Deborah Ager's Blog, page 15

Charles Jensen: An Interview With Serena M. Agusto-Cox

Poet Charles Jensen

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

Along with writing poetry, I am an off-and-on arts administrator, an editor for a small press, a writing teacher, managing editor for a sporadic online literary journal, an arts advocate on the local and national level, and a consultant to small arts organizations. I wear a lot of hats, but I don't necessarily consider them mutually exclusive from being a poet. Being a poet makes me a more meaningful arts advocate in some ways–I can speak to the power of writers in the schools, for example.

2. Do you see spoken word, performance, or written poetry as more powerful or powerful in different ways and why? Also, do you believe that writing can be an equalizer to help humanity become more tolerant or collaborative? Why or why not?

I don't like the limiting writing into discrete genres that are then put into opposition to each other. I think writing is most effective, most meaningful, when it cribs from many genres and traditions at once. To touch on the next part of your question, one book that had a profound effect on me and my writing was Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, which explores toxic culture, grief, and racism in America–but from a very personal, subjective perspective. If you've ever seen her read/perform from that work, you know it's a multimedia experience with video, with her voice adding a significant layer of meaning to the work. How we can divide those impulses into camps? I prefer to look at the tools available to me and then choose which ones are essential to whatever project I'm completing.

I have written a lot of work about the American experience of gay people, partly in an effort to establish some understanding of difference. Is it effective? I don't know. But it was work I felt called to do. On the flipside, not all writers need to take on this kind of burden–there are many stories to be told, many ways to tell them.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

I'm pretty sure none of them are secrets. I love some aspects of "low" culture like trash pop music. I aspire to find ways to sew that into my work as a poet somehow. I am also really connected to film, both as a narrative art and as a form. Physical aspects of film are closely related to the work of poetry for me. I give extensive thought to sequencing, montage, collage, and narrative. Any two things placed in juxtaposition create a narrative. There's a great story of the Kuleshov Effect, wherein an audience's construction of narrative changes when the same photo of a person (mostly expressionless) is interspersed with a shot of soup or a shot of a baby, for instance. In the soup narrative, the audience describes the man as looking hungry. In the baby narrative, he looks happy. That effect of context is something I carry with me–how do individual poems, individual lines, individual images speak to each other?

4. Most writers will read inspirational/how-to manuals, take workshops, or belong to writing groups. Did you subscribe to any of these aids and if so which did you find most helpful? Please feel free to name any "writing" books you enjoyed most (i.e. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott).

I think it's hard to find good poetry manuals because so many of them use floofy platitudes to describe the work: "The poet is the person who hears the elephants coming and makes the graves!" "The poet must plug in the lamp and make it sing!" Etc. That's why I think it's more effective to look further, at other art forms. The language of design–line, color, etc.–were very instructive to me in thinking about the physical presence of a poem on the page. Film theory, as I alluded to above, was important too–ideas of subjectivity, the lens/the eye/the I, "suture" (editing theory)…

I think everyone should read "Ron Carlson Writes a Story" by Ron Carlson. He is brilliant and his enthusiasm for writing is entirely palpable in this how-to "manual" that deconstructs his writing of his story "The Governor's Ball."

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

Poetry itself is none of those things. It is the attitude of the reader that determines what poetry is. The only way to dispel the myth is for people to encounter poetry on their own. I always liken it to television. If you had never seen television in your entire life and then one day turned it on, only to see Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, you might say, "Gosh, I hate television." But most of us realize that television is a multi-dimensional form with various strategies aimed at different audiences. If you watch television long enough, you will find something that speaks to you. This is true, too, of poetry. But because the poetry world has a reputation of being closed, or because it is taught in high school as a "symbolic" art practiced by dead white people, it loses a lot of its contemporary allure. I think now, more than ever, poetry strives to be egalitarian in a lot of ways–people just need to look.

6. When writing poetry, prose, essays, and other works do you listen to music, do you have a particular playlist for each genre you work in or does the playlist stay the same? What are the top 5 songs on that playlist? If you don't listen to music while writing, do you have any other routines or habits?

I almost never listen to music when I write. I have basically no routines or rituals, either. There is a great TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert in which she describes how the poet Ruth Stone explained her inspiration to write, that she could hear it coming through the fields like a train rushing at her, and she would run into the house and grab paper and a pen to get it down before it passed. That is similar to my experience of writing. It's not as loud or as obvious as a train, but I am sensitive to a change in the way my interior monologue sounds, and that moment is the beginning of a poem. If I write it down, I am generally rewarded with a complete poem. If the moment passes, it can't be recaptured (not always a bad thing, in my mind, as many of those I do catch end up in the "circular file" anyway). I do tend to revise poems for a very long time, though–often for years, and I often work best on revision once the work has been placed in the greater context of a full manuscript.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

I find teaching is an essential way to stay engaged with writing on a level that is very enriching for me. For example, I confessed to a student recently, "I just don't understand why people write in syllabics." Four days later, I was experimenting with syllabics in a new poem. I said the same thing in a workshop but about iambic meter, and for three months wrote nearly every poem with an iambic meter–and really enjoyed it! In a lot of ways, teaching forces me to embrace and/or interrogate my own assumptions about poetry as I strive to encourage my students to make their own decisions and determinations. And oftentimes, our discussions help me see work in new ways, and for that I'm very grateful.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer's block?

I don't get writer's block. If I seem less inspired to write poetry, it is my creative brain telling me it is either time to revise old work or read books. Reading generally prompts me to write, and so does going to art museums (the Portrait Gallery is one of my favorites).

I cook dinner almost every night, which I suppose might be one of my few rituals. I have really come to enjoy it after years of feeling at sea or underprepared to complete new recipes. It has become a meditative time for me, and also a time when I become aware of the "physical making" of something, the hands-on work of bringing together various ingredients to develop flavors. I try to connect this to the practice of writing.

I also work out five days a week–a combination of yoga, cardio, and weightlifting. It's a gift to myself, about an hour a day when my brain gets to check out while my body does the–forgive the pun–heavy lifting. That, too, is part of my writing practice. While my body exercises, I train my brain to associate and go off on its own to wherever it lands.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

It is always a total disaster–I would change that! My apartment is very small and my desk is very big–about 30% of my living room. The window is behind me. The room gets almost no natural light. It is absolutely not my ideal writing space. In Phoenix, I had a loft apartment with 20′ ceilings, 17 feet of which were windows. My desk sat up in the loft area, overlooking the living room, facing all the windows and light. That was an amazing place to write. I miss it every day.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

I have a lot going on! I'm putting the finishing touches on a new manuscript of poems and have been writing a few kinds of fiction–a novel for adults, a YA novel, and I recently finished a YA short story that will appear in an anthology for GLBT teenagers. I'm also very slowly writing new poems, but I feel like now would be a better time for me to read, so I have a big pile of books all ready to go!

Thanks to Charles for answering my questions. Please do check out a sample of his work below:

IT WAS OCTOBER

–for Matthew Shepard

I was love when I entered the bar

shivering in my thin t-shirt and ripped jeans

and I was love when I left that place, tugged along at the wrist

as though tied, with a man I did not know.

I was love there in the morning

when our sour kisses bore the peat of rotten leaves,

fallen October leaves. And it was love that we kissed anyway, not knowing each other's names.

I was love in that bed

and I was love in the hall and down the stairs and into the freezing rain.

I was love with hands punched deep

into the pockets of a coat.

I was love coated in frozen rain.

Back home, I was love stripped of the cigarette-stung shirt, love pulling the stiff jeans from my legs.

I dried my hair and I was love.

It was October. What did I know of love that year,

shuddering in my nervous skin. Miles away, the boy was lashed to a fence and shivering.

Where that place turned red and the ground soaked through

with what he was, I was love.

What did I know of love then

but that it wasn't enough.

Julie Brooks Barbour on Mary Oliver's "Singapore"

On the 32 Poems Facebook page, we discussed our favorite poems. Julie Brooks Barbour took us up on our offer to write about one of her favorite poems. What follow is a brief essay on "Singapore" by Mary Oliver.

Singapore

In Singapore, in the airport,

a darkness was ripped from my eyes.

In the women's restroom, one compartment stood open.

A woman knelt there, washing something

in the while bowl.

Disgust argued in my stomach

and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket.

A poem should always have birds in it.

Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings.

A waterfall, or if that's not possible, a fountain

rising and falling.

A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

When the woman turned I could not answer her face.

Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, and

neither could win.

She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this?

Everybody needs a job.

Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

But first we must watch her as she stared down at her labor,

which is dull enough.

She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big as

hubcaps, with a blue rag.

Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing.

She does not work slowly, nor quickly, but like a river.

Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.

I don't doubt for a moment that she loves her life.

And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop

and fly down to the river.

This probably won't happen.

But maybe it will.

If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

Of course, it isn't.

Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only

the light that can shine out of life. I mean

the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,

the way her smile was only for my sake; I mean

the way this poem is filled with trees, with birds.

Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems, 1992, Beacon Press

This poem was posted to my office door during the years I worked as Staff Support for a university composition program, supporting my husband through graduate school. At that time, graduate students and professors surrounded me, and many saw me as a secretary, nothing more. Like anyone else, I hoped I would one day arrive where I wanted to be and that this was simply a stopping place. I was always a grad student's wife, uncertain about my place in the world.

What I love about this poem is its wide social significance. I didn't post it on my door to remind others that my job didn't define me. It was a reminder to not judge others by the jobs they perform. My position, though it may have paid more, did not make me a better person than a custodian or groundskeeper. This poem is a lesson in humility: though the work of another person may disgust her, the speaker realizes that she is no better than the woman because she can flee ("I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket"). The janitor's smile is only for the speaker's sake; her hair becomes as beautiful as the wing of a bird because she is human, not because she cleans toilets. The "darkness" that is "ripped" from the speaker's eyes is the darkness associated with dirtiness, and, more possibly, class distinctions.

Though the title is important in defining place and how we, as readers, might visualize the woman in the poem, I think that is where its significance ends. Since the woman we meet through the speaker never utters a word, acting as a silent movie character, she could very well be any woman cleaning any airport anywhere in the world. What is most significant is the way in which the speaker argues against how the larger culture has taught her to treat a janitor or anyone working a job that would make her cringe, and how she accepts this woman as part of the world, as a human among humans, in the only way she knows how: through a poem.

Maine to Virginia by Sandell Morse

I don't know why I'm obsessed with this, why sitting here in my studio at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, looking out a rusted chain link fence, at trees leafed in the fullness of a Virginia spring, surrounded by the still quiet of this place where writers write, painters paint, composers compose, I see in my mind's eye the face of a man I don't know, didn't meet, a man who approached my car in a parking lot outside of Panera Bread. I'd spent the night in a Comfort Inn at an exit off of I 81 in Harrisonville, and that morning I'd found the espresso that I loved. I was juggling a water bottle, travel mug, wallet and car key when I heard a voice. "Excuse me, Ma'am."

BIO: Sandell Morse holds a Master's Degree in Liberal Studies with a concentration in the Humanities from Dartmouth College and a Master's Degree in English with a concentration in fiction writing from the University of New Hampshire. She has taught at the University of New Hampshire and at the University of Maine, Farmington. She facilitates both fiction and nonfiction workshops for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and for the New Hampshire Writers' Project.

Confession Tuesday: I Might Be a Weirdo

I confess my brain likes to wander when I should be working on my book. My brain has an advanced degree in thinking of one hundred things I could do besides writing. The activities my brain thinks up may vary and may include:

Eating chocolate
Drinking jasmine green tea
Reading, which is acceptable
Exercising
Calling my dad for "research," which was helpful

My dad, when I called him, asked what I was writing about in my essay. I'm writing about how I could not sleep well at night. It seems I never slept, yet I know I must have. Instead, I battled sleep and then, the next morning, always battled the morning too. I thought no one noticed how I rarely slept or how I went to bed so late. I was wrong. My mother said, "I knew you stayed up late, but your grades were good so I decided to let you stay up." If I had a cough, my dad gave me whisky cut with water. If I had insomnia, my dad warmed me milk and served it in a mug. In this way, I learned that love shows itself in multiple ways.

My father asked me, "Where are you?"

"Virginia," I said.

"Mmm." I figured he assumed I was in Northern Virginia, that he might not understand I was away from home.

"I'm in southern Virginia." In Maryland, we know southern Virginia is a world away from northern Virginia.

"Oh, are you near Asheville?"

"I think so. I'm about an hour south of Charlottesville."

"Then, you traveled, I'd say, 350…no…380 miles." I'd traveled 378 miles. Can you see now why I track my trips down to the mile?

"Yes, dad, you got that exactly right." I smiled.

Last night, another artist quoted Stephen King—with the disclaimer he wrote a good book about writing—as saying that you should learn to be different from others if you want to be a writer. Of course, he had a better way of saying it. The point is: Artists are considered weirdos. Those who have no inclination to create art—oh, how I envy you some days!—think we're odd for working on projects that bring in relatively little money. Even for those raking in the occasional commission or book deal, what seems like a large amount is often smaller than it first appears if you calculate the hours put into the project.

I come to the VCCA to be among others who do not think I'm weird for writing poems (no money!) or creating prose (who will buy it!?). I create to make the invisible visible, to connect with people, and to connect people with each other.

William Fain Roby on Hardy's "Convergence of the Twain"

I love "Convergence of the Twain" because it is both terribly flawed and intensely frightening.

Hardy's poem is not the steel chambers, the currents, the moon-eyed fishes. Hardy's poem is not even the gilded gear, or the vaingloriousness—as he probably wanted it to be. "Convergence of the Twain" is, in fact, the sea-worm, crawling "grotesque" and "slimed", though Hardy's description of the worm as "dumb" and "indifferent" is hardly appropriate. I think we can cleave that off, chalk it up to his lack of a cutting room floor.

Had the executors of Hardy's estate not burned his letters and notebooks, we may have more insight into those two little words, those nagging things that hold the poem back. Any middle of the road workshop worth its salt would have led Hardy to cut those vagueries—the worm's presence in the poem is what brings me back to it time after time. The worm is hardly "indifferent," though he may in fact be "dumb." That's the fault of his biology.

Hardy, who famously argued that "Peace is poor reading," gives us very little of it in "Convergence of the Twain." From the (admittedly overwrought) "salamandrine fires" of the foundries that stitched the Titanic and the "shadowy silent distance" of the Atlantic ocean, we are forced to swallow a picture of the wreck of the Titanic that is at once capital-N Natural, small-n natural, terrifying, even Calvinist. Forget the sweet pink cheek of the movie star, or the grip of the blonde boy stowaway—forget the murky algae-swamped submersibles shining lights across "the mirros meant / to glass the opulent," this is the picture of the Titanic I love: a ship that grows in "stature" and "grace" like the boy Christ in his great Lost Weekend. Stately, sharp, tragic, terrified.

BIO: Will Roby is a poet and playwright from Texas. His poems have appeared at Stirring, Carte Blanche, anti-, and Tri-Quarterly.

Joaquin Miller Poetry Series

We took the "cabin" out of the Joaquin Miller Cabin Poetry Series this year. Please come celebrate with us and come listen to the poets chosen to read in this year's series.

June 9: Kelly Cherry with Jacklyn Potter Young Poets Trevor Bobola & Julia Holemans
June 16: Pia Taavila & Ian Williams
June 23: Adam Tavel & Melissa Tuckey
June 30: Yvette Neisser Moreno & Iain Pollock
July 7: Hailey Leithauser & Suzanne Rhodenbaugh
July 14: Benjamin S. Grossberg & Michele Wolf
July 21: Joe Bueter & Lynn Wagner
July 28: Michael Gushue & Jennifer Militello

Although the series will no longer take place at the cabin in Rock Creek Park, we are more than pleased with the new space.

We'll be indoors with comfortable seats, air conditioning for those who need it, and a handy reception space. We will also have the option of reading inside or outside, so we will always, always have a "rain" location at the ready (and at the exact same address).

Thursday evenings at 7:00 at the Rock Creek Nature Center, 5200 Glover Road, NW, Washington, DC near the intersection of Military & Glover roads. Sign up for opening reading at 7 pm. Wheelchair accessible. Nature Center is located at the far north side of the Horse Stables. For more information, call Kathi Morrison-Taylor at 703-820-8113.

Day 36: 5 Favorite Poetry Books by Brian Spears

We had so many poets willing to share their favorite poetry books that we're continuing past National Poetry Month and into May. Today, Brian Spears, shares his favorite books:

I should retitle this to read "My Favorite Book of Poetry and Four Recent Books I've Fallen In Love With," because there's no way I could actually make the first list happen. It's an impossible task, I think, to narrow the field in such a way, especially given the way my feelings toward books can change depending on my mood. So instead, I'll give you the list I want to give you, which is my all-time favorite book along with four books from last year that I thought were really awesome.

Favorite Book: A Selection of Poems by E. E. Cummings

I was already writing poems when I was a junior in high school, but they were very formal, filled with forced rhymes and inverted syntax, clichés and abstractions. Then, in what I imagine must have been an act of desperation to get us to pay attention, my teacher, Ms. Nancy McKee, started writing out "in Just" on the chalkboard. I could tell she hadn't planned it out—she didn't have the text of the poem with her and she openly acknowledged that she couldn't really explain it—but even if she didn't get another student to perk up, she got me. I went to the local bookstore and got them to order this book, and paid for it with the money I was earning slinging chicken at a local fast food chain, and given that I was making $3.35 an hour, that was a solid shift's worth of work.

I stopped writing like Cummings eventually, but I've never forgotten the feeling I had when I saw that poem going up on the chalkboard and saying to myself "you can do that?" I still have my copy of that book today, 25 years later.

Four Great Books From Last Year, In No Particular Order

Diwata by Barbara Jane Reyes is creation myth and song and foot-stomping rhythm and glorious metaphor throughout. I still pick up this book every few days and read a few pages and revel in them.

Julie Sheehan's Bar Book, Poems and Otherwise proclaims that it's not just poetry from the title, but it's still one of my favorite books of poems from last year. Part of my enjoyment stems, no doubt, from the fact that I (like many other writers, I suspect) spent considerable time behind a bar during a part of my student days. I never worked in a bar as nice as the one Sheehan inhabits, and I never married one of my customers, though I did have one move in with me for a while. Long story. Sheehan veers from witty prose to strongly formal poems with ease, and some of the funniest parts are in the footnotes, which you absolutely must read.

Shahid Reads His Own Palm by Reginald Dwayne Betts is one of the most beautifully honest books I've ever read, with incredible range. And he uses the ghazal better than most contemporary practitioners of the form.

The Network by Jena Osman was one of the books I selected for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club, and I chose it because I wasn't even sure it was poetry. It stretches the boundaries of the genre in complex ways I can't even begin to describe. This is a book you have to experience on your own.

Emily Van Duyne on Sylvia Plath's "Ariel"

On the 32 Poems Facebook page, many of us discussed our favorite poems. Emily Van Duyne took me on my offer (challenge?) to write about a favorite poem.

"Ariel"— Microessay

"Ariel" is a poem steeped in silence and movement, by which I don't mean the literal horse ride it's famously about, but rather, the way Plath speeds the language up, and slows it down to stretch out time. This has something to do with a camera—"Ariel" is a poem that occupies a lot of space in my brain, a poem I can walk into if I want, or look at like a film. When I do this, when I look at it, it's like a camera is zooming in & panning out, turning seconds into minutes, minutes into days.

Or maybe that's not it at all. Maybe rather than stretching out time, Plath somehow manages to capture eternity, which is outside of time, which is timeless. This is also about silence— there is something wildly synesthetic about "Ariel," the whole experience melded into one big thing that you can't unpack—so silence and time and sight and flight are all the same. The poem begins, "Stasis in darkness.", and there it is: Timelessness, silence, suspension, stasis, the whispery triple S telling us everything we need to know about a vast, packed emptiness, a time before action, when the action is somehow already known, but not yet done. The time before a poem is written, but just as it's engendered. and then that period, that full stop, that line break— I can hear the silence of it. It sounds like a thunderclap; gunshot before a race.

Then, of course, we're off: "split furrows," "blood mouthfuls," "shadows;" Plath tells us early that this strange landscape is "substanceless," a word she essentially coined. This is a place where the only constant is change—in thirty-one lines, we go from total stasis to flight, from pure kinesis to annihilation, a place where whatever we touch, we fuse to—and now I see I've lapsed unintentionally to the plural pronoun, something I think Plath intended, cheeky, bitchy genius that she was—"Ariel" is one hell of a wild ride, a poem where the speaker and the reader are just as connected as the speaker and her horse, the speaker and her force.

One hell of a wild ride, yes, but totally, perfectly controlled. If you can find a poem as flawlessly executed, without one word out of place, I'd like to see it. Levis once spoke of Plath's genius as, "an instrument of some kind," an "otherness" she could pick up at will. To me, it's as though she wears her otherness like a dress, a total fusion where words are dimensional, where she, where we, for a timeless minute, can be anything we desire.

BIO: Emily Van Duyne is a poet and mom, living in Texas. Her poems have recently appeared in Diagram, Anon, Solstice, and Naugatuck River Review.

Recipes for Poets Update

I've listed the participants in the Recipes for Poets blog carnival. It's not too late to join the blog carnival. Just leave a comment in the blog post at this link, follow the directions, and voila!

On May 20th, each of these poet bloggers will share their favorite 20-30 minute recipe:

Kelli Agodon, Book of Kells blog

January O'Neil, Poet Mom blog

One Minnesota Writer

Spoon Fed Writer

Inkwell Blackout

Hungry Poet

Monica Wendel at No Ideas But

Being Poetry

Jessica Goodfellow

Kristin Berkey-Abbott

Day 35: January Gill O'Neil's Five Favorite Poetry Books

I pulled off 15 poetry collections from my shelves and whittled my choices down to five favorites. So tough.

The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds When I read Sharon's poem "The Victims," in which the narrator "fires" her father—I was hooked. That book gave me license to "go there" in my own work.

Good Woman: Poem and a Memoir, 1969-1980 by Lucille Clifton. Reading Ms. Clifton's work (little or no punctuation, all words in lower case) forced me to reexamine the notion of a traditional poem.

Local Time by Stephen Dunn. Dunn's poems are the right combination of sensitivity and craft in this collection.

Words Under the Words, Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye Some of my favorite poems come from this collection, drawn from Nye's Palestinian-American heritage.

Nappy Edges by Ntozake Shange Read the poem "With No Immediate Cause," and then get back to me.

BIO: January Gill O'Neil is the author of Underlife (CavanKerry Press, December 2009).Underlife was a finalist for ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award, and the 2010 Paterson Poetry Prize. She was featured in Poets & Writers magazine's January/February 2010 Inspiration issue as one of its 12 debut poets. One of her poems has been nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize. She is on the advisory board/planning committee of the 2011 Massachusetts Poetry Festival. A Cave Canem fellow, January is a senior writer/editor at Babson College, runs a popular blog called Poet Mom, and lives with her two children in Beverly, Massachusetts.