Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 83

Dan Kaplan, 2.4.18

 

VISITORS ON A CLEAR DAY

a visitor can imaginespring,
the arcades discolored
and sun-roasted, somebread
and a mushroom, heavy andround,
birdsong a hole in themiddle
where dampness came,
whispered and curled
atop a spare tire,
a table set with thickplates
and a chalky white bone.
I stuck a point in time
to a gum drop and otherbits,
one mysterious form offaith
tucked against the other.

Iwas curious to see Portland, Oregon writer Dan Kaplan’s latest, 2.4.18 (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023), following the bilingual chapbook SKIN (Red HydraPress, 2005), and full-length collections Bill’s Formal Complaint (TheNational Poetry Review Press, 2008) and Instant Killer Wig (SpuytenDuyvil, 2018). 2.4.18 is an erasure of the February 4, 2018 issue of TheNew York Times, a conceptual framework reminiscent, somewhat, of Derek Beaulieu’s conceptual project painting a day’s newspaper via “The Newspaper,”but Kaplan’s project seeks lyric meaning out of a particular flavour ofnarrative reportage. Instead of seeking a kind of randomness for his poems, he selectsnarratives out of a wide selection of found language, attempting to answer, ina roundabout way, the question of what might emerge from a single day’s editionof that particular newspaper. As the poem “Every Act” ends: “changing thelocation at least, / expanded yards and irises // in composite, small andperfected, / a kitchen smoking on the grounds, // sweeping other parts incircles and soft steps, / the children vibrant and shaky in a long line // hardto separate, the sketch narrowing, / clear sequence nudged ahead.”

Incertain ways, these are poems untethered from their source (ie: a book of “just”lyric first-person narrative poems), composed as poems by Dan Kaplan. Whereas theymay contain a language that shifts from his previous published work (which I amunfamiliar with), but otherwise, a project that advertises itself thusly on theopening page as a conceptual project makes me immediately wonder: how has thisproject changed or altered Kaplan’s lyric, if at all? What has the languageoffered or made possible that wouldn’t have emerged otherwise? Otherwise, why advertisethe project as such a strong header? Either way, the results make for a worthy collectionof poems, striking in their use of silence, shape, hesitations and presence. Beyondthe conceptual framework, these are poems that appear composed from withinmoments, attending to pure attention, meditative calm and a curiosity about theworld. Certainly, poems can be excised, created, found or built from just aboutany language, but there seems little reference to the source material that I candiscern. There are certainly, as Suzanne Buffam writes on the back cover, “glimmersof hope among the ruins,” but this lovely and sharp collection of immediatelyrics doesn’t require the distraction of its compositional framework to bethoroughly enjoyed.

REHEARSING FOR PEOPLE

standing barefoot
parts the language.

emotion is outsize,
the kind of primer

a love song roughly
doubled from the tumult.

it would not be

the first time
a line shrugged

and stumbled
from the stereo,

listening for
the others.

 

Eleni Sikelianos, Your Kingdom

 

Our cells recall ancientchemical joys and traumas, pre-life, while our limbs remember salamanders. A poemremembers our past in language and posits a future in the simplest sense, likea to-do note, hoping that it will be seen at some point hence and remind us ofsomething worth knowing, feeling. It is an ecosystem that, like any functioningsystem, should deal with its own shit.

 

If we let phyla betaken over by its bedmate and homonym, phylla (leaves, petals, sprouts,sheaves, sheets of paper), we clear a silent space where we are all boundtogether and leafing from the same roots. If we take it further, to its homonymicneighbor, philo, we fall into love, with all our living friends, andwith the dead left in traces

                                    under oceans and in rivers andlake beds

Thelatest from Providence, Rhode Island-based poet Eleni Sikelianos is Your Kingdom (Minneapolis MI: Coffee House Press, 2023), a collection thatfollows nearly a dozen of her published books-to-date, including You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) (Coffee House Press, 2014) [see my review of such here], Detail of the Living & the Dead (Coffee House Press,2013) [see my review of such here], Make Yourself Happy (Coffee HousePress, 2017) [see my review of such here] and What I Knew (Brooklyn NY:Nightboat Books, 2019) [see my review of such here]. Offering “an ode to ourmore-than-human animal origins,” Your Kingdom works through a strata oflanguage and layering, blending genres and perspectives both human and animal,and into the geologic. “The face like a magnet draws to itself / animal parts,”she writes, to open the poem “In the Great Hall of Bones,” “rabbit paw / vealgut / pig light // to the eye & the skin & the teeth & the tongue /to echo the chaos of mouth // more crumpled mammal than / daylight [.]” Amaster of holding the smallest of moments within such a lyric expanse, Sikelianosarticulates a humanity intricately and impossibly connected to all other lifeon the planet, citing evolutionary and contemporary connections that can’t be deniedor dismissed, especially if we are all, somehow, to survive ecological disaster.“you are not the only you to invent orchestration,” she writes, as part of thetitle poem-section, “all the syntax in mouse song sounding out some- / where betweenbird-syllable and your thumb scrubbing a glass clean // as you hum in thekitchen / and wipe the dishes [.]”

Composedacross seven sections set as lyric clusters or long poems—“First of All,” “Inthe Museum of Contemporary Anatomy,” “Your Kingdom,” “Polishing the AnimalMirror,” “Bestiaries on the Lamb,” “All the Living Living Together(Reevolutionize)” and “Deevolutionize”—Your Kingdom is an open andexpansive book-length lyric, and her approach and tone through subject iscomparable to works by Canadian poets Don McKay or Adam Dickinson, writing an engagementwith science and natural histories, although wildly different in lyricstructure. “In the strata of the rock is recorded,” she writes, as part of theexpansive title poem-section, “some of your earlier story through some scrapsof it / are lost, you read it / in ocean silt: it would have been better / to gohermaphroditic or / parthenogenetic but you adapt / to the instability of two-sexed/ reproduction with / glee, warm-blooded and arisen / from the loving filament[.]”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mike Lala

Mike Lala is the author of The Unreal City(Tupelo Press, 2023), Exit Theater (Colorado Prize for Poetry, 2016),and several chapbooks, including Points of Return (Ghost Proposal,2023). Poems appear in A Public Space, American Poetry Review, BOMB,Boston Review, Fence, New American Writing, the PEN PoetrySeries, and Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula. Lala’s installations,performance, and libretti include Whale Fall (2021), Madeleines: TellMe What It Was Like (2020, with Iris McCloughan), Oedipus in theDistrict (2018–19), and Infinite Odyssey (2018). They have beenshown widely in New York City, where he lives. www.mikelala.com

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does yourmost recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different? Exit Theater didn'tchange my life, but it did as give me an excuse to rethink my process, as Icould look back and see what it took to make a book, how to have a healthierand more rigorous practice toward that making, and what the limitations andpossibilities of poetry are. The Unreal City takes up many of thesame thematic and formal concerns, but expands on and pushes into them further.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction ornon-fiction? I took a few classes with the poet Diane Wakoski in undergrad. I've beenwriting poetry ever since.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Doesyour writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first draftsappear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out ofcopious notes? Wasted work, thinking, notes, outlining, lost dreams,emails to self, written-down fragments of dreams and insights in the middle ofthe night—at some point it all becomes unbearable and I put down a terribledraft, then add and slash and revise dozens of times. Often the initial shapeor impulse is recognizable, but it's become something entirely other.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of shortpieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a"book" from the very beginning? It depends on the poem and theproject, but I like the way poems can support each other, so I gravitate towardunity.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Areyou the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? I do not enjoy givingreadings but they are an opportunity to enact the work in a different way, so Ido them.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kindsof questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even thinkthe current questions are? The questions are different for everyone.For me, some are: Why should anyone care about this? Is it worth a reader'stime? What is the work doing in relation to the history of the form, and whatdoes it contribute? What are the ethics of its formal qualities and ofconveying this subject in this way? What might it do in the mind of a readerand what might that do in the world?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer beingin larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of thewriter should be? Art, as it is received (or not) in the public,reflects the culture that receives it at least as much as the artist who madeit. A writer's job is to make work that is true to them and their time—tofollow their desires and instincts, to push into the hidden and uncomfortableor taboo—and then to let work be in the world, with others, tolive its own life. What exactly the work should be or why you should make it—noone can tell you what to do or who to be.

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

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily givento you directly)? "None of the books I've written were publishedin the order I wrote them." - Anselm Berrigan

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to soundinstallation to performance to libretto)? What do you see as the appeal? Noteasy, but fun.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even haveone? How does a typical day (for you) begin? I do my best writing inthe morning, and since I work full time, I usually write for two hours beforework, starting at 6 a.m. When I can't sleep, I write at night.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (forlack of a better word) inspiration? I read.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? I grew up many places, sothere is no one home in my life. But sometimes the fragrance of someone I lovewill trigger a feeling like "home."

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are thereany other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science orvisual art? Mostly books, but yes, paintings, videos and films,journalism, music, memories and experiences, meditation—it's all available.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simplyyour life outside of your work? There are too many to count here—insome sense everything I read is important for it.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? I wouldlike to write full time.

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 notbeen a writer? For a long time I wanted to be a journalist inenvironment or nat sec. I'd also have liked to have been a filmmaker or a painter.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? Istruggled with perspective in visual art, and reading and writing camenaturally to me.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last greatfilm? Truly great? Javier Marias' Your Face Tommorrow. JiaZhangke's Ash Is Purest White.

20 - What are you currently working on? A new book of variationson Catullus' poems, another group of new poems, and, for once, some fiction.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Parallel investigation

 

1.

Doesthe appearance of               emergingauthor
suggestthe alternate                    , of retreat?

 

2.

Irarely daydream                        in rhyme.
Degrees,experience,

apolished stream of alternates, floating down
thespring excess

ofthe floodplain               at Riverside.

Irespond better to syntax

thanto philosophies.                              Irespond
tokindness.

 

3.

Scientistsdetermine                    that bananas           causeanxiety
inmale mice. What

mightthis prompt in them. Anxiety,

andfear. Hot vax summer, hot girl summer, hot
hot

hot.One might ask           the moon,
afterso many poems, what

hasit done for me  in return.    
Absolutelynothing.

 

4.

Iam behind on further tasks                  thancan be dreamt of
inyour philosophy.

 

Eric Sneathen, Don’t Leave Me This Way

 

You Say to the Boy OpenYour Eyes

Wind. Weather. Of thedeep rigging. Repeatedly
How frail our ship ourwaves. There. Thread
Of sails on the lips. Heldsteady. I rub my eyes.
Love ahead. The badweather. So they did. There
They poured libations tothe passing of a shadow.
Salt lips touching. Marbledfingers. Nights of oars
And weather. The score ofwing beats. Kiss me
Repeatedly dusk. The smellof him. The crew and
Horrible wind. Sun. Soour ship smashed into bits.
Purple waves. The quickblack ship is everlastingly.
There. Love. Clouds wadedboldly out into day.
We fall. Was splashingtossed companions. Sun
Scattered stubble. Littleship. Love’s gleaming sky.
I place a delphinium tilldawn the ship sailed on.

Iam deeply pleased to see a new poetry title by Oakland, California “poet andqueer literary historian” Eric Sneathen, following his full-length debut, SnailPoems (Krupskaya, 2016) [see my review of such here], the lyricly-beautifuland deeply powerful newly-released Don’t Leave Me This Way (New York NY:Nightboat Books, 2023). As the back cover offers: “Don’t Leave Me This Wayblends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnetsinspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as ‘Patient Zero’ of the AIDSepidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy andpornography, Don’t Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of thecut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost spirits: poignant, vengeful, andready to ball.”

Thereis something of Sneathen’s lyric narratives through prose poems that hold anecho of some of the “new narrative” writings of the Bay Area in the 1970s, asshowcased in the anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997, eds. Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian (New York NY: NightboatBooks, 2017) [see my review of such here], such as the late Steve Abbott(1943-1992), acknowledged through the hefty collection Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader, edited by Jamie Townsend with an afterword by AlysiaAbbott (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2019) [see my review of such here] fortheir shared blend of first-person narrative, wild energy and lyric experimentation,simultaneous sense of joy and impending doom, queer content and the AIDScrisis, and for their use of deeply person biographical material. “Gaétan’sperfect finger draws this cluster,” Sneathen writes, to open the poem “Gaétan’sPerfect Finger Draws this Cluster,” “Of gasoline azaleas. Remember that each / Onerepresents with choppy surfaces, men / Bent in upon his inviting smile.” The factsof the story are intertwined with the lyric, and the facts are important, evenwhen offered slant, or cloudy, or glossy. “Since being cast as ‘Patient Zero,’”Sneathen writes, as part of a length afterword to the collection, “Gaétan Dugashas persisted between and among texts, in an array of representations and fantasies.I wrote this book in order to listen to those fantasies. I wanted to hear theclamor of a phantasmic bacchanal echoing in the corridor of an ongoing emergency.Clad in tight jeans and a flannel shirt, it is a fantasy that cruises me underthe dim lights of the recent past. I perceive something of its winning smilebeaming beneath its full mustache.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kimberly Ann Southwick

Kimberly Ann Southwick is an AssistantProfessor of Creative Writing and English at Jacksonville State University. Herdebut full-length poetry collection, ORCHID ALPHA, is out via TremblingPillow Press as of April 2023. Kimberly is the founder and Editor in Chief ofthe literary-arts journal GIGANTIC SEQUINS. Find her on twitter@kimannjosouth or visit kimberlyannsouthwick.com for more. 

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

My first chapbookwith multiple poems all in one book changed my life in the same way that beingalive and writing and sharing my work in the early 2010s did—I felt like I wasa part of something larger than just myself as a writer. I suppose I didn’t knowmuch about the “world” I was entering by sharing my work with people I didn’tnecessarily know and by starting my own literary journal, all which happenedaround the same time. Orchid Alpha is my first full-length poetry book—it feels more thought out, in a way, than any other shorter collections of mywork, and I think I feel farther from my speaker than I did when my previouschaps debuted.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction ornon-fiction?

When I was atEmerson, I wrote “everything—” a lot of us said this. It was when I wasrejected from the invite-only fiction class that I really dove into poetry,honestly. I stepped back and analyzed my fiction and found that my plots weresimple, but the language and emotion were where my writing really throbbed. Andpoetry is often more about those things than plot, so. 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Doesyour writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first draftsappear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out ofcopious notes?

For the past fewyears, I have been running and participating in a NaPoWriMo prompt-a-daywriting group, and through that, I feel like I have more of a process than Ihad in previous years. I write probably 20-30 poems that month, and then Iwrite sporadically throughout the year, be it sitting in front of my laptop orscribbling on the backs of envelopes or taking notes in my phone. And then mostof my time is spent editing and organizing from there. My works almost nevercome out fully formed the first time—especially since I am sometimes startingwith prompts that my editing allows me to let go of.

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

I feel likewriting Orchid Alpha helped me understand what putting a book togethertakes, and now my editing and organizing can benefit from those lessons. Idon’t think of my poems when I am writing them as something that can be a partof a book, but then once they are written, I go through and consider how theymight fit together into a collection.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Areyou the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I do enjoy doingpublic readings, in fact. I think they help sell my work—and I don’t just meanfinancially, but I mean that reading my work aloud adds another element to itthat hits people in a way that reading it on the page might not. I don’t thinkthey are a part of the process of creating my work so much as they are aprocess of my poetry once it’s “done” (always in quotation marks--)

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kindsof questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even thinkthe current questions are?

Orchid Alpha’sfeminist speaker is constantly grappling with technology and desire in theAnthropocene—and how these ideas come up against each other. I suppose it’sbecause a lot of the time she is me, and I am grappling with these things.(Have I already said, “The Speaker is Dead; Long Live the Speaker”? It’s my newfavorite eye roll emoji response to is the speaker me. Yes! No! Sometimes!Maybe! Who is the speaker? I don’t know! Third base!)

Anyway, now thatI’m a mother, that adds a whole other layer into the questions of existencethat my work encounters, as technology, desire, and climate change are evenmore complex when I think about my daughter’s generation.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in largerculture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer shouldbe?

I was reading thiscritical text on Emily Dickinson yesterday, and it was talking about how poetsin the 1800s, specifically those writing in America around the time of theCivil War, were expected to be political, and how they often used both theprivate lyrical “I” speaker and the larger, national communal “we” voice—andhow these two didn’t compete, necessarily, but also weren’t the same. Then Iwas thinking about how I’ve seen people complain about readers who are like“why is poetry so political these days, geeez, bring back the frost and thegeese and the sunset,” and how those people have no concept of what poetry’srole has been in America and the world since… forever. That being said, eachwriter has to figure out for themselves what their “role” is, and I would sayanyone who wants to write should most certainly write, be it about the geeseand the frost or how Rome is burning. The harder part is about sharing yourwork. If it’s just the geese and the frost, your audience is going to bedifferent than if it’s about how Rome is burning. No matter what, audienceswill be critical. Ever since we started defining poetry as “the lyric” and thelyric as “overheard genius,” there has been a lot of pressure on people callingthemselves poets. We don’t really draw lines anymore between “verse” and“poetry,” either, in the same way we did in the earliest colonial days inAmerica. If you want people to read your work, then you should want them to getsomething out of it—each writer has their own “something,” and I hope they knowwhat that is before they start sending their work out to publishers. But eitherway—write, writers, write!

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

Hm, I haven’t hadtoo many hands-on editors in my life, so it’s been easy so far.

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

When I gave myvery first public reading (aside from any I’d done related to school/college)at Franklin Park in Brooklyn, my favorite coworker, Ben McFall, and also mysecond favorite exboyfriend both gave meadvice, and I like it because it works well for reading your work aloud andalso for life in general. I don’t remember who of them said what, but theysaid: “Don’t be self-deprecating” and “Be loud.”

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

I have a memoirinside of me somewhere about giving birth to my first and only child in March 2020.I’ve filtered a lot of everything I was dealing with leading up to giving birthand into those first weeks through poetry—especially because of where NaPoWriMofalls each year—but I find myself coming back to the details when I hear ofothers’ birth experiences outside of my very strange one. I have trouble withsustaining anything longer than a poem, though, as a mother to anow-three-year-old with my very first salaried job in academia plus as theeditor in chief of a long-running literary journal, amongst other many hats Iwear. So I feel lucky to be a poet, and unlucky not to have the time to put ingood work on anything longer.

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

I don’t writeevery day, and I am fine with that.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (forlack of a better word) inspiration?

Okay, so it’s lessthat my writing ever gets stalled, and more like there are 2,752 other things Ineed to be doing, and it’s hard to prioritize my poetry when I know that to bethe case. BUT, aside from editing my poems and shuffling them around in themanuscript I’ve been building now since 2020, I make decoupage (or decoupe)poems. I have a lot of strict rules I set for myself—for example, I only cliplines from one magazine for each poem, and I try to keep the poem’s progressiongrammatical, etc.—and doing this really relaxes me and reunites me with some ofthe things I love about both language and specifically poetry.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Which home are wetalking? I have too many homes. Honeysuckle reminds me of my youth.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but arethere any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, scienceor visual art?

When my firstchapbook was published, I remember reading through it and being like, “oh man,that’s from a song—that’s from a song—that’s from a song too!” I had sort ofunconsciously picked up these allusions and images from the music that I hadbeen listening to.

Also, I don’tthink I can watch a David Attenborough documentary without writing a poemafterwards. I will tell anyone who listens, too, about how when I don’t knowwhat to do with a poem, a sea creature usually makes its way into it to help mefigure that out.

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

The two poets Ilikely draw the most inspiration from are Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath,which is the most canonical answer possible, I am well aware. But they are theskyscrapers, you know? And I’ve read so much by and about them.

Recently I askedon twitter which musical artists/bands made poets think the most about poetry.It was probably my most popular tweet. But I listen to a ton of music, and sooften I wind up loving a song because it makes me think about poetry. Usuallyit’s more the lyrics than anything else, but also how the music of the songitself makes the lyrics work. Jenny Lewis/Rilo Kiley, The National, and FionaApple are probably my top three answers to my own question and serve well as ananswer here, too.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would love tovisit Japan.

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 notbeen a writer?

I would havereally loved to be the person who makes montages for live sports games and likethrows together graphics to illustrate statistics and stuff. I know that seemsso random, but I always think about how much fun that would be!

I think I wouldhave made a decent lawyer if I didn’t have so many feelings. (I cry at TVcommercials, for example.) If I didn’t spend the first 20 or so years of mylife being so very shy, I think I would have had fun as an actress. Not one whoever has to sing though.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

People kepttelling me I was good at it. I feel like so many of the paths I chose come frompeople suggesting I do something because I was good at it or would be good atit—teachers and classmates, mostly.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I am reallyobsessed with Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. My colleagues and I have asci-fi/spec fic book club, and I read the first novella for that and thendevoured the rest of the series. 

I really loved the2022 documentary film Fire of Love—it felt like poetry.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’ve been startingto think about my decoupage works as a part to a whole rather than individual stand-alonepieces, though thinking of them that way doesn’t much change them or myprocess, it just makes working on them feel more like a “project.” I startedthem because my daughter would sit beside me and decorate envelopes, letting mecut lines from magazines and put them together—whereas, when I would try towrite or edit on my laptop, she would insist on banging on the keys from mylap. She is less interested in decorating envelopes these days, but stillinterested in my laptop, but now the project has become more than a replacementfor writing and editing my poetry at home.

The moretraditional poetry I’ve been working on is coming together as my “secondfull-length collection” now, and even has been sent out to some contests/openperiods in earlier drafts, to no success. I think the draft of the manuscript Iam working on now is more complete and might get some different attention. Ihope, though, that poetry about covid and motherhood isn’t rejected simplybecause of its subject matters, as I know poetry about motherhood isn’t alwaysmet well, and I can imagine poetry that forefronts covid may begin to feel oldor dated as we move away from the virus’s arrival and lockdown. Though, I don’tthink either subject is too much or should be shied away from for any writer orpublisher, and I don’t just say that as a mother who gave birth in March 2020,but as an editor as well. The collection has had a few different titles, buteven before covid, it tackled the ideas of loss and what we lose personally andhow we might connect those smaller losses to the larger loss of climate change,in order to give over the best possible planet to our children and theirs.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

some updates: poems, interview, review, substack etc.

I often forget to include such things, so I'll mention that I had poems up recently at Olney and Pinhole Poetry and Horseshoe Literary Magazine , was interviewed by Pinhole Poetry as well, and there was even the first review of my suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022), up at The Typescript! What!

I've been buried lately in a new non-fiction project which I'm hoping to start posting fragments of soon, over at my enormously clever substack. You already know about that, though, right? I've been posting there for a while now, focusing on excerpts of larger non-fiction projects, including "Lecture for an Empty Room," a book-length essay I've been working on, writing on literature, community, etcetera (among other things).

Oh, and don't forget the above/ground press 30th anniversary fundraiser is but days away from ending! There are still plenty of bundles!

Chen Chen, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

my review of Chen Chen's latest, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions, 2023), is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

Kimberly Alidio, Teeter

 

Everyone who happens tolive where

my father’s family happenedto live at the time of
naming has namesbeginning
with the same letter asmine. A name
cuts off the unrulysequence of
discovering a new thingtopped off by
a moment of awareness one’sbeholden to
something new. Ofretrofitting one’s
classical senses: brownbag, al-Qamqám
in disregard of discovery’s
doctrine. Even reducinganomaly or
variation to naming isenchanting. An old
catalog of names is theold story of
mine. A dream is round& uncertain

Thelatest from Upper Hudson Valley, New York poet Kimberly Alidio, following after projects the resound (Black Radish Press, 2016), : once teeth bones coral : (Brooklyn NY: Belladonna*, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Why Letter Ellipses (Chicago Il: selva oscura press, 2020) [see my review of such here] is Teeter (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2023). The threesections that make up this collection—“HEARING,” “AMBIENT MOM” and “HISTORIES”—arebuilt as self-contained structures, whether long poems or suites, all of whichexplore through different elements of patterns of sound and rhythm, bouncingacross line breaks and long sentences. “the occasion to / try out consonants /is when the cry / cuts into / another language,” Alidio writes, as part of “AMBIENTMOM.” A bit further down the page, writing: “this composing / in unlearned /languages // prenatal perceiving + / processing prosodic patterns / aPangasinan of the everyday / palpability of experience [.]” She writes a polyvocality;threads of history and language, existing as a kind of single, ongoing sentence.This work is expansive and experimental, including a cluster of “Autohistoriography”poems in the third section, which suggest a furthering of what Fred Wah oncecoined as “bio-text,” employing a life-writing, but one propelled, first andforemost, by language; or even, far earlier, as George Bowering wrote his firstperson language prose poems, Autobiology (1972). As Alidio’s “Autohistoriographyof Arrival at a River” begins:

            Divorcing one’s queer partner is a chance to divorce one’sart community, one’s social circle who gives one visibility & cultural milieu.& this was both a nightmare & a dreamy comfort. “Why are malls so depressing?”asks S. We were queer children, in some kind of girlhood, in the suburban ‘80s,when it was the height of sociality & familial reproduction to be deadinside, to feel nothing, at least, to feel not much of anything. Isolation isnot always the queer person’s precarity. As S explains, for such a being, isolationis a radical choice. We want an alternative to the binary that accounts forbeing a “woman” whose “community” once destroyed her. After all, one can loveonly one person at a time, someone says. & one must train one’s love towardthe proper object, no one outright says. The romance plot is key to operationsof brutal competition in public & private spaces. Varda’s Le bonheuris brilliant in showing the replaceability & interchangeability of blondepartners. Amacher’s “sound characters” & “sonic figures.”

Thereis such a propulsive language, in both cadence and purpose, and one that seemsto incorporate elements of the lyric journal, whether the late American poet Bernadette Mayer, a poet referenced within, or the journal-lyric of Alidio’spartner, Stacy Szymaszek. Again, Alidio utilizes subject, but as a means to andeven through an end. As the poem “The summer I was born” begins: “two artistsmade durational works // In NYC & MA, Bernadette Mayer conducted an ‘emotionalscience project,’ in which every day / of my birth month was spent shooting aroll of 35 mm film, recording audio & writing // On the day of my birth,she wrote // ‘I must have no respect for nothingness to photograph these sceneswith sand or snow off / monument valley road the road in the valley of the samemountain monument mountain, a whole / series of them a whole series ofphotographs & one monument & I get a whole new picture of / myself,where is your driver’s license he said, you are drinking beer’ [.]” There is adurational feel to this particular work, at least one of a sense of ongoingthinking, or ongoingness, from one point forward, from one cover across to thenext. As the poem “I might as well connect the dots between,” set amid her suiteof prose-explorations that make up the third and final section:

the data flow of archives& internet algorithms & this anecdote. Generate text, language,drawings, associations around the odd detail, the clashing word, the weirdthing that rubbed me against the grain like a pinhole onto large-scale contradictions& social thinking. Events, figures & even tactics of glitchingradically disrupt both the flow of data & the binary categories of IRL& online. Activate the text. Get distracted but try to leave a trace ofwhere your body-mind goes. My recall of sitting in running tights at thethreshold of the archive is an affective mix of shame, disorientation &pleasure. That I was a kind of glitch. Intone it. Recall that many talismanicamulets are inscribed with spells that need to be read aloud to set the magicin motion. I walked into the house of the archeon, I was processed &regulated in its anterooms & I was then identifiably young, brown, a sweatycis-woman, both a product of multiple colonialism & a U.S. historian. Let’sattune to the quiet & the noise

 

2023 Ottawa Promise Walk for Preeclampsia : Sunday, Sept. 10

We are thrilled to be hosting our 4th Promise Walk for Preeclampsia Canada in Ottawa! The Promise Walk for Preeclampsia™ began in 2005 by our sister organization, Preeclampsia Foundation. These walk events have raised millions of dollars to fund research and improve health care practices globally.

Preeclampsia affects 5-8% of all pregnancies and approximately 10 million mothers will develop preeclampsia across the world each year, yet according to the World Health Organization (WHO), preeclampsia is one of the least funded areas of research. We need your help to realize our vision of a world where preeclampsia no longer threatens the lives of mothers and babies. Please join us!

Register for a walk here or donate today by following this link. Registration is FREE. We encourage you to start your team today!

Event Details:
DATE: Sunday, Sept. 10th, 2023
Location: Terry Fox Athletic Facility, 2960 Riverside Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1V 8N4

Timeline of events:
8:30-9:00 am Registration & Resource Fair Opens
9:00am Welcoming remarks
9:30 am Warm up
10:15am Moment of Silence
10:45am Closing remarks and Prize Draw
11-12pm Take down

Walk Chairs: Christine McNair & Karin McNair
E-mail: ottawa@preeclampsiacanada.ca