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

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.

The Angel in the Mirror: An Interview with Jenny Barber

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.

To Make It Matter Again: An Interview with Michelle Taransky

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 (Soma)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).

The Etymology of Spruce: an interview with Joyce WIlson

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.

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

............................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.

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

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!