David Hadbawnik's Blog, page 8

Seven Deadly Sins at a Poetry Reading

Stop! Let us out of here!

We’ve all done it. Given a reading and realized afterwards that we might have left a bad taste in the mouth of the audience, due to an unseemly gaffe or boorish behavior. Here’s a list of Seven Deadly Poetry Reading Sins you might have been guilty of at one time or another.

Preliminary Sin: Avoided reading first. You knew the moment was coming when the host would gather the poets for that awkward discussion of who would start off the evening. You were hoping to settle into the sweet spot, after your friends had arrived fashionably late and the rest of the audience had warmed up, but before attention had started wandering. So you pulled a diva move and arrived late yourself, thus dodging the conversation altogether and forcing some other soul to do the honors. Or you made a face as though someone just insulted your mother when the host approached you and asked you to take the plunge. Or you did the “I really don’t care” routine with the other poets, waiting it out till one of them finally caved and muttered, “I’ll go first.” It’s a minor sin, but the fact of the matter is that poetry readings are not rock shows; with few exceptions, there is no clear headliner and it doesn’t really matter what the order is. Besides, what comes around goes around. Take your lumps and read first from time to time. You’ll hit the sweet spot at the next reading.

1. Gone on too long. Yes, this one’s obvious, but everyone really has done it, and there are particular ways that poets go on too long that are meaningful in themselves. Of course, it sometimes happens that you simply get into a groove and you lose track and read longer than the time allotted (or maybe the host has erred by not making it clear how much time you had). It happens. But you might have exacerbated the situation—thereby revealing that your going on too long was no simple mistake but outright disrespect, even contempt, for your audience—by doing one of the following:

a. Telling the audience you’re just going to read “one or two more,” then reading for another 20 minutes. If a musician says she’s going to play a couple more songs, we know that even if there are actually three more, it will likely take 10 minutes or so. But nobody knows how long your poems are, so saying you’ll just read a few more is already somewhat meaningless, especially since we know you’re not going to be able to resist reading five or six or eight more, anyway.

b. Being so massively unprepared that you lose track of time because you have a giant stack of poems that you stop to flip through after each one. The stack of poems is already a visual reminder of how many you still have to read. Now you’re compounding the annoyance factor by rifling through them in confusion as if they’re a pile of unorganized tax documents.

c. Over-explaining your poems. This could really be its own category, but it falls under the rubric of taking too long because that is usually the result. You may even have been careful to practice timing yourself beforehand, but you forgot to take into account your penchant for blabbing. The need to explain every line in exhaustive detail is not so much disrespect for the audience as distrust of the poem. If we are attentive, and it’s worth getting, we will get it, with minimal or no interjection from you. However, no explanation in the world is going to make it a better poem.

2. Done the “polyvocal” thing. You’ve decided that you’re going to “break the space” of the standard “I speak, you listen” reading format by having audience members join in—either passing out sheets to folks at random or arranging beforehand who will be planted among the unsuspecting audience. Either way, it’s not as new or mind-blowing as you think it is. Also—especially if it hasn’t been rehearsed prior to the reading—it never goes well, because Susie doesn’t speak loudly enough and Doug misses his cue, and what you hoped would be an edgy take on the reading becomes a mess, full of awkward pauses and dropped lines.

3. Only gone to readings that you’re actually reading at. Yes, people have noticed. Noticed that it’s impossible to coax you to the monthly series at the café, even when someone is reading that you’ve expressed admiration for in the past, but the moment you are invited to do something yourself, it suddenly becomes a priority. Did you see all the empty seats at your reading? Those represent all the souls whose events you didn’t bother to show up for when you weren’t reading yourself.

4. Done the “conquering hero” routine. You’ve been invited to perform on—or weaseled your way into—the huge marathon reading that everyone’s going to be at. Nobody expects you to stay for the whole thing. But under no circumstances is it cool to show up right before your slot, with a giant group of friends, noisily fanning out through the crowd as you leaf through your poems, paying no attention whatsoever and distracting everyone else from the current reader. Of course, when you are finished, basking in the glow of your buddies’ praise, you will repeat the same obnoxious move in reverse, annoying everyone and sucking the air out of the room for the next reader.

5. Been the “local poet” at an event for out-of-towners and not bothered bringing anyone to the reading. News flash: the host did not invite you simply because you are a star, but also because you can help put butts in the seats for guest poets who aren’t as well known to the locals. Yet you decided to save your “audience capital” for the big book launch you have coming up, or perhaps you weren’t sure of the other poets and didn’t want to expose your friends to a mediocre reading. Or maybe you just didn’t care. The result was that you didn’t tell anyone—didn’t invite your friends via the event page on Facebook, didn’t send your usual e-mail blast, and arrived instead alone or with your date. Whatever the case, just know that being the one local poet comes with more responsibility than simply showing up for the gig.

6. Believed all the hype after the reading. Having just concluded a brilliant performance, the drinks are flowing and the compliments flying. One audience member exclaims that this is the best reading she’s ever been to. Another, who also publishes a small press, whispers urgently to you that he’d like to see the manuscript as soon as possible. A third promises you a headline slot on the Next Big Event. You dance home, wasted, glowing with the certainty that this is the most significant moment in American letters since Ginsberg’s “Howl” reading at the Six Gallery, and poetic fame will soon follow. However, it’s not 1955. You didn’t just give the best reading in history; the editor who solicited you is not Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and he probably has a backlog of unpublished manuscripts at home that will take years to catch up on; the headline slot (if it happens at all) will merely be another in a series of readings that fade from memory (your own, as well as the audience’s). That’s the way it is. Reading talk is just that: talk. Of course you can and should quietly follow up on these outlandish promises, but don’t expect too much.

7. Been ungrateful. Every reading you’ve ever had happened because somebody (or -bodies) put some work into it. Sure, the venue hasn’t always been packed, and occasionally you’ve felt (and may have been correct in feeling) that more could have been done to make the evening a success. But the vast majority of the time, the reading was put together in good faith because somebody wanted to hear your poetry. Your gratitude should have extended not only to that person—the host or organizer of the event—but to the audience, the proprietors of the venue, and the other poets who’ve joined you in performing their work. You should have introduced yourself to the other poets, listened politely to their readings, and when it was your turn to read, made sure to briefly thank everyone for organizing, coming out, etc. Instead, you showed up late, spent the interval waiting to read busily going through your own poems, thanked no one, and left. Rest assured that anyone in the audience who might’ve been thinking of inviting you to do something in the future took note of your behavior.

FINAL NOTE: This is meant, of course, tongue-in-cheek, but there is a grain of truth to these Sins–we’ve all done one or more of them ourselves or experienced them at one time or another. I’ve been guilty of at least four, maybe five that I can think of. If you’re reading this and you are a poet or someone who goes to poetry readings, and any other mistakes occur to you, feel free to add them in the comments section.

Interview with Arielle Dym Guy

Three Geogaophies: A Milkmaid's Grimoire is Arielle Guy's first full-length book, published this time last year from Dusie Press (and available here). She has also been part of Dusie Kollektiv for the past three years, making poetry postcards, M iss ives [Missives]: Unknowability, and folders, The Invention of Light, as chapbooks. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, has an editing business and is a life coach. She also edits the online journal Turntable & Blue Light.

***

DH: Tell me about the title of the book—Three Geogaophies: A Milkmaid's Grimoire. Quite impressive to have two such challenging words confront the reader right away, and it definitely gets one's attention. What do these words mean to you and how do they relate to and reflect the poetry in the book?

AG: I misspelled words intentionally throughout the book to create a middle language between Swedish and English. I was studying Swedish and spent time in Sweden so the part of my brain that conjured words was swamped in the lilts and foreign, yet familiar-sounding syllables of the Swedish language. When I sat down to write, the rhythm and new sounds were so present and they melded with English so completely, that the Swedish-English words would form in my mind and then on the page. Geogaophies is one of those words from this new language. Grimoire is a spell-book and I liked the idea of creating a modern prayer book that spanned three cities that mean so much to me and have taken up permanent residence in my present life and geography.



DH: Clearly there's a sense of geography here, and the book is divided into three sections/locations: San Francisco, New York, and Gothenburg. What is the importance of place, and did you write the poems in each section while visiting/living in the places after which they're named?

AG: All of the cities point to and were dreams of each other. I started writing the New York section while living in SF, as I was planning to move to New York. The earlier poems were fantasies, a kind of magical realism, my imaginings of New York. Gentle and a dream-like landscape of skyscrapers and crowds. These crashed and burned, as I moved into my sublet in Hell's Kitchen, two blocks from Times Square. So then the poems were more angular and crooked. My life here was hard and isolated in the beginning, even as it was inspiring and awe-filled, and the New York section shows that evolution from Times Square to Brooklyn. The SF section was written almost as a memory, even before I left. So many of my ties were unraveling and the city was like a ghost, one that I walked through but wasn't really there. I have always felt that San Francisco is a city of different planes, occupying multiple levels of reality and space. It's a dream city to me, made of fog and disappearing into itself. Gothenburg was written completely while I was there. I became immersed in the city as congruently a stranger and resident, a strange and surreal experience.

DH: When I first met you, you were studying at New College in San Francisco, still in its late hey-day at that time, with important figures like Tom Clark, David Meltzer—was Lyn Hejinian still there?—Duncan McNaughton, etc. A pretty vibrant scene. Perhaps you could talk about your experience there and the importance of that study for your poetry as it's progressed, particularly the poems in this book.

AG: I can't say enough good things about New College. I wasn't lucky enough to study with Lyn, but did study with the core staff there. The poets I was with there inspired me more than I had ever been inspired. I had been a solitary poet until then and NC offered a community that I'd never had so it was exalted and stays with me to this day. The writers and thinking and poets I was exposed to there changed everything for me. Some of the poems in this book, I wrote while at NC and it's wonderful to see them in the book because they're so connected with that time. The workings and amusement parks of modern and contemporary poets took the ground out from under me and reearthed it. I learned so much there and it breaks my heart that the program is no longer alive.

DH: One reason I ask about that is, I really admire the typographical play in these poems, which begins immediately in the first section, San Francisco. There is a concern with space, and a fascination it seems with the differently toned pauses indicated by different punctuation marks. One line in the second poem begins:

;that is, the warm air is still

and the old ladies sleeping

This struck me as an interesting way of recovering some Beat concerns with typography, punctuation, pause, and space, a recurring element of the poetry here. So often Beat writing is dismissed as simply post-Romantic, but here you seem to tease out a subtle but important development there that's been largely overlooked. Could you comment on that?



AG: I am somewhat red-faced to admit I don't have the familiarity or intimacy to talk about Beat poetry intelligently. I come from a much more Romantic and Objectivist influence, which are both related to Beat in their own way, I think, from what I know. I think what I culled from the Objectivists most intimately were their simplicity and honesty. Utter beauty. The Romantics and older, mainstay poets such as Donne and Dickinson were my first influences. Their mastery and craft and language were grand and epic but tooled and precise, like a well-made, ornate chair. As many baubles as it has, it is still a chair and you can sit on it. The elaboration of physics and metaphysics and love, layered language and infinite Nautilus shell of narrative told in reverent incantation leaves me awestruck every time. My use of typography, punctuation, pause and space tries to solicit that incantation and haunting, yet corporeal form.

DH: To develop that a bit further: In Blended hostess (Letter-sign #9), the poem begins

At fast pace: gone for sale

of:

course, I have four choices:

a lettering'

fold in the canvas

hold

escape!

I am pleasantly baffled by this. Again, it does not seem merely a deliberate fragmenting of the kind we've become all too familiar with in post-structuralist writing strategies. The stacking up of colons in the first few lines seems alternately tonal and playful, almost Dickinsonian in the way they demand a pause and tap the meaning this way or that. I am curious about the apostrophe, as if there's a quote we're missing the beginning of, or a possessive left dangling. Not to overdetermine all this in my mind, but there's the sense of a game, where not only words and letters, but every mark and space is important.

AG: I used punctuation a lot in this book, in erroneous ways, to distract syntax and illuminate meaning and pause. I write to a very vivid mental background of music so those apostrophes and errant colons help to denote the sound I hear in my head. The score is visual and auditory and, for me, those punctuation marks hold as much emotion as the words. The spaces and things left dangling speak to the unknown that is in each thing. We hoist the unknown on our backs every day, without knowing what we're carrying and I wanted to show that in these poems.

DH: What about the relationship of time to place? Towards the end of the "New York" section, there is a poem titled "Calendar." This itself is in ten parts, but all of them quite short. There is a preoccupation with numbers and "getting things done." The poem reads like a hyper-telescoped daybook or even day planner.

AG: I had to laugh when I got to this question because this is so much the way I think on a daily basis: a train's electronic message board. Time is such an arbitrary concept in the scope of what we move through as reality but it's so tangible and bossy. In my poems, I like to both erase and skeletalize time and time's trappings—give form to something that really has no form. Yet, these calendars and day planners are so comforting on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. I am always thinking about what it is to measure—what does that mean? Measure is a soft word denoting structure so it appeals to me, both the word itself and in its meaning. That's what we do—measure. Measure cups of coffee or sugar, time spent, what we've done with our lives at certain ages. To see myself more as part of a whole universe than an individual tapping time away on an abacus, I like to explore what time feels like as a companion and guide, as well as an elusive, purely theoretical apparition.

DH: Next, there is a poem, "City Quotas," that seems to skip around in terms of voice and place. There is the seemingly straightforward entry "Bowie," wherein the narrator recounts listening to Aladdin Sane to get through a difficult time in France; and I'm intrigued by the hints of sensuality that mingle with more fragmented voicings and "liminal" imagery.

From section IV:

I am talking about edges—ridges, valleys, and pools. I am specifically referring to the mood between. The toe, the foot, the sleep—the part of your body you call sleep.

From section V:

We are made of the same stuff, bone and blood and water, and the numbers carved into our limbs. And within it all, that edge beating.

This seems to be one of the themes of at least this part of the book—the juxtaposition of bodies, the zone where one body becomes another, one place another place. Also, a kind of wild zooming between the up-close and physical, and the larger frame of the geographical. Could you talk about that?

AG: For me, there's a melding and opening to an underlying truth that happens in love—whether loving another person or a book or a city. It becomes part of you as you become part of it, while still retaining physical form. I think very metaphysically about connection, that we are all connected and respond to each other on a primal, subconscious level that becomes pronounced and lit when we fall in love. We experience transcendence, entrance into true union and unity. This is reality and expands to one's place in the world and universe. Love is the deepest experience there is and all else flows from it.

DH: The final section is "Gothenburg," which begins with the statement, "Living on coffee and 33 Swedish words for 3 weeks." I wonder how that kind of language-strangeness impacted some of the poetic themes from the earlier sections of the book: the attention to typographical elements, the notion of place and the body, and so on. It seems like there's a heightened return to the concern with language at a minute level in the poem "Geogaophy," for instance, where there are lines like, "Trhe way disaster strikes. of feather: dhattaered clavicle,houseing heart."

AG: Yes, for sure, being around a language I understood smatterings of and yet with which I felt so at home was bizarre and definitely impacted my writing. I began thinking in fake Swedish, as well as real Swedish, which was like a trampoline in my head. Again, in that primordial ooze, we speak all languages so, learning this new language was really like returning somewhere I'd been before and having that homecoming release memories from another time. I am not directly talking about past lives—it's more a shared worldly underpinning of universal truths and human experience that is expressed through language but exists in a pure form beyond language.

DH: You have a lot of disparate but related pursuits: in addition to poetry, music (you performed in a speed metal band in Philadelphia, where you grew up, and you also pursued music in the Bay Area), Buddhism, and you are also someone I've long admired for being in business for yourself. How do these other interests, in addition to the living you've made for yourself, tie into your life as a poet?



AG: This evolves all the time. I am becoming more and more integrated and synthesized in my life, although I have always had that strong and sustaining feeling of all the things I do feeding each other. I have never defined myself as a poet and, for me, living a poet's life means living a life, working, taking care of errands, looking out the window. Poetry to me has always been like washing the dishes, and I get the same amount of satisfaction from both. Life is so big and so enchanted and so miraculous that all I do moves me to write or walk or cook or sleep. Being a lay Buddhist and practicing mindfulness and the spirit and intent of the Dharma in my life has created space and peace, which are rich and fertile and open. To be aware is a field from which the unknown grows up. This experience of an open field is one I try to attend and tend to every moment. This consummate fragility and brute strength of the present has given me peace and constant attentiveness to the sacredness of experience itself.

DH: Finally, your involvement in the publishing side of the poetry world is two-fold—you are a member of the Dusie Kollektiv and you edit an online journal, Turntable & Blue Light. Was this a direction you were moving in anyway, or was it something that being in New York—where you've lived for some time now—inspired you to do? How has this involvement impacted your relationship to poetry?

AG: The community aspect of poetry is important to me and the online magazine and Dusie have given me that beautiful relationship to a group of wonderful writers and artists that I admire and respect and learn from. I have learned so much from both the magazine and Dusie and they've been invaluable experiences. Being in New York hasn't really affected this desire or impetus, it's been something I long for and reach out for no matter where I am. To be able to share other people's work is a deep joy for me—it's superbly satisfying to get great work out there. The involvement in these has brought me closer to feeling that dent in the void—to know that work has meaning and power and purpose, both in the doing of it and the sharing.

***

from Three Geogaophies: A Milkmaid's Grimoire

City Quotas [an excerpt]

II

Bowie

I have listened to Aladdin Sane more times than I can count and the songs are amazing and still heartbreakingly new and bring back a time when I was insecure and didn't speak French and was visiting my first boyfriend in a town 40 miles south of Paris. I wasn't allowed to touch the stereo because I was a girl but I did anyway just to listen to that album because I wouldn't have gotten through that month without it. I remember what it was like to think everything was going to turn out like that, crazy and poorly mixed but brilliant. I want that energy back, even the misery, because it was real and uncool and unrehearsed, unlike the things I say to people now to explain being upset or down or depressed. I wasn't intact and impermeable then.

III

Stove Mitt

And this all there is to tell–The hooded man falling from the tree, pajamas on

and trucks in the grass like homing agents waiting to get back–

There is no back between

hood and forward and there is no trunk in the saddle of his new

car and there is no wife in his blow-up doll kitchen and there is

no nothing in between his legs and his toes and he in the end

generalizes it all out in quotients and potions x = 4z2

and it harms him fully but never warms him.

IV

Protein Chain

Skin repels from inside to create newer and newer boundaries and warts and tumors are growths like any other measured by distance and scale. The row of skin rolls back like a ladder as you come.

Protein delineates action from reaction in the cradling of head to head, groin to groin, image to magic and back again through the forest.

Light counsels the aftermath of numbers as partners pretend to rebuff the broken toenail dust flying off the trees. The shuddering callouses created by counting with an abacus.

(IN A BOOMING VOICE): I am talking about edges–ridges, valleys, and pools. I am specifically referring to the mood between. The toe, the foot, the sleep–the part of your body you call sleep. The furnace, your body heat, how warm your arm was when I touched it last night, the bully from third grade, the guy you had a crush on, the seminar you took one summer on suffering, American style: These are all plural. Dense pluralities made of the same singular material used to make shoes and lamps although in parallel histories of which you've been a part, they found ways to make things out of skin.

Interview with Susan Briante

Susan Briante, whose second book Utopia Minus is now available from Ahsahta Press, recently visited Buffalo, where she gave a reading at our house (part I is above; part II can be viewed here). Her first book, Pioneers in the Study of Motion, was also published by Ahsahta, and she teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas. We first met many years ago in Austin, and it was a pleasure to catch up with her during her visit and later via e-mail, in the exchange reproduced below.

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DH: You've been concerned with tracing the vicissitudes of Capitalism in your poetry for quite some time now. This is most obvious in the ongoing "Dow Jones Closes…" series, in which you personify the DJIA, and recently, as I understand it, use those numbers to help generate search procedures to lead the poetry in various directions. Tell me about the evolution of that series. How did it first occur to you to write these poems, and how has it developed over time?

SB: There are actually two separate stock market projects. I was finishing work on Utopia Minus, when the recession really started to dig in deep. Although, for those of us who did not see our fortunes rise as a result of the real estate bubble, the sense of limited economic possibility was already palpable years before. I wrote the opening poem of Utopia Minus, "The End of Another Creature," in response to the original "crisis" of 2008. Like many people I was shocked (see Naomi Klein) to witness the limited focus of this "crisis"—panic over Lehman Brothers, panic over the stock market. No one was talking about the fact that even prior to the crisis the housing "bubble" priced many middle-class families out of the market in ways that were not true just ten years prior. No one was talking about how health care costs made the middle class more vulnerable in many ways. No one was talking about decades of wage stagnation. All of that "too big to fail" rhetoric started to make many of us feel as if we were held hostage by the "the market" that was "reacting," "responding," and "rejecting" federal economic policy. I mimicked that personification of "market" in that poem with the lines:

The Market migrates; the Market scatters across the Metroplex.

The Market dreams my carcass onto the highway, groans

a few blocks deeper into my neighborhood.

I wanted to explore the idea of "Market" as a person. That exploration became the chapbook, "The Market is a Parasite that Looks Like a Nest," in which the "Market" becomes an aging baby boomer.

As the recession really started taking hold, I was again struck by how the dominant narrative to describe economic events became tied to the stock market, specifically the closing number of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and other so-called "economic indicators." Jobs were lost; homes were lost. The only thing that seemed to matter was the stock market at least in terms of policy. The closing numbers seemed to exert some magical influence over all of us. I wanted to find a way to explore this feeling of helplessness before those numbers even for those of us who don't have portfolios—especially for those of us who don't have portfolios. I started thinking about the Kabbala, numerology. I started recording the closing number of the Dow. I'd take the number and let it lead me to a text by plugging it into Google, Project Gutenberg, Bartlett's Quotations, an on-line version of Paradise Lost, other texts and search engines. I let those found texts and quotations inspire, influence, or infiltrate a poem written for the day. As the project took shape, it became part poetic journal recording my days as well as the Dow's. I've published a chaplet of these poems. Now I am working on completing a full-length manuscript under the working title $INDU or Ghost Numbers. You can find examples of individual poems published here and here.

DH: The concern with capital is not confined to that series; in my reading, it seems to permeate a lot of your work. For example, here are some lines from your new book, Utopia Minus: "What a coin we could make from Walt Whitman's soft eyes!" "O Sunglass Hut, we hardly knew you!" "window screens / taking on gold, an inheritance…" So, when I introduced you recently for a reading at our house in Buffalo, I talked about Keats and the idea that his keen mimetic ability helped him sense the way the early Industrial Age was seeping into and altering his environment. And how this is really woven into his poems. I wonder if you could talk about this more subtle "economic" thread in your poetry.

SB: I wanted to write about the post-industrial landscapes that were so familiar to me having grown-up in New Jersey. Living in Austin, Texas, I started to notice a different kind of disposable real estate: not empty factories but abandoned strip-malls or a half-constructed office building (what was going to be the Intel headquarters) that "rose into ruin" to quote Robert Smithson. They tell a story about booms and bust in a much more tangible and eloquent way than the closing number of the Dow. But they often don't receive much of our attention. When I started looking it seemed there were ruins everywhere, not the ruins of war or natural disaster, but the ruins of late capitalism: abandoned factories, commercial spaces, foreclosed homes. Those ruins and their narrative became the scaffolding for Utopia Minus.

In addition, I think when you come from a middle- to working-class background you think about money in a different way than folks who come from more privileged backgrounds. I feel very lucky about my economic situation, but I don't have wealth. And that creates vulnerability as well as awareness. Maybe that vulnerability influences perspective: you see how economics like a window screen can color everything.

DH: What about lyricism? That same poem I referenced (in part) above, "Scrap Metal," contains some lush description, and I particularly admire the precise but unostentatious use of verbs in the poem:

Dusk pales

at its hemline.

Copper light scores the westside of my chokeberry tree;

rush-hour trafficopters

buzz over live oaks, ignorant to how much weight these branches might hold.

I feel like there is a persistent lyricism—which I guess I would define as pretty word-sounds and imagery—but it's also contained; almost never do you seem to use figurative language, and even in the above passage, we're not free from "trafficopters" and their buzzing.

SB: I admire a precision of image that I trace back to the haiku masters and certainly the Imagists. The haiku masters are also models for having a poetic viewfinder that notes both big seasonal change and house spiders. Smithson, too, challenged our notion of what art could be: what belonged in a museum, what consisted of a monument. I like that pushing of boundaries. I think the lyric can hold a lot. It is also important to me to make art that "defamiliarizes," that shocks us out of our habitual modes of perception, to quote the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky. I try to remain open to beauty from a wide range of places (the county dump, the construction site) and to accept that beauty as it comes often cut with "trafficopters" or high voltage wires or shift whistles.



DH: In addition to what's been noted above, there are some other threads that run through this book: Olson, Melville, General Sherman… I wonder if you approach a book of poems in a project-oriented way, in response to reading and research you may be doing? And what specifically drew you to these figures, alongside the Civil War and post-bellum references that resurface in different poems?

SB: My thinking about ruins became a scholarly as well as a lyric project. I wanted to understand how "ruins" (by which I mean abandoned buildings fallen into some amount of disrepair) function in the American imaginary. We associate ruins with the "old world" of Europe. And yet there's a history of ruins in the United States. You can start with the images of great ruined cities in the South after the Civil War. You can follow that through waves of development and reconstruction. Capitalism seeks to remake the landscape with such speed there is a constant building and tearing down, destruction and redevelopment, until the flow of capital sputters or stops.

The scholarly project then offered a series of ideas that I was able to explore lyrically through the poems of Utopia Minus. In a sense, Olson is obviously one of the patron saints of any long-term intellectual poetic project. I take very seriously his call in "A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn" to "dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any other." I don't know if I succeeded….but I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about ruins, memory, economics, and national narratives.

Melville, obviously, is also relevant when thinking about the long investigation. And Melville like Whitman records the important process of nation building. Looking at Civil War photographs for the ruins, initially, really got me thinking about nation building and myth making: Whitman and Melville both seem important contributors to that process.

DH: "'Sex is difficult,' Rilke explains." You quote him in "Dear Mr. Surgeon General." I believe, given the other Rilke quote in this poem, but correct me if I'm wrong, it's from the Notebooks. First, was Rilke another touchstone for you in this project? Second, this hints at a theme that begins to take on more prominence as the book goes along: Eros, love, sex. "What a time, then, to be an American in love!" you write in "Dear Madam Secretary of Homeland Security." A later poem begins, "Come autumn, we find a new way / to fuck." Talk about the "difficulty" of sex (and love), more particularly writing about it, and in what ways (perhaps, taking a cue from Rilke) it's bound up with distance and loss.

SB: Actually the Rilke is from the Letters to a Young Poet. I was admiring the intimacy and range of those letters and all of their concern for love, art, and distance. If there's a sense of loss or longing in my epistolary, there's also a longing for the kinds of relationship that existed between a poet and a mentor in Rilke's historical moment. I've had some terrific mentors in my life, but—and here's where economics comes back in—at a time when many of them are juggling a writing career and an academic career (if they are lucky) I don't think we have the time or luxury for those kinds of long correspondences.

The difficulties of sex…yes…hmmm… I think I'll stick to the difficulties of writing about sex—per se—or romantic love. My interest lies in the process of reconstituting what's "romantic" (lowercase "r") finding a new vocabulary for describing the erotic. There's been a lot of writing about sex that takes its inspiration from the natural world. I was interested in exploring what happens when we make "erotic" poetry from a combination of chainsaws and earthmovers.

DH: And here, too, the movement of the first part of the book seems reversed in a way. Instead of Capitalism creeping into poems that are almost pastoral in their descriptions, we have these formally addressed political-seeming poems, into which a sensuality kind of sneaks in. Was this a conscious design on your part? And on a slightly different tack, talk about the genesis of these "formal address" prose pieces ("Dear Mr. Surgeon General," etc.) and how they seem undercut with all kinds of intimacy, personal reference, and so on.

SB: I was wondering who might be my Rilke. (My poem "A Letter to Eileen Myles" explores that question in another way.) I was thinking about the relationship between power and intimacy as well. When I began writing these poems, we were in the midst of the Bush presidency, the beginning of the Iraq war. Like many Americans, I began to doubt my actual agency in the political system. This administration was making decisions in the name of the American people without regard to the opinion of many of us.

There's a wonderful quote from a high-ranking Bush administration official from an interview with the journalist Ron Suskind published in The New York Times:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

And I thought: let's pretend that these bureaucrats who act like they know everything and want to control everything really have both that knowledge and power. If they want to pour their policies into every aspect of my life as if they know what's best, maybe they do. Tell me about love, National Security Adviser. Bring it. Obviously, it's absurd. I did send the letters to their corresponding officials during the Bush administration, but no one ever wrote me back.

As in the Dow poems, I am also very interested in using the lyric as a place to frame our intimacies within the political and economic systems, which weigh so heavy upon us. So I get pleasure out of seeing the title "Dear Mr. Director of a Census Bureau" hang over a lyric that attempts to understand my own birth. In that way, the concerns of that series go beyond any one administration. Again, it is a question of delineating a relationship of power, of showing the scaffolding of a larger social economic structure.

DH: Another thing I admire about your poetry is that you seem utterly unafraid to write the long poem. And even the longer prose poem. Longer lines, longer poems. But also the occasional short poem, such as "At the Lake." We've already touched on Olson, but I wonder if there are other poets who've influenced you in terms of form and length of line and verse.

SB: Certainly Olson is a model, not only for the long poem, but for the kind of lyric investigation in which I am most interested. Eileen Myles is model both for the long poem and for writing about economics as is Alice Notley. There's a ton to learn from the New York School—look at Schuyler if you want to think about observation and the lyric—but I think the second generation New York School writers offer really important work that grapples with poetry and economics.

For the short poem, I look to Jean Valentine, Joanne Kyger, and Hoa Nguyen. There's a lot still to learn there—especially about the line.

I'm also a sucker for prose. I love the sentence. That's kind of a new development.

When I was writing my first book, Pioneers in the Study of Motion, I was really interested in the fragment. After six years in Mexico, there were many stories I wanted to tell, but I knew I was writing in the complicated wake of many other traveler/writers. Instead of trying to tell a story—to offer a version of Mexico—I found myself thinking about the field note: non-linear, observation-based, provisional and speculative—much like the best poems. Rosmarie Waldrop writes: "The glint of light on the cut, this spark given off by the edges is what I am after." In many of the poems of Pioneers in the Study of Motion, I wanted to use juxtaposition to create sparks like those you see in the contact between two metals—the conquers' sword and warriors' shield—or the smoke sometimes observed when the wheels of a plane touch down on the runway. I hoped juxtaposition would draw the reader's attention to the poem's surface lest they be fooled into believing they might actually be seeing Mexico rather than a glimpse of my mind.

Before I started writing the poems that would become Utopia Minus, I was reading WG Sebald's Rings of Saturn. In that book, Sebald proposes to take readers on walks through the English countryside, but actually he creates a journey through syntax and thought and history. Likewise, I wanted my poems to start from a fixed place—a building (often abandoned), a batholith in the Texas Hill Country—but I wanted to challenge myself as to the intellectual distance I could traverse without resorting to collage. I wanted to walk through these thoughts. I love falling asleep somewhere over Kansas and waking up on the tarmac in San Francisco. But I also relish the process of taking things mile by mile, word by word, to notice every historical marker, strip mall, roadside curiosity, to savor every preposition, verb, clause.

DH: And how does your own poetry training perhaps feed into this—I know you did a PhD in poetics at UT-Austin, but I'm not sure about your study, formal or otherwise, prior to that.

SB: I lived in Mexico City during the 1990s, where I had the great fortune of working with the poet Roberto Tejada. He and his magazine, Mandorla, really opened up the American (by which I mean from the Americas) avant garde for me. When I left Mexico, I ended up in Miami and stumbled into the MFA program at Florida International University. I was still in the process of coming out to myself as a poet, and from the perspective of my working class background, the MFA seemed like an incredible indulgence. It was the only MFA program to which I applied.

I was so fortunate to end up there with the poet Campbell McGrath, an incredibly savvy and generous teacher. His first book of poem is called Capitalism, so it is not hard to see where I became inspired to write about economics. His third book, Spring Comes to Chicago, includes the 63-page "Bob Hope Poem," which is one part Ashbery's "The Skaters," one part documentary poetics in its investigation of consumerism, the real estate market, the myths of America etc. It's really an amazing feat. I think my interest in documentary poetics began there—although I wasn't calling it that when I first read it, and I don't know that he would call it that even now.

DH: This leads to your immediate poetic community and environment. Clearly, a lot of poems mention Farid (Matuk), your husband and a fellow poet. The two of you met in Austin while you were both students at UT, if I'm not mistaken. There was a burgeoning poetry scene that sprang up around UT, as well as Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith, who were still publishing Skanky Possum, and Scott Pierce, of Effing Press—all of you were (and are) fast friends, and I was lucky enough to return to Texas at the tale end of that era. To what extent was that circle, the art and poetry being created by those folks, and the other poets you may have exposed each other to, important to the work you've done since?

SB: What was happening in Austin happened outside of the university. I think there's value to literature or creative writing programs, but poets also have to learn how to be in the world outside of an institution. Poets need to learn how to be part of a larger conversation. Dale, Hoa, Farid, and Scott—as poets, publishers, curators of reading series, and essayists—were models for me. Their work in all of those areas inspired me. It was like I was doing another PhD on the side, a PhD with a lot of tequila. I am still learning from them.

DH: Now you and Farid are married, you have a daughter, Gianna, and you've moved to Dallas, where you teach at UT-Dallas. There is a palpable sort of loss (it seems to me) registered in this book around that move, as well as an effort to find the beauty and eros and interest in your new locale. Lately, you've been reunited with an old poetic comrade, Roberto Tejada, there, and I gather there is a growing poetic community in Dallas as well. How has all this—the family, the move, your academic position, the Dallas scene—further informed your writing?

SB: I don't know if the loss is personal. My life is very rich in many ways. I can get nostalgic about Austin because of the great community we had there, but I am happier now or happy in a different way. I have a lot more ground under my feet, a stronger sense of economic, emotional, and artistic security. It is the kind of security that allows one to take risks in art.

The loss registered in Utopia Minus comes from a placelessness I find in Dallas, but I think is evident in much of the American landscape. Dallas is a city that doesn't show a very pretty public face: on the surface it's Target, Best Buy, Wal-Mart. When you linger you start to notice snowy egrets floating like awkward angels, monarch butterflies on their way to Mexico, a big old radio tower near downtown, the abandoned hotel, an empty cobalt blue restaurant across the street from the dive bar named Ships.

Like many American cities, Dallas hasn't figured out how to talk about its own history. It's a complicated one especially in regard to race. That lack of history contributes to a sense of loss, but it also creates a kind of freedom. Austin has a real sense of itself as a refuge for old-hippies and young hipsters, but that narrative has become a kind of branding ("Keep Austin Weird" ) that prevents Austin from seeing some of the more complicated issues of its past and present. With Dallas, the story is still being written and that is liberating.

DH: Finally, this is your second book with Ahsahta, after Pioneers in the Study of Motion several years ago. That kind of relationship with a press is pretty rare these days. I wonder if you could close by saying a few words about Ahsahta and your experience working with them on two different projects now.

It has been a great gift working with Janet Holmes at Ahsahta. She's not only a fantastic editor and incredibly smart about the publishing business, but she's an amazing poet. (See: F2F and Ms of My Kin for a sense of the intelligence and diversity of her work.) In every part of the publishing process, I had the privilege of collaborating with someone who cares for the poems line by line. When we were working on Pioneers, she sent a first set of galleys with the explanation that she thought Futura would be a good typeface for the titles because of its association with William Carlos Williams. Swoon.

I am going to start a fundraising project to clone Janet. Then we can still get more books from Ahsahta and more poems from her.

In all seriousness, this brings me back to economics. So much of the best poetry that is happening today comes from people like Janet who have always worked incredibly hard and are working harder still in the grip of the Great Recession. But I don't know how long we can continue to count on these extraordinary efforts. We are all tired and working too hard and worrying about our job security and our health insurance and the kinds of opportunities that will be left to our kids. But on top of all of that heavy lifting, we have to imagine a different economic future. We must refuse to accept the narrow possibilities offered by our current political and economic system. If we the poets, researchers, rabble-rousers can't imagine it, who will?

***

from Utopia Minus:

Isabella

The problem is that I always want two

things at once: to linger on Egyptian cotton sheets

and to be up at my desk hard drive whirring;

to sit on the dock dangling my feet in Eagle Lake

and simultaneously writing you this letter

about the ripples I send clear to the far bank,

how my toes hang above reeds and tadpoles,

about the family of geese that came on shore

yesterday afternoon and shit everywhere.

I am learning to row. Winds blow from the west.

An oar can act as brake or motor.

The ribs of the boat make a cradle.

Last night's sleep was shallow, and I dreamt

I flung myself over a group of children

with arms spread until my winter jacket

opened to wings. Men torched

parked cars. Police hurled grenades

across a street. And while we huddled

behind a Gap advertisement near a subway

entrance, my rather ran towards

the barricades calling

another woman's name.

*



3000 Block Kings Ln–Demolished Apartment Complex

central set of 8 steps to the courtyard,

small rock garden,

kidney-shaped pool, 8 feet deep,

blue flox, purple crepe myrtle,

white plastic laundry basket

in a parking lot beyond the cyclone fence

Apartments for Rent

1-3 Months Free Avignon Realty,

railroad ties, cracked foundation,

It's all George's fault in black spray paint,

and black-eyed Susans

to which I feel no relation

CALL FOR PAPERS: KADAR KOLI—THE VIOLENCE ISSUE

The idea for this special issue of kadar koli emerged from a question posted by British poet Keston Sutherland to the UK poetry listserv and to the Sous Les Pavés online discussion group in response to "calls for violence" during and after the U.K. protests: "I … want to know what people think about the wishing for and urging of violence (against whom? just the police, or who else? how?)." One example cited by Sutherland is Justin Katko's "Lines for a Protest Song, After 9 December":

Sometimes I wish that instead of their horses

They'd call up the hold where they store their guns;

And when they shoot one of us down we'll rise up stronger,

For in the taste of our blood be remembered we are one.

Sutherland's question is an urgent one, particularly for participants in the "Occupy" movement who are debating the role of violence in collective action, its justifications and consequences: What kind of violence? Coming from whom? For what ends? Indeed, from Tunisia to London to Oakland, our current geo-political landscape has been swept by a series of uprisings, reminding us of the power of mass mobilization and of the intimate connection between violence and democracy. What role does or can poetry play in these uprisings? This question suggests the venerable problem of aesthetics and politics: How might thinking about violence alongside poetic practice throw different light on this quandary?

These questions open up other areas of possible inquiry that fall under the general heading of violence and contemporary poetry. How have contemporary poets responded to or documented different kinds and instances of violence? What kinds of poetic practices have been developed as a result of violence? How does violence get defined or named by poetry? Slavoj Žižek says we should distance ourselves from "the fascinating lure" of "violence performed by a particular agent" and instead try "to perceive the background which generates such outbursts." How does or can poetry disclose the unseen contours of the violence that determines our everyday lives? How can poetry illuminate—or sound out—the histories of discipline and punishment that determine the quotidian?

Violence is often said to be "meaningless." But perhaps violence does have meaning. What can it tell us? How does it communicate? Perhaps, it is only the poem that can help us answer these questions. How have poets reckoned with the ways that language itself is bound up with violence? Similarly, how might the poetic act be an act of violence, however necessarily?

Finally, it might be said that the same logics that structure our socio-cultural realities also shape the field of contemporary poetry. Certain "brands" of poetry, for example, remain dominant. The editors would like to see work that tackles the structural violence that shapes our field.

For this special issue of kadar koli, we invite submissions that reckon with the relation between violence and contemporary poetry. We seek poetry, short critical statements (max. 1,500 words), and longer critical essays (max. 4,000 words). We are also interested in art (collage, photographs, drawings). Deadline for submission is January 15.

kadar koli 7 will be produced as a print journal, as well as an open-source, downloadable file, in Spring 2012.

PLEASE SEND INQUIRIES TO: kadarkoli7@yahoo.com

Interview with Ryan Eckes

Ryan Eckes in Philadelphia, September 2011

Welcome to a new feature at Primitive Information. I hope to conduct interviews with poets whose small-press books have found their way onto my desk lately, both as a way to find out more about them and to help get the word out about these great books. The first interview is with Ryan Eckes, whose book Old News was recently released by Furniture Press. (Click link for purchasing info.)

Thanks to Ryan for chatting with me; the interview was conducted via e-mail in October. Enjoy!



DH: The event that provides not only the title of this book, but also a sort of ongoing theme and frame for the text, is described early on: the discovery of some Philadelphia Inquirer issues from the 1920s underneath the carpeting in a house where you were living. Tell me more about this—how does this inform and resonate with the poems and pieces in the book, and what made you decide to reproduce and explicitly reference some of the content from those old newspapers?

RE: As soon as I found the old papers I wanted to make something out of them, but it was a year before I figured out what to do: just re-tell the most fascinating stories, paring down and lineating to bear out what's most fascinating. I was drawn more to odd local stories that wouldn't make the news today, mysterious banalities and antiquities, especially those with oddly beautiful language (phrases like "I have been shy of bandits") than I was to national or "historical" events. At the same time, I was ready to start writing about the block I was living on, where the neighbors were very social—people outside every evening, talking, hanging out, kids running around. It was the most communal block I've ever lived on in any neighborhood, and I was collecting all these interesting little stories from my neighbors. So I figured I'd pull them together, the old news and what was happening in front of me every day, and see if I could find some fluidity between them, see what kind of Philadelphia I'd end up with.

The plan was to construct one whole story out of a back-and-forth between the past and present, using an idea from one piece (either an old-news-story poem or present-day poem) to lead me to the next. What better way to begin than with forgetting, I thought, and so the first found piece was FORGETS CHILD ON TRAIN, and I started building from there. The following piece, "training," responds to it, reaches into my own childhood for some introduction and opens up a space for the next poem, and so on. So there was a level of improvisation even though I was culling intermittently from a pool of articles I already wanted to use. I left out a lot of interesting material because it didn't fit into what I ended up building, which was this scrapbook (of a city) with momentum that's meant to be read front-to-back, which you can do in under an hour, though it might take longer to digest.

DH: The first two poems of the book seem to register a sort of bafflement and wonder in these encounters with other worlds—that of the past, that of the urban landscape of Philadelphia, with its priests, neighbors, roofers, etc. It all seems to harmonize into this unsettling and unsettled space: the "blah blah, he said, blah blah blah, I said" as you have it at the end of "odd years." I wonder if you could talk about that. I know you told me that the series of poems here was conceived as a book pretty early on, and I'm curious if moments like those were a conscious concern as you worked, a fruitful place to go with the poetry.

RE: Bafflement's a really good word. Typically I write into experiences that baffle me, and I've always struggled to remain "at wonder" with the world—I suppose poetry is a way to do that. In retrospect, I can see a pattern of unsettled spaces in the book, if I'm following you on that, but I don't think I was very conscious of those as I wrote. That is, I wasn't purposely trying to create an unsettled space—it wasn't a goal. But I was trying to understand what was around me and in so doing arrived at questions I then used to push myself further from page to page, to expand the stakes.

DH: One of the things I admire about this book is that the "other worlds" I alluded to brings you in contact with lots of people who are less than, shall we say, enlightened about things like race. And you don't shy away from that. Has this caused any problems in terms of reception of the book? Did you think about altering some of that or leaving it out, toning it down, etc.? What did you think was the importance of leaving it in there? An example: The end of the prose piece, "how to get around," records a conversation with a neighbor, "frankie," which reads, "so why don't you take the subway, i say. ah, the subway, he says, well the subway's a little too dark for me if you know what i mean."

RE: Racism is very common, isn't it? At least around here it is. Common as a dog barking. I can't see why I wouldn't point it out. I mean, if I'm writing a book about Philly I'm certainly not going to pretend racism's not a part of it. I'm not a marketer. I call it as I see it. Maybe some poetry reviewers will say it's not poetic to reveal some of the pitiful ways that working class white people attempt to confide their racism in each other?

In any case, nobody's expressed any beef that I know of. But the book hasn't been reviewed yet, and so far most of the people who've read it know me, and perhaps about a quarter of those are not poets. I should probably say that my sense of audience includes people I grew up with and possible readers who are not writers, people much less concerned with literary history than with history—the conditions of the society we live in. While I hope the book challenges and entertains anybody who reads it, there's no way I'm going to write into some narrow idea of "reception."

DH: A lot of the themes of the first part of the book seem to converge in the poem "inside the scowl"—neighborhood tensions, race, marriage, and this cherry tree that you and your wife are trying to plant, a very well-worn poetic symbol that is rescued (for me) by the humor and hopelessness of it all, specifically the anxiety around dog shit that city-dwellers know all too well. Last line: "ginger, did you shit on my tree?" Talk about the turn to really materialize the issues and open up some intimate details at this point in the book.

RE: Ginger was a dog I wanted to pick up and punt down the street. Ginger. That poem vents feelings that had built up—my anger, a feeling of being stuck—inside the scowl of South Philly. It's a gripe about the neighborhood, which I was experiencing as very static at the time (in 2008, middle of that election year). In it I admit my prejudice against the Italians. I think the poem's saved by its acknowledgment of the contagiousness of a certain kind of pettiness. I'm glad the humor came through. Up to that point in the book most of the writing is observation-based (more show than tell, you could say), so that poem does function as a vent. I actually worked it over many times and at one point considered cutting it. Good thing I didn't because much of the later narrative depends on it. It was important to balance the found material with the personal, the intimate, to keep the whole thing real.

DH: I am really struck, on reading this book over again, with the idea of the neighbor, especially this guy frankie who keeps popping up like a disturbing motif. He really ought to have his own theme music. In the poem "originally," he makes an implicit statement that jibes strangely with an idea in Robert Pogue Harrison's book Forests, which maps the appropriating of forests during the Middle Ages in England (among other things), drawing a distinction between the shrinking "wild" forest and the "juridical zone" of the park, the latter brought under the king's sovereignty for the uses of hunting and sport. Clearly frankie's not about to engage in a disputation with you about critical theory. But when the two of you are talking about the woods that used to be in the north of philly and you say, "still plenty of woods, though, if you think about pennypack park," and he replies, "pennypack park, no, i don't think about pennypack park," this really opens out on the contentious issue of zoning, sharing, and "naturalizing" of urban space—also registered in his objection to a cherry tree that you'd planted. Talk about these different conceptions of that space and how they fall differently for older generations vs. younger, in changing neighborhoods, and so on. This seems like a conscious concern of the poems and it intersects in interesting ways with the personal, cultural issues that also come up.

RE: Funny story—that tree we planted, which appeared to have died by the time I moved out of that house and which I mention near the end of the book as a metaphor for the dead relationship, ended up surviving. I noticed a year or so later it was still there, growing, which turned out a nice personal coda, for me, that the literal tree behind the vehicle of the metaphor withstood the tenor (the broken marriage, permanent)—as if life resisted language stubbornly and actively as it does pavement, as if life did what I wanted poetry to, while the little tree in the poem's no worse for it, since it's not the same tree. It was a reminder, or lesson, even, that life—i.e., what grows out of the ground—will fictionalize whatever you do, make a cartoon of you, and you can roll with that fact as best you can or get steamrolled. I'll go ahead here and define wildness, for a human, as rolling with that fact.

I painted Frankie as the worst, I think, mostly out of what I saw in him that I disliked in myself—his concrete nature, you could say, which I can sympathize with. I could see the absurdity of planting a tree on that tiny sidewalk, and I felt insecure in that it was something people new to the neighborhood were doing (it was my ex-wife's idea, who isn't from Philly, nor USA) and I didn't want to be seen as a stereotypical young person from outside the city—but to an older guy like Frankie, I was, since I'm from the Northeast, a newer, suburban-like part of the city (built for cars, spread out with shopping centers rather than corner stores, etc). I understood his distrust of beauty, which is tied to class identification and anti-intellectual masculinity, and his excessive trust of nativeness (Philly is one of those places where people like to live in the same neighborhood their whole lives). The difference is that I hate my own—and his—distrust of beauty (hence poetry). Also, I'm not this born-again racist. Those differences outweighed my desire to try to show him our commonality, which I was unable to do anyway. So I've got this book now that might offer a window into how all that tension, fear and miscommunication works. Maybe I should I leave a copy of it in his mailbox?

DH: Now I wonder if you could extend that theme of "space" out from your book and talk about the particular poetic space of Philadelphia, which likewise seems important here. I read this as a cultural artifact of a poetic community, in a way. You thank poets (in the acknowledgments) like CA Conrad, Frank Sherlock, Stan Mir, Rachel Blau DuPlessis—poets inside and outside the academy, but all nestled in the "Philly scene." How important was that community to the development of a project like this, and how does it inform your poetry in other ways?

RE: Those poets' voices are in my head, their sound and sense, and I keep absorbing them. There's always both conscious and unconscious dialogue going on, and poetry comes of that naturally. It comes of what I read, hear, and who I talk with all the time. From 2005-07, while in Temple's creative writing program, I read many books of poetry that were conceived as books (or "projects"), so I'm sure that was an influence, though I can't trace Old News to one specific influence. But the poets you named there, and others, are deeply invested in place, including this city, and it shows up in their work. No doubt their commitments and poetics have rubbed off on me.

While working on the manuscript I wrote after Old News (Common Sense), there were moments I would read over what I'd written and think, "Am I just ripping off The City Real and Imagined?" I wasn't, of course, but I was definitely after that lyric intensity and could hear Frank and CA in my poems, especially in the months after their book had come out and I couldn't get enough of it. Song & Glass by Stan and Passyunk Lost by Kevin Varrone had also come out at that same time, I remember—all this wonderful shit at once, I could hardly stand it. If my poems are any good, I'm indebted to them. There's some great company around here.

DH: Turning that question around: your own role in the community, how you inform it. You and Stan Mir run a series called "Chapter and Verse Reading Series," and you seem engaged in lots of ways with what's going on there. Looking at it from the outside, it seems like a really vibrant and varied scene, one I've been hearing great things about for years. Temple has obviously been a center of cutting-edge stuff for a long time, and now with Charles Bernstein at UPenn, there is a contemporary poetics community springing up there, too. CA Conrad's "somatics" and other figures (like those mentioned above) just seem to represent some of the most exciting stuff going on anywhere these days. How do you fit in, especially as someone who's both born and raised in Philly and part of the academic world as well?

RE: That's an interesting question. Well, I'm active mostly outside the academy. As an adjunct, occasionally I teach an undergraduate workshop at Temple where I enjoy messing up kids' lives by introducing them to poetry. But in general I'm getting coffee or beer with writers and speculating about the world situation or what we're doing tonight, or borrowing their books to camel up. I would say that is how I fit in. And there's the reading series, which is great because of Stan. I show up at the Kelly Writers House when my work schedule doesn't impede—Michelle Taransky, Sarah Dowling and Julia Bloch (when she was here) have made great things happen there. And there's Kim Gek Lin Short and Debrah Morkun and the con/crescent dudes, Nick DeBoer and Jamie Townsend, always bringing good poets to town to read at various venues. We all try to keep it lively and alive, and I do what I can in that. I try to make things happen, basically, and that includes writing poems.

***

from Old News

The Evening Bulletin, Monday, May 7, 1923:

FORGETS CHILD ON TRAIN

Sleepy Father Leaves Four-Year-Old Son

andrew gray said he had

taken his boy

to the aquarium

and was so tired

when they boarded

the elevated train

for home he had

fallen

asleep

awakening

suddenly without

thinking of

the boy who

was looking out

the window

the father

hurried out of

the train.

*

training

at a party an academic who doesn't teach asked me what i write about. i drew a blank and remembered my first grade teacher, mrs blank. she would never say blank — she would say space, fill in the space. in class we watched the challenger space shuttle lift off and explode into nothing on the screen. there were no answers. when asked to stand and say my name, i said big blue O, which was wrong. the world was a big blue O. it challenged you to fill in the space with a summary, and the teacher gave you an A for effort, which began with an E and felt like jogging the inside of an O to make something go, make the O go fast, not slow.

Actually, you are NOT f*kin perfect…

Christina Aguilera – Beautiful (Official Music Video)Christina Aguilera

Pink – Fkin Perfect – Official Music Video – YouClubVideo.

Katy Perry, "Firework"

I'm not sure when it was, exactly, that we became a nation of Stuart Smalleys, sitting in front of a mirror and telling ourselves this. It's a disturbing trend, however, that I've noticed in music the past several years. Certainly it's not unique to this era — every period of popular music has its element of self-affirmation and healthy ego-boosting, necessary to assert one's own personality and break through into generational identity. But the three songs posted above, each one sung by a beautiful female pop star, seem to me to go a step beyond that.*

*Or at least, taken together with a parallel trend I outline below, they go a step beyond that.

They bear remarkable similarities, especially in terms of the imagery of the music videos. The basic formula is: misfit / outsider undergoes abuse / ridicule, learns to accept his or her own uniqueness / sexuality and realizes that he/she is "perfect," "beautiful," etc. Both Christina Aguilera and Katy Perry deal with queer youth in their videos; Perry seems to throw in a young cancer victim as well. Pink keeps things simple and focused — we follow the arc of a young woman all the way from early childhood through teen years of being the odd kid out, abuse, flirtations with suicide, finally to a blossoming as an artist (and, apparently, wife and mother). The woman is played by Tina Majorino, who was in Napolean Dynamite and also had a supporting role as the straight-edge Mormon pal of Amanda Seyfried's character in Big Love. It is probably the most effective, since it doesn't try to overreach — and it also doesn't feature the silly motif of fireworks shooting out of boobs, like Perry's video.

Nothing wrong here, in a certain sense… and I would add Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" to the list; though it's more overtly programmatic, Gaga's entire career to this point reads like a giant affirmation of outsiderness / queerness, with her concerts, full of positive feedback and motherly assurance, as the Smalleyesque group hug craved by her fans. Up to a point, I don't have a problem with any of this. But taken together with our dysfunctional political gridlock, culminating most recently in the debt limit stalemate; the riots in England, which at least express understandable outrage at "austerity" measures that are a slap in the face to the already exploited lower classes (though the fighting amongst rioters and looting of neighborhood businesses is a misguided channeling of that rage); and the buffet of environmental issues and general decline of the West — taken with all this, it does seem a little to this Midwestern boy as though we are collectively huddling in the corner and telling ourselves everything's going to be fine.

How to put this somewhat diplomatically? We are facing the worst political and economical crisis this country has seen in several generations — an utter breakdown of communication across the political spectrum and an abject failure of leadership in the face of difficult choices — and the attitude expressed in pop music is not only symptomatic of the problems, but represents the core reason we fail so utterly at solving them. Put the above together with the following messages, from male pop stars:

Bruno Mars, "Just the Way You Are"

Hot Chelle Rae, "Tonight Tonight"

–what you get is a disconcerting brew of affirmation mingled with apathy.

I'm especially annoyed with the perfectly execrable Bruno Mars, whose lazy and derivative melodies seem cadged from bubble-gum b-sides, yet who is universally hailed as the Next Big Thing in pop. The video for the aptly titled "The Lazy Song" appears to have cost about $50 to make, including the plaid shirts and monkey masks. "Just the Way You Are" is simply self-affirmation from another point of view — that of the male's, looking at the objectified female — and obviously there is no pretense here of a larger, more inclusive scope; the video says it all, as a beautiful dark-haired model blushes and preens under Mars' gaze and unabashed encomium. Gag me.

I actually enjoy the last song, above — it doesn't pretend to be anything more than a mindless party tune — but its refrain of "Lalala — whatever" etc. falls in line with the overall attitude I'm getting at here. "Everything's fine — don't change a thing — you're perfect — you're a firework — whatever." We've had a full decade following 9/11 of wars, terror, political blundering, and economic decline, and the main tenor of the response in pop music has been just this kind of ignoring-the-problem, let's-keep-things-positive crap.

It is what makes stuff like ongoing grade inflation not only possible, but inevitable; it is what leads to burgeoning obesity rates; it is, most damagingly, what encourages the cognitive dissonance in which people perceive themselves to be much more well off than they actually are, to belong to a higher class that is actually working against their interests — which I've written about before.

* * *

I've often wondered what happens to those losers on American Idol after they leave, crestfallen and angry, having been told that they're not actually the wonderful, talented singers they thought they were. We enjoy watching those terrible auditions; we marvel at the lack of self-awareness, the over-inflated ego that led some tone-deaf soul to believe that she could carry a tune — missing, perhaps, the underlying truth that we are all encouraged to believe ourselves capable of anything at any given moment — but I wonder what happens to them. I would bet most of them just give up in shame. Some probably persist in baseless, clueless self-belief. I wonder how many of those losers go home, look at themselves long and hard in the mirror, and actually work to get better; take classes, embrace the pain and humiliation, put in the several years of hard work it would take to actually get to a point of beginning to know if one ever could be good enough.

* * *

Whenever I teach creative writing, I include some of Keats's letters. The letter on "Negative Capability," of course, and the one on "Poetical Character" — but also the one he wrote to Hessey in October 1818, in response to the latter's having sent him a copy of a note defending Keats against harsh criticism of his first volume of poems, particularly the "slip-shod" Endymion, as Keats himself calls it in this letter. It is, like so many of Keats's letters, a beauty of clear-headed brevity, finely turned phrases in which a complex thought process is crystallized.

In this case, the subject is self-criticism and aesthetic judgment. Keats had been viciously attacked by a passel of mostly anonymous Simon Cowells, many of them motivated by resentment towards Keats and his circle (particularly Leigh Hunt) that had little to do with the poems themselves, and some literally advising him to "keep his day job": "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John…"

Here is the relevant part of Keats's letter:

I begin to get acquainted with my own strength and weakness.–Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own Works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict. and also when I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception & ratification of what is fine. J.S. [John Scott, who'd defended Keats] is perfectly right in regard to the slip-shod Endymion. That it is so is no fault of mine. –No!– though it may sound a little paradoxical. It is as good as I had power to make it–by myself–Had I been nervous about its being a perfect piece, & with that view asked advice, & trembled over every page, it would not have been written; for it is not in my nature to fumble–I will write independently. I have written independently without Judgment.–I may write independently & with judgment hereafter.–The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law & precept, but by sensation & watchfulness in itself…

Keats does several things here that I find pretty remarkable. First, though, what he does not do: he does not stick his fingers in his ears, skulk off stage, and vow to the camera that he's actually a great poet and those bastards don't know what they're talking about, and blah blah blah. He does not take it personally, though some of the criticism has been quite unfair and personal. He does not curl up on the floor and quit. Having precociously published a poem that is, truthfully, pretty weak in places, he takes responsibility.

But he also does something else.* Without denying that the poem is not terribly good, he defends himself and his writing process by recognizing that if he had allowed his own or others' critical standards to guide the composition, he never would have completed this very important phase of his creative growth. He fiercely asserts his "independence" as a writer and critic, assuring Hessey that he has painstakingly developed (through years of careful reading and practice, though he doesn't say this) his own internal barometer for his work. It was necessary to shut that down while he wrote Endymion, but henceforth he will apply it more fully as he writes. Here Keats perfectly captures the entire creative and critical process that an artist must undergo. The wildly creative part — which is, arguably, akin to the ego-boost of self-affirmation described above — that enjoys inspiration, joined with the self-critical part, which guides revision and does the hard work of making final aesthetic judgments. As time goes on, Keats implies, the two can work more easily together, which is why mature artists tend to waste less time going down fruitless paths.

*He also, of course, improved greatly as a poet, which is the reason we're still reading his letters and poems.

Nor did Keats stop being self-critical, even as he wrote his greatest poems. In 1819 he wrote to his editor Woodhouse that while his Isabella — a tighter and tauter poem all around than Endymion — was "weaksided," "[t]here is no objection of this kind to Lamia" (one of his last long poems). One could argue that it was Keats's endless drive to absorb, adapt, and improve that constituted his true genius, rather than the easy narrative of transcendent talent achieved early. But I digress.

Look, I don't begrudge the misfits of the world — especially those who already endure an incessant message of negativity and degradation that echoes from the puritanical mainstream discourse in this country — their dose of encouragement, especially those who dare to question and explore received ideas about sexuality. There is nothing wrong with that, and having attended Lady Gaga's concert here in Buffalo last Spring, it was wonderful to see so many kids happy and proud to be weird.

But there comes a point where something akin to Keats's self-judgment kicks in. Where facts that don't fit one's worldview aren't simply discarded, or bent to make room for one's outsized ego. Clearly, given our political situation, this problem is not confined to today's youth. But it does seem to go largely unchecked, and it seems to be getting worse. If Keats had thumbed his nose at his critics, insisted that they just didn't get it, and continued churning out the decent but ultimately mediocre verse that went into Endymion, we simply wouldn't have some of the greatest poems in the English language.

kadar koli 6 is here!

Cover image by j/j hastain. Contributors: Zack Finch, Geoffrey Gatza, j/j hastain, Henri Deluy (trans. Jacqueline Kari), Edmond Caldwell, Micah Robbins, The Rejection Group, Sarah Jeanne Peters, Josh Stanley, John Hyland, Robin F. Brox, Brenda Iijima, Morani Kornberg-Weiss.

Recent News About Habenicht Titles, etc.

Yes… the blog is back. Thanks to webmaster extraordinaire Jerrold Shiroma, I've done a redesign that's taken care of the issue with the sidebar, and having cleared a few hurdles on the school front, I can get back to posting here more frequently.

For now, some recent mentions of Habenicht titles (as well as my new book):

–John Gallaher discusses the release of The Rejection Group's 5 Works

–John Latta reviews The Rejection Group

–j/j hastain and Benjamin Winkler talk about Micah Robbins' Crass Songs on Inherent Fracture

–SPD recommends Field Work for June 2011

–John Hyland reviews Field Work for goodreads

New Habenicht Chaps

Very limited number of all five chapbooks available for $15, plus shipping (specify in order whether you want white or black Rejection Group cover)

The Rejection Group (white cover), 5 works, 19pp, saddle-stitched, $7 plus shipping

The Rejection Group (black cover), 5 works, 19pp, saddle-stitched, $7 plus shipping

***very limited number copy of 5 works signed by by K.G., V.P., C.B., K.S.M., and K.J.: $20 plus shipping***

Sarah Peters, Triptych, 3pp, hand-sewn, $3 plus shipping

JodiAnn Stevenson, Houses Don't Float, 4pp, hand-sewn, $3 plus shipping

Brooks Johnson, Five Windows Light the Cavern'd Man, 3pp, hand-sewn, $3 plus shipping

David Hadbawnik, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 3pp, hand-sewn, $3 plus shipping

ALSO STILL AVAILABLE:





12pp. Letter-press cover designed by Richard Owens and Clifton Riley. Hand-sewn. Habenicht Press, 2010. $7 plus shipping.

$10 plus shipping

Field Work

Field Work page on BlazeVOX

· Paperback: 138 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-010-1

Previously posted excerpts from this project can be found here, here, and here.

Limited time only — buy a copy for $10, shipping included: