Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 410

Postcard: Billings Estate Museum,

We made our way to the Billings Estate Museum last week, an Ottawa historical site neither Christine nor I had previously visited (we weren’t entirely sure where it was before). Since we moved out of Centretown last fall, I’ve been curious about a number of aspects of our new neighbourhood, slowly making our way out to explore side-streets and parks, and a series of small pockets of city I knew little or nothing about. Our immediate part of Alta Vista Drive was originally one of a series of farmer’s fields before the advent of mid-1950s housing development. To the east, houses are slightly more recent, stepping into the early 1960s. A few blocks to the north-east, the houses along Orchard Avenue, for example, weren’t constructed until the late 1970s (what I would consider rather late for the area), and various neighbours apparently still have memory of a plethora of fruit trees. Christian McPherson, who owns a house on Orchard, recently discovered a lattice of tree-roots throughout his back yard.
We’d only been meaning for a couple of months to start taking advantage (in the tourist sense) of Christine’s maternity leave, and the three of us finally ventured the half an hour or so walk north along Alta Vista through Pleasant Park, over the Transitway towards Riverside, and up into the estate of old Braddish Billings (1762-1864) and his wife, Lamira Dow Billings (I’m curious to know if she, in fact, was related in any way of the Dow family who helped name Dow’s Great Swamp, later cleared out as Dow’s Lake). Curious, too, to see the occasional house around the transitway that seem to pre-date the other houses in the area (including the loveliest green house at the corner of Cavendish and Pleasant Park, with charming log fence), suggesting the 1940s, 1930s and even a house that appeared to be built closer to the end of the 19thCentury (among, of course, the more modern and expensive monolithic in-fills). Once closer, we saw that the estate sits on a fascinating rise, and there is a section of Cabot Street where one can even catch a glimpse of the Peace Tower, which suggests it must have been quite a view before the emergence of city.
Given my fascination with history, I thought the tour quite compelling, and learned a number of things I didn’t previously know, including the fact that American-born Braddish Billings was raised in Brockville, and later moved to the area to work for American-born Philemon Wright (1760 - 1839), the same Wright who established the first permanent settlement in the area (Wrightstown, Wright’s Village, Wrightsville; what eventually became Hull, Quebec). Interesting enough, Billings and Wright were both originally from neighbouring towns in Massachusetts, born two years apart in the towns of Ware and Woburn, respectably. Billings also managed to get the contract to provide food to the workers who built the Rideau Canal, long before being known as one of the city’s founding lumber barons, helping him establish himself enough to build his grand estate on the Rideau River, slightly east of where Billings Bridge and Billings Bridge Plaza now sit. The tour was pretty interesting, with a number of characters throughout the family worth paying attention to, some of whom were quite colourful. It was interesting to compare the story of Billings and his family, as well as see how his connects, with other tales of early Ottawa-area settlers and figures, including Colonel John By, Hamnett Pinhey, Ottawa lumber barons Booth and Eddy, and William Stewart (who invented Stewarton) [see my piece on such here].
According to Wikipedia (which appears to have far more information than The Billings Estate website actually has):
The Billings Estate National Historic Site is an Ottawa museum located 2100 Cabot St. in the former home of one of the region’s earliest settlers. The oldest wood framed house in Ottawa was built in 1827-9 by Massachusetts-born Braddish Billings. It became the home for the following four generations of the Billings family. It is Ottawa’s oldest surviving house, though the Bytown Museum building is older. Billings had moved to the area in 1812, and was the first settler in Gloucester Township.
Billings became prosperous in the timber trade, and built the large home that was named Park Hill. Billings later moved into agriculture, and the house became the centre of a large and prosperous farm providing produce for Bytown, with the farm linked to town by the Bytown and Prescott Railway.
The estate remained in the Billings family until 1975. Over time the property was slowly sold off to developers, and today the estate retains only a relatively small plot of land. In 1975 the house became a Billings Estate Museum which is today operated by the city of Ottawa. The house was included amongst other architecturally interesting and historically significant buildings in Doors Open Ottawa, held June 2 and 3, 2012.
The estate also includes a historic cemetery that contains graves dating back to 1820.
For whatever reason, one of the bedrooms in the house, decorated with an exhibit on World War I, reminded slightly of the Hemingway House in Key West [see my post on such here].
We were given our own personal tour of the house, and later wandered a bit on the grounds, before stopping for tea (my scones are better than theirs). High tea: not something I’d done before either, but I know something my mother would have appreciated. Rose sat on the lawn for a spell, brushing her palms through the grass before finally tearing out a series of small handfuls. After tea (during which Rose was amused and distracted by Christine's change purse), we picked out postcards and guide books, and Christine gifted Rose a small kerchief doll, which brought up peals of laughter from the wee babe. Before we left, we wandered the small cemetery, and Rose fell asleep on my chest, nestled deep in her snuggly. What else might our summer bring?

(further) notes on the archive

My piece, "(further) notes on the archive," a follow-up to this much earlier post, is now online at Open Book: Ontario.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Geordie Miller

Geordie Miller is the author of Re:union, a collection of poetry published by Invisible's Snare imprint (2014). He is completing his PhD in English at Dalhousie University, and his critical and creative writing have appeared in Canadian Literature, The Dalhousie Review, The Coast, and The Rememberer (Invisible, 2010). He lives in Halifax and sometimes cameos as himself, an NFL fan who has the misfortune of supporting the Buffalo Bills, on the Eastlink television show Flag on the Play.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Well, I've done more interviews in the past month than in the previous 375 months of my life combined. So that's a change--getting opportunities to converse about poetics outside a classroom. My previous work emerged out of an academic environment (creative writing workshops and literary studies). At its worst, it was poems about Wordsworth and masturbation. The recent stuff certainly feels different, better. As in, it's not look-at-me clever, and is more mature.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I did do fiction first, technically. In Grade One I wrote a short story about a flying car and was selected to attend a Young Authors' Conference. I returned to poetry as a teenager and carried it forward into my 20s because I liked writing lyrics, but couldn't sing. Then it got to the point where poetry seemed like the best mode of registering that I don't know much about the world. Still is (because I still don't).

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The majority of the poems in my first collection were written in six months. Is that fast? Some poems arrived quickly, and if they didn't make me cringe when I returned to them, the task of reshaping was often minimal--paring down ideas or disciplining the unruly lines. But yes, there are Hilroys or digital records of random phrases/notes/concepts. For my new project, I'm drawing somewhat on my PhD research into how literature is (de)valued in free market terms.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
For the next one, I'm working on a "book" from the beginning. The first time around it was a number of short pieces selected for thematic or narrative coherence, not to mention overall quality.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Public readings are central to my creative process. For years, I would agree to go public as a motivation for writing new poems (a deadline, a purpose). And I've done some stand-up and improvisational comedy, which further encourage me to treat the reading as a performance--banter, jokes, but absolutely no explaining the poem away. I enjoy reading them very much. That said, not all of my material is conducive to performance.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
There are several theoretical concerns behind my writing, which can be broadly considered as political. How do we continue to do what we do while knowing what we know? In other words, how do we bear the knowledge that we've been transformed into market subjects eg/the notion of the artist as an entrepreneur? Such transformations are based on a fiction of agency that is systematically denied to a growing majority of the population. Does poetry not remain "barbaric" given the pervasive illusion of individual freedom (versus the reality of non-living wages, personal debt, and a dominant affect of precarity)? Why write when (to borrow a phrase of Frederic Jameson's that has recently resurfaced in critical theory circles) "it is easier to imagine end of world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism"? I can't answer these questions; I can only try to raise them, however indirectly.  

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
There is a lot of anxiety attached to this question because since the arrival of mass culture (movies, television) in the 1950s and into our neoliberal moment (the Internet, social media), books have not been the dominant cultural form. I don't think that the role of the novelist or poet--to take two examples--is to compete with these other forms as entertainment, exactly. But maybe novelists, poets etc. can be models of aesthetic autonomy--to entertain, yes. But also to educate and/or improve readers (however unintentionally). To be irreducible to market metrics. Here might be the place to include the caveat that I won't complain if my book sells 10,000 copies.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
At first it was difficult in the sense of "oh, I don't want to pass over the wheel. And was I even driving a vehicle? Am I a fraud?" Collaborating with Jake Kennedy was ultimately essential for interpreting my own writing--for getting outside my head and seeing things closer to how a reader might. So, both. Jake didn't wrest control away, and he asked good questions while contributing his own aesthetic insights.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
A writer friend relayed to me that Sue Goyette once described her first draft as an "S-draft" (where "s" is a swear word). That you need to get this draft out, aware of the inevitability of return and reevaluation. I like the term because it acknowledges that writing is hard, but it's also a process. Not a one-off. And if writers whom I admire (like Goyette) are willing to acknowledge this fact, then it moves us (even further) away from the Coleridge "Kubla Khan" fits of madness and inspiration "s" (which more often than not produces bad writing).

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
Moving between genres is not like moving between apartments. You don't need to rent a van or haul a sectional up infinite flights of stairs. You just need to recognize that especially in this instance (poetry and critical prose) the two places are not so distinct (and the rent's roughly the same). I am critical and thinking aloud through poetry and I am striving to compel line-by-line in my critical prose. The style of critical theorists is rarely remarked upon, except in the negative. What I'm trying to say is that the appeal (for me) is that moving between these genres allows me to do both things better. I hope.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
It would be easy to invent one for the sake of answering this question and not feeling defensive. Like I probably should (have a routine). There's an ideal where I wake up in the morning and get down to writing for an hour or two. Then there's most days where I wake up with somewhere I have to be, and try to make time to write in the late afternoon or early evening. Or I don't make it at all.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
The people around me (for lack of a better phrase)--talking with loved ones, going to shows (music, alternative comedy, visual art) in Halifax, discussing literature with my students, overhearing strangers having an odd conversation in a coffee shop.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I was just visiting my hometown (St.Catharines) and could have opened a window then typed something precise. Something more poetic than pollen. My mind must work backwards--home reminds me of certain fragrances.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
The previous question gave me pause, so it ain't nature. The love of my life designs clothes, so I'm fortunate to learn from her aesthetic principles and sensibilities. These aren't a secret or anything; they're just hard to articulate in this space (someone who would answer "science" to this question might say something about osmosis here). Music, yes. Stephen Malkmus will have to suffice as elaboration because otherwise I'll just start listing.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Here I will list (in no particular order and it's partial): Frank O'Hara, Inventory, Karl Marx, For the Union Dead , Wendy Brown, Bertolt Brecht, The Commons , David Foster Wallace, Wars of Position, and Autobiography of Red .

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Teach Creative Writing, particularly at the secondary or post-secondary level.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I think I would have been a professional comedian, whether sketch or stand-up or both. Not prop comedy (insert Carrot Top joke here) .

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I always received a lot of attention for my writing and encouragement to pursue it from a young age (perhaps as a product of my upper-middle class mileu; I've since learned that Young Authors' Conferences do not abound). And when I started reading in earnest I was very, I guess, envious of the writers whom I was reading. I wanted to be them one day, more than I ever wanted to be a lawyer or a not-professional basketball player (my other two options).

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Dani Couture's YAW and The Great Beauty .

20 - What are you currently working on?
My dissertation. And I'm applying for jobs and writing a lot of poems about labour and the labour market. I must not be very creative.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

andrea bennett, Canoodlers

Dock Shoes
After he marries a pleasant single mother,Larry the lech moves in two doors down.
One sunny day I go down to the backyardto pick mint for tea. Rest my hand on the latch.
See my mother, gardening in cut-offsand a sports bra, fists of dirt clinging to her knees.
Lecherous Larry leans over his wooden fence.Lite beer in one hand, the other hand hidden.
His eyes on the hose in her hand,her thumb on the sprout.
Later, I will be scolded for not saying hello.
Later still, lecherous Larry will enter our quiet houseduring a street party. He’ll shimmy
out of dock shoes, pad down the hallwith bare feet. Drunk, he will look for my mother.
Vancouver poet andrea bennett’s first trade poetry collection, Canoodlers (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2014) is a work of short lyric narrative confessionals exploring family and other interpersonal dynamics of small town growing up, existing as a darker counterpart to some of Elizabeth Bachinsky’s early work, notably her Home of Sudden Service (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2006). Where Bachinsky merely hints at some of the Gothic aspects of youth, bennett articulates the failures alongside the accomplishments, as well as the dark aspects of violence, family battles and small-minded abuses. As the entire poem “In #2K11,” reads:














My mum defriends me on Facebook, and this means I am cut out of the family
Many of the poems in the collection exist as prose poems, skirting the boundary of short fiction or memoir, as she writes to open the poem “There’s a story”:
and it happens when I am twelve. There’s the back seat of a car, where my best friend Jane is sitting—I can see her in the rearview. Outside it’s a zoo, according to my mum. Rolling through downtown Hamilton, she says, Some of these people truly belong in cages. She points out the driver’s side window, flicks her fingers at a woman walking, Wouldja look at that, she says, and so I look—crunchy blonde hair, crop top, too-short cut-offs.
bennett is an accomplished storyteller, and much of Canoodlersis seemingly composed very much as a poetic memoir absolutely rich in exactly the right kind and right amount of detail. bennett knows how to create portraits quickly, and in small spaces, utilizing only what is essential to her narratives. And yet, some of the most intriguing poems in this collection are often the ones where she doesn’t allow the story she is attempting to overtake the flow of the language, and allowing the moment to simply be what it is, such as in the poem “Summer,” that reads:
is the well-meaning guest late to the potluck, needing to use the oven for a sec. The anemics swoon, stick their feet out the windows. Deficient in iron, rich in quiet time, they think of those they think of often but never remember to call. I am baking, says summer, echo the anemic. I am making you a pudding cake. I am pitting cherries and leaving their plump cups face up, waiting for syrup.

Eric Baus, The Tranquilized Tongue

My review of Eric Baus' The Tranquilized Tongue (City Lights, 2014) is now online at The Small Press Book Review.

new from above/ground press: Ursuliak, Baus, Dyckman + Touch the Donkey

Braking and Blather
Emily Ursuliak
See link here for more information
$4

THE RAIN OF THE ICE
Eric Baus
See link here for more information
$4

Susanne Dyckman
Source
See link here for more information
$4

Touch the Donkey #2
featuring new writing by Julie Carr, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Pearl Pirie, David Peter Clark, Susan Holbrook, Phil Hall and Robert Swereda.
See link here for more information, as well as a direct link for ordering
$5

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July 2014
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

The Rusty Toque interview with Jon Paul Fiorentino

I interviewed Montreal writer Jon Paul Fiorentino recently on his new collection of short stories, I'm Not Scared of You or Anything (Anvil, 2014), newly posted online at The Rusty Toque.

Pattie McCarthy, Nulls

THE FOLLOWING IS PLAINTEXT. the poem uses no metaphors. the poem uses no irony. the poem uses no figurative language whatsoever. the poem uses no humor. the poem uses no appropriate eye contact. the poem has a monotonous voice. the poem has difficulty repairing communication breakdown & restarting conversation. the poem uses language in an eloquent but inarticulate way. the poem knows the emperor has no clothes. the poem knows squares don’t have cousins. the poem chews on things that are not edible. the poem is unusually loud. the poem creates jokes that make no sense. the poem creates its own words & uses them with great pleasure in social situations. the poem interprets known words literally. the poem interrupts others. the poem tells no lies. the poem not single spies. the poem has impairments in prosody. THE PRECEDING IS CIPHERTEXT. (“Domestic Cryptography Survey I”)
Philadelphia poet Pattie McCarthy’s fourth trade poetry collection is Nulls (Grand Rapids MI: Horse Less Press, 2014), which is, as the back cover suggests, a four-section “collage of possible meetings which ultimately lead to birth [.]” I’ve only seen a couple of titles from Horse Less Press over the past couple of years, but this is easily the most attractive, and showcases the fact that this is a press worth paying attention to. The first section, “scenes from the lives of my parents,” appeared as a chapbook earlier this year with Bloof Books, and the short poems that make up the section each begin with a small asterisk and opening line. In many ways, the entire suite of short pieces in the first section is constructed as a sequence of footnotes, broadening the scope of information presented within an unseen source. Perhaps the footnotes exist as the real story, the important moments, between the mundane pieces of living. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
*scenes from the lives of my parents:
my father shaved his head in order to writea letter upon his scalp & waited(for his hair to regrow)—whereuponhe set off for my mother & there shavedhis head again to reveal the message.this was a period of history that tolerateda certain lack of urgency.
Many of McCarthy’s poems over the years have been composed in part from her apparent love of research into medieval subjects, topics and sources, blended with contemporary, personal and familial references, including her children, all of which come through with an incredible, staccato ease (something she recently discussed in an interview posted at Touch the Donkey). Her poems bounce and leap and have such a wonderful sense of sound and play that I don’t see in most other writers (Sylvia Legris, perhaps, or Emily Carr), as well as playing off a repetition and accumulation that build up to something quite magnificent. As she writes to open one of the pieces in the second section: “WHEN I SAY go TAKE THESE SENTENCES ONE AT A TIME—the / poem may laugh inappropriately. the poem may engage in / sustained and unusual repetition. the poem may prefer to be alone.” And yet, as much as McCarthy’s poems can exist as individual units,they are very much built to live with and even against each other, as Michael Ondaatje wrote in the introduction to The Long Poem Anthology (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1970): “Poems should echo and re-echo against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can […].” It is as though McCarthy’s work is slowly evolving as a larger, ongoing, singular work of interconnected works, each composed as book-length units.


FOR yes—PLEASEPRINT FIVE OF YOUR CHILD’S LONGEST & BEST SENTENCESI can’t do this orally, only headily.my sleep today was long but thin.I don’t like the blinding sun, nor the dark, but best I like the mottled            shadow.but the butterfly is snowed, snowed with snow.the long green grass with be yours & yours & yours . (“Domestic Cryptography Survey I”)
The four sections of the collection—“scenes from the lives of my parents,” “Domestic Cryptography Survey I,” “a poem including a brief history of autism” and “Domestic Cryptography Survey II,” as well as a section of “Sources”—extend many of the threads of McCarthy’s prior concerns, structures and subjects, blended together in such a way that expand on what she’s previously accomplished. Her interplay between medieval and contemporary ideas of women, children, birth, courtship and marriage work their ways through four sections, each of which focuses on a different point in a narrative from courtship through to marriage, childbirth and child-rearing, with the additional thread of autism. As she writes as part of the third section:
John Langdon Down, in his 1887 Mental Affections of Childhood & Youth described a type of child ho, when first dentition proceeding, lost its wonted brightness; it took less notice of those around it; many of its movements became rhythmical & automatic; […] anxiety was felt on account of the deferred speech, still more from the lessened responsiveness to all the endearments of its friends. Down notes other children who at second dentition suffer crises of intelligence having night terrors & not unfrequently loss of speech.
after my third child was born, I worried about post-partum depression. my ‘irrational fear’ was that someone was going to come & take the baby away. but if I confessed my irrational fear to the doctor, would that mean that someone would come & take the baby away? would the fear of someone coming to take the baby away be a reason to come & take the baby away? when I read the history of autism, I can taste that fear again.it is as tough all of my skin can taste it.
Part of what has long appealed about McCarthy’s work is the way in which she manages to combine research and confessional in such a visceral, personal way, pushing inventive language poetry to very personal spaces (something Ottawa poet Brecken Hancock has been doing lately as well, such as in her recent series of pieces at Open Book: Toronto or in her Broom Broom [see my review of such here]). McCarthy is adept at writing about parental fear and anxiety, subjects that still somehow have the sheen of taboo, despite the growing list of poets managing to write such with incredible power, including McCarthy, Rachel Zuckerand Arielle Greenberg. The poems in Nullsare composed with such a primal force over an extremely large and complex canvas, and delve both historically and personally deep. “[A]ll words in fact have private meanings,” she writes. As one of the poems in the second section begins:
to give her something to be anxious about, she was taken to the shock room, where the floor is laced with metallic strips. to give her something to be anxious about, two electrodes were put on her bare back, & her shoes were removed. to give her something to be anxious about, z-process. to give her something to be anxious about, re-birthing. to give her something to be anxious about, he was shot to death in the arms of his aide. to give her something to be anxious about, some children will need more than ninety hours of listening. to give her something to be anxious about, a bit like a radio station going in & out of frequency & will change from left to right ear. to give her something to be anxious about, the process of removing heavy metals.

Silence

Control Lit Mag was good enough to publish my short story, “Silence” back in June, in their second issue. Given that some of the spacing is off in their journal, I decided to re-post the piece here (and yet, I am extremely appreciative they were kind enough to accept the story). Other stories from the same work-in-progress have been appearing in various places lately (which is enormously cool, including Grain, The Puritan , Matrix Magazine, Atlas Review and Numero Cinq , with another forthcoming in The New Quarterly.
Books themselves take time, more time than most of us are used to giving them.Ali Smith, Artful

1.
I awoke from a dream of fire. In my dream, I was standing alone in our two-bedroom condo, which morphed into a three-storey Victorian house. The flame was deep. The air sparked.             White curtains shriveled. The pulse of my footprints burned into the hardwood.            The fire surrounded me, feral, and grew. It concurrently curtseyed, swung, screamed running, jumped bare boned and stood, stock-still.I wake, woke, startled. A confusion of tenses. Bedsheets damp at my chest and my belly, smelling of sweat-musk. Asleep on my left side, I pushed slightly back, jostling against him just enough to hear him grumble, feel his slight shift of torso. Make room.
We settled, both of us, and melted, returned immediately to sleep.

2.
I don’t know anything about you.
At thirteen years old, she salvaged three books of matches her mother had abandoned on the kitchen counter. Each held a busty outline with neon lettering, plucked from her father’s laundry.            From the back step she caught the firefly of passing headlights sprinkle up from the highway, through summer dark. The evening settled, inch by noticeable inch. She flicked matches, lit, at the moon.             The moon rose, orange-pink. She did not know the name of it. She did not know that each moon had a name. Pink, Wolf, Harvest. Errant Blue.
The breeze stole the last of the matches and flung it, mid-air, into a stack of cardboard, set resting against the house. Before she could salvage it, flame began to devour. Cardboard refuse smoldering slow from the inside. It took. Burning cardboard, up against brick.            She panicked. She stomped with her feet and mashed the worst of it out and the rest in succession, ash floating free in small gusts.

3.
What is often most important is what is the most mundane. The jars beneath the kitchen sink. The coupons that created her stockpile. Dish soap, laundry detergent, toothpaste, cereals, toilet and tissue papers, diapers, wipes, crackers and salad dressings. This is what has kept us, she knows. What stretched them beyond their small incomes. It had helped make them strong.
Her father’s only advice: never pay full price for anything.
She clipped and saved, negotiating the spaces between the world, between commerce and income.
Couponista, she called herself. It was more soothing, even impish, compared to what her husband had named her: crazy coupon lady.

4.
I woke from a dream, which was a dream of fire. My skin was warm, and yet, would not burn. I was hot metal naked, deep through the conflagration. Not a hair on my body was singed.            In the mirror, I could see only what the fire had left.             It flickered deep inside me. I felt the flame harden blue, low in my abdomen, resting just on the bladder. The baby kicked, and I became agitated. I feared for my baby, trapped inside with the fire. I clawed at my belly with hands and fingernails, finding little but blood.            And then I stopped, realizing that the baby wasn’t trapped inside with the fire. He was the fire.            My skin froze. Water vapour rose from the surface.            And I was afraid.

5.
According to stories, what Gilles de Montmorency-Laval, Baron de Rais caught first was the smell. It was May, 1431, and he had arrived too late to save the maid, Joan, from her death at the stake.            The skin blisters, bubbles, burns. Skin blackens, fades and slowly crumbles to ash.
The sight of my old flame: a meaning that didn’t emerge until far later, into the 1840s.            Joan, burning up into fable, and legend. Cremated, burned alive. De Rais arrived too late, and spent subsequent years killing and burning the bodies of young boys and girls, releasing the scent of burnt flesh. He might have killed hundreds.
He, who has been falsely identified as the model for Bluebeard.
He killed, savagely. By recreating the loss, he had also recreated the moment immediately preceding that loss, when his life with his near-lover Joan was still possible. He burned.Is this love turned impossibly ugly, or a form of pure narcissism?
Whatever might have been beautiful in him had been broken.

6.
I don’t think I am afraid of my unborn child. A flutter, evolved into a kick. The sensation is impossible to describe, but for what is obvious: the feeling of being kicked from the inside.
I dream cannibal dreams. Sometimes I am ravenous, violently attacking everyone around me, and feeding off the remains. Sometimes I am the one being consumed, from the inside. Like some dark version of Victorian consumption, a cough bleeding into white linen. To waste away in a sigh, the back of my right hand affixed to my forehead.
I am afraid of what I do not yet know. I am afraid of fire. This soft, growing flesh within coincides with but one of those fears.
Most days I am certain which one, but other days, I am not sure.

7.
It is not uncommon for pregnant women to dream of being devoured. Geena Davis in The Fly (1986), and her nightmare of giving birth to larvae, the result of her husband’s terrible metamorphosis.
They say to know a person is to read what they’ve written. I write in my journal, daily. I wonder what it might say about me.
There is a lonely teenage boy in every pop song.

8.
The way you can see heat in the air outside, shimmer. My father, who once melted aluminum siding along one side of the homestead, unaware of the potential heat generated from the back of his barbecue.
From my third-storey vantage point, a sequence of neighbourhood cats skulk about, each with their own shady purpose. This Saturday afternoon deck, and the yard behind ours, as small children scream through their turns on the swingset.
I am learning to filter out everything.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Steven Seidenberg

Steven Seidenberg [photo by Kevin Killian] is a San Francisco based writer and artist. His first book of lyric, philosophical prose, Itch , was released from RAW ArT Press in January 2014. He is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, most recently Null Set from Spooky Actions Books, and is co-editor of the poetry journal pallaksch.pallaksch .

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Constitutionally dissatisfied with the reception of his work, Kierkegaard postulates a readership only brought into existence by the advent of the work itself, an ideal reader ineluctably surrendered to its pull. He fails to suggest, however, the ways in which the artist is reciprocally conscripted into novel pathways of provenience by the same communal forces, fixed to fit the community such supplication seeks, regardless if that posture takes the form of approbation or rebuke. I wrote in relative isolation for many years before seeking public airing in the past few, and though I can’t entirely delineate the ways in which the turn from the prospective possibility of readers to an actual attempt at the inveiglement of such has changed the nature of what I’ve done since, the distortion of the work by its reflection in a readership–no matter how limited–ongoingly transforms my picture of the project limned by that reflection.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry and philosophy at the same time, other forms of narrative too, which in youthful isolation seemed all ‘of a piece’, an early insight still intrinsic to my work, prose and verse alike. My life as an academic philosopher–now behind me–was equally structured around a reading of the canon as narrative, and the pursuit of the Husserlian epoche–eccentrically understood as the first moment in the construction of a ‘Naturphilosophie’–by chiefly lyric means.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Everything I’m doing responds to what I’m reading, and I often begin with a reading agenda that can take years to complete. Sometimes the writing is coincident with that project, sometimes what happens in coincidence is subsequently appropriated to some other end. In all instances, the product comes from long periods of working and reworking–in the case of Itch, it was a full 5 years of continuous, daily writing and revision.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Fragments composed in aggregation. I almost always conceive of poems in cycle, although I don’t always need them seen within that generative consecution. As a prose writer, I’m interested in exploring a form between lyric aphorism and argument laid out in propositional series–the ‘plot points’ of the fiction turn on the transition from premise to conclusion, to premise again, and the same text read as didactic prose presents fleeting renderings of visceral states as both material for and manner of deduction.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I think of reading as its own work, requiring its own preparations, goals etc. To this end, the enunciation integral to the act of composition is distinct from the ostensive performance of the same.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
The centrality of philosophical literature to my practice brings such concerns to the forefront, but also makes them difficult to explicate to those not similarly possessed. One begins at the beginning, at the risk of appearing impossibly pedantic and obscure: Kant’s germinal position in pursuit of the limits–thus the possibility–of philosophically coherent knowledge equally yields the confines of any meaningful engagement with ontological concerns, whether of exhortative or aesthetic nature. The system thereby underpinned reveals the compulsory character of the question posed most effectively by Leibniz, most famously by Heidegger (Why is there something rather than nothing?), but with the concomitant realization of the essential failure–the ‘fallacy’ or ‘amphibology’, in Kant’s polemical formulation–that confounds any stab at intelligible answer. A joyous, desperate wallow in the aftermath of this disaster directs my particular brand of lyric eschatology, conceiving of the material superfluity of representational forms as a loophole in the metaphysics of imaginative reasoning.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I don’t see any one role for the writer, nor any singular culture that can be similarly circumscribed. There are multiple roles in every next cultural convergence, each requiring some new variance of acculturations–an infinite regress of shifting foci, set on shifting grounds. The least common denominator, the dying need not admit of their condition to realize the benefits of hospice.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Neither–not particularly difficult, occasionally useful.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

‘Every position is a failure. The successful failure reveals its necessity.’

(Advice given to me by the philosopher John Findlay, claimed by Findlay to have been given to him by Wittgenstein.)

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to lyric prose to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

All three genres have always been a part of my practice. I do find differences in the character of query available to each, thus the continuing drive to write both poetry and prose. The poetic voice addresses what the narrative voice discovers, and visa versa. My commitment to critical prose has waned in recent years, and generally requires some kind of outside motivation–a request or advantage emanating from some otherwise indifferent quarter.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

It depends on what I have to pay for, what I have to do for pay, and where I am in various reading agendas, set considerably in advance. When I’ve outlined a project, I’ll write for a certain number of hours a day, wage labor permitting. If I’m between contracts, I’ll read for a couple of hours/write for a couple of hours/repeat, and sequester time for visual work.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read and reread. I pace. Play music. Reading while pacing helps.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Pavement drying in the sun. Camphor and old paper.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I also work as a visual artist, and on projects in contemporary archaeology in collaboration with my wife, who’s an archaeologist by trade. In short, I find challenge and novelty in the work of many painters, sculptors and photographers; in various forms of artifact collection/classification; and in simultaneously pursuing material culture analysis through a distillation of aesthetic judgment and analysis of the aesthetic through a distillation of the mechanisms of production.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

It changes in accordance with each present project/focus.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Trout fishing. Learn to use a lathe.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Some form of inductive work, another indulgence of my intermittent (seemingly autonomic) obeisance to the delusion of revelation.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I write in addition to other practices, and each involves an attempt to respond to the quandary (or set of quandaries) explicated above, in relation to which one wants to give to others what one has gotten from them–an ecstatic surrender to this dialectic of antinomies.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Words in Blood, Like Flowers, by Babette Babich

Recently saw ‘The Third Man’ in theatre.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m in the process of revising another book length prose work, called Situ, and in the middle of a long cycle of poems called ‘Exile,’. Also in preparation for a show of photographs.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;