A Conversation with Laura Walker

This week, THERMOS is running a feature of Laura Walker’s poetry, assembled by Cassie Donish. Today’s installment is an interview, conducted by e-mail in the summer of 2014. Please check back tomorrow for some new poetry.

Cassie Donish: When I met you last November at the Poetry Exchange Project in New Orleans, I had the privilege of hearing you read from some of the same new works that we’re featuring here at THERMOS, including genesis. Could you tell us about genesis?

Laura Walker: I’ve always been haunted by the pulling cadences of the King James Version of the Bible. I think it’s partly because the rhythms are incredibly mesmerizing, and partly because I grew up in the Bible Belt with a proselytizing atheist for a father, which created its own host of contradictions and yearnings and hauntings. I felt simultaneously included and excluded by that language. I think genesis was my attempt to go back in time and explore the somewhat forbidden rhythms that have shaped me deeply.

CD: What are you currently writing? How does your current writing depart from your past projects?

LW: I’m in the last stages (I think) of a manuscript I’ve been working on for about a year. It’s a series of prose blocks circling around ideas of story and its manifestations, weaving characters, fairy tales, family stories, and memories, both “real” and created. Sometimes I say it’s as close to writing a novel as I’ll ever get, which is not very close. But there was something that felt “novelistic” for me as I wrote it, for example the ways in which I needed to erect a structure and simultaneously keep it aloft while turning my attention elsewhere—like putting up a circus tent and drawing something obscure and difficult on the floor at the same time. Destined for failure but exhilarating too.

In my mind it departs quite a bit from what I’ve written previously. And that’s part of what I’ve enjoyed about it—the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing, at all—the unfamiliarity. I’ve always been most comfortable with partial narrative, pieces of stories, multiple and shifting and overlapping—I have a huge distrust of anything that presents itself as complete, of beginnings and endings, of story arcs. So in this project I’ve had to write alongside my discomfort. Even though the stories here are still fragmented and incomplete, they’re central and substantive in a way that’s new for me. I’ve had to fight, hard, against my natural inclination to take things out, to subtract. Narrative here is, in some way, the point—not a hazy aura or shifting backdrop or ghostly presence—even though it’s still all those things, too, at least I hope. Anyway, it’s made me really uncomfortable, in a great way. I can feel myself having to reach toward new ways of holding things.

I was haunted by a lot of things while I wrote it. By my own experience of memory, especially of the way my memory now has gaps and holes since a concussion a few years ago, with new gaps being created all the time— and what that means for identity, “truth,” the communal, for creating something. By listening to my grandmother’s memories turn more and more gauzy over a period of years. By my visceral memories of fairy tales, what I took in and made my own, long ago, what I recreated, and perhaps why. By the idea of story as a character, with her own needs and trajectory. By my reading about recovered memories. By the idea of our body as a story we tell ourselves, and what that means for boundaries, transgression, injury. By narrative shape built through layer or repetition or eddies of water, vs. movement over ground and space—a finger rubbing the same circle repeatedly, eroding the surface.

CD: You mention several things that one might think of as characteristic of your writing: fragmentation, the experience of memory, “distrust of anything that presents itself as complete.” What is the role of absence or silence in your work? Is it a character too?

LW: I love the idea of absence as a character. For years I’ve been enamored with Barbara Guest’s description of a poem’s “little ghost.” I’m mesmerized by what hovers— glimpsed but never seen, unarticulated, unknown, unknowable—but still present. Palpable absence. And perhaps, related to that, it can be interesting to think of a poem as landscape or structure, as a place something else might briefly touch down in, or move through. Not to imply that place or landscape (or poem) is passive, awaiting some Other—but more an idea of movement, invitation, shifting inhabitances. And how to create a poem as a place or a stance—and an invitation to what can’t be written and what can’t be sustained.

CD: Reading your most recent book, Follow-Haswed (Apogee Press, 2012), I felt as though I were on a midnight tour through a mysterious landscape, one that indicated or implicated our world through a kind of echolocation. The book, which could be described as a project of erasure and collage, struck me as a different type of translation—in which the OED volume you used was not an original text, but a translator. What do I mean? How did you come to use this particular OED volume, the sixth? Did you work with a hard copy of the volume? What was it like writing this book?

LW: I really love that: an idea of poetry “that indicated or implicated our world through a kind of echolocation.” If you got that sense from Follow-Haswed, I’m thrilled.

Follow-Haswed began when I bought a single volume of the OED off of eBay ten or so years ago, because it was only 15 dollars, while the whole set was well beyond my means, and my space. It was volume VI, “Follow-Haswed.” I think there were three or four volumes to choose from, and I imagine the word “follow” lured me, as well as not having any idea what “haswed” meant.

I fell in love with it when it arrived. I just loved having it there on the shelf, loved the look of the print, loved the layout, loved the heft: loved it. And had no idea what to do with any of that love, creatively speaking. So I just kept packing and unpacking it as I moved.

And then one day, years later, I picked it up and started to read it. And I became enamored with the weird ways the various entries seemed to speak to one another, in part by virtue of the source texts for the illustrative quotations, and in part rather mysteriously.
Everywhere I looked there seemed to be references to water, and soldiers, and girlhood, and war – in follow and go, gibber and gain…. that is, in places I would not expect these themes to crowd in.

And so I became really interested in what a single word might carry, in the word as a world, in a word as a maze. And in the idea that just in the place where we try to pin a word down—in a dictionary—meaning explodes, implodes. I was fascinated by the fact that the smallest units of language are also terribly full, terribly laden. And that words are imprinted, just as they imprint us. Because the themes I was finding everywhere were also, of course, my own obsessions: girlhood, soldiers, water, war. So reading the dictionary started to resemble reading any book—thinking about what we receive and what we project, and the complicated relationship of reader and text. There was something slippery at the core— which I think your text/translator question is getting at—and I’m always mesmerized by slipperiness.

Writing the book was a process of reading an entry, copying out pieces and phrases that struck me as compelling, and then going back to those long lists and collaging. It was hugely enjoyable. It was also something I could do in the small, broken bits of writing time I had as a mother of two young kids. Everything in a poem is taken verbatim from a particular entry, and line breaks reflect where I jumped within the entry—so with all that given, I focused on juxtaposition, on break and link, on rhythm and music, and on echo and repetition—and on, hopefully, having something arise off the page a bit.

CD: What poetic traditions do you see your work as part of, or as emerging from?

LW: I feel very lucky that I went to SF State for my MFA. I went there for all the wrong reasons but it was there that I started to study the work of women who were publishing innovative work in the 1980’s and beyond, many in San Francisco, and many of them brought together in the pages of the journal HOW(ever) in the 80’s. Kathleen Fraser co-founded and edited HOW(ever) and her work became incredibly important to me. I feel lucky that I went to school in a place with such a rich history of women’s experimental writing, where I could stumble across books published by Kelsey Street Press, or take classes from Myung Mi Kim, Norma Cole, and Susan Gevirtz, or hear Cole Swensen or Brenda Hillman or Barbara Guest read frequently. Through these poets I became immersed in ideas of broken or interrupted lyric, in the role of silence or space on the page, in poetic forms shaped in part by women’s lived experiences—motherhood, for example—and in poetry as inquiry or investigation.

CD: What are some advantages and obstacles, in your opinion, of being associated with a community or tradition in poetry that defines itself in part by gender, specifically the identity of ‘woman’? Do you have any reflections you could share with us on the issue of gender and poetics?

LW: I doubt I have anything new to say on that huge and many-branched topic. I identify as a woman and I write poetry, and obviously my ways of seeing and experiencing the world, as a woman, necessarily come to play in what I write, and how I read, and what I’m drawn to read, and how I read the world, and how the world reads me, etc., etc. And this has many implications for what work I end up having access to, and who has access to my work, and how such work is contextualized (VIDA is doing amazing work around these issues.) I feel a deep debt to people like Kathleen Fraser and Patricia Dienstfrey and countless others for making a space for poetry by women when there was very little space for it; and of course that space is still contested and fraught in many ways (see VIDA again), though better, I think, than what it’s been in the past; and of course again gender is just one of the lenses through which we can examine what work is celebrated/ read/ published, and by whom, and how those things are decided. Access and prestige and visibility are huge issues.

At the same time, of course, identity read in a simplistic way is, well, simplistic. It would be ridiculous to read my poetry to find out “what a woman thinks,” or “what women’s poetry is like”—in that weird but weirdly persistent way of reading poetry outside a dominant mode— as if I or anyone can somehow stand in for a group we’re a part of. I guess I believe in constellation rather than essentialism.

So I guess I see such associations as wonderful when they open things up and not so great when they shut things down. “Open things up” by providing space and access and opportunities to share work and explore poetry that moves away from assumptions of the mainstream. “Shut things down” by essentializing one aspect of someone’s very complex identity and making sweeping generalizations based upon it. But that’s more about how these groupings or associations are interpreted or misinterpreted, perhaps?— than about being a part of them.

CD: What’s exciting to you about contemporary poetry? What are you reading right now?

LW: I remember Stacy Doris talking once about how she entered a new book of poetry— from the middle, skipping around as she liked, and hardly ever from beginning to end. And I was so struck by what I took as the freedom of that, the boldness of the recognition that we meet a book where we are, from where we are, because of where we are—her embracing of the subjectivity of reading, as I understood it.

It’s in part why I always find myself on the opposite side of arguments about there being “too much poetry”, about poetry being published “too soon,” whatever that means—that there’s too much chaff vs. wheat, I guess. Bring on the chaff, I say—maybe I like chaff. Maybe chaff is exactly what I need to read at this moment; one woman’s chaff is another woman’s, etc. Which is quite different from saying I like everything, but rather I’m grateful for the proliferation. I’m excited that we can publish each other in affordable ways, that there are so many micro-communities around reading series and blogs and online magazines and installations, as well as books-in-paper. That there’s room. I think there are still plenty of thorny issues around resources and access and prestige, as I said above, but I’m excited for the ways in which we can encounter work outside the land of contests and book publication.

It also means, though, that there’s always more work I want to read than I have time to read. And I read slowly. Recently I’ve been reading Tiff Dressen, Todd Melicker, Martin Camps, Teresa Miller, Joseph Lease, giovanni singleton, John Sakkis, Jenn McCreary, Sarah Vap. And I have a huge stack of books and bookmarked websites waiting for me.

CD: Aside from poetry, what influences your work and your thinking?

LW: Ecosystems, both wild and not—forests, fields, mountains, gardens—all that interplay, the many complex relationships occurring—I find it endlessly thought-provoking, or feeling-provoking, or something. Also, weather—both my direct experience of it and the systems developed to describe it—cloud formations, humidity and temperature, sun and fog and radar maps. Maps in general are amazing to me, both conceptually and physically. Also, I recently wrote a series of poems drawing from the picture books I read repeatedly to my children when they were young and I was extremely sleep-deprived—that combination of sleep deprivation and repetition created an almost mystical space in which I entered those books, lived in those books, in ways I can’t return to, but remember vividly.

CD: Would you mind sharing which children’s books you’re referring to? 

LW: Oh, many more than I can list here—I think I drew from more than fifty books—everything from books from my parents’ generation (Mike Mulligan, Rapunzel, Madeline, The Secret Garden) to books I grew up with (The Lorax, Are you My Mother, Horton Hears a Who, Harold and the Purple Crayon) to books I only discovered alongside my kids (When the Sky is Like Lace, Storm Boy, Mole Music, The Visitor). They all merged in this wonderful hazy space created by my extreme sleep-deprivation and the ritual of reading them aloud again and again.

CD: What’s the biggest challenge for you when it comes to writing? What comes easily?

LW: I love playing with a text. Putting words on paper or a screen, to create something to play with, is not so easy for me. But once I have material, I can break it apart and reform it and recirculate it and try it a hundred different ways, and stay happy. So I’d say I’m happiest when I’m (endlessly) revising something, or re-inventing something, and least happy when I’ve just finished a project and am casting around for something new—something that opens a door to the elusive thing-I-can’t-name which will inspire more messing around.

I’m also terrible at writing “about” something. For example, when my kids were small, people were always suggesting lovely or challenging or poignant things they were doing or I was experiencing that I should write about, that would “make a good poem.” I can’t do that. A lot of times I’ve wished I could, and I try occasionally, but it’s just a mess. I’m sure my daily life enters my writing in other ways, but not directly, or in ways I can easily point to.

CD: What’s something you can easily point to where you are right now?

LW: Just one thing? I can never do just one thing. Quinnehutukqut by Joshua Harmon. A can of Gold Brick Pale Ale. A picture of the sun by one of my sons. And through the window, my new bee hives, swirling.

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A Conversation with Cassie Donish

With this conversation, conducted over the past few days, we conclude our feature of Cassie Donish’s poetry, and welcome her to the editorial staff of THERMOS. Whatever that means! — AS

First of all, welcome to THERMOS. We’re really excited to have you (finally, I suppose) join us as an editor. What have been some of your thoughts about THERMOS in the past, and what’s interesting to you about selecting and presenting poetry?

I’ve appreciated THERMOS immensely since its inception in 2008. I brought printed volumes with me to Ecuador, Spain, and Mexico while traveling to those places in 2010 and 2011, and I was often able to step inside the poems, to lose myself and forget where I was for moments, and to come out again with my head tilted in a slightly different direction. What does this say? Does it say the poetry of THERMOS has been working for me? And if so, why is that? Is it because the poems are intellectually and technically exciting without being oriented above all towards Conceptualism? Is it because I can always feel the presence of a living, breathing, animal body behind the words? Is it because of the poems that are wryly funny while also being serious and unironic? Is it because I’ve known you and Melissa and Jay and Zach for ten plus years, because you’ve been part of the community through/with which I’ve developed my aesthetic sensibilities over that time?

I like the idea that because “there is no canon,” selecting and presenting poems is not about what’s objectively good — unless we’re talking about the feminist objectivity advocated for by scholar Donna Haraway, which let’s say we are, so actually it is about what’s objectively good, and our objectivity is not a view from nowhere, it’s a view from somewhere, from particularly situated bodies in time and space. Speaking of objects, I desire poems the way I desire things, a good mug to drink hot coffee from, say, or something I can wear, like a sturdy pair of boots for walking in the snow – I’m currently in the process of moving into an apartment in Eugene and it’s been snowing here, which is probably why I’m desiring these particular things. But also, I think I desire to be objectified by a poem, to be rendered by it. I want to forget I’m reading a poem, to instead feel like a pair of boots, or a self.

I recently read Graham Foust’s long poem “To Anacreon in Heaven,” and one of the many lines I love is: “The poem is the continuation of poetry by other means.” Whatever this means, I trust the opposite is also true.

What’s changed in your poetry during the few years separating “Las Escaleras, Oaxaca” from these new poems? Also, since you often write in sequence, would you mind talking some about your approach to that form?

I’ll start with the second part of your question. I think maybe sequences suit my temperament. If you’ve ever walked around with me all day, or for a week, which you have, you know I like it when conversations have many threads, and the threads can be interrupted by events (like swimming in a river, or buying ice cream) but then returned to suddenly in a single breath, without syntactic regard for the hours or days that have passed; for instance, resuming a prior conversation with gestures like “But what about…?” or “And anyway…” Maybe poets are like this in general, maybe people are? I think the sequence is a form that suits this mental state; it turns out that a single breath can be hours or weeks or years long. Who wants finality and complete thoughts? I love coffee, but my coffee often gets cold over and over, and I have to warm it up again. It becomes almost a game: how many times can I genuinely forget it’s sitting there, this thing I do want? Maybe I don’t like for the cup of coffee to end.

There’s something about living in foreign places, perhaps, that lends itself to writing sequences. I think I started writing sequences when I left the U.S. in 2004 to spend a year in Prague. Over the next few years I read C.D. Wright, Anne Carson, Barbara Cully, Carolyn Forché, Donna Stonecipher. Place figures prominently into the writings of all these women — and actually, both Stonecipher and Cully wrote in and about Prague. All these women also wrote sequences I loved. I think when you’re living outside your own country, and when much of what you write is epistolary, it seems that longer, fragmented pieces take shape, because there’s so much context to build, so much that is unfamiliar to your imagined, distant reader or correspondent, which is really you, in a way, the you that wants to hear about unfamiliar things. So the sequence written while traveling (and it doesn’t have to be abroad, of course, but really any kind of being in transit for extended periods, which could just be a metaphor for being a person who is not asleep) ends up being a long conversation you’re having with yourself, where you’re telling yourself what you see and making connections in an environment that’s ongoing, in a landscape that’s speaking back to you, because it’s listening, because it contains an endless amount of information you’ll never understand. 

I wrote Las Escaleras in Oaxaca in 2011. At the time, I was getting ready to start a master’s program in human geography. I was filled with the landscape and with geographic questions. Some people say that poetry shouldn’t be about explaining ideas, and while I don’t necessarily agree, I think what those people are arguing against might be modes of explication that are poetically ineffectual. I’m pretty sure that the presence or absence of “ideas” or “politics” doesn’t determine a poem’s quality as a poem, but that poems can certainly suffer for all kinds of reasons. But poems are of course captivating and necessary for all kinds of reasons as well.

Las Escaleras seems to come from a busy mind, a mind troubled with questions and arguments. I was trying to tell several stories, to translate them. In a way, I was exploring several research topics that I hadn’t fully articulated (to myself), ones that were keeping me awake at night, about the relationships between humans and our environments, about being an American in Mexico, about identity, performativity, and being an explicitly conscious thing. Also, about consciousness itself as performed.

Last spring, I finished my master’s degree in human geography at the University of Oregon. After sort of a break from writing poems, during which I was focused on a qualitative research project dealing with art and the gentrification of urban neighborhoods, I think I’ve come back to poetry with less ideological franticness. But maybe that’s not true. I’ve been swinging back and forth between the social sciences and the humanities for a long time. In my current oscillation, I feel a kind of intellectual investment in faith in aesthetics. A faith in that faith. This has implications for the kinds of poems I will write, and the kinds of breaths I will take.

I’m interested by the ways in which pursuits outside of poetry do and don’t intersect with poetic approaches. In New Orleans, I heard you talk with Robert Fernandez about theories of social space, and some other topics that were beyond my reach, related to your coursework in Human Geography. Here, you say that the Master’s program you recently completed gave you a two-year break from writing poems — but I wonder if you’ve tried to imagine ways in which the two pursuits might interact with one another. Specifically in terms of poetry, and specifically in terms of you, does that seem possible?

First I’ll say that a break from poems was really not a break from poetry, but certainly a break from finishing anything that looks like a traditional poem.

I’ve been calling myself an interdisciplinary thinker for a while, which means something pretty simple: that the categories outlining the basic questions and interests I want to spend time with don’t situate me easily in a particular discipline within the academy. Luckily, I’m far from alone in that regard. And there’s a good reason for that, which is that the disciplines in their current iteration are relatively new, historically speaking – less than two hundred years really (and that’s being generous), which is short in terms of the history of knowledges. And for some disciplines, the timeline is much shorter.

Pursuits outside poetry have always affected my poetic approaches. There are inspiring, incredible things to read that really transcend disciplinary divides, such as Henri Lefebvre’s lyrical writing on everyday life in cities and the gorgeous, large-scale metaphors (“theories”/“models”) he comes up with; Donna Haraway’s wild and imaginative critical pieces on feminism, primates, science, and cyborgs, among other subjects, which even in the 80s were probably ahead of our time; Bruno Latour’s brilliant, witty, and somehow warm and inviting analyses of the processes through which scientific facts and objects are produced, and his insistence that objects/things have a kind of agency we’re not good at articulating; and dare I even mention, like, Foucault? At times I’ve actually preferred to read such writers for poetic inspiration over “poetry.” But at my gut I’m looking for the same thing. Call it truth or beauty if you will, call it being shocked into presence by language. Call it disorientation that offers much more than it could ever take away.

I’m not sure I’m answering your question.

But I’ll also say I was very blessed to spend several months talking with artists, performers, musicians, and activists for my thesis project – and there were lots of wonderful opportunities for conversations about intersections between the various arts and social and spatial justice work. Those experiences were invaluable to me as a person and a poet.

Lastly, I’ll acknowledge that it’s probably easy for ideas, experiences, and conversations to mingle, always – but to practice a particular craft within a particular set of expectations or boundaries is different. So if you’re practicing writing songs, or writing academic articles, or writing stories, or letter, or poems, you’re going to be using different sets of aesthetic knowledges and different standards. If there’s a relationship between writing an academic article and writing a poem, I’m not sure what it is, besides that a creative attention to language and syntax will hopefully make both more interesting. There are probably other interesting things that could be discussed, like the aesthetic or ethical trajectory of a piece, but I’m not sure. I will say that I have more of a variety of registers to write in after immersing myself in the language of academic geographers, and that’s always exciting, and a good reason for a poet to study anything else in depth.

In working with us to edit THERMOS, you’ll be engaged directly with poetry as a contemporary happening. What’s exciting to you, right now, about contemporary poetry?

I have a biased view, of course: most of my closest friends are participating in the making of contemporary poetry. No other world has ever made as much sense for me. Often when I meet someone I connect with, I like to assume the person is really a poet, even if they’ve never written a word of poetry, and I sometimes try to convince them that I’m right.

No one’s in poetry for the money; I love what Paul Killebrew says about this at the beginning of your interview with him, about poetry as “the cheapest date in the arts.” I agree with him that if poetry and money were on better terms, the possibilities wouldn’t be as open-ended. Of course, there are all the various pressures even in the poetry world, but it’s just not controlled by market values in the same way as other arts. This changes the game in all kinds of ways – the way people have to be invested isn’t greater necessarily, but different. The organizing values are different, or, if they’re not, they’re at least attempting to gesture toward something not yet determined. Am I being idealistic? Sure. That’s part of it too.

Another thing that’s incredibly exciting is the sheer variety of poetic worlds and the number of people that seem to be writing poems right now. And people are sharing their poems in unprecedented numbers because of online forums. Some people might see this as a bad thing, but I think it’s amazing, and I don’t think we can really know right now what the future holds for poetry. So it’s a very exciting moment. Lastly I’ll just say that there are so many people writing good poetry right now, and I feel lucky to be so continuously impressed.

A Brief and Casual Self-Interview with Zach Savich

Thermos editor Zach Savich’s fourth book of poetry, Century Swept Brutal, will soon be released from Black Ocean Press. For the next week, the book is available at a discount via this link. Below, Zach talks to himself about the book, illness, death, friendship, marriage, and NPR.

Where could I even have written Century Swept Brutal?

David Bartone rented our cabin in New Hampshire, on a lake. Maybe you know David and/or know that his fantastic first book, Practice on Mountains, recently came out from Ahsahta, winner of the Sawtooth Prize. Although David wrote Mountains before we were at the lake, I like to think he finished it there, while I wrote most of the first draft of Century Swept Brutal. Consider: in some ways David is better at being places than I am. During our stay, I went for one run, one bicycle ride, and one excursion to town; otherwise, I stared at the lake and wrote. David climbed several mountains, swam with vagabonds, met hitchhikers, caught fish, etc. He also bought a horribly loud Casio. Good sunsets, a grill. We read Gustaf Sobin and John Taggart and Alice Notley and James Wright. One night we borrowed a rowboat and entered the lake using fragile branches for oars. We made it back, after a fashion, and so I dedicated my book to him.

I wrote its final section in the San Juan Islands during Jay and Cait’s wedding. If you’ve been there, you might recognize a certain kind of flower that, if you forgot your glasses, appears to be made of a single, circular poem, I mean petal; or else you can find it in my book. I offer that flower, or poem, to Cait and Jay. This was when we stayed in the little house owned by Cassie’s aunt, which Cassie and Jay and Melissa and Andy and I had stayed in about a decade before, being poets.

I wrote the book’s first section in Maryland, when my father first had cancer again, a year or so before he died. He saw me read poems in public one time, at a college near my parents’ house. I was excited, revved up, and spoke incredibly quickly during the reading. I worried afterward that I had spoken too incredibly quickly. He said, “It wasn’t too fast for me.”

I think he’d rather be alive again for a few minutes and talk incredibly quickly with any of us than read an elegy. If I say the first section of this book is “instead of elegy” I don’t mean “instead” is any kind of avoidance.

What are my further thoughts concerning this book and the death of my father?

Several. For example, in the first weeks of his final dying, we read the poignant texts. And then, being so caught up in daily poignancy, its bodily flagging, we turned to texts of comedy, absurdity, joy. Beckett understood. You shit your diaper or take a drug or lament our mortal fate or shift your grotesque swellings and go on reading. It was just like getting an MFA.

I wondered what books would we have needed—after poignancy, after absurdity—if he had lived another month.

And then I found one, after doing a reading in Virginia, in a beautiful apartment I could have stayed in for another life: there was Donald Revell’s Tantivy by the bed. I have since found others.

I needed this information three months after he died, when I was diagnosed with the same cancer. I’ve lived. Much remains complex. I am grateful.

He was 60. I was 30, the year he’d been when I was born. A kind of perfect math.

More about this can be said, another time. For now: I’m remembering everyone who ever, knowing nothing about me, said that my interest in interesting literature would wither once I’d suffered more. As though experience erodes discernment, and weariness is a noble aesthetic, is wisdom. Now, having officially suffered more, being daily more weary than at any of my previous weariest moments, I can confirm that I want even more from writing and art. I am happy to find it. I hope this book stands to that. To both the want and the happiness and the want.

Finally, I’ll note my joy at finding that this book, Century Swept Brutal, written when my father was only first dying, written before my diagnosis, has lines that have offered me more after those experiences. “The dying dog could barely walk but lunged / like nothing had happened,” I wrote. It’s true.

What else can one say about a book of poetry, like if I was on NPR?

When I said I wrote Century Swept Brutal staring at the lake, I lied. I wrote some of it that way, but I wrote most of it at a McDonald’s nearby, drinking McDonald’s coffee, eavesdropping, looking across a parking lot at a Walmart. My writing required a professional setting, David said, and he’d know—he used to work at McDonald’s. When I submitted the book to Black Ocean, I had the idea that it was about that kind of interstitial landscape, of sprawl, that I’ve known in Coralville, IA, and Lacey, WA, and Hadley, MA, and throughout MD and PA and so forth. Not quite of any region, and yet, one must conclude (because of heavy usage patterns), also intently expressive of each region. Places made of passing through, outside most stories one would tell about one’s life, and yet—here’s a life. Purgatorial, which is another mode, and also not. I wanted to sit there, be comparable to the harmonic hum sometimes achieved by the air conditioner. Thinking of everyone hearing such a tone—is that sound less present than the passing-through place itself, even less a part of consciousness/official experience? But now I think the book is less of those places, more of the harmonic ping.

I also said I imagined that these poems, more than others I have written, were written for my friends who do not read poetry but are hip to other arts. I am grateful to Black Ocean, as for so many things, for understanding or overlooking whatever I meant by that. I hope it is true, but, clearly, it must be a matter of spirit within the poems, not of any concessions to preemptive, condescending weariness, or trying for a type of communication other than the type I believe poems are best at giving (that only poems can offer, and so should). I have written elsewhere about how offensive I find it when people talk about writing poems for “the people” as though “the people” can’t read; they really mean they are writing poems that justify their own impoverished imaginations, their own uninteresting relationships to language. When anyone who has worked with children or whatever population knows anybody can discuss the strangest art and also remember it.

At another point I thought that this book, compared to my other books, was equivalent to The Muppet Show, but with crystals in place of puppets. I love how, in the early seasons of The Muppet Show, the Muppets are all played by poets and are fairly grungy. But I trust them.

Beautiful to have lost anxiety about intelligence, its calculated remainders. If I say I believe in Poetry, now, more than in poetry, I understand myself; whereas in the past I would have been suspicious. I have read as much as possible for long enough not to mind.

At another point I said that this book re-applied my earliest poetic influences, poets of the Pacific Northwest, my formative home, many first found in Copper Canyon’s excellent anthology The Gift of Tongues, which was my gateway. A mood of mists and ponderous passivity that I think has something to it, but that I wanted to approach without its (to my ears, now, when I remember the poetry scene in Olympia, WA, in the 1990s) elements of self-satisfaction, self-mythologizing, simple-mindedness, suspicion of modernity, indulgences…instead supplying my own indulgences.

Hilary, my wife, was at the lake, as well. We would be married in a few months, standing in the Fort River outside Amherst, MA, our friends reading poems from the bank. David read a wedding poem that was published in the latest jubilat, Pam read, Kyle read a poem about watching us do pilates in Jeff’s old room just that morning, we swam, and then we went to Jensen’s going away party. Paid the justice of the peace with the proceeds of a scrapped car: a kind of perfect math. There’s at least one day a week I can’t sleep for the luck of it, astonished at how much better life can be than I would have known to imagine, I say this still healing, I say this grieving, I say this pained. But before that, on our way home from New Hampshire, we stopped at an Indian restaurant in, let’s say, Concord. It reminded me of this Indian restaurant I went to once (alone, with a book of poems) in Seattle, a decade earlier. Where, in my memory, I found a large metal staple in my curry. And I pulled it out, set it on the napkin, and continued eating, paid, tipped, left. I don’t think I was proud or thrilled at the adventure of finding a staple in my curry or that I enjoyed witnessing myself being the type of person who found one, did that. Rather, I think I found it, ate, paid, tipped, left. I remember also that the sauce was fairly salty. Could a poem be such a meal.

The book is in interwoven sections, each a distinct sequence.

Themes include: water, the senses.

Two sections are written in a form of dialogue between a “he” and a “she” that may be of particular interest.

What about the publishing side of things?

People sometimes worry about what will happen with publishing. Don’t worry. Black Ocean is happening with publishing.

Anything else I want to say?

When I was sickest with and after my cancer, I had many friends—poets, many of them—who offered to do anything they could to help, and they meant it. Many would have left their lives and come to where we lived and done anything. Many more whom I know, and probably many I don’t, would have also, had we asked, and many, many more said things (knowing my state or not) that meant a world. Let’s yawn at those who clearly write mostly from an anxious hope for prestige or a particular success or hoping to replicate parts of celebrity culture and media cycle and commerical renown that don’t matter, that aren’t what any intelligent fourteen-year-old or cancerous person or ardent reader of Sobin and Taggart and Notley could care about, and let’s yawn at those who say that’s all contemporary writing is. I have a thousand friends who prove that what we are doing is advancing better values, in complicating opposition, or caring, in art.

I’m sorry that I couldn’t always reply when you wrote or called. I hope to call you or help some way if you are ever in similar days. Because it meant a world to come to and hear your messages. If this new book can say thanks for that, I hope it will, or I hope I will.

Q&A: Paul Killebrew

When Paul Killebrew came in to talk to my class at Tulane in February 2012, we sat on the lawn and he recited “Soonest Mended” to us. What, among the essential things, hasn’t been better since that day? — AS

(February 2012)
What’s exciting you about poetry right now? Why should I be excited about poetry?

So much, so many reasons. I like to think of poetry as the cheapest date in the arts. Consider: of all the various art forms, which has the most attenuated relationship to material success? Poetry. Even the poets who sell the most books, people like Billy Collins and Mary Oliver, make no more than a middle-class income from book sales. And that’s in their best years. I’m saying this is a good thing. Why? Because so much possibility opens up and so many wasted questions never get asked when you’re outside the searing glare of an active market. I really do believe that poetry has advanced where other art forms have foundered simply because there is no way to make money off of it.

The other thing is that my favorite human beings are all poets. Sure, like all artistic communities, there are some real doozeys out there, but I’ve always felt like the most interesting poets I know are actually the most interesting people I know, by a long stretch.

Your poems seem to walk a line between celebrating the ordinary and tapping into the abstract (often stemming from the ordinary). How does “ordinary” work next to “abstract” in your poetry? What do you hope to achieve by this juxtaposition?

I have a feeling this will come up a couple of times in the questions that follow, so I’ll offer the following explanation and refer to it in later questions as the “cognitive rhythm thing”, which is a very pretentious way of putting it, but basically I mean that some kinds of writing take longer to process than other kinds, and the time difference is attributable to the different forms of cognition in play. So, for example, reading “2+2=4” happens so fast that it’s almost not reading at all, we all know the statement to be obviously and boringly true, whereas something weirder, like say Noam Chomsky’s famous meaningless sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” cuts against notions of truth (if something is green, it’s not colorless) and ordinary meaning (what would it look like for an idea to sleep at all, much less “furiously”?), and so the mind slows down. Somewhere between these two extremes would be the narrative, expository, or syllogistic passages of which I’m so fond. What’s interesting to me as I’m writing is the arrangement of cognitive rhythms, speeding up and slowing down in a poem, and since my poems’ trajectory is generally aimed toward the end of the poem, I’m very interested in finding out how many ways I can set off the ending through the arrangement of cognitive rhythms throughout a poem. Other poets have written about similar concepts with far more coherence and beauty—I would refer anyone interested especially to Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse,” which can be found here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237880.

Now, to get back to the question, which was about the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the abstract, the cognitive rhythm thing seems like one explanation, but it’s probably not the only one. Much of the poetry I like involves the movement from the particular to the general and back, which is also the fundamental movement in law (laws are written in general terms, but they usually arise because of a specific circumstances, and they must be applied to specific transgressions)—so maybe that’s just the concept the movie of my life is starring—and sometimes the movement from the ordinary to the abstract and back has a similar feel.

I’m interested in discursiveness as a strategy, and wonder what you have to say about it. I’m thinking of, for instance, the first stanza of “The Sweaty Intimacy.” I’ve frequently found discursiveness expressive of a sort of general boredom or ennui, a leveling of sensation that those emotions produce. Obviously where boredom is a deeply interesting condition. Do you see discursiveness in that way?

To take just the first stanza of “Sweaty Intimacy” (And let me add here a brief explanation of this title, which is embarrassingly overwrought. This phrase is how a legal academic named Alexander Bickel described the relationship of the three branches of government, saying that they must operate intimately, “even if it is often the sweaty intimacy of creatures locked in combat.”), these are basically four sentences that clearly do not add up together into a cohesive proposition or form a narrative or anything like that. Each is its own world.

A typical sentence in the English language carries some pretty hefty baggage about the relationship of beings in the world. Subjects do things to objects, and saying so amounts to a “complete thought,” or at least that’s the vocabulary I learned growing up. I guess because of this background understanding, it seems to me that there’s a lot of lyric possibility in situating “complete thoughts” from different worlds next to one another. Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own that “a book is not made of sentences laid end to end,” and when I first read that I thought, “But what if it was?”

Why is narrative so often the choice for you? How do narrative and prose function in your work?

I usually use narrative to vary the cognitive dynamic in a poem, not only to change the pace in the ways discussed above, but also to situate the poem between its narrative and more lyrical or discursive qualities, “Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified,” to borrow a formulation of Frank O’Hara’s in his essay “Personism” (available at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20421).

What’s your sense of the line? Does it change much from one poem to the next?

As I mentioned when we met, I’m pretty terrible with line breaks. I’m not sure how important they are to what I’m interested in, and in many ways I side with Frank O’Hara when he says something similar in the essay linked above:

I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, “Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.”

[. . . .]

As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it.

Many of the poems in Flowers have long lines, and my reasoning was that if line length sets the breath of thought in a poem, I wanted to extend that breath for as long as I could. Right now all the poems I’m working on have extremely short lines, like one to three words long, which I’m doing partly because I love the short lines of James Schuyler and Eileen Myles and partly because I like the idea of reducing lines to a poetic foot, though a foot conceived both as a conceptual element and a rhythmic element. On this last point I would refer anyone interested to Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, which creates poetic feet by placing chucks of lines in quotation marks—for example: “One day, I awoke” “& found myself on” “a subway, endlessly” “I didn’t know” “how I’d arrived there or” “who I was” “exactly”

What is your relationship to the sublime?

I like to think we’re on speaking terms. In Eileen Myles’s review of Anselm Berrigan’s most recent book, Notes from Irrelevance, she writes, “it [the book] generally has an only stoic relationship to meaning. Like meaning might be someone he has a working relationship with. They always nod when they see one other.” I wish I could say that every time I sit down to write it’s like what Stephen Dedalus says in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”—but usually I’m just trying to record what a drying puddle looked like or something I misheard or some snarky comparison that I’ll later try to revise into something that at least appears un-ironic and insightful. I’m much more in the camp of folks who write mostly to see what will happen. I do not expect to write the Great American Verse Novel. One of you should, though.

What is your practical relationship to metaphor? I’m thinking of the poem “For Beth Ward,” where the poem seems to tackle the question to a degree – “Does metaphor / contain us, or do we extend ourselves / out into it?”

There’s a metaphysical question of whether qualities are real entities that we perceive or just imaginative constructs that don’t exist independently of us, and if I’d majored in philosophy I might have something really interesting to say about that, but as it is I know just enough to refer to the existence of this question and leave it unsatisfyingly there. On the more practical level, I think I probably over-use metaphor and simile. I love David Berman, and both his book Actual Air and the lyrics he’s written as the braintrust for his now-defunct band Silver Jews are full of brilliant similes that I try to emulate at every opportunity.

Several times in Flowers, there are short, title-less, italicized poems. What function do these serve? How do you want them to relate to the rest of the work as a whole? Why did you choose this particular device to separate or categorize the parts of your book? Are these to be read as poems in their own right?

I really wasn’t sure whether to use those in the manuscript. A friend said he liked that they gave the book some good “My mother is a fish” moments, so I kept them. The poems themselves were written through this bizarre process of intensely meditating in a public place and trying very hard to transmit words from the static in the air. I know that sounds totally mystical and goofy, but that was the project. I placed them the way I did in the book to give the reader a breather every once in awhile, I mean that’s one of the great things about short poems, the relief of seeing a page with so few words on it.

Certain words/images (such as swimming pools, the color orange) echo throughout your book. Was this a conscious choice? If so, why?

I love having stuff like that pointed out to me. Usually I have no idea. In an interview James Schuyler talks about having his manuscripts edited by Kenneth Koch, and Koch would always come back to him and point out all the interesting words he used more than once, with the implication that he shouldn’t have. To me it’s reassuring because it’s some evidence of a larger coherence that you’re not even aware of, that there are levels of coherence that exist whether you want them to or not.

In an interview with BOMBLOG, you expressed that in earlier incarnations of the manuscript there were lots of poems for specific people (many of them love poems). What lead to the shift towards what the manuscript is now? How do you decide what remains important?

The love poems just weren’t very good, sad to say, but they were written for the wrong people as it turned out, so there you go. I think the best way to put together a manuscript is to try as hard as you can to forget the impulses that led you to write any of your poems, concentrate strictly on the highest quality work you’ve done, and cut out anything that isn’t at your highest level. If you’re left with 10 pages of material, that’s much better than 60 pages of which only 10 are good, even if those 10 pages have zero coherence as a set of poems. Personally I had to give up on any idea of having a manuscript in which all the poems would have been written toward a common purpose or theme. Instead I took what I thought was my best work and tried to sequence it in a way that made it somewhat readable.

In your poetry, you refer frequently and explicitly to Nashville. Rather than rendering place abstractly, why do you choose to state the name of the place you’re describing? Is your intended audience someone who is familiar with the locale, or an outsider getting her first glance at the places you describe? Does an awareness of audience influence your work at all?

In Seeds of Contemplation, the poet and Catholic monk Thomas Merton writes, “If you write for men–you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead.” As a Catholic monk, his advice is to write for God. I can say without shame that I write for the reader and that I consider myself my first and most important reader. This often means that within ten minutes I’m disgusted and wish I were dead, but things eek through nonetheless, and it’s like Vegas—sure the house always wins, but they still have to give you a little something every now and then, if only to keep you hopeful.

I think that the question of what audience to write for can be put many ways, but here are two formulations I find useful. Formulation #1: audience is a political issue about who’s included and excluded in the electorate of your readers—whose votes are you trying to get, and whose votes do you not even care about? My complaint with this formulation is basically what happens in the movie Sullivan’s Travels, which I would heartily recommend to anyone who hasn’t seen it. In that movie, a wealthy and successful director decides that he wants to make a movie about the common man, and so he disguises himself as a bum and rides the rails, with the idea of getting source material to make something like The Grapes of Wrath (incidentally his working title is O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which is where the Coen brothers got the title for their movie). But then through a series of mishaps, he ends up in prison and on a chain gang. The prisoners are miserable, the lowest of the low. One night, all the prisoners are taken to a church, where they are shown cartoons, and the prisoners have the most fun they’ve ever had. The director realizes that if he wants to help the common man, he should be making cartoons, not The Grapes of Wrath.

My problem is that I don’t want to make cartoons. So here’s Formulation #2: you’re trying to create beauty, and sometimes doing so requires you to scrape off the barnacles of tradition, to free yourself from the way other people write, and to clear a space for your own personal expression. Inevitably that means some of your writing will be unpalatable to some people, like those who like tradition or the kinds of writing that you feel compelled to banish from your own writing. The problem with this formulation is that while it gives you permission to write as bizarrely as you want, it doesn’t provide any kind of limiting principle or incorporate any competing values. I’m probably somewhere in the vicinity of Formulation #2, but because it’s ultimately a very permissive view, in practice the question of audience operates as a superego-type force, constantly berating me for not writing more user-friendly poems.

The color field painter Mark Rothko said that he thought the highest achievement in western painting was portraits of individuals in contemplation, and he wanted his own paintings to enact that contemplative experience in the viewer, which in my opinion they do quite beautifully. John Ashbery has said that this is how poetry can be political—a reader may have a contemplative experience with a poem that opens new perspectives or truths in a way that may even change the political commitments of the reader. At my most optimistic, this is more or less how I feel about audience, that depth can matter as much or more than breadth.

In your poem “I Love Country Music,” you mention that “Revision is a function of shame.” I wonder if this applies to your own poetry. How much revision do you do yourself – and is it more often small fixes, or total re-writes?

My poems must be awash in shame. The poet Aaron Kunin talks about how shame involves the same ergonomics as reading—head tilted down, eyes downcast, brow furrowed. The same goes for writing. But revision is, for me, basically what writing is all about. I have small bursts of original composition and long, long courses of revision. I love revising, I love the idea that any poem can be improved upon, I love that there’s no finish line. Pierre Bonnard would still go to work on paintings after they were hanging on a museum’s walls. For me revision tends to be all of the above—small fixes, total re-writes, throwing things away, whatever it takes.

What do you mean when you say there is no etiquette in the shower?

That, I’m afraid, is between me and my shower.

How do you organize a poem like “Nashville,” or explain something like “Poem For Cori” to a more tradition-minded poetry audience?

I’ve explained “Nashville” by comparing it to the badhat in Indian classical music—the badhat is an introductory section in which all of the notes that will later be used in the raga are played arrhythmically, and my understanding is that the idea is that the notes are being displayed one by one in an abstract way that will prepare listeners for what is to come. “Nashville” is sort of my badhat, and, as I explained when we all met, the compositional method was really just to meditate on Nashville and try to record words that seemed indigenous to the place as I knew it. Both “Nashville” and “Poem for Cori” are intended to be long, minimal, and tonally flat, to encourage the meditative state I was in when I wrote them. If someone finds the poems boring, I’d say that’s right on target.

Do you consider yourself to be in any relationship to the avant-garde, whatever that is?

So let’s face it, I’m a lawyer. As in, someone who works fully within the currently existing system of power. I like to think my job entails making the system live up to its promises of justice, but still. What I do probably disqualifies me from being in the avant-garde. At my most ambitious I’d say that I hope what I’m doing is advancing the art, though it seems comically self-important to claim that I’m advancing anything. Ted Berrigan completed his master’s degree in English at the University of Tulsa after he’d already moved to New York City, and so they had to mail him his degree. It came right back to the university with a note from Berrigan that said, “I am the master of no art.” Right on.

Incidentally, one of my favorite books by David Antin is What It Means to Be Avant-Garde, and he addresses this stuff much more eloquently than I could ever hope to.

What are you working on now? How does it feel to you, in contrast or complement to this work?

At the moment I’m finishing a very long poem that’s about 70% narrative and, as mentioned above, in very short lines. It’ll be the lodestone of a manuscript that’s basically done and supposed to be published in 2013. The working title for the manuscript is Ethical Consciousness, but I might wimp out and change it. It feels to me like the new manuscript will have a little less variation than Flowers, which isn’t a terrible thing.

Does/how does your work as a lawyer inform your poetry? Is it at all difficult to oscillate between the rigid linguistics of law and the more fluid linguistics of poetry? How similar do you find the meticulous attention to words in each to be?

Both involve careful attention to language, and the hard work of both is constantly revisiting verbal formulations to see if a little tweak here or there will get you just a bit closer to what you intended. Though sometimes poetry is nothing like that, sometimes accuracy is not at all what you want. So I don’t know. I can say that the balance between the two careers has turned out to be totally fortuitous for me. I enjoy being a lawyer well enough, but since I’m also doing poetry stuff I don’t feel like my legal career is the core component of my identity, and that little bit of distance makes it easier to withstand the natural ebb and flow of professional life. Conversely, poetry is much closer to being something like the core component of my identity, and because of that I’m thankful that it has no connection to how I make a living.

Do you feel that poetry is doing work today as a forum for discussing social or political themes? Should it?

I’ve always thought that questioning whether politics had a place in poetry was a little ridiculous. Would anyone ask if politics has a place in philosophy? No—of course politics has a place in philosophy. So are there topics that are available to philosophical inquiry but not to poetry? I certainly don’t think so. There are a lot of other ways to make this argument.

Another point that’s often made is that poetry, in W.H. Auden’s well known formulation, makes nothing happen. I can think of two responses to this. First, Auden is right—poetry makes “nothing” happen, it makes the presence of the void known. What could be more politically motivating than the void? And I mean this with some seriousness—I’m thinking along the lines of what I mentioned earlier about the contemplative experience having an effect on political commitments. The second response is empirical: look at the huge role that poets and poetry have had in the Occupy movements. Of course poetry is involved in politics. Thank god it is.

When it comes to the question of how poetry can engage with politics, poets are doing all kinds of amazing things—giving voice to the oppressed, disrupting the normal operation of language to highlight the power relations inherent in language, expressing the sensations of living through political events, creating narratives for political events, and on and on and on.

Are there any particular poets (or other artists or thinkers) who you would name as foundational to your development as or approach as a poet? Are there others who you feel moved by or spurred by in a very present sense? What is it absolutely necessary that I read?

Here are some things that were/are very important to me:

John Ashbery, especially Rivers and Mountains, The Double-Dream of Spring, Three Poems, and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
Ted Berrigan, The Sonnets and the recording of Berrigan reading the whole thing available here: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Berrigan.php; also the recording of his poem “Red Shift”: http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Berrigan/Berrigan-Ted_Red-Shift_Exact-Change_12_7-25-82.mp3
Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems, especially a recording of him reading “For the Chinese New Year and for Bill Berkson”, which I put online for anyone who’s interested in listening: files.me.com/paul.killebrew/02lbmr.mov
James Schuyler, especially Hymn to Life, which you can hear him reading here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/james-schuyler#about. His novels are also fantastic.
Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses
Eileen Myles
C.D. Wright
Rae Armantrout
John Wieners, especially this recording: http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/dial_a_poem_poets/disconnected/Disconnected_20_wieners.mp3
Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets
Joe Brainard, whose collected writings just came out
Tim Dlugos, whose collected poems just came out
Robert Creeley, For Love
John Koethe, The Late Wisconsin Spring
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours
Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook
Jack Spicer
David Foster Wallace
W.G. Sebald
Larry Levis, Elegy
Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Diaries
Isaiah Berlin, Roots of Romanticism, Two Concepts of Liberty
Wallace Stevens
Arthur Rimbaud
John Keats
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
Henry James, The Ambassadors
Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions
Charles Wright, Negative Blue
John Godfrey, Midnight on Your Left
Tom Raworth, Visible Shivers, Writing
Jane Bowles
Tomaz Salamun, The Four Questions of Melancholy
Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson
Fanny Howe, The Winter Sun
Anne Porter
James Tate
Jay Wright
David Antin

Some younger poets about whom I’m extremely excited right now:

Jacqueline Waters, One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t, listen to her poem “-Phil” here: http://andrewkenower.typepad.com/a_voice_box/files/canessa-park/poirier-sailers-waters/jacqueline-waters.mp3
Dana Ward, who you can listen to reading “Typing Wild Speech” here: http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Ward-Dana/Canessa-Gallery-Segmented/Ward_Canessa-Gallery_10-17-09.mp3
Catherine Wagner
Anselm Berrigan, Zero Star Hotel and Notes from Irrelevance
Jennifer Moxley, anything you can find but especially Clampdown
Dorothea Lasky
Ish Klein
D.A. Powell
Peter Gizzi
Rachel Zucker
Lisa Jarnot
Graham Foust
Miles Champion

As far as what’s necessary, the only thing I’ll say is that reading widely and constantly will improve your writing. There’s so much great stuff out there that I try not to waste time prioritizing or looking for a limiting principle.

Where do you go looking if you want something contemporary, in poetry?

The PennSound website regularly posts new recordings by interesting poets. I’m a regular reader of the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Harriet. The poet Eric Baus is running their twitter feed at the moment, and he’s extremely well read and always points me in interesting directions. Following poets on twitter is a great way to hear about interesting new work. I like to know who’s reading at the Poetry Project in New York. The best thing you can do is find the poets wherever you’re living and ask them what they’re reading.

(October 2013)
What can you say about the short lines that form the structure of most of the poems in Ethical Consciousness? Were they a generative device? Do you expect readers to treat the linebreaks in a particular manner?

I ended up changing the line breaks a lot as the manuscript came together. Partly that’s because I’m not, in general, all that rigorous about line breaks. My practice in the past has been to break between clauses in such a way that the lines are whatever length approximates the breath of thought the poem is trying to achieve. So I guess I think of lines in terms of mental distance and mental pacing, rarely in terms of phonetic meter, though the music is there and I’m sure I’m not completely unaware of it. I’ve liked long lines that stretch the mind’s breath, and I’ve liked long sentences for the same reason. Because I’m not super particular about the precise locations of line breaks, I’ve also generally made my lines all about the same length. For the poems in Ethical Consciousness, I was thinking so much about the present of the poem and how I myself in writing them tried to be as closely attached to the immediate last words and the immediately subsequent as possible and to push out of my mind the overall shape or direction of the poem. It seemed to me that I could represent those impulses graphically through short lines, but that didn’t come to me until most of the poems were already written, so I went back and changed every poem so that the lines would be two or three words long. Then I went back again and changed some poems back to longer lines on the advice of Josh Edwards, one of the editors of Canarium, who pointed out quite correctly that the short lines didn’t quite fit the diction of some of the poems.

It would be wrong of me not to mention here that I am a great admirer of James Schuyler and Eileen Myles, both of whom have a lot of skinny poems.

As far as how the short lines are read, for me they seem to both speed up and slow down the sensation of reading. Speed up because I move down the page so quickly and because it’s hard not to read over the breaks (by “reading over the breaks” I mean that I can’t stand to actually pause at the end of each line, even in my head, because of how stilted it feels, and so pacingwise I begin reading as if the breaks weren’t there). But the short lines make me feel like I’m slowing down because the visual information forces me to pay attention to each line as a unit, a little like the way the quotation marks work in Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette.

How does the process of writing a 30-pg. poem like “Muted Flags” differ from the process of writing a single-page poem?

The single page poems were generally written in one sitting, at least originally, and then revised in small bursts as the book came together. The long poems I’ve written, including “Muted Flags,” have taken shape over the course of several months, usually arriving in chunks and requiring far less revision when the last line hits the page because I’ve re-read and re-worked most of the poem so many times by then. So it’s sort of the opposite of the lack of awareness of the poem’s beginning and end that I described above. Though as I was writing it I didn’t really know where “Muted Flags” was going; when I got into the long narrative portion, I figured that the story would peter out and I’d go back into the kind of writing you see at the beginning of the poem. But then I felt like I reached the end of the poem within the story, so I hit “stop.”

Would you say that “Muted Flags” represents a culmination of your feelings toward public figures? Or is it more indicative of a floating set of opinions? In a broader sense, would you say that your poems, once published, indicate a finality of thought?

The amount of life energy that goes into status control, even in something as peewee leagues as the poetry world, is heartbreaking. I won’t even go into how bad it is among lawyers. Writing about someone running for office was a way to literalize this: here is a person whose complete meaning is the desire to be liked, and you can’t exactly dismiss him because his desire to be liked has deep justifications in our form of government. But I also thought it was important that you’re hearing the take you’re hearing in the poem from an artist; in my own experience, we as artists can be awfully quick to claim the highest rung on the ladder of authentic living, but I mean come on, this is what I was just saying: we’re all running for Congress.

As far as a finality of thought, let us all pray we never reach anything like that. Even writing about this now, I’m struggling to be coherent because I never thought it through systematically, like an essay. That just wasn’t the point.

How did it happen that “Actually Present” appeared in both Flowers and Ethical Consciousness?

The very ho-hum explanation is that when Canarium was laying out Flowers, the pagination worked out so that there were just enough blank pages to spare that we could fit in one more one-page poem. I’d just written the first set of poems that ended up in Ethical Consciousness, including “Actually Present,” so I sent that one to the editors, and they folded it in at what seemed like the right place. But the poem was completely woven into my idea of what the next book was turning out to be, so I knew even when I sent it to be included in Flowers that it would be in both books. I’m really happy it is, too, because I changed the line breaks for Ethical Consciousness, which, especially for that poem, felt like a way to explain myself.

How did New Orleans influence these poems? What kind of atmosphere does the poetry community have here, in your opinion?

The longer I’ve been around the poetry world the more I’ve come to appreciate what a poetry community does. Another way of putting this is that I feel increasingly guilty about how little I do to support other poets, given how much other poets have done to support me. The atmosphere in the poetry community that I knew in New Orleans was one of generosity and openness. It felt similar to me to the other poetry community that I’ve spent some time with–the community around the Poetry Project in New York City. In both the poets are as interested to hear about how you’re getting by as what you’re writing or reading. Someone wrote that Ted Berrigan reached out to younger poets because he felt that they could be too quick to give up on poetry if they had a few discouraging experiences. I think that’s absolutely right, and I think you can take it further and say that a lot of us have kept writing because people made it known to us that they’re interested.

An Interview With Daniel Khalastchi

Nearly three years ago now, I talked with Danny about Manoleria in an interview to be included with Tupelo Press’s Reader’s Companion, released on their website concurrent with the book’s release. It was one of the most interesting conversations about poetry I’ve ever had, even as, or because, the conversation drifted as much to Springsteen and Mobb Deep as anything. I’m excited to have the opportunity to put that interview before you again today, and encourage you to check out the rest of that Reader’s Companion if you have a chance. We’ll conclude our feature of Danny’s work tomorrow, with new poems from his aforementioned manuscript, Homewrecker. — AS

AS: I’d like to begin with a discussion of disruption — of the body (by unnamable, alien force), of rhythm (by in-line caesura), of dinner (by men with axes), all the forms it takes in this collection. Each form of disruption is a creative or propulsive force, the first and most present radicalism in Manoleria’s poetics. I’m invested from the very beginning in your distinctive use of spatial caesura, and am particularly interested in understanding its technical importance to you. In fact, to start there, how does disruption — whether technical, narrative, metaphorical, or otherwise — operate for you as a compositional force?

DK: Disruption, indeed, is something I think about often when writing. The poems in Manoleria came from a time (in my life, in the world) when I felt very disrupted. When these poems were written, I was living in Provincetown, finishing my fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center — I was far away from the people I loved, the fear of securing a job and health insurance overwhelming me on a daily basis, and I was listening to news pour in from my small kitchen radio about a collapsing housing market and a seemingly endless parade of recently uncovered secrets about war, torture, and extraordinary rendition. As a person living in the world, I didn’t know how to react, and as a writer I wasn’t sure I could react.

When I did begin to write, the poems took the form of a recurring narrator who was (quite literally) physically destroyed while the world, the people around him, took little notice. Not such a subtle metaphor I realize, but to me this felt like the best way to examine the utter catastrophe I (like everyone?) was witnessing at the time.

As the poems became more and more sonically driven, it became important to me to bridge the gap between what I heard in my head (a stutter, an uncertainty) and what the reader would encounter on the page. I began experimenting with space, with caesuras, and with punctuation that arrived when the audience didn’t expect or want punctuation, or wasn’t sure how to handle it. Big inspirations to me during this time were writers/artists like D. A. Powell, Caryl Pagel, Nas, Claudia Rankine, Gertrude Stein, Matthea Harvey, Bruce Springsteen, John Berryman, and Mobb Deep.

Music has always been an important part of my life, and to be honest I’m not sure where I’d be without music. That said, I heard Springsteen say in an interview once that he gets away with certain things lyrically that an author/poet would not because he has, “the music raging underneath.” On the page, however, we only have our words and the way we present them — since I didn’t have instruments/a rumbling beat surrounding my poems, I felt it was my responsibility when writing Manoleria to create that “rage” through hiccups/gaps/gasps/delay/disruption. My goal, then, is for you (as a reader) to hear/read the poems the same way I do — so that we (and pardon the terrible cliché here) hear the same song, even if we hear different singers, from different speakers, in different cars, driving down different highways.

AS: I want to pick up later on these comments about music.

However, let’s follow this for a moment: “Not such a subtle metaphor,” you say, and certainly one of the most striking aspects of this book is its unapologetic use of physically grotesque description — of violent forces working their way through the narrator’s body, and of violences imposed on the narrator from without. Whether metaphorically, psychologically, or purely in terms of imagery, there is nothing subtle in the presentation of Manoleria’s main current. It is pure voltage. And, in the wake of the visceral experience of reading these poems, I’m inclined to think that subtlety is overrated.

Psychological terror is something I’m accustomed to in my reading of contemporary poetry — it’s the physical element foregrounded here that I have encountered much less frequently.

What’s interesting to me about it, and to bridge this back to disruption somewhat, is that for all that the world is unflinching around the disruptive force that the narrator might logically become, so too is the narrator entirely calm in the face of all that afflicts or disrupts him. It’s as though there is a mutually derived accord between the disruptive force and the would-be disrupted audience that above all else remaining calm is necessary in these circumstances. As a reader, I find this sort of in-narrative agreed-upon equivocality to be rather calming. I wonder if you could speak some to the impact of an equivocal (or dogged, or numbed) tone on these poems, and your experience writing them?

DK: These are wonderful questions, Andy. While I’d love to give you an impressively original/mind-blowing answer, the truth is that the poems in Manoleria were written with a kind of disturbed apathy because that’s what I saw going on around me at the time.

What I mean to say is that when these poems were shaking loose from my typewriter, we (as a country, as Americans, as humans, etc.) were involved in a war, in torture, in an election cycle that was just beginning to dominate every aspect of the news, in an unemployment crisis, in a healthcare crisis, in an educational crisis, and no one seemed to notice or care.

Now, obviously, that’s a gross generalization — people noticed, but it didn’t seem to me that anyone (including myself) was doing anything about what was happening. When I began to think about writing during such a politically charged/definitive time in our history, I was hyper aware of my limitations (or, perceived limitations): I came from a supportive, middleclass family; I graduated college, went to graduate school, was being paid (at the time) to do nothing else but write in a cottage on the shores of Cape Cod. Since I was in such fear of coming across as (gasp!) pompous/naïve/presumptuous, I wanted to present these poems (this narrator, these terrors) in as much horrific-nonchalance as possible. Maybe it was silly of me, but the thought was that if I could make readers feel the grotesque, if I could bother them by how little the world around the narrator (and the narrator himself) appeared to care about what was happening, maybe the meta-connection to the present state of our crumbling existence (not to sound hyperbolic) would somehow suddenly become more viscerally apparent.

In the absence of all this politically charged rhetoric, I think maybe the poems in Manoleria remained “calm” or quiet because in the face of such glaring and obvious wrongdoing, shouting doesn’t always seem to help. Sometimes, I drive down the street and watch as kids push each other on sidewalks or listen to students on campus use potentially hurtful language as they attempt to make their friends laugh. As an outsider, I am reassured when someone stands up for himself or herself. When a person can vocalize a defense (“Hey, stop pushing me,” “That word is offensive, you shouldn’t use it”), this seems to signal a strength that suggests a recognition of borders/boundaries/ respect/power. What bothers me, however, is when no ones says anything — when we watch the kids bully each other for sport and then seem surprised to hear of a school shooting; when I walk past a homeless vet being ushered from underneath the awning of a sandwich shop and don’t ask the students taking pictures with their smartphones why none of us have enlisted.

I fear, here, that I’m not fully making sense, so I’ll leave you with this thought: It’s uncomfortable to watch people not be able to defend themselves, but it’s potentially more disturbing to realize they don’t want to. That discomfort, that personal/social disruption (to come full circle) is something I’m very interested in, and I hope the poems in Manoleria bring that to light in some way.

AS:It’s safe to say that Manoleria does bring some of that personal discomfort to light, and in such a way as, for instance, a pedagogical theorist would find sound (if you’ll pardon the comparison): that is, this book forces me to begin an interrogation of my own response. Confronted with violence, I remain calm — feel, even, calmed. That’s a situation few readers would claim comfort in recognizing.

But let’s return to the thoughts about music (as an underpinning, as an aspiration) that you brought up a while back. There are multiple tracks I’d like to head down on that subject. Leaving aside the obvious — artists are constantly inspired by and in conversation with other artists, living and dead, in and out of their own discipline, in the same way that they are engaged with, say, landscape or memory — what impact has music had on your writing, in this book and in other writing?

I think, for instance, of the titles taken from Mobb Deep songs in your extended sequence, “Send Weight” (a series not included in Manoleria but published in Thermos) — and you mentioned both Mobb Deep and Nas as presences in your daily life as you wrote Manoleria. Prodigy (of Mobb Deep) is legendary for the coldness in his line from “Shook Ones, Pt. 2,” when he says, “rock you in your face, stab your brain with your nose bone.” And while the coldness is coming from the opposite end in your figuration of violence and non-response, it seems like one place where you might easily have found an example.

Does much of your inspiration stemming from music come from content, as here, and as in your interest in the social situations handled in Springsteen’s music? Do you find hip-hop beats or flow in the current of your own poetic rhythms? Where does music enter technique for you?

DK: I’ll say, first, that I’m overjoyed we are able to discuss Mobb Deep and Springsteen in an “academic” interview. Second, these questions are incredibly interesting to me, and I’ll do my best to rein in my response.

Music, to me, is the most important aspect of poetry. The rhythms, the cadence, the sonic bravado (or lack thereof) of any given poem are what allow a reader (this reader?) a clear shot at the heart. While some poets rely on music to push/pull their pieces in new and engaging directions (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dora Malech, Michelle Taransky), others use it more sparingly to signal shifts I find utterly breathtaking in their subtlety (Denis Johnson, Zach Savich, Marc Rahe . . . the list could go on). I guess what I’m saying is that sometimes the music of poetry is a knocking 808 drum machine, and sometimes it’s silence. For me, word choice and rhythm happen so intrinsically that I do my best to avoid attempting to disguise or analyze it. Like a rapper (say, Prodigy in “Shook Ones, Pt. 2”), when I write there is something in my head that is driving me towards certain words and their combinations. While I don’t have a slick beat thundering in my headphones, I do have a feeling (in the case of Manoleria, a feeling of destruction/political upheaval/uncertainty, etc.) that I want to say something about. If you think of that feeling as a beat, the full “music” of the piece comes together when lyrics/poetic lines are laced on top. What I mean to say is that Prodigy, with that grimy beat from “Shook Ones…”, wasn’t likely to say “kiss you on the cheek, hug you tight cause I love you.” The beat, the feeling it created, allowed him to lyrically represent the violence he felt and saw growing up in Queens. The sound let him let go, and I think I try to allow that same thing to happen to me when writing.

To say this more succinctly, and to go back to the Springsteen quote I mentioned earlier, while I don’t have a beat/“music raging” underneath my poems, I still want my poems to sing. The rise and fall of each syllable, each gerund, each moment of punctuation, is there hopefully to help the reader feel/hear/connect to whatever it is I’m trying to get across — I’ve never stabbed anyone in the brain with their own nose bone, but I understand the anger Prodigy was surrounded by in his youth; my dad never worked in a factory, but I understand the backbreaking labor Springsteen’s characters go through on albums like Darkness on the Edge of Town. Those songs, those musicians, move me — I guess I use music in my poems to try and move the reader in a similar way.

In an attempt to answer this question specifically, I should state more exactly that music plays a direct role in my writing. Every morning, I get up and spend an hour or so reading hip-hop blogs, listening to new rappers, new songs, and new flows. Although it sometimes feels that the rap genre (like all art forms) is “played out,” or that there can no longer be a fresh way to present the same formula (beat, 16 bars, chorus, more bars, more chorus, etc.), I’m always inspired by what I hear. The drive, the determination of some of these artists reminds me to “stay hungry,” as they say. They get me excited about word play, about language, and about what it’s like to have a voice with something to say and a world around you that doesn’t necessarily want to hear you. (Sounds a lot like contemporary poetry, huh?) I go back and forth with musical genres and styles — some days I’ll only listen to Tommy Dorsey, others Springsteen, still others Jimmy Witherspoon. But most days, I stick with hip-hop, and I take walks or drives around town when all I do is listen to one song over and over, focusing intently on how the artist was able to pull me as a listener in and out of the track. How they maintained control. How they kept me from “switching the channel” — how they kept me in it. (As a side note, this week that artist/song was Freddie Gibbs’ “National Anthem.” If you haven’t listened to this, you should. Right now.)

I once heard a rapper (I forget who) say that rapping was like boxing — that every time an artist picks up a notepad or gets in the recording booth, they have to believe they’re the strongest/most well trained/hardest person in the world. If not, and they get in the ring with someone else who’s more hungry, more tough, they’ll just get eaten alive. I don’t mean for this to sound like I believe, in any way, that poetry is a competition, or that I want to be better than my peers — what I mean is that through music I’ve learned that a certain amount of confidence is necessary, and that taking risks and chances with my word play/presentation/disruption (we’ve come full circle again!) keeps me from falling in to the “only twelve notes a man can play” thought process that (at times) seems to inundate all art forms, poetry not excluded.

My final point is a small one: Springsteen is the greatest poet who has ever lived. But maybe that’s something we can talk about later.

AS: There are many avenues to take out of that response — including: Springsteen as the greatest poet, how and why? But I’m most interested in the issue of confidence.

I think we would agree that artists must move with confidence — even something beyond confidence, a non-acknowledgment of confidence — through whatever ground they deem necessary in order to achieve the rhythm/music/form/content that constitutes meaning for them in writing poetry. That there is no terrifying realm of consciousness that should be held outside the materials of a poem. But for the reader — even the serious and seasoned reader of literature — that is not necessarily true. There are territories that a reader might justifiably not wish to engage, for whatever reason. Leaving aside the question of how much a writer owes to an audience, I’m interested in hearing from you about some of the territories you found, as a poet, difficult to traverse — and where you might expect readers to encounter restraints and limits in themselves. I ask because there is evidence in the music of the Manoleria poems of deeper disruptions than the sort we discussed earlier on — things you must have had to reconcile with yourself in order, as your narrator does, to press forward.

DK: I may have said this before, but as a writer I find great comfort in discomfort. For me, there is so much in the world that is upsetting and utterly frustrating (poor education, wars, political issues, etc.) that while I may choose to avoid these to an extent in my daily life (I’m not one to picket, to proselytize my beliefs in any particularly public forum), my poems are a chance to get in the face or the head of another person (of myself?) and say, “Hey — isn’t this fucked up?”

I don’t mean to be crass, but hopefully you see my point. Certainly there are many territories I wish not to (and don’t) write about — I avoid (for the most part) writing about my family’s history (escaping Iraq) because it’s difficult and I don’t feel I have the right to write about this. I also avoid writing direct “confessional” pieces because if I wanted someone to know about my failed attempts at living my own life, I’d leave my journal on a public bus or start a blog.

Maybe the bigger question here is how I expect my readers to deal with the issues/images/violent dismemberment that occurs throughout Manoleria, and the truth is I simply hope they trust me. I worked hard at avoiding “shock value” in this book. I’m not writing to show how weird my brain is, or (honestly I’m shaking my head here) to be funny. Poetry — and I stress that this is a personal opinion — is not meant to be stand-up comedy. Too often contemporary poetry feels like the poets are out to try and amuse their friends at a bar where everyone is wearing skinny jeans; like poetry has become easy, in the sense that (strangely?) it is suddenly a hip thing to do, and if a person makes a few jokes and breaks a few lines, they’ll have a book done in no time. I don’t want Manoleria to read that way. I want the discomfort, the moments where a reader would rather turn away or close their eyes, to be somehow balanced with a more engaged, purposeful stillness. Maybe that’s why so many of the poems in the collection are “narrative” — it was very important to me when creating these pieces that the reader not feel like I was saying anything just to say it. I wanted there to be a feeling of deliberateness — perhaps that leads to the “calm” feeling we discussed earlier — and I’m thankful that the editors at Tupelo saw that in the book.

When I teach creative writing, I tell my students that they owe their audience everything and nothing — they just have to remember that the reader only has what the writer leaves on the page. After that, misinterpretation/alternate readings/etc. are fair game. Hopefully Manoleria doesn’t ask too much of the reader, but also doesn’t ask too little. Hopefully that impulse to want to cover one’s eyes from the proverbial car-crash of images, but still peek through to see the wreck’s aftermath comes from a quiet voice somewhere in the collection telling everyone: there, there — yes, this is happening, but it’s okay.

AS: All right, so you called Bruce Springsteen “the greatest poet who ever lived,” and there’s a part of me that’s inclined to agree, largely for temperamental reasons. What I want to know is what you mean by that statement? How would you justify that claim?

DK: Listen to Darkness on the Edge of Town front to back four times in a row. Listen to The River (all of it), and then put on Nebraska, turn off the lights, and spend three days only eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the floor of your apartment. Make note of the control. The ability for one man to assume the voice of a country (its politics, its people, its economic diversity/frustration/limitation/need), and then try to give me another writer who is able to achieve anything close in a total run-time of roughly 159 minutes. Then we can talk about justification. Am I right? (I get all hot and bothered when I talk about Bruce — maybe my claim can’t be justified, but Springsteen is the one who first showed me what was possible as a writer, if I just opened my eyes; if I just looked out the door, the window, down the stairwell. If I just saw. In fact, I get a very similar feeling every time I listen to Nas’s Illmatic, but maybe that’s a conversation for another time.)

AS: I’ve encountered a question many times with the primary word “responsibilities,” but I feel that an artist’s primary responsibility is to the art, so I want to frame this slightly differently: What do you see as the possibilities of the poet in public conversation? I mean primarily political conversation, but interpret as you will. Who are some poets who have recently advanced these possibilities for you?

DK: Every poet has different responsibilities, and maybe every poet also has different possibilities. That said, I think a poem has the chance to cause action — whether that’s a fiery riot by a critical mass in objection to political tyranny, or a sudden understanding of what to say to a lover and how to say it. In other words, if we can get poems out there (which is easier now, in some ways, with online journals, etc.), they have the possibility of (gulp) changing the world. For me, as I’ve mentioned before, I feel this change, this call to action, often from musicians/hip-hop artists, but there are also many poets/writers who have greatly advanced what I understand to be “possible” on the page. I’m not one for lists, but I will say that the writers whose work I return to regularly for this reason are Roberto Bolaño, Leonard Michaels, Claudia Rankine, Dan Beachy-Quick, D. A. Powell, Jack Gilbert, Robyn Schiff, John Berryman, Vinnie Wilhelm, Inger Christensen, Mario Bellatin, Matthea Harvey, and James Wright. Obviously I am forgetting people (James Galvin, Suzanne Buffam, and others) but these writers/poets all show me, every time I pick up one of their books, that there’s no limit to the power of language. I owe a lot to all of these writers. It’s that simple.

AS: Finally, since you finished writing Manoleria, what are some books you’ve read, films you’ve seen, experiences you’ve had (etc.) that have altered the context of the book for you in some way?

DK: After finishing Manoleria I went on a pretty big TV series kick that I’m honestly still trying to work my way out of. I didn’t have television for a good stretch of the last four years, so I’ve worked pretty hard to play catch up when I can. One show that has made me think about (albeit in different contexts) the themes raised in Manoleria is the beautiful and amazingly under-appreciated Friday Night Lights. Aside from the strange dip in season two (possibly because of the writers’ strike) I think FNL does a terrific job of highlighting the struggles of everyday Americans, everyday people. Like Springsteen, the show touches on everything and everyone — it covers how economic class is driving our country apart, investigates how bad political decisions are impacting our educational system, examines (daringly, by contemporary television standards) the role religion plays in social/personal decisions and actions, and shows people finding a way to survive in the face of obvious hardship and adversity.

While I hope Manoleria doesn’t read as a “family drama,” the themes I’m discussing in the collection are not unique to my poems. Friday Night Lights seems to have similar aims, just with pretty actors and a sexier drawl. If you haven’t seen it, it’s highly recommended.

I’m not sure if that’s the answer you’re looking for. Obviously the election of President Obama, the book The Dark Side by Jane Mayer, my move to Milwaukee, and other experiences/events/etc. have all altered the way I look at Manoleria — but isn’t it more fun to talk about television?

Daniel Khalastchi: First-Book Conversation (Re-printed)

We first published this conversation, on this blog, two years ago this week. What I find most interesting in re-reading the conversation this week is the fact that many of the concerns Danny expresses in the past tense in his wonderful public letter are posited in the present tense in these answers. I’m grateful for both. — AS

TH: How has having a first book out changed how you think about your writing?

DK: I used to think (when I was young, silly, naive, etc.) that having a book out would mean finally getting that Bentley I always wanted and having jobs thrown at me left and right. Yet, to be more serious for a second, I think I actually thought it would give me the chance to really explore poetry in ways any writer who hasn’t gotten their foot in the door may not feel able to.  But in truth, it’s made me more nervous about both the act of writing itself and my personal connection to the global megaphone. I find myself asking more frequently now, “what do I want to say/why would anyone care to listen to me/how come I suddenly have all these gray hairs?”

Writing has become more stressful, but I’m not sure I would change that.  Once Manoleria entered the world, I realized I had to stand behind it, and I had to keep moving. It’s easy to write a bad Danny Khalastchi poem. It’s been more difficult to write somewhat-bad-but-also-somewhat-interesting/possibly-good Danny Khalastchi poems since the book was released, and that’s what I’ve taken away most from the experience.  I don’t want (as a writer/artist) to ever be complacent. I’m proud of Manoleria, but I also know nothing is guaranteed.  Like many other poets with a book, I have to dive right back into the “prize” system. I’m back to getting rejection letters and small notes of “we like this but we can’t take it,” etc.  Though it would be nice to be like some of my fiction writing colleagues (money, agents, cocktail parties with jokes about astronauts!), poetry is the real art. It lasts. Since Manoleria came out, I’m just trying to make more things that will continue to do just that.

TH: You seem to be a various and prolific writer. Is Manoleria a capsule of a specific time, or of a specific mood returned to in the midst of many other projects?

DK: It’s strange to admit this as often as I do, but the initial draft of Manoleria was written on my typewriter while I had a residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  I had maybe a month left on the Cape, and I remember waking up every day with the weight of a brick-filled laundry basket pressing on my kidneys.  I was anxious and afraid that the time I had that winter/spring would (possibly) be the only time in my entire life where someone afforded me the opportunity to do nothing but write.  I read and wrote a lot that year, but everything seemed stale and young and (for lack of a better word) repetitive.

While my own writing was lying flat and shaved in my mind, the news from around the world was doing just the opposite to my body. A new election cycle was starting, we were in the middle of wars on multiple fronts, and information was coming in daily about torture and what these things truly (right word?) meant about being an “American.” Suddenly, I was energized. I wanted to try writing about these things, and I gave myself (possibly for the first time in my writing life) complete freedom to do so.

I had a painting by the artist Justin Richel over my desk, and I wrote every morning and afternoon poems that I didn’t really look at for three months. When I finally did go back and see what had come out of that specific time in my life, Manoleria was there. All packed up. All ready to go. I’ve worked on many projects prior and since completing that collection, but the actual writing of Manoleria was as uninterrupted and focused as I’m likely to ever get.

TH: How do you see your work in what’s happening now in poetry? Are there other first books out there that you feel like yours is friends with?

DK: The closer you read and pay attention to the “aesthetics” of a given press or “school” in contemporary poetry, the more you can become frustrated with what appears to be complete and utter writing towards the middle.  There is a lot of slapstick poetry in the world today, and that’s not something that really gets me excited.  Having said that, there are many first books that I would hope Manoleria could friend-request on Facebook and get a kind acceptance.  I’m thinking here of Arda Collins’ It Is Daylight, Shane McCrae’s Mule, Srikanth Reddy’s Facts for Visitors, Sabrina Orah Mark’s The Babies, Jericho Brown’s Please, and Nick Demske’s Nick Demske (a book that I’ll argue from the top of any building you put me on is not reckless humor—that book, and author, have serious heart).

I also think here of the work of Dora Malech, Caryl Pagel, Marc Rahe, Suzanne Buffam, and Robyn Schiff whose books/chapbooks/and individual poems continually inspire me and my writing every time I think/read/head to the typewriter.

TH: What poems or lines from your book feel the “youngest” to you, like they most show your development (though you remain fond of them)? Why/how?

DK: Juvenilia shines brightest when you least expect it to, and it keeps humming and glowing no matter what you try to do to eradicate it.  There is part of me that wants to answer this question by simply saying now, today, the entire book feels “young” to me. But I have a flair for being dramatic. To pick a single line or poem from Manoleria to illustrate this shockingly youthful ignorance may be hard, but I can do it. For instance, “Audible Retraction” is a poem I appreciate for its detail/drive toward the disturbing, but the last two lines (the rhyme of “flesh in my teeth and screw in/whatever’s in reach”) seem forced and heavy. Like I was more excited about the sounds than the image. In fact, I’ve never read that poem in public for that very reason.

I have other examples of where I believe I missed the mark in Manoleria, but in the end I think it’s okay that some words/phrases/poems/sections/structures feel young. It’s my first book. Maybe my only book. It’s a collection of poems from a specific time in my life and the world, and it reads (for better or worse)—I hope—like a documentation of that era.

A conversation with Robert Fernandez

THERMOS editor Zach Savich introduces contributor Robert Fernandez’s lovely We Are Pharaoh (Canarium Books, 2011) and gives Fernandez a chance to share his thoughts on sublimity, the lyric, and Florida.

It wasn’t quite warm enough to sit outside but I sat outside and read Robert Fernandez’s first book of poems, We Are Pharaoh (Canarium Books, 2011), my bench bisecting school groups on their way to the greenhouse. Inside, they must have seen iridescent petals different to the touch than you think and sturdier, and the overflowing hanging bleeding hearts: Robert’s poems feel similar to that flora, forged of lush and crisp careening forms that show “Dionysian” and “relaxing” can be synonyms, that a “ring of keys” can be a “meadow,” that art can shimmer in “plates of hunger / & luminosity” with desperation that is also empathy. They left me, like good books do, unable to read for the rest of the afternoon.

Instead, I sent Robert some interview prompts—not questions, but concepts his book brought to mind. He responded to a few of them with incredible depth, and also sent us a poem from his forthcoming collection Pink Reef (Canarium Books, 2013). I’m pleased to present Robert’s thorough, thoughtful answers here, preceded by a poem from his first collection. Additional work by Robert can be found in Thermos #6, which also features poems by Julie Carr, Nik De Domnic, Shannon Burns, and others, available from thermosmag@gmail.com.

Zach Savich

Hell Me Down

We take stock of the forearms:
They are like red snapper, slick
And sharp; they are like glass.
You see I am falling through

My pleasure like an intimacy
Of mirrors rubbing against
The face and you cannot uncut
The stomach: it is a die.

Here is the heat because we must begin.
Red rainbow spread like a hawk’s gills;
Red rainbow tied off in its black holes
Which dot the ceiling because it is enough.

A nurse raises
Her beak from my chest:
All my vultures are warm
And with gold discs for heads,
All my vultures are form.

Lord find me,
Who is another? Where is the flesh
Of gain? Venture and thighs
Of gold and living glass?

I forget that I consented to wander
To wander by the pier; I consent
That I wander and am like paper:
A black kite wet with night.

Grid I am good and like the Aeon,
A child playing with colored balls.
In the hall because they know me,
The young ones, the eternally. They see

The stela in the flesh of my throat they divine
The throat-rod and its glyphs. Bright to burn
And nurse on cold marrow-like light:
It is midnight and I am speed cut

Into thirds of day; I am threes everlasting &
Hells of foment. Then I stand like eternal resistance
Like hell. No one who walks over this
Ground senses it is sound: look again:

We find ourselves on the shore
And the flame follows us it flows
Through our speaking it is here.
I have failed again, I am no longer I am failed.

I am first to run aground I am seen.
Let us style vital light: New moon again but I am light;
We are not otherwise we are seen.
How shall I stand how shall I be seen?

The morning curled around us like warm like
I am clasped by infinite waters, I am seen.

—from We Are Pharaoh

1. Tradition, the lyric

The lyric is a perilous topic, one that turns poets and critics into priests arguing for either the sanctity or insidiousness of the genre—if it can even be agreed that it is a genre. Let’s grant that it is possible to traverse 2700 years—from Archilochus to Shakespeare to today—and still arrive at a set of intact lyric conventions. Some of the most salient characteristics of the lyric might be: compression; the sense of an “I” speaking to a “you”; apostrophe; hyperbole; associative logics; distinct experiences of time (e.g. a sense of simultaneity/the ecstatic); refrain; heightened imagistic and/or sonic intensity; constructedness (formal, metrical, etc.). The lyric is non-narrative, non-dramatic, non-didactic.

While genres are indeed useful in establishing frameworks of intelligibility, in the end I’m less interested in cataloging and comparing traits than in posing questions about the lyric I can’t safely answer. For instance: Is it possible to think of the lyric as not only a set of genre conventions but as an accord that seizes on a given material—whether language, paint, or bodies—under the right conditions? Something is possessed by lyricism, it becomes lyrical. Or is the lyric a mode of revealing (say poiesis, i.e. the kind of making that appears identical to nature as springing-forth) in which things emerge in the light of their constitutive foreigness? Which is to say, is the lyric language that, while seeming to come as naturally (as self-directedly) as leaves to a tree, presents a surging, elusive world? Is the lyric-as-song simply language echoing its own immanent emergence and passage, language resonant with the bare fact that things are—that existence is—rather than is not? And can the lyric even be considered an event—something other than the mere sum of its parts—without overlooking historical context or losing its integrity as a genre?

Whatever the case, it seems reasonable, as Jonathan Culler has argued, to think of the lyric as more than just “overheard speech.” Lyric language might as convincingly be described (and accessed) as a kind of haunted singing which makes that which is most familiar to us, language, strange, and in so doing reveals the human being’s essential strangeness—reveals that one is constituted by difference and always at home in otherness. This would amount to a reversal of that problematic strain of the lyric that fatuously seeks to make the home and its inhabitants all the more intimate and familiar. We could speak of the lyric as an artifact capable of registering and transmitting the experience of modernity, of the lyric that poses alternatives to capitalism’s nefarious effect on the human capacity for valuation (namely, its reduction of everything to the status of a commodity). There is a sense of lyric language as the language of birth, joy, or upheaval; of love, intoxication, or praise (in line with which, we might consider the lyric’s relationship to things, to naming). While poetic genres like the ode, hymn, or elegy may deal more narrowly with these concerns, with each it still feels as if we’re safely within the terrain of the lyric. Of course, we shouldn’t smugly or recklessly employ the term if that means overlooking other practices or genres. And one wants to stay alert to the dangers of passivity and euphony, which as Celan pointed out “more or less blithely continued to sound alongside the greatest horror.”

Although the lyric is hard to pin down, it is clear that it would be rash to simply abandon such a rich and potentially transformative reservoir. I think that in We Are Pharaoh lyric language is often in conflict with itself. Conflict is in any case structured into the language of an epoch that pitches itself toward disaster even as survival (the preservation of both one’s life and one’s way of life) is held up as its foremost priority. The book’s particular forces and concerns attempt to mirror this logic. Units of sonic and imagistic intensity are either disparately constellated or constrained by formal logics and the logic of micro-narratives, initiating a struggle between erotics and necrosis, figures and their dissolution, or, alternatively, suggesting a desire for style as transformation, seeing as worlding. Perhaps the language’s intensity, as your email put it, is a function of its conflicting urges to erase, transform, and affirm itself.

Valuing tension in the poem has a bit of a controversial history. Nevertheless, in my work I consistently find myself trying to establish the conditions under which something like a struggle might emerge. Struggle is of interest to me in that, if it takes, it appears endless, ongoing, alive, and that it asks that the work submit to its own design and pursue its own values.

2. Grandeur, the sublime, who’s real

I’m less interested in grandeur as such than in embracing language as desire, abandon, laughter. To hell with anyone who feels it is their duty to discipline excess or ambition. This is, after all, art. Why feel guilty, ashamed, or frivolous for pursuing what kindles, spurs, and gives pleasure? Furthermore, it may indeed be possible to invest in questions of vulnerability and responsibility while also attempting to engage a spirit of joy and courage. When, at sixteen, Rimbaud says of the poet “Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!,” the “adult” in me winces, but I also remember that a sense of innocence and serious play are vital to both one’s work and one’s world.

As to the sublime: we generally understand it as a staggering, ineffable limitlessness, correct? I admit that I feel invested in poetic language as a coming up against or an unfolding of limits. These days the sublime would seem to be more relevant in a consideration of the apparatus of global power than the awesomeness of nature. Nonetheless, that coruscating fog of integrated military, economic, institutional, and media technologies may in fact be unthinkable (it certainly can’t be met face to face). Maybe it would be interesting to reinvest in a sense of the Romantic sublime, to seek out fresh astonishment in the presence of some visually arresting primordial immensity. The problem is that we’re so accustomed to spectacle that such immensities, if not immediately placing one at risk, are only likely to elicit the tourist’s array of uninteresting clichés and inanities. Dread (or a sense of uncanniness) is arguably a more productive starting point for thinking about one’s shared finitude. It presents itself in the poem as an experience of our exposure to a groundless and irreconcilably unfamiliar world. One takes up residence in the unknown and unknowable, sustained by supports/activities (e.g. language) that are inherently uncertain, at risk. These supports, which bear the burdens of the past, provide only a temporary ground upon which a work or world might be situated.

In technological modernity, we can track an ongoing sense of being haunted—by language, images, commodities, bodies. And yet it’s increasingly easy to feel, especially if one has a seat at the table, untroubled, fleshed, streamlined—all crispness, fluency, and versatility. However, it’s also very easy to feel—this especially if one does not have a seat at the table—like a zombie or an animal (I would say “ghost” but ghosts sometimes speak). I’m interested in the ease with which one can pass from fluency to paralysis (and in the difficulty of passing back again), as well as in the trouble of effectively articulating either (each, in different ways, are conditions in which language has withdrawn). If Pharaoh otherwise tilts toward grandeur, it’s less about grandstanding and more about exploring the liberating potentials of generosity, love, and, as I said, innocence and courage.

3. Landscape

I had actually recently been thinking about certain poets (Stevens, Crane, Bishop, Brathwaite) for whom there is arguably a relationship between landscape and time. We find ourselves in the poem, say, as in the petrified remains of history: language reveals itself as time and appears brittle or crushed or powdery—there is a sense of language as fossil, heaving, or dispersal. Or we are in the poem as in some intricately contoured present, a radiant immediacy of detail and sensation (“infested / with tiny white sea-lice…,” “fresh and crisp with blood”). Or we occasionally sense the presence of an inhuman outside and its non-time or other-than-time: “A gold-feathered bird / Sings in the palm, without human meaning, / Without human feeling, a foreign song…”

I grew up in Hollywood, Florida (the exact landscape of Larry Clark’s Bully). Whatever landscapes have been imprinted in me are Florida landscapes, Caribbean landscapes. Using the word “imprinted” (a very Romantic notion) makes me realize—this with the hindsight of seven years spent in the Midwest—that it does feel like some psychic plates were stamped with the repeated exposures to those skies. On the ground, there are ports, diaspora and ethnic communities, spectacles of wealth, wealth disparities, varieties of speculative investments—none of which would radically distinguish the place from any other but for the fact that all are glazed in a near-beatific tropic luminosity and in the candied light of a distinct South Beach nihilism.

Ironically, We Are Pharaoh is probably more directly indebted to these environments than is my second manuscript, Pink Reef.

from Pink Reef

*

I will reform,
re-encounter love’s law
I will follow
after the bright
seeds of marrow are
shaken from the thigh
& the thigh placed
on a stick in
the faceless gallery
I will devote,
for thou hue
thou gravel
thou hearse—
the blood oranges
so bright
because they are
against a white
background
the blood oranges
so bright
because they are
against a white
background
the blood oranges
so bright
because they are
against a white
background
the blood
oranges
cold and light
cold and light
cold and light

The question of landscape is no doubt also a question of boundaries, of limits and the varied efforts to differentiate what one is from what one is not. The dangers of such efforts extend from the interpersonal and political to the ecological. It seems to me that the poetic not only unfolds illusory integrities, it also makes the outside that is already inside more raggedly manifest.

With that, Zach, I’ll say my thanks to you and the THERMOS editors for the prompts and this forum.

–6.12.11

Robert Fernandez is the author of We Are Pharaoh (Canarium Books, 2011) and Pink Reef, which is due out from Canarium Books in the spring of 2013. He is the recipient of awards from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry. With the poet Mary Hickman, he edits the chapbook press Cosa Nostra Editions.

A conversation with King of the Cats

This month, THERMOS has hosted a feature on a writing group, King of the Cats, based in Seattle and taking its from from a post-collegiate cohort of writers. We published work from three members— Zac Fulton, Caitlyn McGehee, and Emily Wittenhagen— and now have an interview with (and embarrassing photos of) these folks.

TH: What was the spark for you guys to become a community of writers? What subsequent structure best seemed to suit formal work, critique, good conversation etc. together?

C: Some friends and I started a writing group— King of the Cats— with poets we’d met through classes at the University of Washington. It was truly a community— we reviewed each other’s work weekly, shared books and ideas, went to events together, hosted events together, drank heavily together.

King of the Cats: unreal mustaches

E: I think really fondly on my first meeting, at Seth’s house back during the wine dynasty. One gentleman got a little caught up in the revelry and produced the most beautiful vomit I’ve ever seen, bright fuchsia the consistency of fine sorbet.

But the reason I kept going back was the poetry and also how freely people critiqued. It was all really wholehearted and I was like, yup, these guys have totally nailed it. I assume this is similar to how lots of poetry groups start, or should start, with a kind of engine grease to help people get over the terrible awkwardness of reading poetry aloud. The best structure I think has been in each other’s homes with comfortable couches and maybe a piano or a balcony. If you can’t help feeling awkward, you can at least be comfortable.

Z: King of the Cats was always a pretty informal and inexclusive affair, so there was a lot of variation. Some times it would be only a few of us and the critiques would be very focused, other times fifteen or twenty people would show up and it would turn into more of a recital/wine party. If Cate decided she a more serious workshop she would sometimes have us meet at a coffee shop, because when we met at someone’s house a lot of wine tended to get drunk.

C: Three years later, King of the Cats formally dissolved, either because this “community” shrank in bodies— specifically, people moved away, clods washed to sea, etc— or because it grew in familiarity— people developed enmities, crushes, histories, tastes and distastes. Now: less wine, no meetings, but still most of the same people sitting in rooms and reading to each other.

TH: What do you want to write next?

Z: There are so many mental resources outside of your own mind, I feel like you should make use of them as much as possible. All language is found language— some of it just comes in bigger pieces. For a while with Cats we went through a phase of mashing each others’ poems up into new poems, and one my mashups of Emily actually worked its way into my portfolio. Occasionally at meetings after someone reads a poem, someone else will read it backwards just to see how it sounds— anything that can spin your mind in a new direction.

E: I’d like to write more about the desert. I just got back from New Mexico and I’m going through this phase I think lots of girls have of being obsessed with the southwest. I think the usual progression is horseback riding, photography, and then tarot cards and desert wisdom type stuff. I also really like when a writer takes on a landscape or a region like that. Barry Lopez does an amazing job of it in Desert Notes. He starts by talking about how he entered the desert by jumping out of his car and just letting it drive away from him and how that’s the best way to enter the desert.

C: I’ve always been a sucker for “peer work,” in quotes because I usually consider these poets (such as Emily and Zac) peerless. I like seeing people do something over which they have ownership and authority; when I say “peerless” I mean apples to oranges to orange soda to aluminum, not Braeburn to Honey Crisp.

TH: What were some of the first poems/poets you loved? How do they seem to you now? How do they relate to your own work?

C: The first poets I loved were determined by whoever took the time to sit me down and tell me why and how someone was amazing. This led to the creation of some pretty schizophrenic work at first, and trying to do both Keats and Koch no doubt still ripples today, in what I can only hope are gradually less distortive waves.

Z: The first poem I remember really loving was “The Pool Players” by Gwendolyn Brooks. I find that poem devastating, and she does it in so few words. A few other early favorites: “Meditation at Lagunitas” by Robert Hass, “The Second Coming” by Yeats, and “The Radish” by James Tate.

All of those poems are still fresh for me. I believe in poetry as something ongoing, social, and fluid; as you gain more experience, read farther and wider, you find that the poems are in a dialogue with each other and that they continue to open up for years and years. I often don’t appreciate I poem until a long time after I first read it, but I rarely lose appreciation for a poem that I liked immediately.

E: The first ones that come to mind are Frank O’Hara and Anna Akhmatova. They each spoke for certain generations and places in time and instead of being just poets, they were like living, breathing poems. People say Frank wrote shreds of poems on napkins and train tickets and things, so probably many of them were lost. For Anna it was different— the Russian government forbade her to write for 30 years, so when a visitor would come to her apartment, she would write a line on a leaf of cigarette paper and pass it to the guest, who would memorize the line and burn the scrap. In a perfect world, the writer’s attached to the words and detached from recognition. I’m not sure I’ve achieved any of that, but I’d like to. My favorite Frank poem is one called “Morning” and my favorite Anna poem is called “You Will Hear Thunder.”

King of the Cats: catmash

TH: What’s your typical day like this month?

E: It hasn’t been real typical. For the past week my typical day was waking up in New Mexico and being really, really excited about it.

Z: I always have a bowel movement at precisely 7:13 am, during which I drink my coffee to save time. Then I spend the rest of the day waiting for the cold embrace of death.

C: Imagine wringing a towel out and then burning the towel. I’m a college student; it’s a 30-hour day.

TH: What’s next for you as a group and as individual makers of art?

Z: We haven’t had any kind of a formal meeting lately. I’m applying to MFA programs for next fall, so hopefully that’s in the future. Today Emily was joking that we might need to have another reading just to get us the three of us to write some poetry. It’s an exaggeration, but not a huge one. I think it’s always good to have deadlines to work towards. I hope to do an ASL interpreted poetry event some time soon, with both deaf and hearing poets.

C: We recently did a puppetry reading at Pilot Books together, where we created a small theatre with a rice paper screen and played shadow puppets while we read— paper cut outs , Emily’s plastic skeleton ornament, Zac’s head eating an apple, etc. This seems like a good example to pull from the past that points to what I want in the immediate future— delightful, insightful tasks that enliven what I’m writing, hopefully with people I can learn a lot from and have a great time. Maybe in a couple years that will sound a little more like grad school than it does right now.

E: We want to get spooky! Readings in abandoned buildings, old morgues, that kind of stuff. I’d also like to get messier and more collaborative. One of our best phases has been the mashup dynasty, where we read poems backwards or dismantled them and mashed them back together, and I want to get back to that. Also, more puppets. Lastly, I’ve been dying to do a coast-to-coast reading, where friends on the east coast do a reading at the same time as us on the west, with the same poems and everything, and then we do something tech-savvy to combine them, like with dixie cups on big long strings.

TH: What do you dream of but feel in some way limited from achieving? Does that affect your poetry in any way?

E: I think right now I’m more into the power of positive thinking. Zac has this amazing ability of making it sunny by throwing a cookout. No matter what, if he has a cookout, the sun appears. I think 2011’s going to be a year like that for poetry and just art in general. Field of Dreams, baby.

Z: I think it’s almost inherent to poetry. Part of the human condition, if you’ll forgive such a phrase, is a desire to expand beyond our physical selves, and the tragedy of being unable to do so. I think that really informs what we write. Carl Phillips puts it: “I think the body is not a cage / no, / but the necessary foil / against which the soul / proves it was always / true, what they said: to stand / unsuffering in the presence of another’s / agony is its own / perhaps difficult but / irrefutable pleasure.”

C: If you’re going to say it, say it with Zac, saying it with Phillips.

A conversation with Sierra Nelson

Sierra Nelson is a poet, teacher, and collaborative data-Dadaist who makes Seattle home. You can learn more about her performance group, the Vis-à-Vis Society, here. We published Sierra in our third issue and caught up with her after batting around questions and sharing a very nice cup of tea. This interview was conducted by Zach and Jay; a new poem from Sierra follows the interview.

TH: How does what you’re writing now differ from the poems we published?

SN: If I had to take a guess, the shift may involve a greater willingness to be tender, as in pressing a bruise, at the core of the poem. I want to feel like there’s an urgent question pulling on the other side of the paper. And in general: more sightings of postcards, brides, and spiders.

TH: Why collaborate?

SN: I think collaborating renews belief in the creative process. Because you don’t feel the burden of the creative process resting entirely on yourself, it’s easier to trust and be excited about what unfolds. Contributing your part to make it work, but knowing you can’t control the outcome, you relax a bit – and you get more thrill from seeing what appears, the magic of a whole larger than its parts.

snowballs; sent by Sierra in lieu of a photo of herself

And really the individual creative process is like this too – at its best, it’s not just coming from you – you’re still just putting in one piece at the start, and other ideas/images/parts appear to meet what you put out there, even if you are physically the one transcribing it all. The next line that comes to you out of nowhere – I love that. Collaborating with other people puts you in the right attentive space to get there more often, helping you to access it even when writing alone.

I feel I’ve been really lucky to find some great people to collaborate with in my life. A good collaboration brings out more of you, more of what’s possible.

TH: Although contemporary poetry is very cloud-aware, full of loose language and breaking news, it’s very secular. How would you invite a writer to procedural or even arcana/mystical practice in poetry?

SN: I just taught a class called “Exploring the Esoteric: Borrowing from Everything to Write New Work.” A sort of corny title, but I hoped it would attract students who would be up for anything. (And it was a great group!) One of the most fruitful homework assignments was when I asked everyone to write down the objects that appeared in their dreams over the course of a week. Not the narratives, just a brief description of the objects themselves. (And if you couldn’t remember your dreams, you could also write down any dream-like objects that crossed your path during waking life – or a combination of the two.) The results were stunning. How do you get images like that into your poems? That kind of eerie, mesmerizing (even humorous!) image that isn’t made interesting because of how you analyze it, but the way it startles you or gleams with some mysterious portent.

TH: What are some of the poems/poets you most recently loved?

SN: Galway Kinnell’s “Saint Francis and the Sow” has come back to me, Lucia Perillo’s “Transcendentalism,” Jean Follain’s brief flung-open dreams, Chaucer’s translation of Petrarch “If no love is, O God, what fele I so?,” Ted Berrigan’s postcard poems:

SPELL
A sparrow whispers in my loins
Geranium plus Geronimo forever
Across the wide Missouri
We drive us.

TH: What was your last lightning-boltish experience or encounter with art?

SN: The Australian Aborigine paintings in the Seattle Art Museum’s permanent collection – at first they just look like patterns of dots or colorful lines, with a very modern feel. But they have titles like “Wild Yam Dreaming,” or “Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming,” or show the swirl of healing leaves in a wind – and they are maps!

TH: What’s your typical day like this month?

SN: I don’t think there is a typical day. A typical week would include teaching and other work-work, rehearsing and conspiring with the Vis-à-Vis Society for our large-scale outdoor graph and show at the NW Film Forum in May, some clog dancing (I’m still learning – but just joined the group the Eclectic Cloggers!), sleep, coffee, reading, houseplants, other.

TH: How do you feel about the different formats you have been or could be published in (established journals, newer journals, chapbooks, books, online, limited-edition projects)? Which particularly suits your poems?

SN: I do love a small chapbook for its tactile feel and inviting qualities. (A lot of my collaborative work has found good homes this way.) And having work in journals (print or online) always feels exciting, for the camaraderie of the other poems in the journal, and the chance for the poems to venture further and meet more (hopefully friendly) strangers. One of my favorite places to be published was on a Seattle Metro Bus – I loved getting messages from friends telling me the time, place and trajectory when they intersected with my words. I also had a poem participate in the artist Mimi Allin’s A Hundred Poems at Greenlake project, where 100 poems by 100 living writers were printed onto 100 T-shirts and given away to be worn and read by people traveling at all speeds in the park.

TH: What do you dream of but feel in some way limited from achieving? Does that affect your poetry in any way?

SN: A painter, a singer, a translator, an aquanaut. YES.

*

*

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Eyeglasses for Insomniacs, or Tests of Mentality, Readiness, and Achievement

I had 15 marbles and lost six.

Write me a letter which says,
I admirred the wintir dresing evry brige with snoe.

Tell the opposite of swan.
If I should say dark, you would say what?

One of the loveliest gifts we received was
night eggs through sugar wrapper.

The year 1600 saw the invention of the wind chariot.
In 1967, eyeglasses for insomniacs.

Would you answer yes or no?

Pascal deduced pressure applied to any one point
of an incomprehensible liquid
creates the sensation
of love transmitted
without loss
to all parts of the liquid.

What’s the thing to do if you are lost?

Eyeglasses for Insomniacs, or Tests of Mentality, Readiness, and Achievement

I had 15 marbles and lost six.

Write me a letter which says,

I admirred the wintir dresing evry brige with snoe.

Tell the opposite of swan.

If I should say dark, you would say what?

One of the loveliest gifts we received was

night eggs through sugar wrapper.

The year 1600 saw the invention of the wind chariot.

In 1967, eyeglasses for insomniacs.

Would you answer yes or no?

Pascal deduced pressure applied to any one point

of an incomprehensible liquid

creates the sensation

of love transmitted

without loss

to all parts of the liquid.

What’s the thing to do if you are lost?