i thought i was new here

Bones That Looked Like Me: an interview w/ Leslie Anne Mcilroy

2012-01-15T15:33:00.007-05:00

I dreamed last night
that your face pressed
against the skin of my belly
and I could see your eyes
wide open, bones
that looked like me.

(from “Surrender”)

GL: Your second full-length collection of poems, Liquid Like This, begins with an epigraph from Carole Maso: “Of course she goes too far. / There’s nowhere else for her to go.” This notion of being forced by circumstance to go too far seems essential to your work. In what ways does your poetry respond to having “nowhere else to go” but “too far”? And to what extent do you think people and poets find or define themselves in moments of exaggeration, desperation, extremis?

LM: I don’t think of going too far in terms of exaggeration/drama as much as a kind of learned internal truth — something that intrinsically works. It is what is known about the self and the struggle to be present in the world. I’m not saying it is smart or good or right — always. In fact, it can be sad, come from a place of desperation, as you note. On the other hand, for me it feels mostly bold and honest and uncompromising — risk taking. The speaker, to be true to herself, cannot go halfway or even just all the way. She has to give everything to feel alive and true — jump in with two feet. This is a way I try to write — and live. It’s not pretty and I am often disappointed when I find myself writing around something that I am maybe afraid or unable to say out loud. I know I have to go further. The poems I admire most take that step.

It is not that I disdain modesty and decency and sound judgment. I like to think I have those, too, just that this tactic doesn’t often serve me well in my creative/relational life. I value it and would never intentionally hurt another in the name of pushing through, but I am also deaf to polite and pretty poems/people. They don’t enter in/make a mark.

The poems/poets that stick with me aren’t extreme (in some cases I wish they were) as much as they are willing to say what needs to/can’t be said. I always go back to Lucille Clifton’s “Moonchild”: “jay johnson is teaching/me to french kiss, ella bragged, who/
is teaching you? how do you say; my father?” It kills me that she can say this so simply and beautifully and that the moon is the poem’s metaphor and it shines so pure and bright through all this ugly. It goes so very far.

If you go too far, you can always come back (at least in a poem); if you don’t go out there, you’ll never know.

GL: There’s a terrific and ghoulish poem, “Dismember,” near the beginning of the book that provides an eerie counterpoint for the way the body is often treated in Liquid Like This. Many poems in this collection portray the body as a kind of magnificent but doomed device that offers fleeting promises to satisfy desires while simultaneously altering or frustrating those desires. In “Dismember,” on the other hand, the speaker contemplates the way the body is severed, appropriated, and/or destroyed for perverse, malicious or tragic reasons. The poem features a litany of gothic scenarios, including images of amputees, a “hooded captor” beheading a hostage, a serial killer collecting trophies in a box, and other nightmarish but realistic predicaments. What I’d like to know is: Why is this dark and somewhat atypical poem of yours featured so prominently and close to the beginning of the book? And how does “Dismember” inform the book’s more erotically focused exploration of the body?

LM: I love this poem: the images, the rawness, the ugliness. I think it is a good poem — my simple explanation for its prominent positioning in the book. I love it because it comes from my longtime, graphic fear of dismembered body parts, which began when I was a child and remains long after I discovered my erotic self. What I found as I wrote the images that haunt me (I slept with the light on for months during the Jeffrey Dahmer case) was that in a textbook psychology way, it has to do with a fear of not being whole or connected, an exploration of the many ways people are damaged by separation — how identities are formed in pieces that don’t talk to each other — how we can be so distant from ourselves.

Or worse yet, how two parts of the self can be so contradictory and still exist in the same space. Identities are complex but we often reduce them to a simple character we can hold on to — and then they change.

I feel like the graphic, “gothic,” violent images of tearing/cutting the body apart are significant in that they speak to the real atrocities/horrors that take place every day. People DO THIS to one another. There is the doing and the done to and they are equally terrifying. It surpasses everything I know, except what I might do if someone tried to hurt my daughter. That’s another poem.

I have taken some crap for the last line, “the nanny who pays good money for a soup bone,” but I believe that if we thought about the daily massacre of animals — what it is we really do to a cow — if we looked in that beautiful animal’s eyes as we chopped off its head — we would be forced to see that every time we ate a piece of beef, and feel it. Yes, I am a vegetarian.

Finally, I am very close to my body — it is central to the way I live. I don’t understand it sometimes, but I am uniquely focused on it because I am a Type 1 diabetic, which means I have been monitoring my health, diet, weight and blood sugars for 30 years now. I don’t get to escape my body and all the variables that affect it. I pay consequences for ignoring it. I struggle. The body is a beautiful and terrifying thing — the things it does, the things we do to it, the things we do to each other. Pleasure and pain walk together in much of what I know and express — very much so erotically. I don’t really know how else to explain that.

GL: Your poem “Sexicon” investigates the words and expressions we use to build a language of love and lust. After first mentioning some conventional phrases for orgasms, like “the small death” and “angels flying,” the speaker searches “for something better to explain/the panic/calm, fierce/sweet, fire/ash of us,” a word that can not only call to mind, but even achieve sexual consummation, with its mere utterance. Why is this ambition, finding language sufficient to the task of representing or even reenacting sexuality, of such crucial importance to your work?

LM: For me “Sexicon” is about a universal call to love explored through the power of unrestrained sex — it is hyperbolic, but need not be. It was informed, in part, by these back-and-forths I have with my daughter: “I love you,” “I love you more,” “I love you bigger than the world,” “I love you bigger than the sky,” and one day she countered, “I love you 140 universes.” It stayed. And for me (though one might not believe it) the best of our sexual beings is always brought forth by love — and trust, and vulnerability. How much would you give for your partner to look at you wide-eyed and say without abandon, “I love you 140 universes,” and mean it?

Something Bigger than Love. This is a phrase from “Sexicon”, that my lover, Don Bertschman, and I have adopted as our code. It is a reaching, a calling, a truth that can only be found if you are open and honest and seeking and desirous and willing. I wear a ring with SBtL engraved on it, a tattoo on my back, and now, a necklace. It is something I believe in — that we can give one another a consciousness and break old patterns (love the Andrea Gibson poem, “Stay” about this), which have held us captive. We can choose one another without anyone telling us what form that needs to take, AND we can trust one another in a way that challenges our very core. Trust is hugely important. When you give yourself wholly to another person you need to know that you are safe in that giving. It comes back to the “too far.” You have to take risks, be present, be honest to love — physically, emotionally and spiritually — that big. If you, like I, want to experience love at that level, I believe you have to go that far.

GL: Many poems in Liquid Like This use the second person or use the second person address at some point. Why do those moments happen in your poems (when you turn to a specific “you”) and which would you say is the greater motivation for you as a poet: to address others or yourself: Examples of this can be found in "Heart Time" (at the conclusion), "Best Fuck II," (great titles), "One Blue Second" (in the middle), "Headed South," "Winner Takes All," (the “you” who's kissed), "Surrender," "How Did it End," "I Don't Want to Write about You Anymore," "Gone Missing," "Keep Breathing" (at the end), "Nothing's free about Verse," "The Poem in You," "I Wasn't Surprised at All," and "Again."

LM: The audience is always a big factor for me. I write for myself, yes, but the only reason to share this is that it might make another feel/see/engage/change. It’s a form of connecting that is hugely important to me. If I can’t talk to YOU, who am I talking to? When I write, it is almost embarrassingly autobiographical. I lack the leap of imagination to walk outside myself, which is central to a lot of poems I love. I try and almost always fail.

Still, within the autobiographical, there is an energy that forces me to address the other, to acknowledge that I am not here alone in this and someone has brought me/come along with me to this experience or way of thinking, and because my “I” is very much MY “I,” I want them to hear me. I want them to LISTEN — even if they never read the poem. I feel the need to address/invite/engage the other as part of the narrative, to help inform the whole picture. Often the “you” is easily identifiable. In most cases, it a partner/lover, who can then be extrapolated to the universal “you” depending on the experience of the reader.

I try to write from what I know and the “you” is always part of that. This might explain why I rarely write in the third person …

GL: The last poem in the book, “Heart Time,” the speaker tells us she has been “hearing [her] heartbeat…[i]n [her] dreams, in the city wind, on the radio,” which prompts her to count everything, and then claim “…I can measure beauty this way, / by counting my presence in this final world.” These are fabulous lines, and I wonder if they provide us with an ars poetical account of your core aesthetics. How does your poetry attempt count your presence into this world?

LM: It’s funny that you ask that. I perform “Heart Time” and in rehearsing, asked my musical collaborators if in hindsight, that line, “I can measure beauty this way, / by counting my presence in this final world,” sounded egotistical. I worried that I did not really think it through when I wrote it. What I meant was not that beauty is only measured by how much I count in this world, but that how much beauty I leave IS how much I count — it’s what I’ve given, what I’ve left after I go. I love that it is pretty, but if you really think it through, it’s semantically unclear. I have a wild need to leave something beautiful — to add to the beauty in this world, to be a part of it — I want to be that beautiful thing.

GL: When I was an undergrad at Pitt, I was introduced to poetry by writers like Jeff Oaks and Jan Beatty, whose work displayed a fierce attachment to Pittsburgh. I came to think of them, and several other (otherwise rather diverse) writers, like Judith Vollmer, Terrance Hayes, Jim Daniels, and Sharon McDermott, as being a part of a regional literature. The tenets of this literature, I would argue, include: locating the reader in very specific places of interest, like the Cage, the Pegasus, on Forbes Avenue, waiting for the 61C bus, etc; using river and bridge imagery; both celebrating and mourning the city’s gothic, post-industrial architecture and atmosphere; bars; music, specifically blues and erotic rock lyrics; and exploring sexual and sensual imagery. To what extent you 1) believe there is such a Pittsburgh aesthetic? 2) locate yourself within that aesthetic or 3) try to complicate and/or write away from that aesthetic? (Sorry about all the aesthetics!!)

LM: OOOOOOOH — I LOVE Pittsburgh. It is so rich to me, but I feel like I am faking it when I try to adopt the working-class, steel mill history, the industrial meat of it. I come from a middle-class family, though I am a third-generation immigrant, my grandfather (on my mother’s side) was a draftsman and my grandmother a writer. I have nothing but love for the work ethic of Pittsburgh, having been employed since I was 12 (at Fox’s Pizza Den, Burger Chef, some crazy Elaine Powers exercise place, selling magazines on the phone for a lunatic, babysitting — it seems fitting now that I bartended for 10 years with my three Carnegie Mellon degrees).

I like the brutal determination of Pittsburgh, the skylines and the hills — the weather. I love the poetry of the landscape — the bridges and rivers. I love the parks (I run in Frick nearly every day with my dog), and the way, when people say we are pedestrian, I get to point to the exact same people you note as counterpoints: Jan Beatty, Terrance Hayes, Jeff Oaks and Jim Daniels, whom I studied under as an undergraduate at CMU. They are in my blood. They are a pulsing part of Pittsburgh. I am happy here.

And yes, there is a Pittsburgh aesthetic and I hope I am a part of it. I don’t feel a need to distance it. I don’t care for the Steelers /Pirates/Penguins, I don’t eat pierogies or kielbasa. I don’t dine at the Dirty O or Pramanti’s, but it is in Pittsburgh where I have met the most beautiful, creative, artistic, energizing people in my life. I raise my daughter here in hopes that this energy finds her. And I know it will.

GL: So what’s been new with you since Liquid Like This appeared two years ago? Are you writing away from those poems? Or has your work since been a continuation of the poems in that book? What are you reading, writing, thinking?

What is new? Performance, I guess. I have begun memorizing my poems so that I can deliver them in a way that focuses on emotional connection rather than simply transference of ideas, words, images, feelings. If I KNOW a poem, I can emote, use my body (back to the body), think about timing and effect. I can fully realize what I am trying to say and share that.

LM: I have been lucky enough to work with musicians (Don Bertschman, Danny Morrow) who add a new dimension to my work. It is so freeing to collaborate with artists who share an aesthetic and then raise the bar with musical influences that take the poem to another level. Sometimes I rework the poem for a performance — add things, repeat things, accentuate the melody of the words. Mostly I concentrate on making sure my poems work as hard on the stage as they do on the page. I still want them to stand up to academic scrutiny/poetic craft, but I want to deliver them the way you would to a friend over a glass of wine, from the heart — passionate and true.

Last year I took on the challenge of writing a poem a day for National Poetry month in April. That exercise lead to a lot more writing (not all good), and a devotion to the process I was lacking. Since, I have been working on those poems and others (I am a big believer I revision) to compile a new book, sending out a lot more (getting a lot more rejections) and am writing grants to fund a larger project that has been in my mind for more than five years now: a performance piece dealing with diabetes, bulimia and motherhood. It has yet to get funded, but I know if it does, I can write/perform a piece that will be powerful in the way that Sekou Sundiata’s “Blessing the Boats” or Caroline Rothstein’s “Faith” promises to be.

I speak from my heart and rarely from intellect (I suck at arguing politics, but swear to god I know what is right and wrong). I don’t read as much as I’d like, but in the last years have been given the gift of Jeannette Winterson and Carole Maso. I always return to Lucille Clifton, Terrance Hayes, Tim Seibles, Sekou Sundiata, Martín Espada, Linda McCarriston, Scott Fitzgerald and James Baldwin. Most recently, I have discovered Ada Limon, Erika Meitner and Cheryl Dumesnil.

Each morning I read “Verse Daily” and “Poetry Daily,” giving me a poetic jumpstart to foil my retail, copywriting world. I have explored the slam scene and don’t do so well there — I think my material is not a good fit for the audience — but that, too, has greatly informed my presentation. I think a lot about what it is I want to achieve with my writing and what devotion/sacrifice it will take me to get there.

Sometimes I regret not getting my MFA/Ph.D. and being an active part of the academic/poetry world. Other times I regret not being the soul artist that puts her art first. Then I remember that I have 3 books and a daughter and a home and a lover, my family and my beautiful friends. I remember I have made choices that came from my own truth, my own needs, my desires and limitations. I think a lot about mortality and take comfort in knowing that no matter what happens, I have lived as true and whole as I know how to be. I pray that it gets truer and wholer each day.

Leslie Anne Mcilroy won the 2001 Word Press Poetry Prize for her full-length collection Rare Space and the 1997 Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Gravel. She also took first place in the 1997 Chicago Literary Awards Competition judged by Gerald Stern. Her second full-length book, Liquid Like This, was published by Word Press in 2008. Leslie’s work appears in numerous publications including American Poetry: The Next Generation, Dogwood, The Emily Dickinson Award Anthology, The Mississippi Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose & Poetry and Pearl. Leslie works as a copywriter in Pittsburgh, PA, where she lives with her daughter Silas, and writer/guitarist, Don Bertschman, with whom she performs her poetry.

Four New Poems by Brad Liening

2011-10-16T21:21:00.008-04:00

My Spirit Animal

My spirit animal is your mucky lake,
your sick duck.
Cellophane cell phone
battery barf stringing the reeds.
Your grandchildren will weep
if the people of the future
still do things like that.
Maybe they just gnash their teeth and moan.
Maybe they just drool.
What good is a firecracker
when the cyborgs are all lining up
on the gorgeous dais
to show us just who
the boss is around here?
I know how this movie ends:
the beautiful people
slink off to glory in small,
sequel-related victory
and reproduce (not that
we get to see that part),
while the rest of us
are sent deep underground
to labor in silicon mines
and plot our resistance.
Run through with our own antennae,
atrophied language skills
impairing our ability to think creatively
so it looks like it might be a while.
It’s dark down here, indeed.
Poetic justice demands our suffering.
The split world maintains
we had it coming.

Manifest Destiny

Killer ants are overrunning our town.
They sink what we imagine to be tiny fangs
beaded with tiny drops of poison
into our ankles and arms,
our necks while we sleep.
We’re only guessing here,
since a lot of scientists
have already been bitten and no one
else wants to get too close.
The mayor turned blue,
the deputy comptroller exploded.
There’s a spate of ugly suicides.
Celebrities form a committee to raise awareness,
and we’re told of massive donations.
Parents are on morning television shows
discussing the dangers killer ants pose
to teens and other humans.
Don’t play the killer ant game, they warn.
A whistle stop tour conducted
by a prominent politician has included our town.
We have been lifted to national consciousness
by the tiniest of creatures,
and slowly things begin to change.
Our mailman received a Guggenheim
and next week I will be in a fashion shoot,
draped in a tunic of artificial killer ants
under a giant killer ant moon.

Wunderkammer

Everything here seems somehow
to be about you: the triptych

depicting melting ice,
steam hissing from a pipe,

all of it tagged and inventoried.
The inventor of the in-flight safety video

is your distant cousin,
he’s here in person explaining

to the crowd what to do
in case of sudden loss of pressure.

The last time you two spoke
you swore to speak again soon.

Who put this together? you ask
but everyone has put on headsets

for the guided audio tour,
and they all silently look at you.

So you do the only thing you can do,
which is appreciate the exhibit.

Here’s a big book in which
your name doesn’t appear.

A heap of potatoes
and a feeding tube.

A film about a
trip to the moon.

Forced Hand
after a song by Much Worse

We’ve been let down.
Fish gills scummed with muck,
prohibitively expensive baseball games.
The poetry section at the bookstore:
how sad.
Can we ever get back
to the lobbed bombs
of liquored up flowers?
Not in this dirt.
Not in our current climate
of wild and severe swings, snow settling
into the opening tulips
and coating the confused bees.
I was just making up that last bit anyway.
Budget talks fail.
That rubble is the road.
Some crumpled cardboard is sold
to the local art museum for a million.
No joke.
Our lame prospects get much worse,
our only silver lining
in the cable coverage
of teary politicians doing their honest best,
the beautiful young royals trading narcotized smiles
in berserk flashbulbs,
more reminders than
I can forget about in my sleep,
in my repetitive, punitive dreams.
Their shoes cost more than my rent.
Their lapel pins cost more than the hot air balloon
I could buy to take me far,
far away from here,
someplace I can’t
even imagine.

Liening is the author of Ghosts and Doppelgangers (Lowbrow Press) and several chapbooks. He's an editor at InDigest Magazine and can always be found at bradliening.blogspot.com.

The Angel in the Mirror: An Interview with Jenny Barber

2011-09-25T14:48:00.003-04:00

Trembling, unseen,
I stayed there in the air
like clear
water in a glass,
transparent angel in a mirror.

From “Variations” after Emilio Prados

GL: In her introduction to your first book, Rigging the Wind, Jane Miller credits your poetry with searching for and revealing “essences,” oftentimes in “landscapes haunted by suffering.” Do you think Miller’s characterization of your of poetry is correct? Does Rigging the Wind look for redemptive essences in places of pogrom and disapora? And if so, why does your poetry so frequently travel abroad to look for these essences?

JB: I was very appreciative of Jane Miller’s introduction to Rigging the Wind. In the book, I wanted to inhabit certain landscapes, many of them in Spain, in order to penetrate moments of history, especially the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. I love Spain, where I lived for a spell back in 1987, and I felt a lot of sadness when it was time to leave. This, along with a growing interest in medieval Jewish history, got me interested in researching the stories of those forced to leave Spain by historical circumstances. I was also, as you suggest, looking for a redemptive aspect in places of pogrom and diaspora. The endurance that people show in living through such times is, for me, proof of the human capacity to begin again after disastrous loss.

GL: You begin Rigging the Wind with a translation of Amrita Pritam’s “Conspiracy of Silence.” The poem tells us that “someone has broken / into a human ribcage” and stolen “our dreams.” No one can tell where this thief has gone to, except for “someone’s / poem [that], like a chained dog, barks” in warning. It is a complex and beautiful poem that, due to its reuse of the pronoun “someone,” makes the thief and the guardian of our dreams seem like the same thing, or person. Why did you choose to open your collection with Pritam’s poem? And why is the loss of dreams so pressing a concern for you and your work?

JB: I had been translating poems from Punjabi with the Pakistani writer Irfan Malik, and Amrita Pritam’s poem was especially resonant for me. There are many forces, both external and internal, that array themselves against the artistic process, so the artist has to be adept at finding ways to break through the “conspiracy of silence.” The conspiracy is not only about the difficulty of making art, though; it is also about the tendency we all have to shut down, to live life in a routine way. The existence of a piece of music, a painting, a book of poems, or a novel, with the worlds that they provide, can help us avoid that fate. Zagajewski says that “Only in the beauty created/by others is there consolation/in the music of others and in others’ poems,” and I believe we’re in need of such consolation. And, as for dreams or aspirations in life, those are fragile for all of us, and have to be nurtured by whatever means possible.

GL: The last poem in Rigging the Wind is the somber and understated “Notes.” In this piece, the speaker describes a lurching trolley and plastic sheeting “on the scaffolding / [blowing] into ripe sails” before she and another (“We”) “sit down on the steps / of the temple with its Moorish dome,” and listen to the “small dark notes / of night begin.” These notes, “like so many sparrows,” are compared to “a sparrow diaspora” that is “choosing this time to call their own.” It’s an ambitious metaphor with which to close the book. The notes of night (sensed, evaluated, but not described directly) turn into sparrows (that aren’t actually or at least necessarily there before the speaker) that disperse in diaspora (a human term for, in this case, either mere dispersal or migration); and the birds “choos[e]” to “call” (as in assign) this time as theirs. There are many levels that the speaker sees (she could even be said to see through or past immediate reality here), and yet the speaker herself is nearly anonymous, invisible, accompanied a nameless other (perhaps the reader). With so many personal acts of imaginative projection happening here, why did you choose to employ such an anonymous speaker about whom we know almost nothing? And why does the act of imagining diaspora (in the night sparrows) rather than an act describing the Spain-at-hand close out this collection?

JB: Thank you for this perceptive reading of “Notes.” The sparrows in the poem, in addition to being themselves, are, as you point out, meant to represent human migration, and I also meant them to stand for the survival, and even the ability to thrive, that is possible after catastrophes such as exile. Your question about the poem’s speaker is an interesting one, and is relevant to the book as a whole. For Rigging the Wind, I wanted a speaker or speakers who were relatively effaced, so that they might better reflect the landscapes they were describing or the historical moments being explored. My hope is that the speaker of “Notes” provides the means by which the reader can occupy the center of the poem, be directly affected by its atmosphere. Incidentally, “Notes” describes a block on Beacon Street in Brookline, which is close to home for me; the poem was a way of returning from the geographic travel and time travel that occupy much of the book.

GL: In your new manuscript-in-process, Given Away, you use an epigraph from Celan’s “Psalm” to welcome the reader into the world of your poems. Celan’s poem is a sublime prayer to a kind of post-war anti-deity, a presiding nothingness. According to this poem, there will be no resurrection: “No one moulds us again out of earth and clay.” And thus all human beauty “flower[s]” for the “sake” of “no one.” This is about as starkly an anti-essentialist, nominalist, nihilistic poem as you can find. So why did you choose this almost devoutly hopeless (or post-hope poem) to inaugurate your book?

JB: Yes, I intended for the excerpt from Paul Celan’s poem “Psalm” to set the stage for the poems in Given Away, some of which struggle with spiritual questions that have no ready answers. I’m struck by the fact that you describe Celan’s poem as “nihilistic” because of its proposition that there will be no resurrection, and that no deity exists. I see it somewhat differently. The lines “Praised be your name, no one/For your sake we shall flower” (trans. Michael Hamburger) to my way of thinking express an extraordinary human stubbornness: even doubting the existence of a deity, even recognizing that we have no ultimate salvation, we still “flower,” we still are. So, although “Psalm” confronts nothingness, I don’t see it as conveying hopelessness; I see it as a modern psalm, an act of witnessing as well as the embodiment of great need, a need that in and of itself causes the urge to speak.

GL: The first poem in Given Away, “Away,” the title of the book suggests, is something that the book gives to us (as readers) in several senses: it is the poem that welcomes us to the book, says hello, or makes appropriate warnings on our behalf; it iterates the book’s theme or preoccupation with departure; it prompts the reader to think about otherness and elsewhere not just as emotionally and/or intellectually burdensome absences but as things that can be given and received as a kind of (albeit dark) blessing. But it could also suggest that the speaker of this poem (and perhaps of the book as a whole) is almost gone from the beginning. The poem begins ominously with a countdown of sorts: “I count to twenty / and back” and ends with images both seasonal and apocalyptic: “Past the old blast furnace, / the wheel of August touches down.” In between, the speaker is often haunted by both what’s missing form the immediate scene (peace, sustaining quiet, a clear view of the world) and by what transcends it (blighted histories, “cities…destroyed”) as well. What I’d like to know is: to what extent is the speaker away, or spiritually or psychologically exiled from her experience of reality? And to what extent does she mourn what’s missing from her world, that is, what’s away from her?

JB: I was thinking about several different things while working on that first poem. One was the devastation that Hurricane Katrina brought, the ease with which the hurricane and subsequent flooding destroyed the city. Another was Isaiah, who follows up prophecies of destruction with prophecies of restoration. Finally, some of my despair about human harm to the world’s environment—what Chase Twichell calls “negligent worldicide”—though largely unspoken in the poem, underlies it. In other words, I’m afraid for us, afraid for the world. I experience this fear as a kind of spiritual exile, in the sense that fear removes the speaker from a certain trust in the ongoing nature of the world. An apocalyptic attitude creeps in, not in the sense of a religious reckoning with predetermined end times but in the sense of an impending disaster of our own making. We will need the deepest kind of change in order to avert this disaster. I do want the poem’s speaker to be a kind of witness to events that are happening in the world rather than an entity that has withdrawn itself; I would like the reader to feel accompanied by the speaker’s thoughts, even when these thoughts are dark.

GL: The poems in Given Away sometimes return, perhaps, even more bleakly than the poems of RTW, to Spain. “The Train to Malaga” is filled with passages that suggest ennui. Here, from the poem’s opening: “Nothing, / only olive trees / observing their slope,” and here from the second section of the poem: “Afternoon. / More afternoon.” There is a dialog later in the poem that enacts futility, or perhaps even biblical suffering: “When we get there—/ but we won’t, / not the place we thought.” These lines showcase a greater despair than any in RTW. So, does this poem record an evolving bleakness with regards to your view of Spain, or travel, or the world at large? Or does it simply it portray a momentary lapse in spirit? In other words, are the depressions here more circumstantial than representative of a larger shift in your perspective?

JB: In the third section of Given Away, where “The Train to Malaga” appears, I am exploring Celan’s lines that say, “How much, O how much/world. How many/paths” (trans. Michael Hamburger). Thus the section includes travel, one way to follow the world, to follow other paths, and the richness and discovery those paths might provide. With that said, though, “The Train to Malaga” can be seen as a fairly bleak poem. The key to it is the four-month drought mentioned in the second section. The last time I was in Spain, there was a severe drought in the south, and the olive trees, responsible for a significant share of the economy, were at risk. As in “Away,” a fundamental aspect of our existence—the physical world that supports us—is in question.

There are other poems in this section of the book, however, where I intend to counteract bleakness or despair by positing spiritual presence rather than absence. Among these poems are “nefesh” (the Hebrew word for “soul”); “Arriving When It Does”; and “Orchard,” which is about the way the biblical psalms still unfold for us in all their immediacy and beauty. In “God Doesn’t Speak in the Psalms,” toward the end of the book, I want to examine how sorrow and praise can exist side by side, how both are essential to the fabric of the psalms, and, of course, to our experience of our lives. Overall, Given Away is about wrestling with one’s angel, whether that angel is loss, despair, absence, or presence, or all of those elements at once.

GL: So now that you’re nearly done with Given Away, what new projects, if any, are on the horizon? What are you reading and thinking about these days? Where does Jenny Barber’s poetry go from here?

JB: In terms of new projects, I’ve written some poems toward a next book. It’s too early to say what the shape of the book will be, but I am continuing some of the themes in Given Away while also reaching into other areas. Overall, I’d say that the new poems exist in a space that is more “here” than “away,” more centered around local geography than places at a distance. While the poems in Given Away are very much about an individual in spiritual crisis, the more recent poems are closer to finding ways of resolving that sense of crisis, one moment at a time.

Jennifer Barber’s new collection of poems is Given Away, forthcoming from Kore Press in 2012. She is the author of Rigging the Wind (2003) and Vendaval (1998). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Orion, Bellevue Literary Review, Zeek, the Jewish Forward, Upstreet, the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Cerise Press and the New Yorker. She is founding and current editor of the literary journal Salamander and teaches at Suffolk University in Boston.

Three Poems by Dan Rosenberg

2011-09-01T09:35:00.011-04:00

NO EXAMPLE BUT THE NAMING

Here deep light. Here deep light rising
from a sack of rusted whistles.

Rustles in the closet’s deep light.
A breath is a breach, cuts a lip
on deep light. Here bedpost tops
wicked in a rattle. Brassy
like an undergarment. Undone.
Such keeping tracks the eye.

New holes make a shirt perfect
for this deformity. The box cries from its corners,
the mold-bearded box.
Here air ages. Manners tip gently
in the lone. Deep something
thumps down and startles.

In the sleeping hour, the hour of disobedience.
The scavenge comes
unbidden. The tic, the squeak.

Here deep light beats back.
It comes in slats. It comes:
The hamper of efforts drooling knee socks.
A blue vase collects itself.
Here blank walls for walls

are not lit by deep light.
Not the bur on time tugged forth.
See a fray failing a shoelace.
Here deep light kept rolled like wrong carpet.

Deep light without aim. Dying
pockets of air. Each pocket
sent mewing at deep light.

ROOM

the floor is a storeroom

we keep each other
in the original packaging

I bought you a t-shirt with many kinds of breasts
I was desperate

something to say I care but not too much

The sun taxes me heartily
                                and my heart

lost in our angular house
for a place to leave       things and never remember

I want to go to the movies I said
            I was joking       the hand on your knee
when we were alone was mine

I slit the folded paper: a book! of dust-
collecting     the air mattress’s sotto voce

Am I using this bookshelf wrong?

that child safety cap fails
because you’re a grown woman stumped

to listen hard I ignore my own pulse
we all do
the delicate touch       the stamen     a stone
bookend shaped like a book

laundered the sun in a pile of feeling
up oneself absentmindedly on the phone

slouching over my weak core like protection
not a symptom

when I forget to say “I” you remind

the chickadee all puffed up      the driveway

how much of our favorite non-stick pan
can we safely eat?

the tongue of the prayer book        on the hardwood
a stack of change won’t do me      ok then

the plastic frame worked all its scuffs
would have happened to the picture if

a stretch of the esophagus
            what’s bloodied by the camera
            what’s lost without a backup
            plan for fire: a tangled rope of knots

and the anchor      the doorknob’s inside doesn’t match

                      but fits

AT FLOWER, GRIPPING

Epistle, a yellow footprint on the hardwood. Open the fist, a
palm. A shake. Nine walnuts in a Ziploc baggie chatter. I'm
holding. I'm shaking. My photograph slinks down. Its frame.
Frayed like shoelace. Her lips purse. Every edge threatens a
fall. Even hems, even lips, even beauty's tight edge. I'm
pressing against. The factory atop my neck. The spill. One
flash surprises, the next captures. I freeze wide open. It's a
countdown. If thunder comes. Chewing comes easily. Yellow
my finger in the lily. It doesn't keep to itself. As well as it
should. Woman in bra between dogwoods. Red spills on her
head. Just a magazine ad. A dangle. A docile puppy in a nook.
A shoulder. I've fallen. Not my nook. Limpid with springtime
my angles. Shake, a greater tremble. Tremble my ginger veins.
A color wheel of fingers. Pointing, a basement before dawn.
The chimney a finger. What she wants. My eyes, then the
frame. Then my chest. A descent. A cracked cocoon. No
moth. Bulbs in the basement open. It takes forever. Petals
fall, her feet. Recover the ants all together. Light, then hand,
then wall. Thumb becomes a mandible. Touch my crushing
organ. My outreach. A small apple falls. The worm inside.
What eats. What's eaten. Two flowers kiss, wilt. The cyclist
falls. The garbage is a nest.

Dan Rosenberg's first book, The Crushing Organ, won the 2011 American Poetry Journal Book Prize and will be published in 2012. His poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in several journals, including Pleiades, American Letters & Commentary, Subtropics, and Gulf Coast. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is a PhD student at UGA and co-editor of the poetry journal Transom.

Two Poems by Dereck Clemons

2011-08-15T07:36:00.005-04:00

GAMES

Brooklyn starts to unravel as soon as the
cameras roll. The wheels roll. The bus
stops.

Gorgeous in a tight black bodysuit, a
regular shimmers across the stage. A
man in the front row launches himself
into a kinetic leveling of evidence to the
contrary: he waves his feet, his arms.

There are more, actually, says Mrs.
Rubin, thumbing through a dozen
laminated sheets. Mrs. Rubin begins
dancing gleefully within minutes.

What makes her to stick both hands into
applause, which she calls a gas fire
glowing in the fireplace.

IMPOSTERS

Lag in battle. Do the heavy lifting. The
American military effort in the not-too-
distant future wrestles into scenes of
contest, observed over eight days by two
New York Times journalists.

Not long after, the two were seen being
microwaved during a standoff on Feb.
12. Their unpublished novel spreads
throughout the world, causing pregnant
women to miscarry.

A simple warning that she could, she
felt, her patterns, or fabrics clumped
together into Karen Carpenter, who
balances a cup in the hallway, in the
night, on its saucer, heading back to the
room.

The effect forces the childish millions to
remain out of work, out of savings, & to
face the end of the comforts of middle-
class life—who are now in their lives,
potentially for years to come, selling
beauty salon equipment.

Dereck Clemons is in San Francisco with Wendy Trevino & he writes poems using material from the newspaper in this 1 page:1 poem limit thing. That bulk of data (in each of these prose blocks of phantom collage sentences) becomes a board across which the continued work of expansion, abridgement, switching, & transferring occurs, or where performance occurs. To be sure, the poems telescope in & out or up/down a continuum of lyric & narrative & transparent subjects, more trope-related stuff, or equally w/r/t to scheme stuff, or word arrangement as such, so some end up going through cycles of repeated phrases, let's say, very opaque, while others enact more continuous-seeming narrative threads. They're all, though, employing very similar patterns, regardless. Similar behaviors. It seems like what I'm describing is an observation of rhetoric, of how those four operations I mentioned might do fantastic things w/ narrative & DO fantastic things to us, right now, all the time. Otherwise, the poems are concerned w/ audience & our entire lives as in-audience to countless stages or platforms that, while contrived by not-us, are still where we find ourselves dealing w/ ourselves & w/ each other. The Spectacle, which is truly entertaining, is able to subsume into Performance an audience ever more thoroughly at these key points, where reason is being pivoted around on itself--the aggressive, finite actions of the Spectacle--so the poems try to concentrate on that. So the first 10 pages of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, basically.

What Passes For Meat In Heaven: An interview Kim Gek Lin Short

2011-08-06T12:14:00.007-04:00

GL: The The Bugging Watch and Other Exhibits (TBW&OE) is, to a certain extent, a story of grief and recovery. Harlan, one of the paired heroes/intimates of your beautiful book, wants to use the artifacts of his post-traumatic present to recover the past with his beloved and "cure his broken Toland." Toland, however, "touched everything" before she fell apart and away and therefore cannot be adequately preserved. Dan Magers at Sink Review was keen to note your curatorial interests in this book. And it sometimes seems like Harlan wants to collect his Toland back to life. I wonder if you could explain or at least comment on the link between grief and curatorship, between suffering and the longing for preservation in Harlan’s character.

KGLS: Hey Greg! Thanks for the interview. Stories are loopy things, and there are so many ways to tell them. Even not telling a story is a way of telling a story, stories are capable of such fishslippery. The story in The Bugging Watch is a sort of fishslippery, a curation, not linear, a collection, an exhibition. Yes, it is an idiosyncrasy of “denial” that links grief and curatorship, it is a way of denying the end of something (something linear), and a way of manufacturing a future. Preservation has that suspicious quality of broadcasting as much about the past as the future. Curating especially is tuned into this station. Have you ever been to a retrospective of an artist’s work in a museum or gallery and had the prescience that the effect was not as much to honor the truth of the past as to create a future for that work that person that (now) subject? So this is how Harlan takes Toland to Tuesday in his world where it is always Monday.

GL: The second section of TBW&OE, “The Bugging Watch,” features footnotes that tend to complicate/enrich Harlan and Toland's narrative rather than clarifying it. This kind of approach seems, broadly speaking, to dramatize a kind epistemological notion: the more we pursue knowledge the more we are rewarded with and further enmeshed in our own mazelike pursuit of it. Harlan and Toland are dazzling poetic figures prone to Carrolian utterances and ingenious turns of phrase. They are dynamic & mysterious characters to begin with, but in The Bugging Watch, their stories become even more labyrinthine (and fun) through and because of the footnotes. What I'd like to know is: Does this corridor of poems in the middle of the book seek to entice by threatening (the reader, the poet with) a loss of control (not being able to make sense of a "larger narrative")? Does it, in other words, woo readers away from trying to make sense of the story behind these characters and try to encourage them to admire instead their many arrivals and departures?

KGLS: This is a book about a departure, and the fantasy of an arrival. In a manner of speaking, Harlan is trying to find another way of looking at a door that is always used for leavetaking. It is another way of looking at leavetaking. The footnotes dramatize this “stage” full of doors, full of entrances and exits. Is there sense to be made of it? Yes. Is there also non-sense? Yes. Is the story that is bobbing under the surface of these poems a cocktease? It depends on the cock. This is not a purposeful comment on epistemology, although I am delighted if this text dramatizes an epistemology for a reader. Knowledge is not a sure thing. I hope it woos readers away from needing sense, but I’m also happy if it just woos them enough to be okay with all the halfsense. Would it clear things up if I said that I think questions are more important than answers in art? Didn’t Milan Kundera write that the brilliance of the novel comes from having a question for everything? I like that. I think it is true. I think it is also true of poetry. And prose poetry novellas! Narrative tends to breed a kneejerk assumption that its function is to clarify. But with poetry, readers don’t expect clarity or answers. Readers of poetry have bigger fish to fry. They want truth. They want the animal to awaken. That true animal inhabits all true comers—tall tales, teeny hunches, towering questions—that “yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes.”

GL: So far in your brief but formidable poetry career, you've concentrated much of your efforts on exploring characters that have weathered considerable trauma. These figures are both sustained and potentially crippled by their fantasies that lead them away from their suffering. Delmore Schwartz wrote: "In the unpredictable and fearful future that awaits civilization, the poet must be prepared to be alienated and indestructible. He must dedicate himself to poetry, although no one else seems likely to read what he writers, and he must be indestructible as a poet until he is destroyed as a human being." Masculine gender bias aside, do you see any value in Schwartz's above proclamation and prescription for the poet? Must a poet be (at least temporarily) "alienated and indestructible" in order to dramatize suffering in her work? Or should the poet share in the suffering of her creative progeny in order to reveal it?

KGLS: Ah, civilization and its discontents. The future is scary. People suck. Poets rule. Yes, poets should prepare themselves for a good dose of marginalization, Schwartz’s prescription has some truth. This sort of glorification of artistic alienation always put me in mind of The Residents’ Theory of Obscurity, the idea that the artist creates work in isolation for the art itself without consideration for audience, or “market.” In the case of The Residents the artist goes so far as to conceal her “real” identity, which doesn’t matter, only the art does. Artists like Fever Ray and even Lady Gaga do this to a limited extent. So this is like what Schwartz is saying about the indestructibility of the poet and the destruction of the human being. Although I don’t think Schwartz is prescribing concealment of identity, but rather that the poet and the art merge to transcend finite material existence. It is an exaltation of poetic identity, a superidentity. At its best, it has something to do with souls, or that part of ourselves that is eternal, the stuff we hope our art is made of.

Great works of art can come from alienation or not, to answer your penultimate question. As for the final question—“should the poet share in the suffering of her progeny in order to reveal it”—yes. This is not to suggest that a character or a character’s circumstances in a book should be conflated with the author or the author’s life, they shouldn’t. But if there is suffering, or any measure of emotional depth in a work that exceeds the merely rhapsodic, that lives and has truth and guts, it is because the author has experienced that emotion.

GL: The geographical backdrop of Harlan/Toland's fantastical story is Denver, Colorado, a very real place colored by powerful fantasies. Denver was one of late twentieth-century America's biggest boomtowns, gaining affluence, wealth, and both white-collar and progressive prestige steadily as the century closed. Its suburbs have been portrayed as both middle-class Edens and, at times, Cheeveresque nightmares. How and why did Denver, with all its signifying baggage and promise, present itself to you as the landscape for your twenty-first century Gothic tale?

KGLS: I do think of The Bugging Watch as a period piece, and the period it inhabits is a sort of gloomy afterperiod. That sounds very precious and meta but Harlan’s world—the drippy architecture of his lost hours with Toland—is just that: a reminiscence constructed in a future. So why Denver? Harlan and Toland live in Denver because I lived in Denver when I first wrote about them. I lived in a tiny and buggy first floor w/ basement of a Cheesman Park duplex. The exact address was 1412 E 14th Ave, here is a Google map.

But Harlan and Toland do not inhabit this exact address, their address in The Bugging Watch is 1412 Humboldt Street. Humboldt is one of the cross-streets for the aforementioned address on 14th Ave. In real life, there is no 1412 Humboldt Street, and the fictional place where Toland and Harlan dwell is a pretty convincing facsimile of the buggy 1st floor w/ basement I lived in for a few years. So why did I bother to change the address from 14th Ave to Humboldt St? I liked the way Humboldt sounded. I liked the word. I chose the music over the truth, to borrow from Richard Hugo (“All truth must conform to the music”).

Still, it wasn’t just that. It is never just that. Harlan and Toland do not live in the 1st floor w/ basement that I lived in. They live in a once-a-past-a-time-ago of it, in a place that is part real and part fantasy, so I put them inside walls invented near-real—a made-up address in a real town. And even though the exact address is not a place I have ever seen before, it is a place I have seen my whole life. Because, to keep borrowing from Hugo, “the poem is always in your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another.”

GL: You recently expressed some grief through correspondence over sending your forthcoming MS, China Cowboy, to the publishers. Why the sorrow of letting this book out into the world? And what comes next, or don't you know?

KGLS: The characters in my book China Cowboy are characters I’ve had in my life for many years. Sometimes it feels like these characters are part of my family, as demented as that is considering how demented they are. But I talk about them with my family like they are real people. We have inside jokes on them, we imitate them, we make fun, and we Stevie Wonder their flaws. My daughter has a stuffed animal she calls La La, for instance. Is that twisted? Maybe. It is part of our dysfunction. I guess we can still do all these things even though I have put China Cowboy out of my house. But it isn’t the same.

What’s next? I have a couple works-in-progress, a novel and a collaborative hybrid. I am not letting either of them out of my house yet.

Kim Gek Lin Short is the author of two full-length collections, The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits and the forthcoming China Cowboy, both from Tarpaulin Sky Press. Her chapbook Run was the 2010 Golden Gloves selection from Rope-a-Dope, and a previous chapbook, The Residents, is available from Dancing Girl Press.

Two Poems by Dustin Luke Nelson

2011-06-21T08:41:00.012-04:00

We’ll know we’ve hit the big time when we’ve got a set of equipment for smut and then another for non-smut

I’ve been doing sit-ups.
Sit-ups every day under
pulled curtains & now I’m
a disassembled pen waiting
for spit balls to papier-mâché
fluorescent lights.
Brigades of knob-eyed
ferrets tuck our coins,
our coin-shaped wedding rings,
& our gold-plated Velcro straps
into hollow slats beneath
our beds. When I have bed
head I just cut out the offending
hairs, kneeling over the toilet,
flushing away the evidence.
I’ve been doing sit-ups.
I’ve been trimming the skin
inside my nose with formaldehyde
& rosewater. Others are using embalming
fluid. It’s fashionable. We’re rising.
We’re gaseous. We’re blinding sun
particulars. We’re furious for glory.
Forward! Fold your underwear
lengthwise. Trample the one-
eyed & the believers, &
the fish-taco-loving 20-somethings
with ambitions of overhead
lighting made of glass.

Wednesday June 11th, 2010

He wanted Abraham Lincoln to be tragic.
To not be the joke of a man that he had become.

He wanted to cut Lincoln’s hair, trim his beard, tilt
his head into the basin and push the pads

of his fingers into Lincoln's scalp. "How's
that?" and "He said what?" and maybe

that's all a little later and right now Lincoln
just closes his eyes, let's the tension do somersaults

from his chest to his knees. And he shakes a little
because it's hard to let go. Billiard balls popping

from his chest, rolling down the checkerboard floor
to the back room where six women are waiting

for their hair to dry in translucent beehives. They whisper
to the bees, "What is wrong with him?" "What?"

And Lincoln sits ignorant of bees and their keepers,
preoccupied with the beeswax candy in his hand. Free at the counter.

Dustin puts oil on Lincoln's beard before cutting it with scissors
Down to the skin, then the hot cream, the kind that explodes

with foam in a ceramic bowl with a little water and a brush.
He shaves Lincoln once. Then again, running

the blade against the grain the second time. Following
That with some lotion for the burn. "How's that? Better?"

Dustin Luke Nelson is a Co-Founding Editor of InDigest and InDigest Editions. He is also a writer/producer for Radio Happy Hour and his poetry has appeared here and there on the Internet and on the not-Internet. He blogs at blogsareaboutego.blogspot.com and takes to heart that a dear friend once said, "The Nile is a river in Egypt. Don't make jokes about it."

At the Bottom of a Shadow: An interview with Kiki Petrosino

2011-06-01T11:09:00.011-04:00

It’s very quiet in this room. It feels like
being at the bottom

of a shadow, at the bottom of
a room. (“Question”)

Kiki Petrosino is the author of the poetry collection, Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009). She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in FENCE, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Gulf Coast, Forklift Ohio, and elsewhere. Her poem, "You Have Made a Career of Not Listening," was anthologized in Best New Poets. Her awards include a post-graduate writing fellowship from the University of Iowa and two staff scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She has recently moved to Louisville from Iowa City, where she worked for five years as a Program Assistant at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. She is an assistant professor at the University of Louisville, where she teachers literature and creative writing. Check out her author page, featuring a great interview about her work, at Sarabande’s website.

GL: Robert Redford, the comically romantic muse who stars in the first section of your anagrammatically titled and uber-wonderful collection of poems, Fort Red Border, exhibits a mixture of a glib, amorous proficiency and dialogical absurdity—he says the darndest things: "You float around my house all day / just like a little cloud of sweetness." Redford's such an interesting choice for a poetic subject qua beloved because he's so…meretricious. For example, I noticed when watching one of his movies not too long ago that he seemed really adept at putting on and taking off his glasses. That is, he appears to prioritize all the wrong things, have little to no negative capability, and somehow still be appealing. So, did you choose Redford (as your Beatrice) in part because his polished veneer allowed for projection and fantastical extrapolation? Do you think that the speaker's paramnesiac trysts with Redford show us, more often than not, the way that modern love works? That we fall in love with images that allow us to dramatize a monodramatical affair with the self?

KP: Yikes. I hope that we moderns haven’t succeeded in creating a world where love is nothing more than a series of “monodramatical affairs with the self.” The self can be such a stifling, terrifying little locket to cram yourself into. I once heard the poet Dan Beachy-Quick say that love is a leap across empty space. And I believe that for love to work, there ought to be something real on the other side of that leap. But can I confess something? I don’t think the poems in my “Redford” series are love poems at all. And I don’t consider the “Redford” who emerges in those pieces to be a romantic figure, painted in the usual shades of eros (or whatever the silver screen is made out of). I’m glad that you’ve mentioned Beatrice here, because Dante’s journey was on my mind as I wrote these poems. This series came to me during a time in my life when I felt deeply wounded on a bunch of levels. Some of this wounded-ness had to do with romantic love, but most of it was about me learning to accept the circumstances of my life at that point. I think my Redford emerged as a possible answer to my hurt. The certainty that I associated with the Redford archetype was like a cool glass of water or something. The contrast nourished me, and was generative of new thought. For me, the “Redford” poems are artifacts of a highly personal, interior thought process—yep, a long monodramatical affair. So I always hesitate when asked why I “chose” Redford as interlocutor. It didn’t feel like a choice; more like a surfacing. The Redford I found in my poems is really a constellation of desires for lots of things—certainty being chief among them. This is, perhaps, similar to how Beatrice embodies all the virtues that Dante yearns for in his epic. There was a real Beatrice, of course, but that person is not the angelic guide whom Dante crafts into being. That Beatrice, the one who calls Dante by name in Canto XXXI of the Paradiso, represents Dante’s best self, in both a spiritual and artistic sense. And I think Dante knows that all along. He knowingly invests her with all that is good and wise and pure so that he can strive towards that. When we hear Beatrice interrogating Dante, and when Dante answers her in the poem, he’s actually in dialogue with two conflicting aspects of himself. Dante as Seeker. Dante as Keeper of Wisdom. So I’ve always read Dante’s Beatrice—and, for that matter, his Virgil—not as true characters, but as forces that come from within the poet; they give voice to his inner life. I’d like to think that a pale copy of that might happen in my series; that desire gives rise to a revelatory encounter with the imagination, and that this encounter is an opportunity for redemption.

GL: In one of your poems, "Canton Thirteen," you describe "the slender rise of [Redford's] collarbone" as "[making] a ridge / under my cheek, like the worn fishtraps they've found in dry / moat beds near the Tower of London, delicate forked machines / of flint and willow, no bigger than a thmubspan." I remember seeing a poem you wrote as far back as 2003 that featured a reference to fishtraps. I don't know if I remember it correctly, but I believe the poem said something like this: "Love knits a fishtrap loose in water." Why does this image offer you such abiding fascination? And what do fishtraps have to do with love?

KP: You’re right to point out that certain lines tend to stay with me. There really is a very old wicker fishtrap on display at the Tower of London, and when I saw it as a young tourist, I thought, what a beautiful machine. The thing is, I have no idea what fishtraps may have to do with love, which probably explains why it’s taken me multiple poems to work through that image. Perhaps it’s a question of sound. I have to confess that, as a museum-goer, I often find myself more taken with the explanatory notes that accompany an artifact than I am with the artifact itself. The note next to the fishtrap said, “Fishtrap, willow and flint,” which has such a wonderful and wistful sound to it. As if someone were speaking a command, or a wish, into the empty air, and this was the result. As a poet, I’m interested in how desire can bring a world into being. And I’ve learned that the laws of such worlds may have very little to do with objective reality. For example: in my memory, that fishtrap was as transparent as Wonder Woman’s jet. It seemed like nothing more than a white clasp woven from extremely tender shreds of bark. But I just did an image search for “Fishtrap, Tower of London,” and it turns out the real fishtrap resembles a giant Triscuit ™ more than anything else. Awesome! It doesn’t change anything for me. I love them both.

GL: The second section of Fort Red Border, titled Otolaryngology, begins with the prose poem "White." The poem details in stunningly beautiful language the perhaps typical or maybe most essential characteristics and actions of the color/figure White: "White rises from her set of tines…White drags her swordwhite self packed down in rice." White does and is many amazing things, but toward the end of the poem, you write of White that "her broken breath [is] the tree you break yourself against." This line struck me because I remember you using this phrase to describe one of Shakespeare's sonnets; you said something about how one of the sonnets features a "voice that breaks against the rock of itself." At any rate, it seems to be an idea especially important to you: that a poem constructs its own method and means of destroying itself in such a way that reveals ever more meanings while never providing a totalizing account of meaning. In "White," interestingly, the catalog of descriptions and actions enriches our understanding of White, but never finalizes it. We can only guess at White's motivations, and we can only guess at the extent of White's figurative relationship with the color white. Even the last line of the poem promises more violence to come, not closure. White remains an active and dangerous force, but not an agent that helps resolve or fully account for its meaning. Which leads me to wonder if you think (your) poetry is most revealing, dynamic, or moving when it attempts to mean violently, to complicate and/or proliferate meanings, instead of tapering toward some kind of meditative or epiphanic conclusion?

KP: Well, the connection between violence and meaning isn’t something I’ve really considered in relation to my own poetry. But now that you mention it, maybe I am hostile to the notion of fixed definitions. Kiki smash! In fact, one of the first poems I can remember writing was called “Fork,” and it was a series of associative definitions of the word (i.e., “an extension of the tongue,” “an outstretched arm with flaring silver sleeve,” etc.). I chose to lineate the poem in the manner of a dictionary entry and to include a phonetic spelling of “fork.” There was something empowering (to my high-school self) about proliferating the possible meanings of this rather utilitarian word. I felt the same way while writing “White.” We all think we know what “white” means, but it doesn’t just lie there on the page. It’s a word that moves through the world all the time, like a glacier. And like a glacier, it gathers some things into itself and crushes others to smithereens. There are times when white appears to open itself up to our view (“The Great White Way,” “White Light/White Heat,” and my favorite: “Whitesnake”), and there are other moments, particularly in America, when the idea of white excludes (“Whites Only,” “White flight.”) If I took a hole-punch, or a garden spade—or if I drilled through the wall—could I find another way into white? Could I kick down the door and find myself, somehow, in someone else’s white—maybe even your white? The thing is, just when it seems possible to do this—to transgress the definitional boundaries of a word in order to generate new meanings that I like better—that same word will come roaring back at me with a roundhouse kick. For example: when I visited Nigeria a few years ago, I overheard the shopkeepers referring to me as “white.” This is something that wouldn’t happen in America, where I’m a “person of color” due to my mixed heritage. Neither descriptor has anything to do with my actual skin color, but yet here’s this word, this color, this word “white,” that gets all freighted with meaning to the point that it serves as shorthand for a whole host of other physical and cultural attributes. In Nigeria, the word “white” actually had the power to kick my ass, because it showed up and attached itself to me in an unexpected way. It engulfed me for a short time, forcing me into an extremely uncomfortable bear hug. In short, “white” is a word that constantly reminds me that I have not mastered it. It’s an extremely solemn word, because it can be about space and eternity and beauty, but it’s also a dangerous word for those exact same reasons. I can’t fully account for white, but I keep unfolding it. I keep trying to break it open.

GL: Okay. So your poem "Secret Ninja" is something of a crowd pleaser. I've read it to a handful of people over the past month or two and they inevitably love it. But the poem, aside from being tender and funny and inventive, is all about adolescent suffering. The speaker catalogs a number of things she would like "smash," and does smash, I guess, in her imagination--things she hates, things that irritate or perhaps traumatize her, like gym teachers. The speaker wants to enact some kind of clandestine transformation that would render the speaker powerful, magnificent. First, I'd like to know what kind of secret ninja transformation you wanted to enact when you were young? And, second, I wonder if the narrative of such transformations, found in comic books, action flicks and fantasy lit, have affected the way you write?

KP: My dear Greg, I wanted what every young girl wants: a total makeover. The kind of makeover whereby your garden-variety blushing weirdo (who, each day, carefully pins a Starfleet combadge to her uniform blazer) might magically transform into a slender orchid of a lass. I wanted long platinum hair, vanilla-scented shampoo, a Fossil watch, an emerald-green prom dress, and perfect, squared-off teeth. I also wanted a British accent. How I suffered. Certainly, books and movies helped me out. I watched Sabrina about a million times during my high school years, and I still love both the original 1954 film and the 1995 remake. (“I have learnt how to live... how to be in the world and of the world, and not just to stand aside and watch. And I will never, never again run away from life. Or from love, either…”) I don’t know if such films have exerted a direct influence on my writing, but the archetype of transformation—the whole ugly-duckling-becomes-swan-and-proceeds-to-rock-the-mic fantasy—is certainly alive and well in my imagination. As far as writing goes, I believe the page is a realm. It can be a space for enacting transformations in language. It’s good to be confident when you approach the page, but not arrogant. After all, the page will not be impressed by your kicky new haircut and French verbs. The page wants results. I don’t think I’d be a poet now if I hadn’t suffered through my terrifically dorky adolescence. My identity as an outsider forced me to become a good observer of things, and allowed me to cultivate an inner life that continues to sustain me today. Qapla!

GL: The third section of your book is comprised of a series of valentine poems. One of these poems describes the speaker's trip to the butcher's, where she orders "the perfect amount" of meat. The speaker goes on to say that she finds food "ingenious" because she can successfully order "some of the food" and "Not [just] any food"; that is, she can get exactly what she wants. But with love, well, "You can't order some of the love" because "you get the wrong love" or "the wrong amount." Were the valentine poems an attempt to grapple with and explore this problem: trying to order a certain kind of love and rarely-to-never getting what you want? If not, please set me straight.

KP: The conceit that governs those lines came from my early study of French. In that language, you can’t just say that you want to buy (for example) some cheese; you have to say that you want “some of the cheese.” In other words, you have to stake out a claim to your personal smidgen of cheese as separate from the total amount of cheese that exists in the universe (“Je voudrais du fromage”). In an instant, the particularity of what you want is juxtaposed against the totality of what’s possible. This contrast reminds you that you’re just a speaker in the midst of a larger system. You can’t have all the cheese in the universe (says French) but not for the reasons you think. You can’t have all the cheese because the truth of cheese—the cheese—is so huge that it belongs to everyone. The cheese belongs to French (says French) but maybe you can have a little. If you ask politely. It’s all very reassuring, at least to the non-native speaker. But when we move to matters of the heart, you’re right: Cupid doesn’t take special orders. Like artistic inspiration, true love probably belongs to the realm of the unspeakable. Just as there are some poems that seem to drift from view the more you try to pin them to the page, true love must surface in its own way.

GL: It's been a couple years now since Fort Red Border was published, and even longer since you wrote many of these poems--some of them date back to 2004, right? So, what direction has work drifted in since? Are you writing more Redfordian poems--fantastical narrative/dramatic poems--more self-broken, sound-conscious poems like "Or," new stuff that fuses these modes, or Planet Weird poems that defy categorization. In short, what are you working on these days and how's that going?

KP: Right now, I’m working steadily on a new manuscript of poems and adjusting to some exciting career changes. This past fall, I joined the faculty at the University of Louisville, so I now have the chance to teach and write full time. I’m also co-editing a new electronic journal of poetry, Transom, which I launched with fellow poet Dan Rosenberg. In January 2011, a new chapbook of mine, The Dark is Here, was published by Forklift, Ink. And this past April, The New York Times published my poem, “Allergenesis,” as part of a spring-themed Op Ed page. These days, it feels good to write poems that don’t mention the pronoun “I.” It’s great fun to escape from the locket of the self, to explore other terrain in language. Repetition and musical incantation remain important to me, so some of my new poems attempt to thread particular sounds together. Sometimes I do find myself returning to the fantastical narrative/dramatic realm, and I’m working on a series of prose poems featuring a recurring character called “the eater.” I’m several poems into that series now, and I’m not sure where the eater wants to go next—maybe nowhere. For the past few months, I’ve just been writing one poem at a time and liking that phenomenon. Mostly I’m trying to listen and follow my intuition rather than force poems onto the page. It’s a process of seeking and revelation.

A California Suite: Poem by Peter Ramos & Paintings by Sharon Shapiro

2011-05-12T11:33:00.001-04:00

Sunset, Strip

Our scuffed and unmatched luggage
      in the sun, beside the Chrysler and all
that fine bleached sand for miles, beyond which
   …the cold Pacific—whispering, blue-midnight
gelatin

                              a dirtier heaven shot through
                            with palmettos and roadside cacti,
                        with yucca plant and scrub—brown hills
                            winking lights, come down

here beyond Wilshire and Culver City,
Santa Monica, Venice. A repetition
of cotton stucco, electrified
pastels by dusk, a thousand pink motels

                                               AIR-CONDITIONING. POOL. COLOR TV. And you
                                               blowing on your toes while I waited—the room-key
                                               in the ashtray, the daybeds rolled back—
                                               in the living-room swallowing beer. Come out Sugar
                                               and see: your brightly painted feet
                                               sink into bone-white shag. Turn over
                                               on the sofa while I tongue your fresh burn.
                                               Show me all your tan lines.

Soap up
your skin, your pinks
and browns and rinse—my pretty pinup
horrified or shocked by currents, by telephones
your swollen mid-century areolae.
Ripple-suck, water echo, bright laughter in the tub.

                                               You opened the sliding door and walked out
                                               of the cold blown-air, the news drifting
                                               from portable radios of a starlet
                                               murdered, of armed robbery
                                               starring some billionaire’s daughter.

That clear blue wobbling
       glass I’d almost drink—its ripples
flash and crackle
       in the sun, scintillating.
You tell me to show off
       my bikini and dive in.
But the deep end gapes. Already
       I can feel the cold water rush
over and up to my neck
       as you stand above me blacked-out
by the sun, laughing when the world tips,
       tumbles and spills until I fall down
into my deck chair dizzy.

Now you want a ring
and a chapel. No dice.
We’ll make the scene

here without it. Let the kiddies run
wild, half naked by the pool. Look up
and tell me to get over all
my old fashioned hangups.

Peter Ramos’ poems appear in Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, The Chattahoochee Review, and Poet Lore. He is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008), and two chapbooks: Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems (handwritten press 2004), and Short Waves (White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2003).

For over 15 years, Sharon Shapiro’s paintings and works on paper have been exhibited in numerous venues across the country, including shows in Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. Her work has been the subject of two major solo exhibitions with catalogs, one at Brenau University in Gainesville, GA (2007), and the other at Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, VA (2004). More recently, she was included in Playful Things: Examining the Role of Female Identity in Contemporary Art, a four-person exhibition at the University of Central Missouri documented by a hardbound catalog (2010). Shapiro has a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art (now SCAD), and is currently based in Charlottesville, VA.

To Make It Matter Again: An Interview with Michelle Taransky

2010-08-19T19:40:00.011-04:00

Michelle Taransky was born in Camden, NJ. Winner of the 2008 Omnidawn Poetry Prize for Barn Burned, Then, selected by Marjorie Welish, Taransky lives in Philadelphia where she works at Kelly Writers House, is Reviews Editor for Jacket2, and teaches writing at University of Pennsylvania and Temple University.

GL: I’d like to talk about the epigraphs to your book (or more specifically, to the first half of your book) since these two particular quotations seem to have an especially ars poetical function for your work. One is from George Oppen and one is from Charles Bernstein. Oppen’s goes something like this: I seem to know what I mean to do, and seem to be myself; I would like to get the thing said, I would like rather to get it thought, to grasp it—I look at things and they become large, like barns, I feel lost and yet they are not big enough—merely a little clumsy, reminiscent and clumsy. And Bernstein’s pithier contribution: I care about poetry that disrupts business as usual. The Oppen quotation (an excerpt from a letter he wrote to Frederic Will) seems to position the barn as a figure indicative of potentially visionary perception in your work (perhaps a fundamental aspiration), while the Bernstein quotation obviously has more mischievous and critical implications. In other words, one epigraph is constructive while the other is deconstructive. Could you tell me about these two (conflicting? complimentary?) impulses in your work? And could you also tell me why you selected these two particular quotations to introduce your work?

MT: For me, these epigraphs foregrounded the poems as both processes and events, the materials and the things. They suggest, or introduce, the barn's potential to be both archetype and particular.

Oppen positions the barn as a figure, the barn as many barns, and the barn as a holder of the unknown. To approach the barn like Oppen was, for me, a way to come to know the strange, as well as the stranger. "I never knew any barns," Oppen writes later in the same letter to Will, "If there were any barns in my background it seems to me that I would be writing at this moment about barns--- It occurs to me that many people have."

The Bernstein quotation continues: "I care most for poetry as dissent, including formal dissent, poetry that makes sounds possible to be heard that are otherwise not articulated [...] by form I mean ways of putting things together, or stripping them apart, I mean ways for accounting for what weighs upon any one of us." I wanted to deal with this counting and accounting Bernstein points to by writing without a "predictable measure." It's this choice that continues to disrupt while revealing that thinking and looking closely may be a clumsy business, and that it's ok to care.

GL: In Bob Perlman’s astute and enthusiastic blurb on the back of Barn Burned, Then, he credits your “fluency in frame-scanning, collage, and abstractions to alert readers to the depth of tinder we live amid.” It’s a lovely bit of analysis, but I’d like to hear about the techniques of “frame-scanning and collage.” How did the use of such techniques influence the composition of the poems?

MT: The poems move the barn and the bank from their original locations---- these jumps in frame and context and place ---- they make clear that "techniques" are being used, are a part of this work, are included in these operations. The poems, like barns and banks, are constructed, made things, where thinking through is a visible element like a nail or beam or joint or brace.

GL: Your book, as I alluded to earlier, is split into two sections: “Burn Book” and “Bank Book.” Could you tell me a little bit about the bifurcated structure of the book as a whole? Why did you want to keep the barns and banks (at least partially, nominally) separate from one another?

MT: The thing is: I separated them. But (as you note) they are, at the same time, not separate. Just as a field can flood, a barn can burn, or a calf can get sick, there may be a run on the bank or a robbery. When I started the project, I knew the barn had burned. But, I did not consider the bank then, it wasn't there then.

The bank began to figure itself during an indepentant study I was doing with the amazing Dee Morris at Iowa: "Poetries of the Left." We were reading Cary Nelson's Revolutionary Memory project and I came across this line from Genevieve Taggard: "They sold the calf. That fall the bank took over." That line changed the incomplete narrative implied by the title: "the barn burned, then ..." to "the barn burned, then there was a bank." Grammatically, the "then" in the title is a conjunctive adverb meant to connect: to join words, phrases, clauses and ideas. The Taggard line that repairs the broken speech and moves the narrative forward is among those shifts where the working it out "made the bank take place."

While writing Barn Burned, Then, I discovered all sorts of ways barns and banks may be linked in the poem--- and I discovered all sorts of ways barns and banks are linked in the world, including: there is both a barn swallow and a bank swallow, there is a barn called a bank barn, and there is a bank called Farmer's Bank. I think this means there are more links, in both the poem and the world.

GL: Part of what’s at stake in this fascinating collection is an analysis, or exploration of the dubious and exploitative foundations of our economy—the way we, or those of us complicit in our political and financial power centers look for “A way to get more for less. To stock up on the stolen / For the shortage that is always coming again” (“Theory for Building Where Fault”). There’s a spirit of philosophical and political critique in this book, but at the same time the book is far from polemical, in part, I think, because your poems are skeptical of maintaining any one particular rhetorical strategy for too long. The poems are full of un- or semi-punctuated, enjambed lines and phrases (Perloff’s “floating modifiers”), fragments of language juxtaposed against complete sentences, etc. How do you manage to use language that so complicates our ordinary patterns of speech (which “disrupts business as usual”) as a vehicle of political and philosophical critique?

MT: In a conversation with Sarah Louise Green (The Offending Adam issue 13), we suggest the "the beggar's way of speaking" (from "The Bank Holds") as the book's description of it's method of telling (or not telling). This is the kind of speech that asks with each breath: at what cost? Here, language (like barns and banks), is not safe from disaster and its disruptions. Here, the stutter of saying it (wanting to or having to) and associated anxieties get into the work and the working out it proposes. Like the poems press the impulse to hoard up against an impending loss, the full sentence being beside the fragment might mark the ways language is or is not an available currency.

GL: So what does Michelle Taransky make of the contemporary poetry scene? What kinds of writers, publications and projects are you taken with at present? What trends and tendencies in contemporary poetry do you find most intriguing? Contrarywise, what aspects, if any, of contemporary poetry do you find troubling?

MT: The work CA Conrad is doing in Philadelphia is amazing. His Urchin series, which gathers poets in public places in Philadelphia to read the work of poets like Niedecker, Oppen, O'Hara, and Spicer animates a community of writers as active readers that is continually nourishing and informative. If you haven't read (or tried) his (Soma)tic Exercises, stop reading this interview now and go right now to this (So ma)tic Poetry Exercises page. Send me your poem. Write your own (soma)tic exercise and send it to me. Philadelphia is full of innovative programming: the EMERGENCY reading series curated by Sarah Dowling and Julia Bloch, that engage poets in dialogues about emergence and poetic communities; the New Philadelphia Poets consistent push for poetry to happen in more and more places around the city; as well as Kelly Writers House's energetic revisioning of reading format and what is or is not possible for writing programs. It's a joy to write in this city among so many other poets who love writing.

GL: So what’s new with Michelle Taransky these days? What’s the next great project that your cooking up in your poetry laboratory? Who are you reading these days? Watcha thinkin’ about? Do tell.

MT: I'm working on two series of poems: SORRY WAS IN THE WOODS, and EPHRAIM GOLDBERG.

My father (an architect) and I are at work on a public project: the WPA: Whitman Park Artpsace. To be built adjacent to Walt Whitman's house in Camden, NJ. the WPA's mission includes fostering and supporting the literary arts in and around Camden. We're also working on a series of transcribed walking pieces built around buildings in Philadelphia and Camden.

The books and treasures on my coffee table: Neighbour by Rachel Levitsky (Ugly Duckling Press), Sarah Dowling's first book Security Posture (Snare Books), Thinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen edited by Shoemaker (University of Alabama Press), the noulipian analects (Les Figues press), aaaaaaaaaaalice by Jen Karmin (Film Forum Press), HOW by Emily Pettit (Octopus Books).

Three New Poems by Marc Rahe

2010-06-16T18:18:00.007-04:00

Mermaid Tank

Their mouths disfigured their faces,
opening. Their black hair about them
in the water. All along

the evening was a leveling
of gazes. We watched each other.
Some of them sang. I could be seen

observing their bubbles
for signs of damage.
I watched their breasts.

More breath was being manufactured.
I was left out being in the plush chair.
I felt, at least, that I was.

The heat in my face. Their tank was lit;
they cast their shadows.
There was no ink clouded in the water.

Theirs was salt water like my tears.
My tears were still in me. Indistinguishable.
Where the singers learned their song

warm winds blow continuously over palms.

America,

My impression of you is so many
commercials. What is a family if not
who does the shopping, who does the buying?

I know you better than that.
You fixed the broken air
when it was so hot in the hospital.
How could that have happened,
if not for you?

That was not your commercial image,
as such. Insurance was always
an issue. The crowding
quote unquote of the room.
Such discomfort in being exposed
to the discomfort of others.

A curtain, at most, two curtains
between my ears and the instruction
of another man on self-catheterization.

And the hours of the days
with—what would you call them?

Roommates? Bed-neighbors?—
one of these guys watching Fox News
all day like white noise making

an argument of shouted interruption?

America, I could find you now
or direct anyone at all,
almost, to think – America -
and there you are: some acetylcholine,
some activity in the basolateral amygdala

is you, someone’s experience.

You taught me all I have
to do is dream. How can I
not know you? You’re so
like make-believe, a story problem.

Given the inalienable, what imagining
is equal to the distance between
the imagined and the unlearned?

Cradle Gave

Cradle gave coffin
respectability, the familiar.

Gave shapeliness to coffin.
Gave a pillow.

Gave mouthfuls of milk,
gave shit and pee to the air

for coffin. Kicking
and sleeping gave, and drool

waking and sleeping for coffin.
For coffin cradle gave

heart and wailing,
gave eight fingers and a thumb.

From coffin cradle kept hush,
kept one pink thumb for suck.

Marc Rahe grew up in Pleasantville, Iowa. He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gutcult, Ink node, La Fovea, Notnostrums, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sixth Finch, and other literary journals. Marc lives in Iowa City and works for a human services agency. The Smaller Half from Rescue Press is his first book.

The Etymology of Spruce: an interview with Joyce WIlson

2010-05-26T08:22:00.005-04:00

Joyce Wilson, editor and creator of The Poetry Porch, a literary magazine on the Internet at www.poetryporch.com, teaches English at Suffolk University. Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Poetry Ireland, Ibbetson Street, and online at Mezzo Cammin (www.mezzocammin.com). Her first book of poems The Etymology of Spruce has just been published by Rock Village Publishing, Middleborough, Mass. A chapbook “The Spring House” has been accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press, to appear in November 2010.

GL: The title poem for your first book, The Etymology of Spruce, catalogues the definitions and the historical meanings of the word spruce. The poem is, in some ways, the most anti-poetic (it almost acts as a found poem) in the whole collection. The poem’s form, part litany, part lexicography, blends the word’s uses(s) with its beauty—to demonstrate, in other words, how so many histories, cultures and sounds converge and survive in it. Which makes an interesting and challenging choice for an opener since this is such a memoiristic/meditative collection. In Etymology of Spruce “personal” disclosures abound and yet you start with such an impersonal poem. Why? And how did you see the concept and symbol of spruce as interacting with the narrative, meditative and anecdotal poems in this collection?

JW: The preface poem IS a found poem. When I first saw the list of spruce words in the OED, I had already written at least two of the “spruce” poems. I found the list of spellings and changing pronunciations a riveting source of material. I still can’t keep from chuckling with delight every time I see those words on a page. The list I present as an epigraph has been selected. What drew me was the first spelling “sprws,” which doesn’t even have a vowel!, and sounds so earthy and graphic as if out of the granite hills of Great Britain. Then the introduction of “sprusse” transforms to “Prussia,” a fully formed national identity. It all ends with “Sprutia,” which could be a country or, even better, a state of being. This preface poem sets up a pattern in the book, from individual to universal, from the day the couple must deal with the remains of the felled tree to the more challenging demands of impending war, social integration, environmental destruction.

The idea for “spruce” as a symbol suggested itself when I knew I had more than one “spruce” poem that worked. The “etymology” part of the title refers to the definition's “true sense of the word.” In parallel, these poems present the true sense of the life or experience. And I should also say that the poem “Spruce Down” was inspired by an actual tree in our yard, of which there were five, and I’ve written about three.

GL: There are a number of poems in this collection that address/are concerned with personal, emotional and political violence. The sequence of poems at the beginning of the second part of the book charts an interesting and thematically varied line of antagonisms, and I’d like to ask you about how you see these poems working with each other. Could you tell me a little bit about why you decided to place the poems “Fences,” “Brooch,” “One Cow Stands Quietly” and “School Bus” in such close proximity? Was there a larger meditation at work here during the composition of these poems? Or did you simply juxtapose those poems that happened to be thematically similar, thereby allowing the reader to make her own connections?

JW: I tried a number of ways to order these poems. Most were written during or shortly after I was taking classes and poetry workshops as a nontraditional, older student at Harvard (Special Student was the category; Robert Frost was also one), so they were spilling out as a result of many prompts and inspirations. At one point I wanted to make the principle of “etymology” more of an ordering factor, and I had headings according to divisions of etymological study, such as “origins,” “reconstructing roots,” and so on. But after a while I felt that these categories distracted from the poems themselves. So I divided the book into two parts after Blake: the first group presents poems of innocence, the second poems of experience. This more general frame allows the poems to relate to each other more freely on an intuitive level.

GL: You turn to mythological sources of inspiration both at the beginning and at the end of the collection. “Persephone,” the third poem in the book, is a dramatic monologue that recalls the day the titular speaker returned home to see both her vernal welcome and her mother’s lasting grief. “From the Land of the Lotus Eaters,” the final poem in the collection, portrays different facets of the speaker’s travels (along with her companion) toward some nameless sea-side retreat, where she contemplates the relationship of “indolence” to art. Could you tell me about why you chose to use these mythological scenarios as a secondary framing device, in a sense, for your book? And how do you see these mythic themes interacting with the etymological, meditative and memoiristic work in The Etymology of Spruce?

JW: In the poem, “Persephone,” I wanted, first, to write about a moment I experienced with my mother, which I describe in the last line, so I “seized” the Persephone myth to give the moment context. In the case of using mythology, I rely on the details from my own life to give the narrative its uniqueness. Doesn’t every woman write a Persephone poem? The challenge is to write the myth the way no one else has.

Then the notion of joining a colony of pleasure seekers (lotus eaters) and losing one’s way has cautioned me for quite a while. Again, I did not plan to include the final sequence of poems with the rest of the book until two of the poems were accepted for publication. The way a book falls together, for me, has a great deal to do with what happens when a poem seems finished, when it is recognized by an editor who wants to publish it, and when I feel quite sure that I will not revise it again. I have a great many other poems in the works that have to do with this collection, but they just didn’t make it.

I like the way Michelangelo distinguished between the two processes of working with marble: one in which he has an idea of the finished sculpture, takes a solid block, and carves the image; and then another, in which he finds a block of stone that has something in it, a flaw or shape that inspires him, so that the material guides his creation and informs the finished sculpture. You might call this working from the inside out. When I can approach a poem this way, when I find something in the poem itself to guide the process, I usually come up with a better poem.

Looking now at the last sequence of poems, “From the Land of the Lotos Eaters,” I am reminded of the years raising our daughter and how I was tired most of the time. The conflict between being busy and being productive does not bother me so much now as it once did. Yet, I ask my students, isn’t it ironic that in order to read and to write, you are usually sitting still, or even lying down, and for all appearances to those around you who want your attention, you look as though you aren’t doing anything? It seems as if you are not doing anything, yet the work is exhausting.

GL: Let’s talk influences. Who were the writers you were reading while cobbling together The Etymology of Spruce? And how did those influences manifest in your work and/or change during the book’s composition?

JW: I was reading Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and the modern poets covered in Helen Vendler’s class on Modern Contemporary Poetry. I also liked the work of the metaphysical poets, especially George Herbert and his use of symbol and metaphor. Then I was lucky enough to take a workshop with Seamus Heaney. I was completely taken with the concrete element of his writing. After that, I helped a local group bring seven Irish poets to Boston for a series of readings. There I heard Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paul Muldoon, Paul Durcan, Medbh McGuckian, John Montague, Derek Mahon. And I heard about Thomas Kinsella, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Chris Agee, Ciaran Carson, Michael Longley. And I bought all their books. I loved the approach I saw them taking, what Heaney calls putting feelings into words, where individual words resonate the way the hazel stick stirs in the hands of the diviner when held above a hidden source of water. I liked seeing a poem as a thing that is made, rather than an idea that is argued, that puts the thing in the center rather than keeping it as a detail on the periphery. I’m doing a great deal of experimenting with the concrete aspect of words in these poems. My favorite example is “My Father’s Dreams.”

GL: In addition to writing poems, you’re also an editor of Poetry Porch. Could you tell me about the history of that project and how it has impacted your work as a poet?

JW: After I left my position at The Woodberry Poetry Room, where I was also managing editor of Harvard Review, I saw that my husband had a book about designing Web sites. So I set up The Poetry Porch to keep in touch with the many poets I had recently met and to publish those who were having trouble placing their work. I saw the Internet then as a big chaotic library and I wanted to organize a place in it, a journal with cyber extras. I have thoroughly enjoyed experimenting with thematic issues and matching visual with the written works. I thought someone might approach me one day with a reward for all my efforts, a big monetary reward, or a financial commitment of some kind. I’m still waiting.

GL: So what’s next for Joyce Wilson? What kind of poems are you writing these days? How have things changed for you since the publication of The Etymology of Spruce?

JW: I am working on a long version of a chapbook, “The Spring House,” which has been accepted by Finishing Line Press to be published in November 2010. I also have a third manuscript in the works, in which I’m thinking a great deal about the formal and informal ways of presenting verse. This summer I am presenting The Etymology of Spruce on the First Books Panel at the Poetry Conference at West Chester, Pennsylvania, and will take a workshop there to revise my many lumpy, lop-sided sonnets. I also have ideas for some prose pieces. And I’ll be teaching at Suffolk University again in the fall. Since the publication of The Etymology of Spruce, I am busier than ever. But then, I was very busy before.

New Poems by Zach Savich

2010-05-13T19:45:00.009-04:00

From "The Mountains Overhead"  

I sang: Tell me of the heart which exists

in which to continue is not

to confine  

Then dreamed I sang so loudly, I woke

myself singing

The cygnets' feet were lost in snow

The cygnets were lovely because footless  

Our augurs read their veils

What's sensible isn't seizeable, you said, waking  

You may only sing to dedicate a song  

You may hang your dresses on the back-

yard's line and you may rest here

You may work in a mine where you see yourself in

the rock and every day remove a piece

as large as your body    

To bring you to this:

We row out now over the lake where stars are

these muscles sobbing makes

Slashed across nightsky like bones

in owl droppings  

Star exhaust

Have fun, we said for goodbye  

11.  

Literally: to found meaning

to founder

Every pause, a cause

Every bow, a vow

At each footfall, landfall    

16.  

I sang: You would love it here, because I'm here

You sang: My cheek is softer where it touched your neck

I sang: I will hold you like it is enough

for a singer to hold a single word

You sang: Don't you always hold the door an extra second,

hoping?

Did you say something?  

18.  

I walked home—you can see it in my eyes  

23.  

When the lake froze, I crossed it

To a shore closest in the coldest  

24.  

Can't say to land: think of me

Or: you held me in place, in places    

30.  

Singing: And here you are coming toward me

Everything nearing, blooms

Water cold enough to cut

I could go on  

31.  

As though the end of harvest were not

farthest from harvest

As though reunion were not so close to ruin  

36.  

Dawn in the clouds like gold in a tooth    

40.  

Then a man we saw at the dance club dressed all

in white and carrying an orange  

42.  

I could see by your look  

43.  

I wanted a gentle way of waking you, so I let

So I let a tissue

sift to your face… 

46.  

Be how you were, be how you were

I mean more    

50.  

Or needing to break one's mast on the bridge or

go back to the burning dock

The mast changed to a gnarled desert tree

Sail lifted to a gull      

53.  

Afternoons, we watched the benign gags

of silent films…  

54.

I drew your picture by holding

my brush over a shaking tray    

58.  

If the road is shaped like an S,

you know there were mountains    

61.  

And there is a tribe that carries water for months

in their cheeks, their cheeks

hanging to their bellies and they never swallow  

63.  

Recall: I bent my brow

to the back's small      

69.  

Walking, so aware we were touching

Thistle

Granitescape

To leave being to meet  

71.  

The creek bed frosted like it isn't dry

The pump in the lawn, a lean dancer

Glove in the road,

sunning lizard

Day diving at me like the winking of a smoke detector's light

Once a minute

I remember love    

75.  

Sang: Tell me a secret I don't know I have  

76.  

So I spend a week here, have been carrying

a Thing so precious any touch dissolves it, but to prove

its worth, meaning, destroy it, now, I need

to go on, so I

hold it against you  

78.  

We may rest here    

81.  

…Be how you were, be how you were  

82.  

Then cut me so I unfold like the sky between

leaves into a string of paper dolls either

holding hands  

88.  

The dog has worn a circle around its post bare, chain

a clock hand

It is not our dog, we release it    

91.  

Dandelions miners' headlamps  

92.  

I sang: What is love to a fault?  

95.  

Then second: can the metal melt?  

100.  

Snow coming now like tissue after tissue from a box    

102.  

The plane never lands  

104.  

Or not draw a small V as though a gull seen

from a distance or a migration

of geese every time

through the day I think of you every

minute      

108.  

Sang: Outlast this song

Zach Savich's first book, Full Catastrophe Living, won the 2008 Iowa Poetry Prize and received a New American Poet honor from the Poetry Society of America. His second book, Annulments, won the most recent Colorado Prize for Poetry and will be published by the Center for Literary Publishing in November of 2010. His poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in many journals, including Boston Review, Kenyon Review, A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, and Pleiades. A recipient of a BA from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Savich has lived and taught in Italy, France, New Zealand, and around the US. He currently teaches and studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he helps organize the jubilat/Jones Reading Series.

If You Are Reading This You Can’t Be Nearly Close Enough to Me: An interview with Dora Malech

2010-05-01T12:31:00.014-04:00

............................Welter swelter

split the deck of cards. Can't predict king
or jack but that you'll pull the black and I

the redder riddles. If you are reading this
you can't be nearly close enough to me.

("Missive")

Dora Malech is the author of two collections of poems: Shore Ordered Ocean published by the Waywiser Press in November 2009, and Say So, forthcoming from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in October 2010. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Best New Poets, American Letters & Commentary, Poetry London, and elsewhere.

GL: I am fascinated with poetic greetings, how poems and books of poetry welcome us in or warn us away—or both. “Let Me Explain,” the opening poem in your fabulous debut collection, Shore Ordered Ocean, strikes a dire tone: “Spring, and the tulips urged me / to stick to schedule, flower furiously.” These lines offer something of a play on the seduction ploys of male Elizabethan poets who urge their beloveds not to squander their beauty before it’s spent. Still, what’s at stake in this poem isn’t merely beauty, aesthetics, etc, but rather some kind of mortal accounting. The speaker recalls a point in her past when she wanted to cross certain Adamic chores—naming and taking stock of things—off her existential to-do list before it was too late: “I called my eyes near-sighted, / my hands near misses, my arms / close calls…” But the poem’s final lines indicate that a drastic although necessary compromise had to be achieved: “Stars, thanked. Days, numbered. / I wore a coat because you can’t trust / weather and I looked like rain.” If the speaker wants to explain anything, as the title insists, it appears that she wants to explain why, despite her urgency, she has had to resort to certain (regrettable?) outfits, appearances and, perhaps, disguises. In other words, she has had to conceal her nature in order to gain our trust or approval. Why, then, does a speaker with something to hide, her inclement appearance, apologize her way on stage at the very beginning of the book? Is it important for us readers to know that the speakers we will meet herein will likewise define themselves by trying to explain who they are while perhaps failing to do so?

DM: Some part of me really believes that words can do things. I don’t know if it’s a little bit religious or a little bit OCD or both, but when I encounter the “right” (whatever that means) words, something physical happens. That something physical is just in my own body, of course, but I can’t help but hope that one day I’ll write a couplet that causes a small explosion in my yard, or makes a few frogs fall out of the sky, or causes two strangers passing by my window to fall in love. I can’t shake the sense that a poem is still in the same phylum with spells and prayers and incantations. Most of my favorite poems possess a kind of grandeur that casts a swooning spell on me: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Sailing to Byzantium”…the big boys (and girls, of course; many of Emily Dickinson’s poems are visually small and cosmically vast at the same time). The stakes in my favorite poems feel high. Of course, if you decide that you want to write “like that” (aiming for grandeur, etcetera) you run the risk of either sounding affected and anachronistic, or psyching yourself out and never writing anything, or some combination thereof. So I go ahead and read “Sailing to Byzantium” again, and I let myself love Yeats while loathing my own inadequacy in contrast, and then I take the awe and the blah and whatever other emotional, intellectual, or linguistic materials I’ve got lying around in my head and I make a poem. And it is what it is. So for me, the act of writing a poem is always tangled up with the act of confronting my own limitations as a writer and as an individual human being born into a particular consciousness in a particular body in a particular time and place. And of course, I always harbor the hope that our particular limitations can shape (or be) our particular strengths. I think there’s an element of that idea in the title of the collection, Shore Ordered Ocean: this sense of being shaped by our limitations, defined (for better or for worse) by our boundaries and distances. You mentioned the first lines of the first poem in the book, “Spring, and the tulips urged me / stick to schedule, flower furiously,” and later, in the poem “Treasure Hunting”, there are the lines, “The baby bent to an iris and willing / her face to unfurl,” and in the poem “Makeup”, there’s “God, grant me a brighter myself”; I do keep returning to that unfashionable dream of language and imagination as transformative forces, of close observation as a way of becoming, for an instant, the object itself. Of course, this is physically impossible, but I think I’m drawn to this idea that the “surface”, in language and in the physical world, need not always be synonymous with the “superficial”, but can instead be entered as this incredibly dynamic liminal state, a space where the world of the mind and the world of the world (imagination and observation; desire and necessity) can coexist.

GL: Many first books these days take comfort in big themes or over-riding preoccupations. Ask a young poet what his or her manuscript is about and he/she is likely to say, “Well, I’m writing a book of dramatic monologues in the voice of Jean Baudrillard” or something to that extent. Shore Ordered Ocean is full of meditations, odes, elegies and other divergent reactions to sundry poetic occasions. Thus it seems that your book is free of those heavy-handed organizational tactics I alluded to above, but, who knows? I’m usually wrong. Could you tell me how you navigated the process of not only writing this book, but beginning to conceive of it as such? Was there an implicit organizing principle to which you adhered, or did you simply corral the best of your poems from the past several years into this collection?

DM: I certainly don’t write “occasional poetry” in the literary sense of the term (poems written for special occasions), but I admit that I have the urge for a poem I write to feel “occasioned”, necessitated, not necessarily by some “event”, but perhaps by a collision of thoughts and feelings, or an accumulation of mental energy and observation in a particular direction. In graduate school, I churned out poems for the sake of churning out poems, which I believe was totally illuminating and necessary for that brief chunk of time. When I graduated, however, I found that pace unsustainable and ultimately at odds with my sense of why I write poetry at all. I’m a bit jealous of poets who can come up with a “project” and then stick to it for an entire collection, but at this point in my life, it just isn’t how poems happen for me. I wrote each of the poems in Shore Ordered Ocean as an individual poem; I never wrote a poem to serve some kind of function within a collection. This did make it difficult to conceive of a unified book, and the whole idea of crafting a “manuscript” kind of freaked me out. I had a big stack of poems and I’d kind of shuffle them around and send the pile under different titles to various publishers and book contests. I was pretty lost, and I was willing to take advice from anyone who would take the time to tell me to cut poems or rearrange the order. These years of aimless shuffling were a kind of blessing in disguise, since I was writing more poems as I fiddled with the so-called manuscript. Gradually, I began to see my growing stack of poems gravitating in two directions: one direction was more outward-looking, concerned with politics, the natural world, distance and the unfamiliar, while the other direction was more inward-looking, concerned with relationships, interpersonal and private life, speech acts, and the colloquial. Of course, there was a lot of overlap, but the former direction became Shore Ordered Ocean and the latter direction became Say So (my second collection of poems, forthcoming in October). Once I had these gut senses of what each book felt like (not so much what it was “about”, but more of a synesthetic sense of texture/timbre, palette/palate), the individual poems in each collection began to make patterns and talk to each other in more meaningful ways. I hope that this translates into something like a cohesive experience for a reader. Maybe I’ll save myself all of this trouble the next time around and just write a third collection that consists entirely of pantoums about Heidegger from the point of view of my Chihuahua. Now that’s cohesive.

GL: One of my favorite poems in Shore Ordered Ocean is “Makeup” because, among other things, the speaker ultimately sympathizes with the value of expressive fictions as much as or even more than ugly truths. The language at the beginning of the poem indicates a kind of satirical perspective: makeup “Renders the dead living / and the living more alive,” which is creepy…and true. But, in conclusion, you write, “Even the earth claims color / once a year, dressed in red leaves / as the trees play Grieving.” These lines are both illustrative and argumentative…though it appears to me that the argument here happens chiefly for the benefit of the speaker. Which reminds me of the famous quote from Yeats: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Yeats’ distinction strikes me especially true for both this poem and your work in general. Could you tell me a little bit about how “the quarrel with” the self functions in both “Makeup” in particular and in the book as a whole?

DM: This gets back to what I was rambling about earlier: appearances and surfaces not simply as façades, but as liminal places where imagination and reality can wrestle. Isn’t that what all art allows, on some level? I would hate to imply that cosmetic surface is simply a stand-in for poetic surface in this poem, since that isn’t the case, but there’s certainly give-and-take between different sorts of hopeful artifice. I love that Yeats quote about the “quarrel with ourselves”, and I like the idea that we don’t just write “about” those inner conflicts in poetry, we enact them in poetry. James Longenbach’s book The Resistance to Poetry is a great investigation of the ways in which the power of poetry lies in its apparent powerlessness and marginality, and it is “a power contingent on poetry’s capacity to resist itself.” Poetry’s ability (obligation?) to put pressure on its own materials gives it a potency that the one-way language-as-usual rhetoric of politics, commerce, and the media does not.

GL: More on the argument with the self… your poem “Push, Pull” consists of seventeen musical couplets that force images and contemplations of violence to coexist with or communicate through euphonious language and sound devices. For example, “Baby’s first words were friendly fire. / Chrysanthemums of copper wire.” This poem terminates with these likewise rollicking lines, from which the title of your book is derived:

Couldn’t we call the crash a birdbath?
Couldn’t we call the coffins gift wrap?

Must have been some misunderstanding.
Shore ordered ocean but sent it back.

So okay. Could you tell me how the images/language of violence and war function with or against the music of the poem? What’s the tension you were trying to produce, and why did you feel that this poem, or language from this poem, in some way spoke for the volume as a whole?

DM: I am repelled and fascinated by contemporary public language (politics, commerce, and the media, as I mentioned before). The miasma of euphemisms, willful omissions, hot air, and scare tactics is numbing and enraging and could almost possess a kind of fractal beauty if it weren’t so dangerous. I wanted to write “about” the war in Iraq, but it felt disingenuous; who was I to try to speak to the situation? Just some citizen of the Empire glued to the television and the internet and the newspaper and the radio. So I ended up entering the subject in the same way that it entered me: through the media and that uncanny sense of the public projected into the private, complete with digressions, diversions, distractions, and so on. You’re seeing footage of a bomb blast and then you’re being sold something. You’re hearing a stranger’s tragic testimony and then you’re listening to a pop song. I wanted to write about what I cared about (how human beings treat other human beings), but I didn’t want to bear false witness by creating some knowing persona. I didn’t want to claim answers when I had no answers. Enacting the junctions and disjunctions of public and private life through language was the “truest” way I knew to bear witness to my own citizenship of America and of the larger world.

GL: Let’s talk influences. As I was reading Shore Ordered Ocean I thought I noticed the appropriation/modification of several radically different kinds of poetic modes in your work: metaphysical devices, such as the use of wit and conceit; a Hopkinsesque focus on the ecstasy of sound; use of irony and parable together in the same poem, as in “An Old Story,” which might derive from someone like Mary Ruefle, or even Kafka. Who were some of the writers who preoccupied you while you were writing these poems, and how have those preoccupations and/or influences changed since you finished the book?

DM: You’re so dead on. Thank you for being such a sensitive, attentive reader; all of your questions have really made me think carefully. I am totally obsessed with the Metaphysical poets, especially John Donne. I’m obsessed with Shakespeare on every level, especially the way he works with wit and word play. I’m obsessed with Hopkins and the tension between his reverence and his linguistic sensuality. Donne, Shakespeare, Keats, Hopkins, and Yeats will never not be hugely important to me. When I was writing Shore Ordered Ocean, I was also reading: Mary Ruefle (her book of “prose”, The Most of It, was especially moving to me), Dean Young (Skid, Strike Anywhere), John Berryman’s Dream Songs, Cort Day’s Chime, Mark Strand, Mark Levine, Wallace Stevens, James Wright, Emily Wilson (The Keep is amazing), Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, George Starbuck, Donald Justice (he’s a poetic hero of mine, although it might not show), Denis Johnson (it’s all about The Incognito Lounge), Eugenio Montale, and Jim Galvin, of course. Faulkner was really important to me, as was John Berger’s Here is Where We Meet. And now? Hmmmm… well, all of the above are still very important to me. I’ve still been reading a lot of Montale, and I’ve been reading other Italian poets from that era, like Pavese and Saba. I’m making an effort to read more contemporary poetry too; I have the tendency to end up reading the same “great” poets over and over (see the short list above), but it’s important to me to listen to and enter the contemporary conversation as well. Some contemporary poets I’ve been really excited about lately: Robyn Schiff, Jane Mead, Michael Dumanis, Jericho Brown, Darcie Dennigan, John Murillo, Erica Dawson, and others. I’m also pretty obsessed with the rapper/poet/musician K’naan right now.

GL: So, what’s new with Dora Malech these days? What are you writing, reading, thinking? Are you settling down in one place after years of travel and moving about, or revving up for many more years of peripatetic poeting? What’s doing? What’s the scoop?

DM: I’m copy-editing Say So now, thinking about commas and so forth. I haven’t been writing a whole heck of a lot. Well, actually, I’ve been writing, but I haven’t been finishing anything. I’ve just been scrawling down lines or images or words in my notebook without asking anything of them. I’ve been sort of on-purpose/by-accident letting work (teaching) take up all of the energy that might go into completing a poem. I don’t know if it works this way, but I’m hoping that I’ll come out of this “fallow” spell somehow different on the page, as if the pressure might result in a different kind of energy. Who knows. This summer, I’m going to try to actually make the poems and drawings and paintings that I’ve been thinking about for the past months. We’ll see how that goes. Then, in the Fall, I’ll be a Writer-in-Residence at the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program in Creative Writing; I’m really looking forward to working with the MFA students there. I’m also looking forward to being in a different landscape; my poems always end up shaped in some way by the context in which I write them. I’m looking forward to letting California work its way into my writing for a few months. And after that… I have no idea. Iowa City is really “home base” for me now, but my rambling days may not be over yet.

Two Poems by Lindsay Coleman

2010-04-21T21:14:00.008-04:00

I MISS ZIPPY

You have to love all animals the way they are or you will be sorry. This I learned when I bought Zippy, the little white parakeet. On the way home from the pet store I looked into the cage and realized Zippy only had one eye. There was a dark hole surrounded by chapped feathers where the other eye was supposed to be. When I looked into Zippy’s head, I saw he was thinking the same thing I was thinking: I need some birdseed. This was normal, but seeing into Zippy’s head was not. I felt very sad for Zippy, but I kind of wanted to take him back to the store too. I didn’t want to see into his head all the time, because then I wouldn’t know if what I was thinking was because of me, or Zippy. So I ended up returning him, and it was a big mistake. Now, I have this horrible molting parrot that bites. He repeats everything. He says I have a rotten heart.

ME AND YOU

Me and my Huffy bike
me and my Nike swoosh
me and my purple shins
me and my squinty glare
me and my rucksack
me and my pronged walking staff

You and your shoulder-kick
you and your robot eye
you and your skull lantern
you and your forget-not box
you and your pentacle skateboard
you and your Death Dealer lighter

Me and my all-in-one tool
me and my vermin swarm
me and my ceremonial hammers
me and my werewolf hearthrug
me and my flaming tower of Tarot
me and my voracious Bluefish of hope

You and your torturer’s sleeve
you and your house of smoke
you and your jewel-hoofed horses
you and your smoke-lipped cannon
you and your night fox alliance
you and your purple barbed lotus tree

Me and my lightless yo-yo
you and your inside voice
me and my pirate coin
you and your couch-fort
me and my geode collection
you and your expired milk carton
me and my time-out chair
you and your bee-stung cheek
me and my honorable mention
you and your black mood ring
me and my sunken tear ducts
you and your sixth toe
me and my Shaolin show-down
you and your merciless rubber band of doom.

Lindsay Coleman is a professor at Babson College in Massachusetts. She received her B.A. from Harvard University and her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writer’s workshop. Some of her previous poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Forklift: Ohio, Quarter after Eight, Bateau, Seneca Review, H_NGM_N and Fairy Tale Review.

Who's Got My Extra?: An interview with Paul Siegell

2010-04-04T18:03:00.011-04:00

I “spoke” with Paul about his second and third books, jambandbootleg and wild life rifle fire.

Paul looks like this all the time...

Paul Siegell is the author of three books of poetry: wild life rifle fire (Otoliths Books, 2010), jambandbootleg (A-Head Publishing, 2009) and Poemergency Room (Otoliths Books, 2008). He is an editor at Painted Bride Quarterly, and has contributed to The American Poetry Review, Coconut, Dusie, NOÖ, Rattle, and many other fine journals. He has also been featured in two national music and culture magazines, Paste and Relix, as well as elsewhere exciting. Kindly find more of Paul’s work (poems, poemics, videos) at his ReVeLeR @ eYeLeVeL.

And here are some links to Paul's books, blogs and etceteras:

wild life rifle fire

jambandbootleg

Poemergency Room

ReVeLeR @ eYeLeVeL

GL: A wise man once wrote: “A poem is energy transferred” from the poet to his reader “by way of the poem itself,” which is “at all points…a high-energy construct, an energy discharge.” The way to write in this mode is to remember that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” (a snippet of wisdom that became as important to Creeley/Olson and other Black Mountaineers as “WWJD” is to born-agains) and act accordingly, treating “process” and “perception” as the holy fixations of field poetics. You, Paul Siegell, it seems to me, take much of Charles Olson’s advice. Whenever I read your adventurous and formally innovative poems I always think of Olson’s phrases about “high-energy construct(s)” and “energy discharge(s)” because your work often marches ecstatically all over the page. Your most recent book, wild life rifle fire, is an explosion of visual as well as sonic “energy,” using concrete forms and visual puns to explore the nuances of reading and poem making. Jambandbootleg, too, features a number of concrete poems and different visual paradigms that shake up the dry old left-justified poetry of mainstream verse culture. So, could you tell me about your conception of the poem and poem-making in light of Olson’s “Projective Verse” orthodoxies. Do you think your role as a poet bids you to “transfer” energy to the reader? How important is the physical presentation of the poem? When you write, do you conceive of these different lines of poetry and their layout simultaneously? And, please, no one word answers. I won’t stand for it.

PS: Yes. Yes. Somewhat. Rarely.

Maybe because I’ve only tried to read it while laying low under the fluorescent lights at work, or maybe because it’s on-screen and I’m a slow reader, but Olson’s “Projective Verse” makes me sleepy. I’m down with the parts I’ve read, but I’ve yet to finish it. Kinda bad, I know.

I honestly didn’t learn of Olson until after jambandbootleg was all wrapped up. I saw the phrase “Projective Verse” on another poet’s blog and with a “what’s that?” I copied and threw it in the search. And then, look out, there’s this essay from 1950 and it articulates things in wild, familiar things, felt-already things. (Papa? Dunno.) Maybe I was scared by it.

Here’s my deal: I’m MFA-less, they didn’t teach any of this stuff to us at Pitt, and I should really know more about theory/traditions. I have that responsibility. (There’s an overwhelming So Much going on in poetry at present, let alone decades ago.) What I know is the propulsion of instinct. This thing tryna push from out my fingers, making my grip on meaning looser or tighter depending. If I feel it worthwhile, or just plain awesome, I pay it enough mind (I obsess about it) until it becomes Something More once it’s fully passed through my fingerprints.

None of my poems are made in Olson’s light, but I do have to concede that they’re made in his shadow. And many, many others’.

OK, moving on: Does my role as a poet bid me to “transfer” energy to the reader? See, what I dig about this is that that’s even your question. Heck yeah I’m psyched to write when I’m writing so of course I want the reader to feel that. Energy, discharge, buzzbangboom, transference, acceptance and ah, I’m happy! Isn’t that how we Art our way along? A song is played and a foot is tapped, a head is nodded. [In urge: energy transferred.] When the reader feels it, the leap, from my work, that’s miraculous and I’m grateful.

I don’t know what my role as a poet is.

As for the physical presentation of the poem, yeah, I don’t like ugly looking poems. Ha. But that’s not “100% Important.” I’d like to think that if I read my poems to a person who couldn’t see, the words, the wonder, would still hold up. Audiences don’t see that this poem holds tight to the left side of the page, or this one is in the shape of two cells dividing or this one’s in the shape of fire, but their attentive eyes, their faces, they tell me I’m jamming—So if it’s not important why do I do it? Because I can! Because Art says that this piece about a break dancer would look effin sweet in the shape of an actual break dancer, and so I go: Full force for the fuck yeah!

Always always, the poem, the words and wonder, always comes first. Without the poem, there is no form, and there’s definitely no function that I’d care to share. It’s gotta be a poem, and hopefully a Poem, before it can be anything else. The layout can come later that day or sometimes years later. At some point the poem goes to me, “Yo dude, I don’t look like this.” And so I listen.

GL: The title of your second book, jambandbootleg, refers not only to your life and travels as a Phish fan, but to the aesthetic of the book itself. Bands like Phish place a huge emphasis on performance and improvisation, perhaps as much as writing and recording their music in the first place. Thus, many of the concert poems in this collection are poetic bootlegs, or poems derived from someone else’s original performances. For jam bands, doing the same song over and over becomes part of the challenge and fun of presenting music in this way; fans want to see what this version of the song will sound like on this particular night. Did this notion of improvisation inform your concert or “SET” poems? In other words, since you were so often describing the same band playing the same songs again and again, did you feel the need to somehow enact improvisation in your poems in order to accurately report on what you were seeing?

Sweet Photo

PS: Absolutely. But it’s not haphazard writing. It’s still very much purposeful, crafted, and hopefully, real. Peaks and releases. There’s always a direction in which I’d like the reader to go.

I love large crowds, and love being in them with my friends. When you’re at and a part of a Full-of-Great-Crazy-Joy place where there’s 10s of 1000s of like-minded others and they’re all there for a band, for the experience of accepting the transfer of energy from unbelievable musicians, beloved, there’s a lotta people-watching potential, a lotta free things going on, self-expressions, and the entire event is… improvised, much like the music. The mirror. Sure, there are plans/arrangements: score “supplies,” take a piss, meet up with the Coleman crew, chill and whatnot, but the entire thing is in love with the spontaneous. If you allow yourself to descend into it all, you’re gonna wind up talking with strangers, and hopefully not have any fear. So, let’s get into the song—Let’s see what happens…If I didn’t write it with that kind of feel, that heady American festival atmosphere, I’d be doing it wrong.

Again, I love that that was your sense. In all, “SET I” (the road trip, the arrival, the overall sense, etc.), “SET II” (music/style in the U.S. in relation to the concert parking lot, etc.) and “SET III” (an honest take on intoxication and what it means to have a ticket, etc.) took me about 12 years to write and your question says a lot about what I had hoped to accomplish.

GL: There are a couple of poems in jambandbootleg that go back, way back, to the days when we were both undergrads at the University of Pittsburgh, oh, however many years ago. “EPIcureANS PAY FOR FeeLINGS” and “Pass/Fail” are two wildly different poems from that era. (The former is a formally exuberant but tonally complex poem about drug-sloppiness, and the latter is an anecdotal piece about one of “your” father’s friends who presumably died in Vietnam because he didn’t purposefully fail an intelligence test, the way the speaker’s father did, in order to avoid the draft). I love these poems and certainly think they belong in the book, but I wonder what it was like to work with poems that were written at such different times. Did you feel that you were dealing with the work of two different poets? Or did it seem as though there was a steady and stable arc of voice and vision that ran from college-Paul to the Paul or the present day?

PS: College-Paul is where jambandbootleg got started. It’s where all my poetry got started. The first poem I ever wrote was after an NYE-run of PHiSH shows my sophomore year. If I was going to book some poems backboned by jambands, college needed to be there. All the potential of not knowing anything—So many things to taste. I had and have no qualms about including those early voices. They lend range and arc to the project, as well as offering the very central [UNDERGRAD > GRADUATION > JOB HUNT > REAL WORLD] transition that so many of us go through.

GL: The final poem in jambandbootleg, “Requiem for a Festival” details your experience of the last Phish concert (or so it seemed at the time), the teary and alluvial Coventry show of August 2004. The poem dramatizes your complicated reactions to the past as a peripatetic Phishhead who has to move on to something new. The poem is dated September 21st, 2004, more than a month after the finale, and “you” begin the poem by contemplating the soiled wristband from the concert, which “you” are a little reluctant to take off. The whole “subgenerational” movement seemed “a firework departed” at that time and your speaker doesn’t quite know what to make of things now that the Bacchanalian festivals have packed up their tents and departed for good. Could you tell me about the biographical underpinnings of this poem? Did it seem, at the time, that you were losing, in addition to the band, a little of your poetry too?

PS: Fuckin’ Coventry. We were all so effed up by it. Just one listen to Page crying during “Wading the Velvet Sea” and it all has that hurt again.

Was a crazy week. I was living in Atlanta at the time, so I flew up to Philly to catch the final pre-festival show in Camden, NJ with my old college friends (Note: *08.12.04 – PHiSH – Tweeter Center, NJ* is the first poem in the book. *Requiem for a Festival* (08.14-15.04) is the last). All weird feelings when something that big and fundamental, to us, began winding down. A few hours after the Camden show, around 2 AM, I got into a white van with six other fans, our white van got in a line with three other rides, we all got gas then made our way up to the Northern Kingdom in Vermont. Took us 26 hours, and we were the lucky ones. With all the heavy rains during the days leading up to the event mixed with all the in-coming cars getting stuck in the mud, the festival radio station was forced to tell people to turn back, go home: no more vehicles would be allowed into the venue. WHAT!? Something like 110,000 people were expected to attend, but only 65,000 or so made it in. People drove from all over, and with ticket in hand, weren’t able to get in. Mud City. Others, and these people are truly special, they parked their cars however many miles away from the gates, they packed what they could carry and they hiked in. Now that’s a fan. Those people, they’re the believers. They’re the true spirits of the jambandbootleg epic.

And so with the final notes of a band I’d spent so much time and money on, a band I’d found to encompass so much love, I wasn’t losing the poetry, I was gaining ground on the poems. It was time to get them tighter. To get serious. It was time to go from being able to see just the head and a fluttering heartbeat in the ultrasound to beginning to make out the fingers and toes. The nitty-gritty. Without Coventry, jambandbootleg wouldn’t be what it is.

GL: Is wild life rifle fire, your brilliant visual poem/new book, the wave of Paul Siegell’s future? Are you currently working with poetry/visual art projects or are you writing in more traditional Siegellian directions?

Check it out!

PS: Thank you, Greg, for your kind words (and for this interview). I’m really glad you like the new book. I’m having a great time getting it out there, seeing so many surprised and charmed reactions, and it’s definitely something I’m excited about, but I doubt I’ll doing something like this again. Well, maybe, but differently, of course. (After my dad saw it he goes, “You should do something like this, but for kids, as a children’s book.”) Thanks, dad. We’ll see.

Elsewhere on the visual front, something that’s started getting published is a series of poemics called hot pepper people (samples at Moria, Antique Children, and forthcoming in Word For/Word). I’m having fun and glad editors have taken to it.

The next big thing is Trombone Bubble Bath, which is currently in manuscript. (((Whooo’s got my publisher?))) Look for poems to go down the left margin, ha, look for some sonnets, and also, sculpted by the spacebar, poems in the shape of a raven, a quaver rest, a trumpet, a saxophone, an old STS9 sticker, Roger Waters on his bass, and a few other offerings I’m very excited about.

And then in a few years time, Take Out Delivery.

GL: You have a strong poetry-presence on the Internet. You also write a lot about community, in your own way, in your poetry about music. Could you describe how and why your poetry is so suited for the Internet? Do you think that you have courted a different kind of readership because of it? Do people go to your readings expecting, well, something of a show—that is, the kind we get from the poems themselves?

PS: I’m going to answer your poetry-suited-for-the-internet question with how this whole interview got started: ENERGY.

The Internet’s a funny thing: Someone’s always on it. I’m amazed every day that I’ve created and sustained a facebook group with over 1200 members. I’ve garnered a lot of great relationships thanks to my activity on Goodreads, and turning some poems into YouTube videos has been fun and rewarding, too. I’m planning on doing a few more videos, in a different style, in the coming weeks. All of these portals, plus ReVeLeR @ eYeLeVeL, are all great ways to get in touch with readers, and for readers to find me.

From the emails I get, my work reaches out to not just those in college or grad school, but to those IMing their friends all day at office jobs, to those downloading music onto their computer, and even to those of the older generations. Somehow, people in their 40s/50s/60s and up have also taken to my style. I think maybe I remind them of something. I don’t know.

Since the birth of jambandbootleg back in July ’09, along with the HUGENESS of having bassist Marc Brownstein of the Disco Biscuits lend his name and praise to the back of the book, my readership has absolutely gone beyond the “standard” poetry reading crowd (i.e., poets) and is engaging people that are fans of the same bands as I am. Live music fans are very appreciative people and when they like something, they really let you know.

With wild life rifle fire now, a whole new set of people are taking notice. Artists and graphic designers are starting to come aboard. I got an email recently from a complete stranger that said he didn’t “care much for experimental poetry,” but really liked what he saw of wild life rifle fire. Plus, for people who have always been curious about what I was doing but never knew how to enter it all, this book has given them a much more comfortable place for them to merge onto the interstate.

As for my readings, I don’t know about a “show,” but we’re getting there. I think you already know you’re gonna get some liveliness. One woman came up to me after a recent reading and said, “I felt like I was just listening to music, not listening to poetry.” That was kind of stunning. You’re gonna get my smile, my eye contact, you’re gonna get challenged, entertained, new platforms from which to think about things, and you’re gonna wanna see some of the poems up close. Now, imagine a gallery show/reading with some of the shaped poems and wild life rifle fire-elements up on the walls. Stay tuned!

I’ll be reading at The Soundry in Vienna, VA on May 7, and all over the Philadelphia area this summer. For more info on dates and upcoming events, please see here. Thank you!

Three Poems by Sam Reed

2010-03-27T14:01:00.009-04:00

Cave Stream

What you see isn’t there,
If the crimson, ever-bruising
Effervescent light-starved
Musings of the eye teem
Fathoms deep in what
Only its touch can tell you,
Palm equally outstretched
To find and fend it, is
Clearest rock. Climbing you
In the chill, very rush
Chiseling this density
Grit by unthinkable
Less-than-grit open to
Unseal what heart nor brain
Have right to beat in
Is only water. Like you
It must keep moving, but not
With you, crowd panicking
The other way. How long
Since you were anything,
Threshold to seeming depth-
Lessness once waded, but
Engulfed? Can time, great reacher,
Ocean-shadower, pass
Through crevices so tight
A single human such-
As-it-is knowingspan’s
Straitjacketed, cinched
Both fore- and hindsight in this
Impenetrable instant’s
Night-knot? Deeper, and dis-
Belief be your guide, rose
Impervious in the vise,
Your daredevil angel (turn back
If you know how) beckoning
To the last, hand, heart as eyes
Straining for some trace of
That fool’s phosphorescence
Not wholly dissolved in a
Blink, but to be left grappling
With that impossibility:
Grasses, a tree, the sky.

              South Island, NZ

Field Guide Marginalia

             Coyote

Snow-tracked it to
the creek and that
was that

             Rattlesnake

Each cool scale
as it slides
over me

             Raven

One-lettered
in sand, but
in wind

Solstice, South of Tucson

You’d call this humid, if they made
Humidity out of fire, not water.
If fire could hide in air, like kerosene
Lit and covered up with sand,
You’d call this air.

I was just trying to breathe
When you looked at me like
You were covered in kerosene.

Whatever has a shadow
Won’t for long. A little overhead, the saguaro
Fruit is splitting, showing
Its red of crushed strawberries,
Its lushness.

You looked at me that way
One time before, only that time
As if I was pouring it.

Sweat leaks down my neck.
The shadows shorten in.
Please,

Don’t stop.
You’re scaring me.

Sam Reed graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Orion, Thermos, and other journals. He currently lives in Seattle.

A Great Poem: Norman Dubie’s “Ibis”

2010-03-15T21:33:00.018-04:00

Zach Savich's first book, Full Catastrophe Living, won the 2008 Iowa Poetry Prize and received a New American Poet honor from the Poetry Society of America. His poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in many journals, including Boston Review, Kenyon Review, A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, and Pleiades. A recipient of a BA from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Savich has lived and taught in Italy, France, New Zealand, and around the US. He currently teaches and studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he helps organize the jubilat/Jones Reading Series.

Zach's piece is the second of ITIWNH's new series of writings called "Expositions," which are, in essence, short essays about "great" contemporary and/or non-canonical poems. The idea behind this series is to allow for critical interaction with either individual poems or small clusters of poems, since such writing is hard to come by in mainstream publications. My guidelines, as such, are both nominal and (therefore) flexible, so authors are free to investigate poems they find fascinating in whatever way they see fit. Even after just two installments of "Expositions," the nature of the project surprises me--and, to a degree, escapes me. Peter Ramos's inaugural essay on Joy Katz's "A Desk." is rigorously focused on exploring the poem at hand; Zach's work, by contrast, tapers toward its observations about Norman Dubie's "Ibis" only after considering some of the constituent elements of poetic "greatness": great lines, great poems, great books. It spirals, beautifully, toward insight. Perhaps Peter's work will establish the precedent for future Expositors; perhaps Zach's will. I don't know. But I do enjoy the fact that I don't know what to expect. It's all so wonderfully out of my hands.

***

Is “Meditation at Lagunitas” greater than Robert Hass? Is any Robert Duncan poem greater than his use of “ensouling?” Is his “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” great or does it just have great first and last lines? What about Alice Notley’s “The Prophet”—I’ve often quoted lines from it (“The purpose of awakening is black coffee”; “You are not great you are life”) but have never been moved to memorize or copy-out the whole piece. This is typical of my favorite poems: with effort, you can memorize any poem, but the best lines seem to stick with me whether I want them to or not; I often forgive dull books that have three great lines. And often, I mentally anthologize poets not by poem but by line—Ezra Pound, for example, wrote more beautiful lines than anyone since Chaucer, one might claim in an undergraduate paper, but may have never written a great poem. And then, of course, there are the poets I love who do not write poems but books of poetry, sometimes in contrast not just to the idea of great poems but to the idea of great lines. There are passages by Rosmarie Waldrop that have composed my days (“Much work still to be done. And the smell of ripe peaches. And Long-Jin tea. And lungs full of words. And being an opaque body that intercepts the rays of the sun.”), but I would tell students to read an entire book by her, not any anthology’s selection.

Of course, this may be a problem not only of contemporary poetics—that today’s best poets often work more by sequence and line than by lit mag page units—but of contemporary perspective, as Keats’ contemporaries neglected his odes and Auden’s best early verses (including the hits we all know) first appeared untitled. One day, we will come to see the singular in what now seems continuous, and the major anthologies will no longer get limp after O’Hara. Perhaps, we will come to see that a truly great poem is one that has no great lines—those painted scarecrows—but exists as a unit, each piece equally required. Carl Phillips’ “Custom” is one of my favorite great poems that may have no great lines (except for, perhaps, the displaced augur’s thesis of “I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere / to be found” and the line linking that sensibility to poetic effort, claiming that “art can become, eventually, all we have / of what was true”—but I see these lines as structurally integrated into the poem, necessary machinery, not vivacious fauna flashing in the rough). It is a poem I never tire of reading or sharing with others. Like other poems I have memorized and recited to myself and motley assemblies over the years (Yeats’ “Adam’s Curse,” in particular, comes to mind) it deepens with each saying, like things should in the old idea of greatness. On the same hand: what about a poem like Dean Young’s “Sunflower,” with its “ketchupy light” and “crowness?” Some memorable phrases, riveting turns, general plunging descent and the invention of running by moving your legs very fast—but I remember most the rush and the voice of it, its vibrational contagions infecting my oatmeal when its way of seeing comes to mind, not a particular bon mot that’s reducible from it.

Other concerns: recent poets who do not focus on producing polished poems at all, but on recording their producing of poems, a process set down; or those whose process is not product but project, apart from the projection of greatness; or those who intentionally uglify a poem’s proceedings so its experience is more empirical than transcendentally great, based in a friction that can be created only through the exchange within its particular presentation. (An upcoming smart, sharp, and somewhat sociological review of American Hybrid by Michael Theune and Jay Thompson in Pleiades gets into thoughts about how anthologies variously represent poets, poems, and ideas of poetics.)

And I think of the conventional “beauty is truth” great line ending of a great poem, in which the line is great at all because of the particular path of greatness that has preceded it, long ice luge that makes the cheap vodka worth getting on your tie…And how that gets changed in a book like, e.g., Joshua Harmon’s Scape, where I often feel the BMX boost ramp of Keats’ ending in grounding, voice-rooted phrases that frame and stitch more burbling and diverse lyricism mid-poem…

All that said, this weekend I have been reading Norman Dubie’s The Mercy Seat (Copper Canyon), which compiles poems from 1967 and 2001, most of which appeared in earlier volumes, and such thinky thoughts have been far from my mind: I’ve been thrilling at the poems, jealous of what Dubie can do, pleased that his work exists. I first read his poems in 2002 at the suggestion of my teacher at the University of Washington, Linda Bierds, whose own careful and passionate work shows the influence of Dubie’s historical dramaturgy and personae. At the time, I got that, but missed the strange depths and hard-bright rhetoric that drive the speeches and scenes of Dubie’s poems. His poems may resemble work you, reader of adventurous poetry, distrust—imported scenes and personages; tremors of Zen; naturalistic landscapes depicted as though language can, by naming, portray and give voice—but they are more startling and solid than the often-made, dull performances of those traits. The sense of the actual in them recalls Yeats’ materially constructed images (“a tattered coat upon a stick”); the presentation of consciousness is as expressive as Faulkner’s or shifty-stanced Keats’. The mix of reserve and rollick, characterization and its dissolution, detail and the minds that frame them—

There’s a poem called “Ibis,” first published in 1975, that I particularly recommend. It begins:

There is the long dream in the afternoon

That turns a large, white page

Like, once, the slow movement

Of slaves at daybreak

Through the clouds of a stone laundry.

The blossoms

On a black vegetable and

The olive wood burning in the plate

Are the simple events

That I’ll wake to this evening.

At dark, we’ll walk out along

The shore having finished

Another day of exile in a wet place.

As a boy I burned

Leaves in the many gardens

Of a cemetery in Rome.

I wrote in my diary:

A blue vessel

Is filling out in the rain. All day,

Here, the water falls and is not broken,

But it punishes me like the girls

With their clubs and bowl

Flattening the new maize,

Millet, and the narrow tubers

Of yam

That are white like hill snow.

You do not yet realize that the speaker of poem is Ovid, in exile, attended by a servant he envies, admires, and hates, who, a page and a half later, is told he must “fuel the terra-cotta lamp / And gather the cress and hidden eggs / Of the Ibis” when Ovid is dead, but of course the poem isn’t really about Ovid: it’s about a situation, a dailyness that surpasses the weary dailyness of most dailyness-based poems. Are these lines great? Well, the sense of line is great. The sense of real things somehow more real than the things around me, given with range that is held so it is tight but still vibrating, a heavy kite by which you deduce these must be very heavy winds, and somehow my thin wrists are up to it—it makes my poems feel smaller than they should, as though I do not take on the real good variety of utterance and world. I would like to. To see poem and line, book and poem, intelligence and artfulness as more wildly aligned. As they are in the great poems of Norman Dubie.    

Two Poems by Tony Mancus

2010-03-03T20:19:00.015-05:00

Break even on the coin

—I say the word
you agreed upon
and now that we’re here: page crinkle,
a golf course hearsed
into a vineyard—balls teed

suppose this freight weighed
as much as dollars in coin.
As much word
as what carried wood’s
left behind. Forget the shot length
and the bag of talking sticks.

What’s now camera’d and circumstantial:
mantra, medina, occipital, medulla, oblong

I can’t make you know me better
than science. Ozymandias either. Poor dustbowl.

The bag’s disposed of, my coat hangs
limp without me. Interminable hunger at the sight
of it. Interminable hunger of arms
and all things parceled.
Think a lot of East, of Eden, think
a lot of laurel
and then of whinnying—a way through
the long afternoon’s thirst.

Who would want to eat here. The horses halve themselves
and go on display. We are not. Art no longer
available. On access: the Ah-ha video plays all night long:

Take on me take on
my thanks love, my thanks
for beaning me in the middle
of the street—a proper form of solitude.

For one dog might refuse any number of others
dependant on mood or the color patterns
invisible to its hairy eyes. We decide to be
confused and the doors to the train reflect
all of the other possibilities this city could hold
for each of us.

I am we here. You are the television’s
burbling and pale blue light or fluorescence—
a harbor view of the kitchen
laid bare with construction equipment.

Simply put, my perspective carries
your refraction
and that means the bridge between us, its bigtop lighting,
a set of teeth in a bag for when
something needs to be bitten. Some cite another path through—
a squirrel say or a person
limping the crosswalk or the millions
of dollars paid to the bridge’s intestines.
Keep flickering.

The nation of a dollar. Coined:
a thousand fuses short to make the commute
more bear-than-able and after
there are individual and startling pops

it’s like we’re not could not even inhabit
the same plans—how bright and cold it gets

The mystery of bending

I’m going to blow the socks
off the water. Here’s a tea

pot boiling, bags wait
to be saturated so they can

share what’s inside them. With
our mouths properly inhabited, we

have a total jaw full
of bony protrusions

things that we’ll eventually
lose or have to have worked on.

This body is a cave
of wonderful aches

and production methods. I am writing
what I want less and less. In the same way

the wind picks up speed
between skyscrapers, the compass

points everywhere at once:
under the illusion

that its exploding. I’ve taken to sewing
a necklace of earphones that muffle

out round our rising chests. Money
gets tumbled clean and art

is impossible to make from a field
of doughy-eyed marionettes.

No politics set in on my top
hat or on this the best first sentence

for a new idea of the novel:
do you know, my lieutenant,

the war is another thing we cannot
touch. So our company stayed put

drunk as every bottled ship, as every
kernel of corn drawn white and out

from itself by hot and unstirred wind,
as every hand that claps itself to sleep, drunk

in the notion of deserving what comes next.
A generation of light sleepers learn their emotions

and park them right
in our faces, so we’re lost

but we recognize the cardinal
directions. The search for true

north takes a long time.
It’s surely no picnic.

Tony Mancus lives in Rosslyn, VA with his fiance and a chinchilla. He teaches writing and literature at Emerson Prep and runs creative writing workshops with Writopia Lab DC. He is cofounder of Flying Guillotine Press and prefers sleep to pancakes, though pancakes can be enticing. Some of his poems can be found online at 42Opus, No Tell Motel, H_ngm_n, CUE, keepgoing.org and elsewhere.

More Pepper Than Salt: a response to Joy Katz's "A Desk."

2010-02-15T17:29:00.022-05:00

Peter Ramos’ poems appear in Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, The Chattahoochee Review, and Poet Lore. He is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008), and two chapbooks: Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems (handwritten press 2004), and Short Waves (White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2003).

Peter Ramos' essay, as noted in the title, responds to Joy Katz's poem "A Desk." quoted in its entirety below.

A Desk.

Solicitous of its own business. Not chewable, and never mordant.
How to say a desk as I would say a hand? I look out
from the brows: wooden, unaltering.
Perhaps a desk is more important.
Perhaps I cannot have a sentence without a desk,
more pepper than salt, more violà. Perhaps in life
one does not discover a desk enough—its cruelty and trousers—
simple as a line of dancers, full of bone.

Is a desk modestly a field?
No: a turnstile, an airplane wing.

You can count on railroad bridges, on cut celery.
You can count on the flatness of bateau,
on all that is not the flesh, such as a deck of cards.

The boxes fit one inside the next, the cutlery is put away,
sturdy to push on as bike pedals. All this belongs to the desk,
and a berm awash with tide—all things at rest,
not panicked or insane.
As if the heavy telephones were back.

--Joy Katz, from The Garden Room

Peter's essay is the first in a series of "Expositions," in which poets present brief essays on either a single poem or a small group of poems...

***

It’s almost not a poem. At least it doesn’t fit the model I usually hold up: most poems begin with a scene that is then destabilized and then, finally, resolved—in some fashion, either by the passage of time or the arrival of some epiphany—as in, say, Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in which the sun sets by the poem’s end, and the speaker has gone from addressing the historical moment in which he is situated to confronting those readers of future generations taking in the poem long after the speaker has passed away; or in Dickinson’s “465” (“I Heard a Fly Buzz when I died”), in which the speaker’s death-bed expectations for the coming of Christ—or wisdom or final illumination—are horribly undercut by her/his ultimate and final sensation: the carnal, decadent, insistent, small and defiantly non-transcendental noise of a fly.

Katz’s poem, by contrast, doesn’t really begin in one place and end up somewhere else. Nor does the poem seem to resolve anything like a conflict or tension. In this, and other ways, it resembles Gertrude Stein’s most compelling work (for me, anyway), the shorter prose poems of Tender Buttons. In fact, Katz’s use of the period in the title/phrase makes the allusion seem intentional. And, like Stein, Katz takes up the otherwise drab, commonplace items usually associated with the domestic sphere—food, linen closets, coffee, desks—and transforms them, makes them appear strange, magical, out of context. It’s tempting to read this as a critique of the domestic sphere—of the place socially constructed and designated to accommodate a patriarchy. But that’s too simple a reading. This poem is about establishing a ground, a solid surface on which a self or subject can establish itself as a self, from which that self can then greet and make the world. Yet the poem contains both aspects: a launching pad and flight, the latter inconceivable without the former. But flight can only be imagined or anticipated here—what the “turnstile” or “airplane wing” will precipitate. The ground must be receptive and innocuous—neither imposing nor critical—and also trustworthy—“sturdy” and “full of bone.” That something so simple—a wooden desk—can be so valuable, so essential also reminds us of the times in which we live: where a place for silence and meditation is threatened by the speed and distractions of living in this era—with our apparent dependence on email and cell phones, on various pressing and immediate obligations. The desk is “not panicked or insane./ As if the heavy telephones were back.”

In terms of meter, the poem maintains a wonderful conversational quality that keeps the bouncy anapests and dactyls almost hidden: “MORE PEPPer than SALT...Is a DESK MODestly.” The rhymes, too, move just beneath the surface, internal and aslant, innocuous, insistent, and essential as the desk itself: “solicitous/ business”; “brows/ trousers/dancers”; “flatness/ bateau/ back”; “desk/rest.” It’s as if, somehow, especially in this age of spectral distractions, there is still a need for something simple, solid, and dependable, on which and from which to cast the nets of our imagination.

The Edge of Awake: An interview with Peter Ramos

2010-02-03T17:26:00.010-05:00

...Here's the edge of awake--

Cocktails, pack of matches, somebody's face

Watery-familiar. Hi, there, stranger.

Here's to being up for something beautiful,

Regrettable, and sore. ("John Berryman in My Dreams")

GL: Your first book of poems, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost, opens with a piece called “John Berryman in My Dreams,” in which, as the reader might expect, you channel Berryman’s dream-song voice. Your own early 21st century version of Henry discovers that now “Henry’s famous, even hip,” easily recognizable to his adorers in Chinese joints and bars, where Henry hunts for sensuous gratification: food, booze, sex. The last three lines of this poem are a come on of sorts, a seedy salutation that makes the reader wonder if he or she should turn back: “Hi there, stranger, / here’s to being up for something beautiful, / regrettable and sore.” It seems like you’re deploying Berryman’s Henry as a brief Virgil for this book in order to color your approach to a number of issues and themes in your work: the relationship between poetry and autobiography, exploring extreme psychological states, and working with short, emotionally violent lyric forms, to name just a few. The poem is efficient for these reasons but it’s also a little dangerous since the person at the door, in this case, isn’t really (not quite exactly) you. So. Why choose this beautiful poem, which is an attempt to veer away from self through impersonation, imitation, etc, as the piece to inaugurate Please Do Not Feed the Ghost? What advantages does writing as Berryman (sort of) provide you when you’re simultaneously trying to welcome and warn the reader?

PR: First, thanks for taking the time to ask me these thoughtful questions. This, like the rest of them, is challenging. To try and make a long explanation shorter, let me say that I didn’t take (reading and writing) poetry seriously until my first year at college. At that time (1987), the Confessionals and the Deep Image poets, even though they were over twenty years old, were still new enough not to be taken up into academia; that is, those few of us interested in poetry read them on our own, in part because they were not assigned in the curriculum. As such, these poets held great power for me: I’m talking about the big ones—Lowell, Plath, Sexton, James Wright, Merwin, Roethke, and maybe Kinnell. And the Freudian idea that you could exorcize your own trauma through art—art as therapy—was still acceptable. Although I moved away from these poets and these ideas, they have always stuck with me in some minor but essential way, un-hip, or outmoded as they seem today. I didn’t discover Berryman until much later, in my PhD program. I’d always known he was loosely associated with the Confessionals, but his work struck me as so much more reliant on art, or artifice—in all the best ways. With Henry and Mr. Bones, he reinforced the idea for me that the “self” in art (which is what we’re talking about, the place where this kind of self matters) has room to be grotesque, clownish, a minstrel, a liar. I think part of the reason the Deep Imagists and the Confessionals went out of vogue—after such a long heyday—was because poets and critics began to doubt what language could do; a skepticism arose I think in the early to mid 1990s, or we might a skepticism about language itself that was there a long time suddenly became accepted by most people in academia and the literary arts: language, at best, can only play. The signifier does not and cannot secure the signified. But I could never accept the kind of poetry that is, by this point, falsely associated with the avant-garde, the stuff one reads in many, many journals today where the language is so mutilated, so reduced to linguistic rubble that one can’t find the tension or essential drama of the poem. I understand that the plain narrative form still holds sway in places like The New Yorker. But that’s like saying rock and roll is still hegemonic and popular since it’s doing so well in Las Vegas. In terms of actual poetry journals, poetic techniques that privilege distance—through irony or cleverness—and narrative opacity, and fragmentation have become pretty conventional. In doses, it’s great. I love Stein, Bernstein et al. But I think too often bad imitations of that style—like nth-generation LANGUAGE poetry—allow people the opportunity to give sloppy work the dignity of being considered innovative. In his Dream Songs, Berryman seems to accomplish both: personal trauma, with its implicit dramatic tension, and a playfulness of language, a “black” humor that unsettles even as it makes us laugh. I get the sense of there being a person connected to all those wild language tricks—someone suffering terribly, and in his case the irony or humor or non-sequiturs somehow bring the reader closer to that suffering without allowing the poems to become false or sentimental. It seems to me then (and of course I am no Berryman) that if Berryman could be a confessional poet by substituting these strange characters for his “self,” then I too could use that technique at an even farther remove. Poet and critic Andy Franzee, in a generous review of my book for the Verse online blog, said that, “Ramos takes up what continues to make [Robert Lowell’s] Life Studies important: a recognition that selfhood is never self-contained, but is a performance that operates within, is even constructed by, the demands of family, desire, and national life—demands which in the work of both poets may take place years before their births.” I’m flattered by the comparison, and I wouldn’t necessarily place myself alongside with Lowell. But I did have this idea in mind when I wrote these poems, including the Berryman one. And he seemed like the perfect “character” to invite the reader into the collection; his persona as it appears in Henry is full of the contradictions I wanted to explore—locked into an influential and necessary but perilous past, charming but destructive, intimate but untrustworthy.

GL: One of my favorite poems in this collection is a generational piece called “Short Waves,” which probes the ancient lyric relationship between suffering and song. It begins with this metaphor: “Lonely son of a drinker, my father slept / uneasily, his throat swollen with a delicate creature—” an avian manifestation of suffering, trauma and music, which later forces the speaker’s father to “cough[] up feathers.” Equally delicate is your treatment of the subject of the illicit encounters between father and son, who are the speaker’s grandfather and father respectively. The language in this poem is so musical, and the imagery so lush, even, at times, artfully typical, that the reader sometimes (and briefly) wonders if these sexual assaults weren’t more spiritually and artistically generative than they were damaging. In the fourth and final stanza of the poem, though, the speaker describes the tender wreckage of his father as he appears in a photograph: “Glazed and drunk, / his face wrung out at last, my father strains. / He almost sings.” Here again, images of personal ruin, pain and beauty are forced to coexist. Why? What is the source of beauty in the speaker’s father’s story, since this man is so clearly a tragic subject? And is this traumatic encounter from the past, and from Venezuela, the most important psychological import that speaker’s forbears have brought to the new world?

PR: That’s an old poem compared to many of the others in the book. And here let me admit that the poem alludes to many autobiographical or “true” events in my life—the father in the poem is very much like my real father, although exaggerated of course. At the time I first began writing this one, I felt that compared to other fathers I knew, mine seemed more withdrawn, more unassuming; he is a child of an alcoholic and at that time he was going to “Al Anon”—for children and loved ones of alcoholics—a helpful experience that also dredged up a lot of his painful past. I kind of experienced that vicariously. I’m not the child of an alcoholic, but we have our fair share on both sides of my family. And I know the symptoms of such children; they often grow up with shame and guilt for things they never did. I’m not sure if your question limits itself to the poem or to my life, but I would say that my father moved to the States when he was thirty, married my mother (an Anglo-Saxon American) and helped raise me and my brother here (in the States). He never spoke Spanish to us because he believed that it would interfere with our assimilating, a forgivable mistake. And I think being the child of an alcoholic played into his own insecurities as a foreigner—this was the 60s and 70s, historically before whatever multi-culturalism trends came into some kind of vogue. So, the lack of translation, as it were, the lack (or limited amount) of Spanish language or culture in our house, comes from a similar kind of insecurity or sense of inadequacy. And when I was writing the poem, I thought that in many ways, my father’s experience of being the son of an alcoholic, as well as an immigrant, took away his dignity. That’s what the beauty remedies; and really I believe poetry has this function of bestowing dignity and visibility and humanity to the otherwise marginalized or invisible: I think of Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper,” for example. At the time I was reading poems by Bruce Weigl. He has one called “The Impossible” in which the speaker remembers some horrible event: when he was young, an older man, a stranger, forces him to give the man oral sex. It’s violent, of course, and the older man slaps the child’s face. But then, mysteriously, the speaker remembers the man’s small hands, and the gentle way he held his (the boy’s) head during the act. The last line of the poem is “Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.” It’s as if in order to love himself again, the speaker has to love even this most traumatic, violent event he suffered since it—the event and his survival of it—has become such a large part of who he is. I read an interview with Weigl in a journal (Phoebe, spring 1993), and he said that he also considered using the line “Say it beautifully and you make it clear.” I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but looking back, I’m sure I was influenced by that poem when I wrote “Short Waves.” It seems like they’re both trying to do the same thing.

GL: The title of your poetry collection, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost, implies that ghosts are angry, uncivilized quasi-animals, best kept at bay or at least appeased. It also implies that the past, in the shape of ghosts, can become suddenly charged and transformed through the incitements and aggravations caused by the living. Could you tell me a little bit about how you came up with the title for this book, and how it functions as a marquee for the poems therein?

PR: Sometimes it’s hard to explain poems and their titles, and even though this title seems easy to figure out now, I wasn’t sure what it meant when I came up with it. Growing up I felt there were two very powerful spirits that came to me over which I had no control: a life spirit and a death spirit. The one I associated with spring, the other with autumn—a bit cliché, I admit, but it felt real to me. When I later read William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All and then The Descent of Winter, I took both very personally. My title is nothing like Williams’ Descent, but I had the same idea—the loamy earth, like the autumn, calling us back down from the heights, down to the murky, intoxicating bog of memories, nostalgia, the irrecoverable, apparently safe and ever longed for past—it’s really a kind of death wish. The past is no place to linger; obsessively yearning for it is no different than getting drunk every night, or watching hours and hours of bad television, or binging on junk food.

As others have mentioned, the book’s title itself announces a dual and, in a way, contradictory command the poems therein implicitly perform: don’t get caught up in your own past; you must go back and deal with the ghosts of your past in order to live in the present. Turning one’s past into a ghost to be viewed but warned about, as in zoo animals, seemed like a good way to set up this dance, this dancing around autobiography. On the one hand, what really happened or happens to the poet is irrelevant: who cares what my daddy did to my mommy when I was six? On the other, you need some kind of drama or tension in a poem, as in all forms of art, and if you can channel some personal trauma in a convincing way, it’s one kind of dynamo the poem can plug into. Also, I find the tension that results from the impossibility of completely resolving that traumatic past works well in the poem: you must go back to the past without getting caught up in it in order to resolve it. And you realize that this is impossible. But you must do it anyway.

In the book, the past covers a specific historical moment: the fold between and including the forward looking optimism of the U.S. right around the time of (and in the fifteen years following) World War II, and the inevitable skepticism of the 60s that followed it. Historically I was born in the latter era (1969), but my first impressions are of a country still caught in that fold. Rilke writes (in his Letters to a Young Poet) that poets spend the rest of their lives trying to crystallize their earliest memories—in part because they occur at the threshold of language acquisition and as such are hauntingly unclear or ill-defined; poetically this means such impressions usually contain elements of what Keats called Negative Capability—a kind of pleasurable uncertainty or mystery. So the speaker in many of these poems (of course “me,” to the extent that we are always constructed of a constellation of fictions) is haunted by a past which threatens to overwhelm him/her, yet which must be confronted for various unavoidable reasons.

I’ve been reading your book, and I see what seems to me a similar technique throughout it. In at least a few poems, the speaker ends up back in what seems to be his hometown: Scranton, PA—ghostly rustbelt of his past, made almost gothic twice, both by the passage of time in his own life, and by the economic political realities of the country. Yet in one of my favorite poems, “Scranton Considers Reviving the Coal Industry,” you have a speaker who is asked to perform a similar, similarly impossible, task: the aldermen of the town make him go back into the coal mines and take up the work that has been abandoned for all these years. The final couplet has the speaker saying, “You couldn’t pay me/ to go down there”; and then we get “and they don’t.” For me, this means the speaker has no choice in the matter. Payment implies a transaction—work for money—based on choice. Why would the speaker here feel forcibly compelled to revive Scranton’s coal industry, single handedly? The industry failed long ago, and the speaker won’t even be paid for the work. I’m reminded of that terrific song, by Bruce Springsteen, called “My Hometown.” It’s tempting to hear the lyrics as a sentimental, even jingoistic paean to the singer’s small American hometown (I love John Melloncamp, but this description is much closer to his “I Was Born in a Small Town.”). But if you listen carefully to Bruce’s song, you discover that the singer is full of self-recrimination. He feels painfully guilty for all the failures of his town. What an enormous responsibility he takes on—to blame himself for his hometown’s racial hate crimes, failing economy, social and physical decay. And yet, we are responsible for our towns, as much as we are for our histories and past. I guess an example closer to our craft, writing not song, would be Randall Jarrell’s prose work, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” I read this last summer, but it seems so tied to what many of the Confessional, mid-century poets were doing that I feel as if I’ve known it and been influenced by it for years.

GL: “Watching Late-Night Hitchcock,” presented in “24 frames,” takes up almost a third of the book. This poem offers said number of short to very short poems that alternately report on or address the speaker’s different family members and appropriate or imitate language from film. What was the genesis of this poem? And, given that “Watching Late-Night Hitchcock” was published as a chapbook and, thus, stands on its own as a collection, how does it interact with and speak to the other poems in Please Do Not Feed the Ghost?

PR: I guess most of us can admit that our poems begin so far back—as experience, memories, impressions—that there’s no way to accurately locate the starting point. But in terms of getting this poem down in words, I stared writing about my great-grandmother (on my mother’s side) when I was in college. She was a well-educated, tough and elegant New England matriarch born in the nineteenth century. She was frigid and authoritative, and I guess I’ve always thought of poetry as having similar qualities: true, clear and hard as ice, dazzling but cold. And also, somehow, essentially feminine. My favorite poems by Wallace Stevens are like that, illuminating, inhumanly cold, but necessary, fertile and supreme. And of course Dickinson’s work is full of these qualities. I stopped writing poems about my great-grandmother after college and focused my writing more on my father’s culture, side of the family, etc. This was while I was in the MFA during the mid 90s. But in 2001, I was half way through my PhD, and that summer, I was living in the house where I grew up, studying for my oral exams. I had to read something like 60 books—poetry, fiction, and philosophy. In terms of writing poetry, I work best when I’m reading a lot—“no input, no output,” as Joe Strummer used to say. So, I’d stay up all night reading Wallace Stevens, and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, and Stein, and William Carlos Williams, and Walter Benjamin until my head was full of their voices. Then I’d just wander through the empty house at dawn, a house full of paintings of my mother’s mother and grandmother. At one point I really felt like Norman Bates, a fantasy I’ve had before, a kind of mamma’s boy, now an adult, roaming through the empty house he grew up in, with a head full of ghosts. It was terrific—that feeling of having voices in your head that you trust, that are bigger than you, older than you. So that was really how the Hitchcock poem began. I’ve never been able to duplicate the intensity of that experience. But looking back on my favorite poems of mine, they usually begin as someone else’s voice in my head.

It’s true the poem came out in a chapbook first, but I felt like most of the issues or qualities of the poem seem similar to, or in dialogue with, the other poems I collected for the full-length book: early- to mid-century Americana, family trauma, booze, sex. But it’s also very matriarchal—the feminine voice of authority. All the men in my book are childish drunks, and the women have to tell them what to do, take care of them.

GL: You’ve written cogently about the intersection of Deep Image poetry and translation of Spanish language poems, specifically Wright’s translations of Vallejo’s poems, in your scholarly work. It seems as though you sometimes come close to proffering so-called deep images in your poems, but in the “personal” and historical contexts of family narratives and confessional vignettes rather than in the snowfields of the Midwest, as we are wont to see from Wright and Bly. And, your work is also very conscious of the causality of generations—how family stories lead into and affect, and sometimes afflict, the now, which is how the cultural past translates into the personal present. Could you tell me a little bit about how Deep Image poetry, notions of translation, and your exploration of origins all come together in your work?

PR: That’s a great question I’ve never thought about, and I’m not sure how to answer it. Starting with Deep Image poetry, I don’t tend to go back to those poets very often, though I do read James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break every few seasons. That’s probably the most impressive book I’ve ever read. I’m guessing, from what I know of your own poetry and background, you probably had a similar experience with it. The first time I read “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio,” I walked around for a week in a daze. I don’t even like football, but I memorized the poem and just repeated it to myself all the time. How the hell did he write that?

In terms of translation, I must admit that my Spanish is fair to middling; as you note, I’ve written critically about translation, but I’ve never published my own poetic attempts at it. But I do think I translate other aspects of my father’s culture into my own work. Although my father never taught my brother and me Spanish, there were many different languages spoken in my house when we were growing up. My father knows French from living in Beirut, Lebanon during his teens, and so he and my mother spoke it when they didn’t want us to know what they were saying. Plus, whenever we visited my father’s family in Venezuela, which was almost every Christmas, no one there spoke English, so my brother and I ended up speaking “Spanglish” with our cousins. And of course, when my father spoke to friends and relatives on the phone, which was almost every night, he would use French, Spanish, and Arabic—sometimes all three in one sentence. Though this was initially a source of shame whenever my friends were around to witness this crazy foreign language-soup, I eventually realized there were advantages to such an upbringing. For one thing, it’s a nurturing environment for someone who eventually wants to be a writer. This linguistic, cultural interface or confrontation tends to illuminate the extent to which language itself is a material, to be manipulated in new and often strange ways. The immigrant tongue, however diluted or marginalized in the new country, nonetheless bleeds through in ways that call attention to the very pliable nature of language itself. In my adolescence, for example, whenever my father wanted me to feel special guilt for my poor academic performance, he would say, “Your mother and I pay a lot of money for you to go to this school. But a lot!” In Spanish, the conjunction would make sense—a way of emphasizing the first part of the statement. In English, it sounds funny. Such syntactically strange sayings were a source of shame for us, growing up. And yet, they personalize my father; the older I get, the more endearing his awkward language constructions and translations seem.

The second quality produced by this kind of linguistic/cultural confrontation seems more related to the U.S.-born children of immigrants: a keen awareness of the dominant language and culture they have been born into and yet feel somehow partially (and, to them, shamefully) barred from. Julio Marzán describes this phenomenon as it applied to the poet William Carlos Williams, whose mother was Puerto Rican. According to Marzàn, Williams chose to be called “Bill” at a young age (and for the rest of his life) as a means of gaining acceptance from his surroundings—those outside of his childhood home, that is—and to avoid being considered “foreign” by the community; it was a kind of persona he took on, a way of being re-born as an Anglo American. In fact, considering that such large numbers of the U.S. population either come from immigrants or are themselves immigrants, Williams’s case seems perfectly common. And however ambivalent immigrants or their family members feel about the process of assimilating into U.S. culture—however much guilt, shame or resentment is involved—the fact remains: assimilation is such a common process, so widely shared by so many U.S. citizens throughout history, it has itself become part of our culture. It’s no wonder so many works of “American literature”—Goodbye, Columbus; The House on Mango Street; How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, to name just a few—have this very process as their central theme. At the level of language, however, the linguistic confrontations that make up the assimilation process engender in immigrants and their children new ways of articulating the American experience.

GL: You’re part of a generation of poets whose writing life has straddled the eras of print- and electronically-dominated poetry publications. The acknowledgments page in Please Do Not Feed the Ghost features credits from both print and digital journals. During the time that you’ve been writing, how has poetry changed because of technology? And do you favor or tremble before the nature of these changes in the current poetic-cultural landscape?

PR: Well, of course there are many advantages to the changes you speak of: poets have more venues in which to showcase their work; they can meet one another more easily on the web. I found your work online, and then I just found your email address and wrote you—all in the space of a few hours, which was great. That must happen all the time. And there are some terrific blogs and journals on the web now—H_NGM_N, elimae, yours, and others’. There are many advantages, but I guess accessibility is the greatest. On the other hand, and I know I’ll sound like a curmudgeon here, I don’t entirely trust all this Exciting, Revolutionary electronic communications technology. I started teaching (adjunct-ing) at the college level in 1994. At that time my students, like myself, were pretty new to the internet, to email, etc. And all these people, even folks in academia, were shouting, “students are writing letters again! Students are writing again!” And yet we have to admit that students now—who grew up writing emails—are not, for the most part, better writers than those of previous generations. I sometimes feel that all these new forms of communicating to one another encourage a kind of A.D.D. and grunt-speak—OMG! LOL!—and a real laziness toward engaging in long texts and critical thinking. You see it in poetry, too. All these poems that jump from fragmented “thought” to “thought” without any glue or cohesion, any sustained “argument” or narrative. You just can’t imagine “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” being written today, for what that’s worth. Or maybe I’d say that while this new technology doesn’t make students or poets worse writers, it can’t take the place of literacy, of reading and learning from all those poets who have contributed to the very tradition poets necessarily engage—consciously or not—when they write, or close reading skills, skills that take time and effort to acquire and master.

GL: So what’s new with Peter Ramos these days? Are you busy destroying the old Peter Ramos and starting afresh? Or are you merely perfecting the Peter Ramos of yesteryear? What are you doing, reading, thinking? What’s new?

PR: Hard as I try to destroy Peter Ramos, the old man always returns. Last summer I was at a writers’ colony, and I promised myself I’d cut myself, and my history, entirely out of all my new poems. I had this idea that I’d only write poems about motels. It was impossible. For me, I just can’t come up with a concept before I write: for the poem to work, it must always be from the inside out, not the other way around. So if or when the new Peter Ramos shows up, I won’t know what he looks like ahead of time. I like your idea that we should just try to perfect ourselves in our art and respect our obsessions. I think Allen Ginsberg once said, “The mind is shapely,” and I always understood him to mean by this that if you pay attention to your obsessions, even if they don’t seem immediately connected, you will see a pattern, a picture. For my job—teaching American literature—I have to publish articles of literary criticism as part of my tenure requirements. My bosses appreciate my poems, but I’ve had to direct my mind almost exclusively toward criticism for the past five years. Poetry and criticism share important qualities, as you know, but for me, I have to change my mind, attitudes, schedule, and lifestyle when I switch from one to the other. I’ve written poems, but not as many as I’d been used to in the last twenty or so years. Over winter “break”—I put that in quotes, because I still have to do research, write grants, apply for conferences, write papers, reviews, etc.—I’ve had a bit of time to read books for pleasure, so I finished both books by Oscar Zeta Acosta, the famous Chicano lawyer who was part of the “Brown Power” Chicano movement in California. He shows up in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as the Samoan lawyer and cohort of the speaker. Also, I’ve been reading lots of Latin American poetry from two terrific new anthologies—The Oxford Anthology of Latin American Poetry and one containing nothing but poetry from Cuba. I’m also writing about William Carlos Williams’s connection to Latin American poetry (his translations of it) and his own bi-cultural identity. I’ve also been enjoying Joy Katz’s new shorter collection, The Garden Room. Finally, I’d like to get together a panel with you, Nate Pritts and maybe someone else to discuss the decadent second half of the twentieth century—something that covers rocket ships, TV dinners, and Sputnik-shaped chandeliers, the glorious and brave New Frontier that so quickly rusted apart and fell into oblivion.

Three Poems by Andy Stallings

2010-01-27T21:26:00.009-05:00

CLEAN LOVE’S NOT LOVE

Only sad things,
like: the tea is not
coffee. Silence
arrives, sudden
as mail. Only magic
things, like: if
you’d only say so…
(You: say so.)
How feeling is
‘the useless cry
of a bird’ /
a sort of
nowhere including
everywhere.
Each song the choir
sings sounds like
the end of service.
Enter the city:
delivery trucks
drag concrete over
cobbles, over
curbs where I
wander with my
gigantic dome umbrella,
alive as in a
tenancy to silence.
Rocks stacked on
stovepipes. Windows:
debts I pay
again and again.
The rain has no
idea –

YOU CAN’T IMPLY LIGHT

Tiny city on the inside
of an ember: model for
that other city, memory.

Conversations we pass,
like beliefs, down through
generations.

An orange in frosty grass, rotting slowly.

So cold I’d steal my brother’s clothes, so quiet
I hear the dim electric crackling of power lines,
headed who knows where.

Whatever disappears
becomes a mirror.
Still talking
about the world
though it vanishes.

In the distance,
graceful skater.

City of pigeons frozen in fountains at night, singing:

What finally
our lives must
correspond to,
the sky –

Shadows even in darkness.
Snow: the great equal.
No two stillnesses alike.

NOT THE WORLD ENTIRE

Nothing changed: it ached away.
You cried all night last night
about your dreams. Under
ether, sound elongates, bells
like tulip bulbs. I am
easily broken, or moved.
I spoke today with a man
who no longer speaks.
We walked around defying.
Winter: cat past lit
doorway. Sunlight:
counterfeit. Journey
begins in winter as
despair. The city contains
a second, sleeping city
where, stranded near
the bakery, we buy it
entire. There are days
for an old-fashioned
silk-lined suit; days for
vanishing. Approaching
the new city in conversation,
we catch a coming hymn
and fall silent. Together
we enter the bright gymnasium.

Andy Stallings lives in New Orleans, where he teaches creative writing at Tulane University, co-edits Thermos Magazine, and curates Exploding Swan Operations. His poems have appeared or will soon appear in Mid-American Review, Bat City Review, Seattle Review, Crab Creek Review, Hubbub, and Clementine Magazine.

Three Poems by Jack Christian

2010-01-19T21:54:00.011-05:00

DOGGED UNCERTAINTY

If that’s what you really are
If you are that flat and I am that round
If I am a rock beside an embankment
And if badness is the quality of being very far behind
And your sidekick is what others term vision
And then there is no then
Because you owe from the east
And hold closely a cotter’s joint
And yours are instructions on how to spin around
And in your kind of heaven and in your kind of paint
We are the pink inside the gravel
And you sell coats from inside your coats
Because your city is large enough
Your are always there to sell us something
We are always in need
And the sign for this is the octagon
And your butterflies are quotidian another word for incessant
And likewise your occupation causes you to teeter
between noticing and looking after
And we discuss this motion as demonstrative
of the fifth and sixth law of flight
And in truth and in longer days
an earlier truism’s small corollary
becoming practicable now
The pipe and plank and space
And I am without approximation I am edged and all
And speed in conjunction with
And I beguile the highway

NORTHAMPTON ECSTATIC

When great movies are in my device which is clean
and I’m on my couch got secondhand
with elderberries in the compost and fruitflies in the kitchen.
The chickens I’m to meet in weather unapproachable.
And the defenestrator who stays in my mouth
and the river I discard.
The gift bags full with lemonade powder
in time for reenactment. And often on the perimeter of thought
on a knotted street.
The governor necessary to incite these things:
the calm, the golfcart and ugly shrubs
the trail unrumored and repeated.
A prayer for courage
which is superior to the feeling of being brave.
And is brought by our bumblebee, our mother’s rose,
her dogs who mistake swimming humans for boats
and attempt to climb aboard.
A caterwaul across gravel. Mom’s ghost in the graveyard
or skunk in the bushes.
The light the bricks take. The brick and ivy together.
The apartment complex aglow
the basketball goals. Their shadow-games
the crows-nest that clears. Our great speckled bird
by exhortation – how sane to be a knucklehead!
with a wagon to tote a friend in across the bridge
with the traffic jam.
And the variety and all of a terse debate.
The sunspot on the sidewalk that travels with me.
The parts unknowable and so, impossible to tame.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW?

We were scientists and fringe scientists.
We had the feeling of a new morning
with the lights off. We were a possibility.
And one of us set his hair on fire.
And one made a box. And one grew a forest
in the ruins. And the box split in half.
We put the halves on a train that went away
and on a train that followed a circle track.
We, who stayed, acted as ecosystems.
Insistent as pillars, we stood.
We comported ourselves in the attitude of parked fire trucks.
We weren’t thinking; we were conducting thought experiments –
a thing as natural as jumping rope.
It was tic-tac-toe with ourselves, a match seen in re-run –
a nothing, also, that could not change.
And one was housed in ruins. And one grew horns
to guard her shell. And one curled.
And one bloomed. And one sought heat in soil.
One bore children; their eyes were open.
And one split her skull in half.
The tests were not called How Stupid We Are.
We who remained were with our questions.
They were the river we bathed in.
Our bridge walked from the water.
Our rumor shivered in the cathedral.

Jack Christian is the author of the chapbook Let’s Collaborate from Magic Helicopter Press. His poems are upcoming in Drunken Boat and Thermos, and his work has appeared recently in Sixth Finch, Cimarron Review, notnostrums, Phoebe, and Diagram. He is from Richmond, Virginia, and lives now in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Links to Jack's online poems:
http://sixthfinch.com/christian1.html
http://www.notnostrums.com/iss3/christian.php
http://www.webdelsol.com/DIAGRAM/8_2/christian.html
http://cimarronreview.okstate.edu/currentissue_sample1.html

Four Poems by Brad Liening

2009-12-21T19:12:00.007-05:00

Foxy In Death (Brad Liening Finally Gets the Upper Hand)

In the eyes of the casket, the earth
is more beautiful than the sky.
Hello little groundling,
you look smashing.
My brain?
Totes made of stars.
When I die, exactly how foxy
will I look?
Answer: so foxy
and still I'm hedging my bets:
I want to be semi-nude,
I want to be interred in terrycloth,
I want it to be suggestively draped
over my privates.
In public.
In the totally packed amphitheater,
nobody will want to get up
to go to the bathroom
for fear of missing something,
everyone weeping,
everyone a little aroused and asking
who made all the windows so steamy.

Wolf Blitzer

Everyone steps gravely down
from the helicopter,
expertly dressed and coiffed,
even the last guy
who’s nowhere near the landing pad,
who’s back in the office at 4 am
pitchforking the day’s
shredded documents
into the furnace
and updating the website.
Who’s running
this asylum, anyhow?
The sky fills with
little slivers of light.
In other news:
My foot hurts. My head
is screwed on right
and still the cogs look
wonky wheeling through
the moth’s fraenulum.
Such a tiny thing
keeping us aloft.
A hawk, a wounded butterfly,
a man asking for a lift to Florida.
The tick gets big.
It's time for a change.
Pills, wars, the dollar
against the yen,
water and air filters,
what once saved us
is now decomposing
and dangerous.
Who’s nudging us
through the noisy maze
into the noisy world?
The other side of green
is green, the other side
of purple is the bruise.
Dig deep and you'll get the bone.
Dig deeper and follow
the rat through the hole.

What Brad Liening Does Sans Parents

Looks up definitions for all the words he doesn’t know when reading the King James.
Watches daytime TV and drinks Cokes through Twizzlers.
Masturbates.
Plans the perfect heist.
Practices his dance moves in front of a mirror for three consecutive hours, because this is his life and he’s living it by his own rules!
All the real work begins after three hours.
Stares through the window into the street.
Dreaming, dreaming.
Avoids mirrors.
Avoids the telephone except when making crank calls.
Anonymously disses celebrities on the internet.
Finishes the New York Times crossword puzzle then buries it in the backyard and then begins to prepare lies about what happened to the paper.
Digs a tiger pit.
Studies flight patterns of butterflies.
Reads all of Keats’ letters to Fanny and clutches Kleenex not already used for masturbation.
Masturbates again.
Diagrams possible architectures for new flying machines for a new century.
Sips a cup of tea.
Cultivates neuroses.
Accidentally splices his DNA with that of an ordinary housefly, setting into motion a chain of events that will change the face of science forever!
Sets a trap for ghosts.
Hangs out at the mall.
Checks the ghost traps.
Practices his swing because he’s not going to be trapped here forever and this is his ticket out!
Adjusts his headband.
Tinkers.
Some medications may increase thoughts of suicide.
Putters and tinkers some more.
Puts his suitcases by the door.
Rigs up a fishing line to catch fish from the crick while tricking some older boys into painting the fence he was supposed to paint.
One-armed push-ups.
Develops new ice cream flavors previously undreamed of: pickle-cherry-oyster-candy-corn!
One-man band practice!
Tries to remember.
Tries to forget.
Places bets on underground bare-knuckle boxing events.
Grows wistful thinking about the smell of fresh-cut grass and the flat sharp crack of a baseball bat and those haunted Michigan summers.
Seals all his secrets in a box and stashes it in the middle of a snowman.
Leaves all the lights on in all the rooms because he was raised in a damn barn.
Drafts a list of goals that never gets filled in.
Cooks a big meal with lots of asparagus.
Waits to pee.
Breaks in the new trampoline.
Goes green, goes paperless, trades in his car because cars are coffins and amasses a large amount of spray paint cans for local radical action.
Affixes sparkly dolphin stickers to the fine china.
Outruns the apocalypse.
Terror starts at home.
Blacks out his name on every document in the house.

Poem

Aliens turn people into goo
in an act of great
metaphorical significance.
But first there are a few
buildings to burn down
and a dozen trucks to explode,
a bloody handprint to smear
above the banister.
The dangers of socialism.
The dangers of capitalism
as obvious as the requisite
naked breasts or the mothership
fucking up the metropolis
but nowhere near as fun.
Exploding heads!
Exploding hearts!
Dust: familiar signifier
of our collective futures.
Still, the nudity was nice,
that scene in which the man’s
face changes hideously
into a scary man’s face
and who then brings home
a really creepy poodle
for his daughter, played
by you, the only one who
suspects something is wrong.

Brad Liening is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poetry has appeared in over a dozen online and print journals, including H_NGM_N, Swink, Forklift, and Fou. He's a poetry editor at InDigest Magazine and he helps run Hell Yes Press, a DIY press that publishes poetry chapbooks and zines. He lives in Minneapolis.

You Said, Did You Say Something: An Interview with Leigh Stein

2009-11-21T09:06:00.008-05:00

Leigh Stein is the author of the chapbooks How to Mend a Broken Heart with Vengeance (Dancing Girl Press) and Least Inhabited Island II (h-ngm-n Combatives). In 2008, she won an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, and was nominated for Best of the Web, Best of the Net, and a Puschart. She lives in Brooklyn, where she teaches drama to public schoolchildren.

GL: One of my favorite Leigh Stein poems is “You’re Mispronouncing My Name Again,” which appears in your chapbook How to Mend a Broken Heart with Vengeance and was originally published here. The speaker begins the poem by recalling how she used to work as an astronaut in a department store window display—nice work if you can get it. She says, “I took that astronaut job so I / could miss you from the cosmos beyond the glass” though she’s ultimately subjected to more than just self-selected romantic torments. For example, no one can quite hear her or understand her through her helmet, which people recklessly ask her to take off several times by the end of the poem—doing so, it seems, would be symbolically but nonetheless mortally dangerous. In the end, the speaker is so trapped that the reader can scarcely tell whether she, her beloved, time, or the world is at the root of her captivity. Could you tell me a little bit about this impulse in your work, how your speakers, that is, often seem to court captivity and then later wonder if it’s possible to get out of such predicaments? And how do we (or your speakers, at least) derive meaning from captivity?

LS: I'm glad you like it. “Self-selected romantic torments” sums up most of my life.

The poem was inspired by the Macy's takeover of Marshall Fields, an iconic department store in Chicago that has the best window displays every holiday season. Maybe “courting captivity,” as you phrase it, is a writerly tendency—it's the desire to be left alone, but more than that, and especially in this poem, the desire to be left alone while also being admired as an object on display. I think my speakers are often trapped: by their names, their ages, their countries, their languages, time. The physical entrapment in this poem definitely mirrors an emotional predicament.

GL: The title of your wonderful chapbook, How to Mend a Broken Heart with Vengeance, offers the thorny suggestion that this collection of poems functions as a process analysis for treating emotional wounds via, um, vengeance. But the opening poem, “Warning,” indicates that recovery—and even survival—is impossible, at least for reader, if not the speaker as well: “what I’m trying to do here is ruin any hope / you may have had of coming out of this alive.” Thus, therapy, sadism and philosophical pessimism are all thematically linked here. So, I wonder if these poems are having some fun with the tenets of Confessional poetry, which usually seeks to examine loss, heartbreak, neuroses, psychological trauma, et al, through personal disclosures for both aesthetic and therapeutic reasons. Is there a satirical dimension to these poems—or at least an ironization of Confessional poetics, a la Mark Halliday or Stephanie Brown? And could you tell me how the concepts of vengeance and healing interact in your work?

LS: That's interesting that you would read them as satirical. I think it would be fair to classify my poems as confessional, genuinely; I'm aiming for emotional honesty throughout, even in narratives that veer off into the absurd.

When I was about thirteen, three important things happened: my mom made me join the cross country team because she thought it would help my asthma and I came in dead last in every race, I had my first major depressive episode, and I started writing poems. Writing poetry is how I make sense of misfortune, and along the way I make up little jokes to temper the bleakness. Like here's a great Tennessee Williams joke: Nobody gets out of life alive. Haha! I'm getting tougher. I go to parties and flex my biceps. But vengeance for me comes down to the act of writing, keeping a record of he said, she said.

Many of these poems were written in the span of a few weeks, to win back the guy who dumped me for a Go-Go dancer.

GL: The poems in How to Mend a Broken Heart with Vengeance enact a Chose Your Own Adventure motif that frequently gives the reader nothing but bad or impossible choices (For example, you sometimes refer readers to pages that don’t exist in this book), unlike the original CYOA books, which let readers rewind death and try again if they make a mistake. Could you tell me about working with this device/conceit and how it affected both your conception and composition of these poems?

LS: By “rewind death,” do you mean start the book from the beginning once you've met an untimely death or fallen into a trap? I can't remember how I came up with the idea originally, but I bought a couple CYOA books at Myopic, my favorite used bookstore in Chicago, and tried reading them at home and didn't have the attention span to actually finish an adventure. This sounds stupid. But they're like the US Weekly of YA books—there's nothing real to hold your attention, you just keep turning pages. It's so formulaic as to be distracting (at least to me, now at my age).

Anyway, I found a way to use this in poems because I find I'm always looking backwards or forwards, and rarely in the present moment. All those “turn to page such-and-such” cues interrupt the narrative to let you know there's a future, maybe a bad or impossible one, but a future nonetheless.

I also liked playing with the idea of infinite regressions in this book, mirrors facing mirrors, stories inside stories. I think once or twice I reference a page number as if my character is telling a poem from inside another book.

GL: Flip over the back of just about any first or second book of poetry these days and you’re bound to find out that the youngish author of said book more than likely lives in New York—and even more-than-likelier, lives in Brooklyn. Hyperbole aside, it seems like New York offers the best and perhaps the worst or environments for young writers. Regarding the former, there’s a wealth of poetic talent and events in the Apple that should make boredom/lack of inspiration impossible. Regarding the latter, Daniel Nester, for example, has written that the affectations and inhumanities of many New York poets present a savage distraction from the real business of writing. In New York, Nester warns, many poets become enchanted with cliques, trends, imitation and meaningless praise, which are dangerous impediments to art: “To be coddled in New York City as a poet is to be killed slowly.” And Joan Didion wrote about the kind of ennui that sets in for young New York writers who continuously, endlessly, fruitlessly “meet” new people without discovering anything new: “I had already met them, always.” So, what are the virtues and difficulties of being a poet in New York? And how does living in New York affect the way you see, and write about, the rest of the world? Have you stayed “too long at the Fair” or does New York continue to reward?

LS: I moved to New York on my nineteenth birthday to be an actress. Then I moved other places, and then I came back. My poems are usually set in the places I miss, so it's hard to write about New York (or Brooklyn) when I'm here, though this has been changing over the past year. Last year, most of what I wrote was about New Mexico, and when I lived in New Mexico, I was working on my novel, which is set outside Chicago.

If you're a poet, does it matter where you live? It's not like being a fisherman. I like living in New York but find I never have enough time to do ten percent of the things I'd like to do here. I do like having a community of friends who are writers, but I also like having friends who work in non-profit, who are choreographers, who teach. When I moved here the first time, to attend an acting conservatory, I found that spending four to eight hours a day with actors made me want to throw myself down a well, but I'm sure I'd feel the same way if I had to be around other writers so much. Luckily, as writers, we're able to do most of what we do at home in our pajamas, and only come out at night, like bats, to go to readings.

I've always been ambitious and competitive, so sometimes living in New York seems to me like an extreme sport, a contest to see who can “cut it.” I want to prove myself here, but I can't imagine staying here forever. I like open skies and crickets and stars and things like that, as much as I like the Brooklyn Bridge at night, roasted almond vendors, and bagels.

GL: What’s new with Leigh Stein these days? What are you reading, writing, thinking? What kind of poems are you working on at the moment? What kind of poet are you trying to become?

LS: I quit the New Yorker to teach drama to 120 K-5th graders in Sheepshead Bay, a predominantly Russian community in Brooklyn named after a fish that looks like a sheep's head. I just finished the sixth draft of my novel, What We Do when You're Not Here.

I've been reading a lot of poetry lately (this seems obvious, but I usually read more plays and novels than poetry collections) Some recent stand outs: Ohio Violence by Alison Stine, Oneiromance by Kathleen Rooney, AWE by Dorothea Lasky, This Clumsy Living by Bob Hicok, Tsim Tsum by Sabrina Orah Mark.

After finishing the novel that took over two years to write, I'm happy to have more time to write poems, and maybe a play. I've been getting into Russian folklore with, and for, my students, scaring them with Baba Yaga. Kids like to be scared. I read them a picture book and they hold their breath and then when I'm done they ask to see the book, so they can read it back to themselves, master their fear. It's really fascinating to watch.

Three Poems by Kristin Hatch

2009-10-15T12:38:00.012-04:00

wolfmouth

under the junkyard sky of this brittle-boned place, hope
was smokier.

cold windshield (or julytime) you there like a monk (never a monk, still)
while a thousand babyponies thought you could grow them manes like library scrolls.
listen. behind your puffup lips, you twinkled (your wrinkles).
in the truck this & that.
in the truck & old goat.

(another ha-ha lolita & the sexpart of your neck – really, an origami crane)
fuzzes out of a car, always is a car in scrapfield town:
ooh baby love, my baby love i need you, oh how i need you

when you smiled big: rows of black tulips where you should have had teeth.

oh my animal thief (loudly – my, my what weak), i’m grown.
bring me w/your grayish wiles, your dote & leave

& the dearlittles, the sweetest hums – tuck them into my cloak,
into this bright-okay as i make a bouquet

& safer, just to keep them safe.

babydoll

that whim of rot all gussied-up
in guts, in guilt. our gasps, our gum-pop
jokes like what. not. we were lullabies
around that yard, that yard.

so bright & sweet, so brightly.
our faces were round, that kind of round, & full
of flour.

we hadn’t yet buried this child (his tiniest head)
unnamed in the garden
behind the garden, stage left.

& our limbs – the buoyancy.of regularlife,
our hands, just balloons.

this is how it was. this is the absolute truth & bone of it.
how teenager & our teenaged shirts &/but ancient
in our inside sky.

there were maps & dogs & shadow plays
(small moons alive, velveteen: our fingers
curved for cup) & so many usual sadnesses:
not enough birds or brick, weathers.

sometimes when he’d sleep,
what worlds shook. we’d touch
his neck & before that globe say home.

hunger haven

in the walk-in, everything is honest
& stacked in clear, plastic tubs. you can think about a bath
of cold noodles or death.

they say, years ago, before i was here,
an old lady was eating soup at table twenty-six (by the window)
& then she just died quiet
& they found her still at closing.
on good days, when it smells like green beans here, i think of her like a lullaby
& our work, our good work, is wholesome.

in the walk-in it smells young like all the things you haven’t done yet.

the guy at table sixteen calls himself a regular, but everyone here eye rolls.
he calls you by name & says it a lot. the consonants ping-pong on his teeth & the vowels
are swear words he likes saying.
one time he told shaya to call him uncle eddie, but his credit card says sam.

in the walk-in, your arms cross in front of you for fake winter.
you can sometimes sit on an empty, upside-down tofu bucket.
this whole place is an animal
& here in the walk-in, you are crouched safely in its white, panicked lung.

uncle e-thing always wants tepid water with a lemon wedge.
once, i forgot about the ice.
i brought him ice & he shouted & waved his hands a bunch
for emphasis. i was scared he didn’t like me & that any second he’d demand shaya
& my face burnt & suddenly i wanted to show him a boob.

in the walk-in, it’s like stagedeath in someone’s arms,
that booming tenor showtune. because sung-to is more comforting
than being the singer for obvious reasons.

you have to cut a whole lemon if it’s lunch and the bar isn’t open yet
& if the bar is open they get mad at you for stealing their lemons. i mean,
it’s just a lemon. you can handle a lemon & the bar really doesn’t care.
it’s just uncle blah-blah & how you’ve already given up
just to say his name & eddie-sam likes that & that one time, how you were.
it makes you blush to think of it so you just shut up & don’t.

in movies, that moment before a buck gets shot & either lives or dies
depending on the storyline.
how its face turns to the gun & hush.
you are crouching in its lung.

Kristin Hatch's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, Black Warrior Review, Cranky, Fence, Forklift, Ohio, The Madison Review, Phoebe, Shampoo and Quarterly West. She lives in San Francisco with Luke and enjoys fog, cooking for nice people, the color orange and rolling like a ball in pilates class.

A Little Place for You and Everything: an interview with Dereck Clemons

2009-09-27T20:09:00.014-04:00

Hollowed out was a little place for you & everything. (from Paragraphs)

Dereck: writing & living in San Francisco w/ wife Wendy Trevino & liking this / finds dance/house music shortens an otherwise long commute / enchiladas, quick & easy to make, just like he's been told / current reads: some Alice Notley collection, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, Dara Wier's Reverse Rapture.

Three Poems by Dereck Clemons

…

One rake across the neck, & not even that deep, was all it took for him to dramatize the rest. A suitcase is cornered. His paragraph unmoved by my kneeling on the bed, weeping into a trash can.

…

Not even if you made me guess your name. Not if these flies took off on back of your bicycle, bound there with the thinnest gold rope. Not if precious baby down floated through my idlest of moments. Not if the lakes coughed up their blood-stained gears. Not if the bandits offered their silky pockets. Not if the waylaid, gutted in the drift of ditch grass & skin-trotting sun, withdrew their gaze. Not if your unicorn came blasted through with a radio dial in its mouth.

…

Or how not to sound like you. Not to sit here, waiting to. False starts. Lies back into traffic. Lies awake in a roomful of exhaust, disgusted at the bubbling crude back of the mouth. Wants plentifully out. Back inside, mistaken, she identifies a match. Piles of this last failure to get ready sooner, make what remains above ground a little longer, inhale less.

GL: A wise man once said: Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. Your beautiful chapbook Paragraphs seems manifestly conscious of the “neutral, composite, oblique” space that writing affords. In these eerie, disjunctive prose poems, subjects appear and disappear seemingly at random; observations, motifs, and narrative gestures stagger momentarily into view before being subsumed by your cryptic and apparently urgent meanderings. I find that few people change the subject as compellingly as you. But I’d like to know why you are always changing the subject. Is it because you look at poetry as a unique opportunity to explore obliquities and lost identities? That is, the medium through which the poet can (advantageously) contemplate his own mysterious absence (his death as an author)? Pray tell.

DC: Hey, thanks. I’m glad for the compelling bit. My hope is to draw the reader into this tight little hug, affectionate-like, that becomes a sort of logical headlock. So readers feel sort of taken advantage of, or molested – logically.

I guess there are all these ways to respond, & I suppose that’s part of the shifts. One thinks on “footage,” rolling footage, multiple channels of information, streamed in simultaneously over 13 monitors, but then as well on exhibitions, installations, displays, poem sentences as “examples” of, what, real-world sentences? Live-action sequences of such? So, chain-reaction pieces? The shock of being in a dressing room with a chain reaction?

So…more to that authorial point, I’d say the Barthes thing is present during composition but more as an assumption than an overriding concern or, I don’t know, investigation. I’m not contemplating my own nor the author’s dissolution into the stuff of poetry-making all that much, but rather the actual spaces opened up by the shifts, by the reader’s memory, which allows for the singular & momentary shift in the first place, these resultant spaces, some of which are quite plain & ordinary & pseudo-narrative, actually, opening — & always opening, at each turn, & hopefully ending likewise, creating an impression of these fields much wider & deeper & darker than the almost offensively ordinary discreet sentence, fields that start small & then blast open in the back of the reader’s head. Because of the headlock. Is my hope.

GL: The title of your collection, Paragraphs, is almost brutally non-descript. It seems to abandon the very notion of titling poems, while at the same time calling attention to the anti-formal impulses of your work. Could you tell me a little bit about the title and how it (dys)functions as a heading for these poems.

DC: Paragraphs is intended to point to the installation-type quality of the work. Here’s the space, the paragraph, that states these sentences belong together, they will add up to more than the sum of their parts, etc., as they’re joined — the reader remembering & (re)contextualizing. The paragraph is that body making the shifts possible since it announces a field of gravity, this meaning — making field of social, cultural law I try to exploit into an observable matter that makes constant crisis attainable.

GL: Reading your poems calls to (my) mind two masters of the non sequitur: Gertrude Stein and Donald Barthelme. On one hand, as with Stein, your poems mischievously undermine the commonplace ‘sense’ of words—that is, both their most immediate connotations and our ordinary experience of their sound and application—; and, as with Barthelme, your poems consistently interrupt our ordinary experience of time, plot, event, etc, by featuring ‘events’ and narrative shifts without presenting a coherent causal chain for those events and shifts. Have these writers indeed influenced your work? And, if the above description of your lineage seems inadequate, what other writers have conspired to influence the sensibility and poetic practice of Dereck Clemons?

DC: But yes, about that causal chain, there’s got to be those, though, or else my fear is the work hangs limp, boring & contains no opportunity to shift a reader into a weird, dark space whatsoever. The causal chain, in Paragraphs, then, isn’t always subject-oriented, or a single subject carried out over numerous sentences, but sometimes based more in idiomatic expectation, or what my historical, socio-etc. moment of language “usually” sounds like. I mean, it can get pretty basic & ordinary, so for example “Martha” is a woman’s name but may be the antecedent for a “he.” That’s a pretty simple if not ludicrous example, I think.

Of course Stein is omnipresent, & Barthelme I haven’t read much – one of his books some time ago – but more than that I think David Foster Wallace’s sentences are the greatest & weigh heavily on me, constantly, telling me to turn here or there. Then there’s Félix Fénéon, speaking of shifts & turns in tight spaces, whose book Novels in Three Lines is just tremendous (a debt of thanks to my photographer friend Scott Polach for that rec.). Getting along, though, you have Rosmarie Waldrop, Bob Perelman (a.k.a. is one of my all-time favorites), Sabrina Orah Mark (just got Tsim Tsum in the mail!!), Karen Volkman, Laynie Brown. They’re brilliant with the prose poem.

GL: You are currently a resident of the great and nearly bankrupt state of California, which is, at present, I would imagine, both a sunny and a turbulent place to live. What has California done to your poems? And, although there’s nothing resembling a mimetic representation of ‘place’ in your work, I wonder if you also could tell me how your sense of particular environments, and experience(s) of place and landscape in general, impact your work?

DC: I think the consensus is that moving to any heavily urban area affords a tremendous opportunity to refocus attention away from the domestic & semi-cloistered & toward all this traffic of stimuli - it seems true for me as well. Notions of convergence, of compromise, of one space being inhabited by another, equally valid space – it’s all there, palpable & hypnotic. Plus we’ve met a great bunch of writers out here, as well. It’s great.

GL: Contemporary poetry is becoming increasingly cyber-ethereal these days. Some of your poems that were published in the now-defunct Kulture Vulture, have disappeared following the expiration of said journal. This vanishing seems to epitomize the nature of poetry on the Web, which offers us seemingly “limitless opportunity” (according to the contemporary proverb) to post and publish, while simultaneously featuring an erratic shelf life and a problematic metaphysic to boot. I’d like to get your take on poetry’s migration to the Web, since it’s offered you both opportunity and privation.

DC: Blast! The Kulture Vulture thing, yes. That’s how it goes. I’m interested in how we adapt to the Internet, how we change our expectations of what’s expected & valuable, what’s acceptably permanent or impermanent, what we think the lifespan of some production or other should be — how all these feelings we have will adjust into our technology. Cyborg stuff. Of course, online journals will only get more, what, established? permanent? common? as the Internet continues to grow into this visceral space we spend our lives in. Maybe this is an opportunity for poetry to actually develop something new that sculpture / the visual arts haven’t grown into quite yet — this adaptation that’s taking place on the Web.

That’s the constant flux of the Internet as-is, but too there’s the notion that we’re in this period of expansion, & that before too long we’ll have a hardening that occurs as more regulations are instated & the technology develops to offer a greater sense of permanence. Of course, you’ll still have to pay to operate a site, I imagine. Who knows, maybe Google will own everything by then, including our poems – I’m sorry, the intellectual property our poems depend on to maintain a state of “having been published.”

GL: What’s knew with Dereck Clemons these days? Sparking faculty revolts in the Sunshine State? Drafting manifestos? Writing new strange and beautiful poems? Give us the scoop…

DC: Hey! The UC Faculty Walkout is fast-approaching. I don’t know what to expect. I think it’s vital that demonstration remain active in this country. People are claiming that other sectors of the workforce are also having to deal with the weight of this downturn & why should UC faculty members expect anything different – which is just a completely horrific line of reasoning – that because several groups are going through hardships, no single group should actively demand accountability & transparency from its higher-ups? Here’s a link for those interested to get some context & here’s another if people want to find out more info regarding how to throw their support behind the walkout. It’s strange. I’ve been working as an adjunct English Comp. professor for over 3 years now, & even as a sort of outsourced labor for UC Davis, & I think this is all going to come back around to people like me, somehow. I mean, one of the colleges I’ve worked for has now turned my old position into an unpaid “internship” – so messed up – so I’m watching closely.

But yeah, hopefully pretty & strange. A nice performance Re poems. That’s really it, I imagine. Well, I just finished this ms. News Organization, of which Paragraphs is a portion, a more concentrated sort of demonstration-oriented portion while the surrounding structures provide more breath & aesthetics-oriented language. These newer poems (Paragraphs became 1-year old this past August) explore the language of reportage, of the daily news of Arts & Politics & Human Interest stories, among other language & convergent-fields-of-info demonstrations. Yay. Thanks for the questions!!! Hello everybody!!!

Three Poems by Brooks Winchell

2009-09-19T19:19:00.007-04:00

Out of There

I barely lifted a finger.

It seemed so

right there

(being with everyone),

and I never considered

being gone.

However, looking back now,

I clearly see

there was an emptiness.

What Is To Come

As there are so many possibilities,

we are all, arguably,

concerned at first with what’s

out of the question:

How likely is that to come?  

Arriving at the End (I Suspect)

I will never be there,

or I absolutely

would have arrived earlier:

Certainly, that time is past,

but as you can see,

I am still continuing.  

Brooks Winchell lives in Boxford, Massachusetts with his wife, Meredith, and their new daughter, Ella. He received an MA in English from UMass Boston and an MFA from Lesley University. Currently, he teaches literature and writing at Suffolk University and writing at Cambridge College.

What Is Orphan in Me: An interview with Kevin Goodan

2009-08-28T07:24:00.008-04:00

I hear the river, and your hand
Brushes against what is orphan in me (“Winter wheat is shorn”).

Kevin Goodan was raised in Montana, and fought forest fires for many years. He attended the University of Montana and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His first book, In The Ghost-House Acquainted, was published by Alice James Books in 2004, and received the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for 2005. Alice James Books recently published his second collection, Winter Tenor, in the spring of 2009. He currently lives in Idaho...where he does battle with ruffians.

GL: Your first book, In the Ghost-House Acquainted, exhibits both pastoral eloquence and psychological intensity. Reading and rereading those wonderful poems, I often think that you—because your poems feature so many breathtaking moments of solitude—have equal parts Frost and Rilke in your poetic blood. Both of these poets are obsessed with solitude but in radically different ways: Frost sometimes uses his woodland excursions as a temporary deliverance from society and its confusions, while Rilke seems to approach solitude as the necessary and fundamental condition of the poet—the state of existence that gives rise to epiphanic vision and angelic concourse. So, if these simplifications hold (any) water, which poetic strategy has been of greater use to or influence on your work? That is, do you view solitude as the poet’s necessary state of being that gives rise to privileged artistic experience? Or do you find that pastoral solitude offers an imaginative haven from social or urban living?

KG: I can only speak about what kind of solitude is vital to my life, and my work. I cannot really say what is necessary for all writers. I know some writers who need to write in the presence of people… malls, and the like. I, myself have a long-standing relationship with solitude. Solitude allows me the conduit by which to engage the world, to see it and know it, on my own terms. It allows me the stillness with which to hear what is living beneath the din of the modern world. Here is an example… I lived for a time in a smallish cabin out in the woods of Massachusetts, and one day, in this cabin, I heard a loud scratching sound that seemed to be coming from inside the wall in the furthest corner of the cabin. I followed the sound, prepared to deal with a mouse, but what I discovered stunned my friend cooking dinner in the small kitchen. That sound was actually a carpenter ant crawling on a brown paper bag. Would have I heard that sound with that much intensity if I lived in New York, or Boston? I’m just not made to live in close proximity to large groupings of people. I’ve tried a few times, and each time was a failure. So, to answer your question, I feel I reside more strongly with Rilke, though, after I interact with people, I need Frost’s deliverance.

GL: The poems of In the Ghost-House Acquainted are, as the title suggests, beautifully obsessed with the phenomena of absence and disappearance: “Does vanish mean / to arrive elsewhere? A place perhaps / to flourish, to withstand?” (“If I’m Not a Garden) Your speakers spend a lot of time cataloguing natural and agrarian images but often fail, Romantically, to find an abiding link between self and landscape—except for the final and troubling link between the body and the earth, as illustrated here: “Plant me in your soil she said / and I will become your earth.” (“Losing Something Important”). Thus, the observed world seems to continually remind the speaker(s) of your poems both that he is not what he sees and also that he won’t be seeing forever—so that his visionary presence is ultimately ghostly. I’d like you to talk a little bit about the emotional or existential precursors to these poetic sentiments. Do you often feel ghostly in your life and work outside of poetry? If so, does poetry help you to corral or objectify these feelings? Does poetry, for example, offer you a sense of permanence (by creating something that will outlive you) or does it give you a new and different experience of absence and loss?

KG: When I wrote most of In the Ghost-House Acquainted, two things were happening: 1) I was trying to cope with the loss of people close to me, and 2) I was living on a farm in Massachusetts in very destitute circumstances. I have a lung condition, and at that time I not could afford health insurance, so I ‘d been living sans medication for roughly 5 years, and it was taking its toll. I couldn’t breathe really, and what I could breathe was getting less and less. I remember one night in the middle of a poem, I stopped, panting, and asked God to give me just two more years (which seemed extravagant at the time) so I could at least see the manuscript become a book. Then, I said, you can have me, as you must, but just let me see this through, so I can say that I’ve been in this world. So not only is/are the speaker(s) of the poems haunted by the missing, but also by the impending mortality of the selfsame. Luckily, I’ve been granted more time than what I pleaded for. More time, a second chance at love, a first chance at marriage. I’m not sure if this answers your question.

GL: Your second book, Winter Tenor, features many of the same prosodical attributes as your first book: anaphora, catalogues, short lines, punctuation play. But, unlike your first book, the poems in Winter Tenor have no titles—or, like Dickinson’s poems, their titles are taken from the first lines. This structure suggests thatWinter Tenor should perhaps be read as a book-length poem. So, to what extent do you or did you conceive of this volume as a book-length poem? And if so, how was the composition process different for Winter Tenor than it was for In The Ghost-House Acquainted?

KG: Winter Tenor came quickly upon the heels of the poems that became the first book. And they came very rapidly, within the span of a few months, often a few poems a day. They came so rapidly that I almost could not keep up… initially I thought that I would go back at some point and give them titles, but as I went on, I began to see the poems as being of a whole. And, I wanted the reader to be thrown into each poem without a buffer, as I was while writing them. Some of the poems in the first book were ten years old by the time the book was put together. So, I view Winter Tenor as a strange gift. It feels to me that when I wrote it I was writing beyond my capacities. Or maybe I was simply taking dictation from “the source,” as Jack Spicer alludes to in his lectures. Though I think he mentions Martians as being the source of poetry, which, well…. Spicer should’ve known that they gave up on poetry eons ago, and turned their attentions to perfecting the crop-circle.

GL: The poems of Winter Tenor are quietly haunted by violence—by the violence inherent in the slaughter and subjugation of animals, for example, though there is an almost cosmic violence that your poems call attention to as well. The speaker of the final poem in this volume asks: “Will you go as gently to the knives?” which made me look over my shoulder. The poem “Sudden shock of field-surge after rain” describes the “the blade [slicing] across the neck” of a Cheviot lamb. And the first and perhaps most mysterious poem in Winter Tenor ends with a mare bleeding onto the snow after a “punch” from her human keeper. Are you using the master/bondsman relationship between people and animals to think and speak about the nature of power and violence in human beings? Or are your depictions of and meditations on violence more locally confined to the way humans interact with animals and the natural world?

KG: The universe was created (so the theorists tell us) by one massive act of violence. Therefore, violence is an essential ingredient to existence. We cannot get away from it no matter how much we want to “give peace a chance.” I think the authors of the Old Testament understood this. Their God is not a warm and fuzzy god. Violence is as much the cosmic condition as it is the human condition. I believe that any relationship has undertones of violence, be it human/human, or the relationships of animal husbandry. Because I tend to believe that the interactions between a farmer and his animals are often more true and raw, more integral than relating to humans, the violence tends to be more visible, uncloaked, and yet, sometimes no less heartbreaking.

GL: Given the realities of melting glaciers and ice caps, species extinction, and the violent transformation of climate and landscape, I wonder what you make of the role of the pastoral in our current historical moment. How is the very notion of ‘the rustic’ changing right now, and how do those changes affect the way you write about rustic settings? Also: Is every pastoral poem now an elegy for the disappearance or transformation of the natural world, including the Massachusetts farmlands and Montana wilderness about which you so often write?

KG: Right now, in this country, there are more people living in urban areas than in rural areas… this is something new in the history of our nation, however, with the current and ongoing financial downturn we are in, I would not be surprised to see that new trend change as people return to self-sustaining methods of living—gardens, and so forth.

In the places where I’ve lived mostly, the idea of the pastoral and the rustic are simply the ways in which people have to live their lives. When I mention to people in Boston that I do not and have not lived with a television or radio in my house, surely they think I’m odd. But in Montana, or in rural western Massachusetts I’m living pretty much just like everyone else. Which is to say impoverished. Where I grew up, only rich people have cable. Anyhow, I think we will see people living simpler lives out of necessity, because it is being realized that the current mode of existence is unsustainable, for humans and for the environment. As for poetry, I tend to believe, and always have, that every poem written is an elegy. Even if the poem is written in present tense, the thing that triggered the poem is no longer there, at least not in the condition that it was when it sparked a poem, whether it be a piece of conversation, a wheel-barrow, or a face in the crowd at the metro. Certainly, the only constant is change, pastoral or otherwise. Did you know that in Icelandic there are 300 words for weather? And Iceland has a population of 300,000. There are places where the mode of the pastoral is still vital and thriving.

GL: What’s wrong with contemporary poetry? What’s right with it?

KG: I don’t know if I could say that there’s anything “wrong” with contemporary poetry. There are aspects of the current literary world that I don’t engage in, simply because they don’t interest me, but I don’t think that should be the case for everyone. I do read very widely, and I admire the diversity of voices that are present at this point in time in American poetry. I hope it continues.

GL: So what’s new with Kevin Goodan these days? Working on a new book? An epic autobiographical poem about fighting fires, for example? I hope so. What’s the scoop? What’s cooking?

KG: Well, I just moved from the corner of 1st and Crackwhore in Lewiston to a five acre farm a few miles outside of Moscow, Idaho. So, I get to have my barns, my little house, my woodstove. And, it is grain season, so I am watching machinery tread the fields between storms. I love the way the air smells here this time of year, and the qualities of light that exist on the Palouse. And I love the fact that I don’t have any neighbors slashing my tires or trying to run me over because I had the balls to call the cops on them. But, those days are done. Things are quiet. I am enjoying the newly married life, and recently returned from the good old-fashioned honeymoon in Iceland. I do have a manuscript I am slowly, leisurely putting together. In high school, I worked in a slaughterhouse, so this seems to be the underpinning (thus far) of a majority of the work. But, that is always subject to change. And who knows, maybe the work will turn its eye directly toward fire fighting. We will have to see.

My Very Me: An Interview with Nate Pritts

2009-08-15T08:20:00.009-04:00

… this tremendousness,
this unutterable and inexplicable tremendousness

that fairly quivers both inside & outside my very me.

(“This Tremendousness I Can’t Talk About”)

Nate Pritts is the author of two books of poetry – Sensational Spectacular (BlazeVOX, 2007) and Honorary Astronaut (Ghost Road Press, 2008) – with a third, The Wonderfull Yeare, due out in early 2010. The editor and founder of H_NGM_N, Nate teaches poetry at the Downtown Writers Center/YMCA in Syracuse, NY. Find him online at www.natepritts.com.

GL: The poems in your second book, Honorary Astronaut, are passionately cosmological. Plus, they’re clever, companionable, and funny at the same time. You (and by ‘you,’ I mean the speaker(s) of your poems) often present yourself as a kind of butterfingered metaphysician: “Again & again I fumble / with the cosmic thread,” who, despite his best efforts, continually falls short of his philosophical quest. Yet…this failure seems to keep the poems energized and thrusting forward. For example, you write, “I am / the thing lost and the thing looking for it.” Could you tell me a little bit about what it is like to be the “the thing lost and the thing looking for it”? And why does this state of inevitable loss, of self-missing-ness, give rise to poems that attempt to “rocket toward discovery” of self and cosmos alike?

NP: Well, I think you’re left with two choices – you can sit around lamenting things, sort of griping & complaining – or you can put this big goofy grin on your face because the whole wide world is pretty damn amazing. And if you’re a normal human being, you probably never hit one or the other pole & instead spend your days kind of sliding between them. I’ve resolved, in my poems at least to give reign more to the latter, even when I don’t totally feel it or when the ostensible subject of the poem would seem to be counter to that emotional range – fake it ‘til you make it. Which is itself a rhetorical stance in a lot of my poems – the speaker sort of hoping for the best, amping himself up & everyone within earshot because then maybe the whole group of them will be ecstatic enough to be worthy of the spectacular things this world is offering us.

A lot of my poems have, at their center, an implicit sense of constructing the self out of words & out of sensations, thoughts, riffs, feelings built out of an essential distrust of experience, or events, as an indicator of anything. So the poem itself is the rocket & the ride begins when the poem starts.

GL: Your poems are full of sudden and unequivocal disclosures, “I live my whole life inside, walking / as carefully as possible to lessen my chances of a fall,” which make your speakers seem lonely and eager for company, as though they have just moments to tell someone, some stranger, their life story. I could imagine these poems—so conversational and urgent—being spoken to someone on a bus ride, on a first date, or in an elevator. They seem, in short, to take advantage of the fact that someone is, momentarily, within earshot and ready to listen. Could you tell me why so many of your poems take the shape of such candid emergencies?

NP: I really like that characterization. My poems often develop out of an intense desire to blurt something out, something that is valuable & necessary. To me, the moment of the poem implies a couple of things – things I take for granted & so don’t even really think about: 1) that there is something really important that needs to be said & 2) that someone is listening but could potentially stop listening if the substance of what is being said is not delivered in a compelling enough manner. This ties into my feeling about subject matter, which is that basically the poem itself is the subject. My role as speaker isn’t to get you to care about the ostensible subject of my poem (holidays at grandmother’s house, or the sound of a certain kind of music); that stuff is & should just be fodder for the poem itself, hurtling forward, trying to get the reader to open up their eyes to the moments of the poem’s happening. To me, I think there’s no bigger emergency than the fact that birds are flying overhead & we’re all still walking around grumbling, or that the big yellow sun is shining down on us & we persist in dopey moodiness. One of my poems says something about how we’re all having epiphanies every day – the big crisis is that not every one is truly experiencing themselves, or allowing themselves to be changed. Or sharing.

GL: There seems to be a lot of New York School in your poems, in that you use what seems to be the speakers’ immediate surroundings and experiences as a source of poetic kinesis and inspiration: “My first name is Nate. / My last name is Pritts. I’m having a wonderful time.” Thus, the reader often feels as though she is witnessing the creative genesis of the poem—feels, that is, as though the poem is being written right before her eyes. At the same time, there is an emotional force in these poems that’s more personal than Personim: “I am not afraid to die. I am afraid to die / before I tell you what I’m thinking & what I’m thinking/ is that everything decays and crumbles…” But the fear of death often shuts us up. How and why, then, do you use these deep fears and anxieties to build a poetry of such velocity, volubility and animated engagement with the present moment?

NP: I call this “processual poetics” – a poetics of process. You’re right that I’m heavily influenced by New York School poetics, which I would define as inherently social & public & demonstrative. Berrigan talking out loud to himself & whoever would listen, Schuyler talking just to you in an intimate way, Koch clowning in front of the room. But the other part of the surface mix, for me, are the styles often lumped together as Black Mountain poetics – though for me it’s much more centered on Olson, Duncan & Eigner – poetry that I think of as inherently remonstrative in nature. And I guess my deeper sense of “where I’m coming from” is channeled through Coleridge.

But, to me, the end of your question answers itself: when faced with deep fears & anxieties, how else can you face it but with something so wound up & charged with life?

GL: As an editor for a successful on-line literary journal, you must be achingly aware of the trends and/or shifting currents in contemporary American poetry. Of those trends/currents/etc, which do you find the most fascinating and appealing? The most aggravating? And how do such editorial observations affect your work as a poet?

NP: I receive as submissions & read in other journals lots of poems that mimic other poems – taking all the surface & none of the substance. But what I love about poetry is its ability to package up the sensibility of another person & deliver it to me – as an intellectual or emotional or linguistic or poetical knock out blow. I found that I was reading a lot of poems that were competent – the kind of poems you couldn’t find much wrong with but where certainly nothing was really crucially right either. This is when I talk about lamenting the professionalization of poetry. But the thing is reading so much poetry keeps me honest – I guess I’m able to see the bluff & bluster of others very clearly so when I go to write my own poems (& let’s say I get to a moment where I want to reach for a zany image) I make sure that what’s in there is earned & necessary.

GL: If I told you that ten years from now you could either become the Poet Laureate of the U.S., or that H_NGM_N would become the most widely read literary journal in America, which outcome would you choose? And, for five points extra credit, why?

NP: To me, this question comes down to a consideration of influence. And I would much rather imagine a poetic landscape that is open to the kinds of diversity I hope H_NGM_N fosters, than a poetic landscape dominated by me. Actually, I think I’m going to write a fake Nate Pritts poem – the way an MFA student in the future might.

GL: How is Nate Pritts becoming something or someone different than the man who wrote Honorary Astronaut? Will the Nate Pritts of the future ever be a real astronaut, for example? Or in other words, what new and exciting things are you reading, writing and/or thinking about these days?

NP: I’ve been working outside of academia for most of the past three years – in advertising as a writer & web developer, & as a tech editor. I think my view of things – which you characterized as that of a “butterfingered metaphysician” falling short – is being tempered by one of extreme order, mechanization & awe. I think the earlier Nate Pritts didn’t trust emotions because they were inexplicable. I think now Nate Pritts feels like even the inexplicable is explicable but is still worth gasping about. My new favorite quote is “Everything is a file” – something that old assembly language programmers thrown back & forth.

My new book, The Wonderfull Yeare, grew out of an experiment, really. I had written all these overwrought emotionally symbolic poems under the influence of Bly, Wright & Stafford in the mid 90s. I found that, when I returned to them, I could see the emotion but not totally feel it – I didn’t even know what I was writing about in some cases. So the poems in The Wonderfull Yeare are collage cut & paste versions of these earlier poems – my present day reconstructions – hoping to invest them with new happinesses & sadnesses.

I’m also diving back into Coleridge & Clare, lots of contemporary poetry, & spending lots of time reading about, & looking at pictures of, what people in the 1950s, 1960s & 1970s thought the future was going to look like.

The Opposite of Kiss: Three Original Poems and an Interview with David Gruber

2009-05-28T20:46:00.024-04:00

…and bodies eroding
the only home I’d call a body

whispering out from darkened corners,
offering the opposite of kiss.

David Gruber is a graduate of Bard College, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of Denver. He holds a PhD in English, and has taught at the United States Military Academy and Bard College. He lives in Rhinebeck, New York.

Three Poems from David Gruber’s Sleeper’s Republic.

Biedermeier

And turning towards night
whispers reports of failures and losses
from the front that blacken
all the playful beaches hot
with nude whispers continually

walking long streets
distant invasions awake

Transport

I had been that ghost wavering
on a footbridge. They cut off my head
once they broke my neck once
once they pulled my arms
tender from their sockets.

   I gulped down my last breaths
which were epistles addressed to you
from the trash-strewn foot of the gallows.

I soiled my pants going up that ladder.

After, I dreamed of being in your belly
when they split it open and emerging
fully-grown and blood-slick,
swinging my son by his hair,
   flesh to bludgeon flesh,

blowing steam from my nose and ateeter
at the edge of the earth a new heaven of stars
spread open above me as the body of a woman, the body of a child:

as we are folded in our blankets,
   as we are rebels.

An Instant Heaven

Truly, these are dog days, and they try us to our limit.
But for the moment it is raining, and you are looking out
into the haze that has risen from the ground, and
another day has left dry petals in our teacups.
And the serfs are still idle in the fields. We’ve had some good
times, of course, but nothing like what I promised,
or was promised. Me, a lousy country doctor,
and you, a lousy country wife, kings of what little
we can see from the open doorway. The tractors are due
to arrive any minute, to wrap garlands around
our necks and lead us off to the tower, or maybe
the scaffold. It could be worse.

Our bad habits never really disappear but are reabsorbed,
distorted and transformed, revolutionized, born
disheveled and looking like tramps, while they wait for the day
when the low vault up the ladder again,
striking their heads on the rafters,
and hang those wreaths with the streamers that dangle
down almost to the barn floor.
The kids love it, dressed in their white pinafores.

Your face is wet with tears or snow, carrying the wooden mantle across
your shoulders as I hold my tie collection up out of the mud.
I saw you once, laughing with a gaggle of girls
behind the tavern, and I thought: “Here’s trouble.”
Pack your bags, my love, it is time to throw open the windows –
our fairy lights have burnt out but they’ve restarted
the electricity in the city. I’ll put on my dilapidated cap
and we will play at peasants again under the willow.

Interview

GL:: The title of your book, Sleeper’s Republic, brings to mind a number of fascinating associations. On one hand, sleep offers the solace of non-being, “the balm of woe,” etc, during which the mind can rest, forget and repair. On the other hand, sleep presents a state of imaginative intensity—dreams—that the poet depends on for his or her art. For example, this anecdote from Breton: A story is told according to which Saint-Pol-Roux, in times gone by, used to have a notice posted on the door of his manor house in Camaret, every evening before he went to sleep, which read: THE POET IS WORKING. Sleep is also (I’ve run out of hands now) a preview of death, the site of nightmares, and in general a routine but deranged and intimate encounter with self. I’ll stop there for now so I could finally ask you a question. What kind of sleep is it that dominates Sleeper’s Republic and obsesses you as a poet? And how does this Sleeper’s Republic (the republic you construct in these poems) parallel, distort, reflect and/or refract the ways in which we (sad humans) organize socially and politically to form our republics in the waking world?

DG: I’ve never been an easy sleeper; it seems that all my life I’ve struggled to find my way into sleep – often lying awake for hours at a time – and then when I do I am often awoken many times each night, whether by the sounds of the night, dreams, or even my own tossing and turning. As a result, I often wake with lingering threads of dreams and nightmares intermingling with the returning sensations of the “real world.” I think that this kind of moment, when “awake” means being awake both to the world and to the world of dreams, has shaped many of the poems in SR. This is the kind of awakeness where intimations of desires and denials, pleasures and sorrows, life and death, all seem to co-exist. I suspect that, at least for me, these are the moments when we can know the truest things about ourselves, and often the most surprising things as well.

And I often think that those true and surprising things can tell us something important about the way that we relate not only to ourselves but to, as you put it, our social and political republics (in the sense of commitments made and obligations incurred through our own choices and actions). Last year, I was teaching Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, a book that I had [originally] read during my adolescence; it made an impression on me then but my memory [of the book/work] had faded over the years. While reading the book, I re-encountered the passage, part of which eventually became one of the epigraphs of Sleepers’ Republic, in which Thoreau has this great pun on sleepers and sleepers, the track-ties of the railroad against which he was railing as an example of the way that the individual submits himself to the commercial needs of the state without enough concern for his own experience. He writes: “And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.” And this passage threw a sudden light over what I had been trying to think through in this collection, the way that our dreams and ideals make possible a quiet subversion of the “way things are” in the world, not only in our relationships toward the state, which I think is of course vitally important, but in the way that our sense of the possibilities of relating to other individuals are also shaped. The question of whether my book parallels or distorts our social/political relationships, well, I’m not sure I’m the right person to answer that question, but those are the questions I’m trying to ask in this book, and I’d be interested to know what my readers might think.

GL: A number of the poems in this book reminded me in certain ways of Ashbery’s shorter pieces. For example, poems such as “As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat,” “Street Musicians,” and “At North Farm” seemed to inform such Gruber short poems as “Biedermeier” and “Bildungsroman.” Like much of Ashbery’s work, these Gruber poems feature allusive/elusive titles, associative leaps and nuanced and even obscure declarative observations about places and things the reader can only see in fragments. Yet your poems seem sculpted, less concerned with “tr[ying] each thing” and spontaneous bursts; your poems appear to pursue their own hallucinatory scenes and meditations with meticulous care. Could you discuss the ways in which Ashbery, whether as a teacher or a poet, has influenced you?

DG: Ashbery has been very important for me, and I would be remiss if I didn’t begin by remarking on his generosity to me as well – not only as a teacher, when he helped me feel like I could actually do this (write poems), but obviously his willingness to write a beautiful blurb for the back cover of the book as well. I think my poetry has always been a little more, as you say, sculptural, less improvisational, than Ashbery’s, which perhaps just says something about the differences between us as individuals, and about what interests us in poetry. That’s not to say I haven’t written my fair share of (thankfully unpublished) poems in the mode of Ashbery. I also wanted to be able to achieve what he has achieved in his poetry and understand what makes it work. In fact, for many years I wanted nothing more [than] to write a great long or book-length poem as Ashbery had done, and so I produced a number of incredibly boring, twenty-plus-page pieces.

But I recall, maybe about six or seven years ago, reading an interview with Ashbery that was collected in Michael Palmer’s edited volume Code of Signals, in which Ashbery is reported as saying something to the effect that, if one really values a poet, one tries not to write like that poet, but to write away from that poet, because what one really values is that poet’s uniqueness, and so the logical thing is to cultivate one’s own uniqueness as well. And that was really freeing for me. I think, though, that my titles have kept something of Ashbery’s spirit (I am really damning myself here, I think) in part because I love the way that they set up a tension between the expectations of the reader and what actually follows in the poem, and the way that they point towards interpretations and meanings that the poem itself then tries to dance around or escape.

I think that, yes, I have ended up coming back to Ashbery’s short poems as well, perhaps for some of the same reasons I see that I’m still influenced by Ashbery’s titles, but in my reading of Ashbery, his poems are just as meticulous and deliberate (if I may adopt your term of, I hope, praise) as mine are. That is, I’ve always thought that Ashbery means exactly what he says, in the way that I try to mean exactly what I say too. So I guess that’s something else I’ve taken from my experience of his work.

GL: In your beautiful mostly-prose poem, “The Fair Republic,” the speaker appears to mourn the fall of a certain utopia: “The ideal city we vowed to build trampled by rioters / to reach the last toy on the shelf, the first motor off the back of the truck.” That is, your ‘city on the hill’ suffers from physical and moral chaos brought about by consumerist obsessions and/or possibly a faltering of resources. Beyond this collapse the speaker looks forward to the “borderless day” and the “zone of disappearance” of the future. Is this poem a snapshot of our tottering zeitgeist, a dream-hymn to the decline of empire and terrible days to come?

DG: Ha! Well, I’m certainly happy to accept that it might be a “dream-hymn to the decline of empire and terrible days to come.” That is, if the poem can be read in this way, then I think it has succeeded in being more than an artifact of the moment in which I wrote it. And this, it seems to me, is what poetry should do: speak as much to the moment in which it is read as that in which it was written, to achieve an intimacy with its reader rather than clinging to that with its writer. And I also welcome the idea that it is a comment on the chaos that our consumer culture causes for us poor men and women.

GL: Your poem “Instructions for Antigone” draws language “from the speeches of Osama Bin Laden, Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s The Social Contract, and The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States,” according to your notes. The language from these texts intermingles with a triptych of cinematic portraits, moving, first to last, from Antigone to Creon to a panicked Chorus that stands “in the middle of the street yelling into a cell phone” following an un-named but all too familiar calamity. These portraits are novel but not entirely re-imagined. The somersaulting ruin of the Oedipus Cycle bears down on contemporary America, where the integrity of the social contract is threatened externally by terrorists and internally by “soft and weak” politicians and executives who mismanage our calamities. The poem concludes with the now famous and haunting weather report from the morning of 911: “Tuesday dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the east…weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey.” This breathtaking poem forms, I think, a kind of lyrical keystone to Sleeper’s Republic, which tries awfully hard to wake up from the ‘nightmare of history.’ Could you tell me why you sought to blend these texts with a retelling of Antigone? What is it that you found so intriguing about connecting those Theban ruins with our own?

DG: I’ve always been very interested in the story of Antigone, and, re-reading Sophocles’ play a few years ago, I started to think about the way that my sympathies for the characters had shifted, or had become more complex, in response to the rise of terrorism – both the kind that comes from outside, as with our September 11th attacks, and that which emerges home-grown, as in the British July 7th attacks – and our at times misplaced, at times correct, reactions to it. I found myself much more sympathetic to Creon than I’d ever been before, as a kind of gray bureaucrat who gets the responsibility of state thrust upon him by the abdication of Oedipus, and has to deal with this kid, Antigone, who refuses to be bound by the laws of the secular state in favor of familial bonds, which are underwritten by supernatural diktat. Obviously this is in part a deliberate misreading of the play, but I didn’t set out to simply translate the story into contemporary terms, but to rethink it in such a way that it might say something about our own moment. So I found in the tension between loyalty to the law of the state and loyalty to a supernatural “law” that there were things I wanted to think about, and kind of “recasting” Antigone in this way made sense to me.

I looked to the texts of bin Laden (for the passages focusing on Antigone) and Rousseau (for Creon) as a way to think about the kind of language that might inform the way that these figures might speak to themselves about the world that they live in, and the reactions and motivations they might have for their actions. I was also, right before I wrote the poem, reading a collection of Brecht’s essays on theater, and came across his notion of providing a kind of director’s instruction book, containing notes on staging and photographs of sets, costumes, even scenes, which could be sent around to theaters that wanted to put on performances of his plays, and it struck me as an interesting structural idea for the poem; thus we get these scenes that I see as simultaneously frozen and moving, in some way. I also find it satisfying that there is a sonnet-like logic to the poem as well.

GL: How long did you spend working on this book? How did your sensibilities change, if it all, while you were putting this book together? How different is the David Gruber of today than the (slightly) younger David Gruber who first started writing Sleeper’s Republic?

DG: The book came together over a period of about eight years, although there are only maybe three or four poems that have survived that many re-workings of the collection in all that time, and themselves have been revised quite drastically (so maybe it is better to consider it younger than eight years, I don’t know). I’d say that the majority of the poems were written or significantly revised during the period 2004-2007, and the idea for the collection, or what makes the collection cohere, came to me during the 2004 Democratic national convention. It was while listening to John Kerry give his convention speech that I actually started writing lines from what would eventually become the poem “Ingathering of the Exiles.” That’s not to say it all came together as a collection right at that moment, but that I started to think more seriously about the questions that motivate many of these poems at that time. And I hope what comes across in the collection is that I’m not really interested in the bien-pensant liberal responses to the questions of politics and polity that were raised during the Bush era, and which seem to permeate much of the discourse about politics among practicing artists right now, but rather of really thinking about how those questions matter to the way that we experience even mundane things. I’m not sure how much my sensibilities actually changed during this time, aside from the inevitable changes that come with getting older and thinking more seriously about perspectives other than the ones one is surrounded by in the stereotypically-liberal grad-school milieu, but I do think that if you look closely enough at these poems as a collection, you can probably find evidence of a desire to speak to a wider audience than I had been considering before.

GL: Over the past twenty to thirty years there has been an extraordinary proliferation of MFA programs around the country. During the past ten years or so the Internet has allowed writers and editors to launch all manner of web publication with little to no cost aside from donated labor. Blogs (my apologies) run rampant. Are we drowning in poetry? Or is poetry thriving?

DG: Both, I think. We are both drowning in poetry as it is simultaneously thriving in the corners and spaces that it carves out for itself. I suppose this is in part a survival mechanism, since I tend to agree with the new-old saw that only poets are reading poetry these days. Of course, on the face of it that is not at all true, since plenty of non-poets read poetry, they just tend not to read contemporary poetry unless it falls into the Irish epiphanic-lyrical tradition, the American confessional mode, or else is translated from Spanish. But it is obvious that there is a dwindling readership for a serious-minded (though often humorous) contemporary American poetry, and so I think that is where web publication and blogs provide a tremendous service, even while at the same time inundating us with poetry that goes largely unread.

It’s hard to tell if the volume of poetry published either in print or electronically at this moment is much different in proportion to previous eras, though; I suspect that there has always been a great glut of poetry about, and it simply takes time for the important stuff to find its way to the top of the pile. Where I think we might differ from previous eras, however, is that with contemporary professional poets seemingly less interested in addressing a readership outside of the poetry world, we might not end up with anyone who is all that interested in searching out the best of what is being written now. Though no doubt there will be plenty of English doctoral students around in thirty years who will want to resurrect some of our criminally overlooked talent.

GL: So what’s new with David Gruber these days? Are you continuing to work in much the same way as years past? Embarking on new and zany lyrical experiments? Are you out to reinvent poetry? To destroy it? Oh, and by the way, what is the opposite of kiss?

DG: Like everyone these days I am busy worrying about the economy and employment, which I’ll admit hasn’t been all that conducive to writing. But fortunately I managed to finish the bulk of a new collection of poems before it all hit, and I’ve been keeping myself busy with editing and revising those poems over the last few months. The new collection is quite a bit different, in my opinion, from Sleepers’ Republic, or at least I’ve attempted to strike out in a somewhat different direction both stylistically and in terms of the questions that interest me in these new poems. I’m excited about it, honestly, although I’m not sure that anyone will describe the poems as zany.

As for reinventing/destroying poetry, I suppose the answer I should give is “both,” but in reality it’s probably “neither.” Though if one wants to be philosophical about it, every poem both reinvents and destroys everything that has come before (didn’t Frost say something to that effect?). My aim, I suppose, is to remake poetry in my own image. And a handsome image it is, I promise you.

And the opposite of kiss? Again, I think I’ll leave answering that one to the readers of this book.