Lights? It was a fair question, but I don’t see F&F as a commercial or money making venture, so there is no competition for that kind of market space. I have no delusions about becoming an institution, I just want to do what I do well. I have a full time job so not thinking about a bottom line gives me a lot of freedom to do whatever I want. I hope to break even but the poetry world is a tiny place despite our grand gestures and the same people buy my books time and again – much appreciated! - with additional fans unique to the particular poet sprinkled in. I get the work into the hands of the people who will read it and respond to it. F&F doesn’t do a whole lot otherwise, but my comp list, the author’s comp list, and the copies that are purchased are just about what a one person bandwidth can support. Hopefully, it generates enough interest in the work to expand the poet’s readership.
6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?
Depends on the project and the poet. I assume the expertise of any poet who sends me a manuscript. F&F reflects my reading through the selections and how the work is presented. It is important to me as an editor to respect the poet and to realize they know better than I do. I’m not here to workshop the poems unless asked. Whenever I read any work I’m always tweaking it in my own head, it is only natural to read actively like this if you also write. I’ve had authors specifically ask for my take, in that scenario I approach the manuscript as if I were writing it and give line-to-line, poem-to-poem feedback. I’ve had projects where I’ve been heavily involved in the selection of poems for the chapbook from a wider sample, giving input on a poem-to-poem basis and manuscript sequencing, etc. So I guess it depends, but I count on the author to solicit my feedback before diving into the work in that way, unless I see something glaring.
7 – How do your chapbooks get distributed? What are your usual print runs?
Mail, bookstore, libraries, and most important, word of mouth. Nothing is more important than an enthusiastic readership. Usually publications are in an edition of 200 copies.
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?
F&F is a solo show, but I always enlist the feedback of friends involved in similar publishing. I have go-to eyes and ears that always help me realize shortcomings and strengths. And for that, I’m grateful. On a few occasions poets have helped me with the sewing, folding, and collating which is very appreciated. I would love to collaborate 0n future projects with other editors.
9 – How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?
It’s another close reading of the text that makes me examine some of the particulars with a little bit different lens. Why this font/text? Why this size book? etc. How the presentation informs the reading of the poems. I hope to be as generous to the poets and their work as they are to me as a reader. Also strange relationships develop with the text, you begin to see only first words of poems when you are collating, things like this. So the interaction with the text is both more serious and more playful. The repetition of working with a text makes it more familiar and deepens the relationship. Orson Welles would often make his actors/actresses do many takes of a scene. The first handful of takes would be energetic and begin to establish dynamics, the next handful would be a sort of drudgery. After doing even more takes, the actors/actresses would begin to assimilate and embody the lines and scenes in a different way, a kind of somatic gnosis develops, that, I’m guessing, gives them greater intuitive insight into the dialogue and the scene. This happens with chapbooks I work on and in my own obsessive approach to revising my own poems.
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?
The only publishing of my own writing that I’ve done has been collaborations, if you don’t include the trailers to Sky Brightly Picked and Penny Dreadfuls (only distributed to a handful of folks). The question is relevant but it is also one that can’t be answered definitively. If you publish other poets and your work belongs alongside the poets who you publish, than I say go for it. If you just publish your own work, it may suggest something else, but not necessarily. If you feel it is necessary and warranted, go for it, Whitman did. There’s a rich tradition of self- publishing. In some ways publishing your own work holds you accountable in a way that is even more pressurized. I would relish the idea of designing my own work and may do this at some point. I’ve been fortunate that my publishers have been very attentive to my work and I’m grateful for that.
11 – How do you see Fewer & Further Press evolving?
F&F will likely do smaller press runs in the future. That would ideally lead to more titles published during each year, but realistically I’m not sure that is true given the many attentions in my life.
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?
Many of the poets I published didn’t have a great deal of their work in print when I published it and have since had full length publication or their poetry has received greater attention. If by publishing their work I’ve had a hand in these developments that is what pleases me most.
My biggest frustration is that I can only do so much. The cost, the time expenditure, the energy available often means I can only publish x number of titles each year. Ideally I’d like to publish more work that deserves attention and I wish I had the means to publish full length manuscripts.
I can’t say what folks have most overlooked. Any attention I’ve received for F&F has been appreciated and almost universally enthusiastic. Maybe if pressed, selfishly I’d say the cost of doing business. Cost in terms of dollars and amount of time. Small press work takes time and money to continue to be viable. Many folks in our community either don’t have the means to support it, aren’t aware of the economics of publishing, or are just indifferent to the responsibility of supporting it. I’m not in it for money, as I’ve said, but despite the fact that the support outweighs the indifference, I can have moments of despair where I feel like the hours I spend folding and stapling amounts to pissing in the wind.
13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?
Friends. I ripped off any and everyone: Anchorite Press, Katalanche Press (now Editions Louis Wain), Aaron Tieger’s CARVE books (became Petrichord Books), Scott Pierce’s Effing Press, Maureen Thorson’s Big Game Books, Open 24 Hours, Ugly Duckling Presse, Pressed Wafer, Toothpaste Press, Skysill Press, Brooklyn Arts Press, Tuumba, Jargon Society. I bought everything I could and went from there, while soliciting advice at critical junctures from folks who knew what they were doing.
14– How does Fewer & Further Press work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Fewer & Further Press in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?
Where I live has a very active university-driven poetry community. They are extraordinarily supportive of their community through publishing, readings, etc. I appreciate how close knit this community is. Another portion of my more immediate community is other writing communities not identified with the university but mostly consists of writing groups. There’s some overlap with each community but really my poetry community is many of the New York City poets whose aesthetics and interests are more closely aligned with my own and who have become good friends. I’m fortunate to traffic in many communities, and in limited ways, as a result I have what I feel is greater freedom to make choices that prioritize the writing rather than the social implications of my choices.
The dialog is essential. That dialog is not just limited to current presses, but previous ones as well. I think of United Artists, Angel Hair, Toothpaste Press, Tuumba, Jargon Society, Ugly Duckling Presse, Skysill Press, etc. Some of the more established poets that F&F has published are folks who are from this tradition and create an essential bridge between the poets and publishers of the past.
15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?
I co-curate a local reading series, All Small Caps. We are somewhat restricted in that we pay to rent out a pub to hold our readings. These readings are held one Monday a month. We are fortunate to have the space but Monday night isn’t prime time. As much as possible I try to feature readers that have had a book recently published or are looking for a reading venue for whatever reason. But this reading series is not directly linked to the press as official readings for F&F projects. Unfortunately I do not have the space or the time to give proper launches to the books when they come out. The importance of public readings and other events is that these readings remind us that poetry is an animated activity. Poetry readings are the most useful means to combat the notion that poetry is separate from our everyday world.
16– How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?
I use Facebook and I have a website for the press. These are employed as a means to distribute the work and the appreciation for the work. The internet is a very useful tool to get the word out. Part of the beauty of the publication process of books is that it requires continual effort and attention for fruition so it is less prone to vicissitudes and overestimation as say the more immediate form of web publication. Taking your time to do something well never hurts.
17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?
I haven’t yet placed a, “we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts,” note up on the site, but unfortunately it will be forthcoming. I want to be surprised, unfortunately a lack of a solicit-first policy is construed as an invitation to send me multiple manuscripts without first querying. I’m a one person operation, but I do eventually get to whatever is sent and read it. I had a recent correspondence with an artist/writer who was very impatient with my process, which was unfortunate because I value his work and might have worked with him otherwise. I’m looking to avoid these types of interactions. It takes time to investigate what I want to publish and to do it properly. F&F publishes a wide range of poets and diverse work, but a lot of what I receive is nowhere close to the things I’ve published. There are plenty of publishers out there, there is no reason to chose a publisher randomly. Folks who are involved in publishing the work of other poets, who run their own reading series, who write reviews, who continually purchase small press publications, those are the folks whose work I’ll read with greater interest and consider more intently for publication.
austerity measures
I’ve been reading Stacy’s work with great interest since I first encountered it. There is a temptation to excerpt austerity measures to give you a feeling for how generous Stacy’s economy is, but the full impact of this work is achieved by the accumulation of her tonal precision. Basil Bunting said, “It is confusing and destructive to try to explain anything in terms of anything else…” He was speaking about applying psychology to poetry, adding a level of artifice in order to develop a relationship that might help you understand something. This approach creates an understanding that is removed from the thing itself and is not necessarily accurate however comforting it might be. In austerity measures, Stacy develops the reader’s understanding not through the artifice of hyberbole that might give you a sense of relationship to the feelings but rather the details that create the feelings of the experience.
Singles and Fives
Anselm Berrigan introduced a poem of his at a recent reading saying that his mom often asks him to tell her what the streets look like. John Godfrey lets you know what the streets look like. Godfrey’s poems could be put in a time capsule and be used for future dioramas of New York’s people streets and avenues. His work is accurate, musical, every day and inexhaustible. Godfrey writes his poems over and over by hand before he types them up. This kind of meticulous, sensual labor requires a slow-down attention to the infinitesimal. These are the details that illuminate unrecognized situation. I’m lucky to have a couple of his early works that he doesn’t even have copies of anymore: Music of the Curbs and 26 Poems. His early surreal poems remind me that surrealism isn’t a trap door to escape the poem closing in on you, rather it is a means to unlock or articulate those moments when your world defies you and requires a different articulation.
Allotments
After Aaron Tieger sent me a copy of Crab and Winkle, which I thought was one of the best books of poetry I’d read in a long time, I wrote to Laurie. As our correspondence developed, he generously sent me a bunch of his books, naming them, “further instances of my folly.” In Crab and Winkle Laurie writes, “I have to do battle with Ron Silliman’s notion of ‘music’: that this makes him seem not so unlike the same School of Quietude he denigrates. ‘Music’: shouldn’t it take care of itself? And the American sense of ‘expertise’? We are all inspired amateurs around here.” Poetry that overestimates the poet’s stature in relationship to the reader undermines the reader’s trust that the poet has an accurate sense of self, and by extension the things around him or her. Humility and contentiousness seem like natural conditions for intimately articulating human interactions if we are going to begin to understand what is really taking place. Laurie illuminates unacknowledged depths beyond the surfaces we accept as everyday by locating the particulars that make up these seemingly disparate surfaces and focusing our attention on them.
12 or 20 (small press) questions;
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rob mclennan reads on main stage at WESTFEST, June 7, 2013
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new from above/ground press: new titles by Stengel, Christie, Smith + Tucker,
by Jill Stengel
$4
See link here for more information
GOVERNMENT
by Jason Christie
$4
See link here for more information
MNEMOTECHNICS
Jessica Smith
$4
See link here for more information
punchlines
by Aaron Tucker
$4
See link here for more information
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April-May 2013
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each
above/ground press: twenty years (so far),
To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles(many, many things are still in print). And don’t forget, 20th anniversary/2013 annual subscription, still available!
Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.
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