Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 86

Quietly Between: Megan Kaminski, Brad Vogler, Lori Anderson Moseman and Sarah Green

 

with texture and light
with words sunk
skin hoarding electric

my relation to scarcity
to extended touch (lack)

I tell you stories I tellno one
that they were just names
whispered from ash    a collection
of coin without reprieve(Megan Kaminski)

I’mintrigued by Quietly Between (Fort Collins CO: A Viewing Space, 2022), aquartet of solicited poem sequences and photography  by American poets Megan Kaminski, Brad Vogler,Lori Anderson Moseman and Sarah Green that each respond to the same veryparticular prompt. As the original prompt, included at the back of thecollection, opens:

15-25 images/cards (combinationof text and image).

Begin with place andtime.

Place(s): where youare/were. Both text and photos could be of your present place. Or one elementis, and the other draws from something else.

Time: some element oftime is incorporated into the project. In the film All the Days of the Year,Walter Ungerer returns to the same place in Mount Battie, Camden, Maine everyday for one year. He sets up his camera, and takes thirteen, ten second shotswhile turning the camera clockwise.

Curiouslyenough (at least to me), three of these poets are above/ground press authors,with the fourth, Sarah Green, being a name entirely unknown to me before this. FromLawrence, Kansas, Kaminski writes “this wide open heavy”; from Fort Collins,Colorado, Vogler writes “Ceremony of Knotted Songs”; from Provo, Utah, Mosemanwrites “(t)here now soon new”; and from Joshua Tree, California, Green writes “HoldingGround.” I’m fascinated by each contributor’s approach to the serial poem and thepoem/photograph interplay, as well as to the poem-as-document, an echo of how Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay termed her own particular exploration through thetradition of the Canadian long poem, “the documentary poem,” or even to Lorine Niedecker’s own simultaneous explorations examining geography and languagethrough and against each other. “My project documents a deep listening and akind of answering,” Megan Kaminski writes, to open her “PROCESS” note at theback of the collection, “as well, to the human and more-than-human persons thatcall us into relation and into the specificity of place through their whispers,songs, and histories. From the Kansas Ozarks to my backyard in East Lawrence,to First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach where I sought refuge as ateenager, to the daily bike rides to the Wakarusa wetlands on the edge of town—likethe oversaturated spring and summer soil, my embodied experiences and thesepoems soaked up all that fed them.” Each of the four poets have short ‘processnotes’ at the back, offering insight into elements of their thinkings andresponses to the original prompt, and there are interesting echoes that ripplethroughout all four works of attention to small detail, and how each poet respondsthrough landscape to their individual landscapes and how they see them. As LoriAnderson Moseman writes: “I wrote poems not about the images but through them:snapshots became magnets that drew emotions, experiences, ideas to them. I wouldrevise words as more photos/life events joined the sequence. The most dramatictransformation came after a conversation with Brad Vogler. He challenged me tonot limit my vision of our project: one postcard does not have to contain justa single landscape.”

Kaminski’s“this wide open heavy” offers a kind of unfurling across sixteen short lyricbursts, providing one step and then a further step. “to enter into a clearing,”the opening poem writes, “to bathe in gray April light / not-dying not quiteemerging [.]” Vogler’s “Ceremony of Knotted Songs” is a sequence of sixteennumbered poems, and there is such delicate thought and placement to his shortlines and phrases. “I keep going back // here              there,” he writes, to open thesecond poem. Or as the third piece begins: “pillowcase curtains / season with/            wind [.]” I very much likethe way Moseman’s “(t)here now soon new” writes around and across herparticular landscape, spacing out the lyric across the varying and individual pointsacross her view. Her particular lyric offers a kind of accumulation ofindividual points across a wide gesture. “dear cottonwood,” she writes, “I cannothear you / from the far jetty // your roar fell last fall [.]” And for Green, her“Holding Ground” is the first I’ve seen of her work; the effect of each poem isakin to setting down one playing card after another, each card shifting themeaning of what came before, each poem self-contained in a kind of tethered rowof lyric moments.

Viathe poetic sequence, each of these four poets offer their variation on thestretched-out lyric sketch, allowing this collection to emerge into a bookabout being present in temporal and physical space, each poet blending lyricand photographic attention from their own particular American corners, across aquartet of American states moving straight west from the Midwest to the Coast.

mother left a letter
of
    naming
(home) tree – sassafras
here ash

for you

walking
         walking
unsettled
leaf at (the) river lip
    loosed quietly (lost)
        (on its way) away (Brad Vogler)

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Joe Hall

Joe Hall [photo credit: Patrick Cray] isa Buffalo-based writer and reading series curator. His five books of poetryinclude Fugue & Strike (2023) andSomeone’s Utopia (2018).He has performed and delivered talks nationally at universities, living rooms,squats, and rivers. His writing has appeared in places like PostcolonialStudies, Poetry Daily, Best Buds! Collective, terrain.org,Peach Mag, PEN America Blog, dollar bills, and an NFTA busshelter. He has taught poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workersthrough Just Buffalo and the WNYCOSH Worker Center. Get in touch with Joe: Twitter, Instagram, website.

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

2008: I’m sitting at a desk in a sub-basement in Indiana. In frontof me is a candy jar. Behind me is a particle accelerator. My official jobtitle is Secretary. I get an email from Black Ocean. They’re going to publish PigafettaIs My Wife. I get the hell out of there, and I am still getting the hell outof there: my poetry leading me out of the big abyss of bad jobs to the frailextent art can, which is only ever to contribute to a constellation of momentsof momentary escape.

Like my first book, Pigafetta Is My Wife, my fifth book, Fugue& Strike, grows from historical research. PIMWdrew from primary and secondary sources surrounding Magellan’s circumnavigationof the globe and attempt to claim the Philippines; it attempts to turn thesesources inside-out into a self-implicating, anti-imperialist sequence. Fugue & Strike draws on researchsurrounding sanitation strikes and the uses of waste in militant politicalaction. Fugue & Strike departsfrom the mysticism that animates stretches of PIMW, embracing absurdity, humor,and the polemic. It’s tonally rangier and includes prose.

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

I came to poetry through song, and I came to song through therhythmic boredoms of work, singing while I was mowing strip after strip oflawn. Rapture in repetition. Soundgarden melodiesmutated into my own.

And I came to poetry through evening prayer. Performing a nightlyself-inquiry before an omniscient being transformed into the devotion togetting some thing right on paper. Iwrote my first book in bed—at night until I fell sleep then immediately when Iwoke up, notebook and pen sometimes tangled in the sheets.

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 firstdrafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out ofcopious notes?

The process is a two-minded mess. I often toggle between apatient, research-based poetics, building up notes, slowly secreting atheoretical framework—and just going for it:  freewheeling, intuitive, ecstatic attempts totranslate a whole emotional-intellection moment into the world.

So I write multiple projects at a high volume and get lost in andbetween these modes, often. I have to hit the brakes in order to figure outwhat I’m actually doing and if these different modes make sense together. Sometimesthey really do not.

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

It’s almost always a book. The poem iterates from some energy thathas a coherence beyond the poem and wants to animate and bind more poems—eachpoem a variegation of the larger distinct wave that is the book and the bookitself an expression of the smaller patterns it contains. That said, whateverRobert Duncan referred to as Life-Melodies, well, usually I mistake thebeginning of a year or two of this iterating energy as a life-poem. So I mostoften feel continuity more than difference when I first draft then must finddifference and silence in retrospect.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creativeprocess? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Ideally, I think about the context that a reading is then reshuffleand sometimes rewrite my poems for that context; sometimes that rewritingsticks and becomes the printed version. Readings are creation, what the scoreeach written poem represents has been waiting for. I owe it to those pieces toperform them in a way that demonstrates this.

But because of the investments I have in readings, they are also abig outflows of energy. That can be dangerous and not enjoyable. And I wishthere were more expansive formats for readings. 10-15 minutes just doesn’t fitmuch work or many readers. There are so many poets I would listen read for anhour who will never get the chance to read for that hour.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? Whatkinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you eventhink the current questions are?

Three hauntings:

1.     From Marxist ecology: what is apoetics, in this long moment of climate crisis, that can account for (notlandscapes but) ecologies as open-ended, dynamic systems of human and non-humanactors involved in the circulation (and extraction and hoarding and etc.) ofenergy? What is a poetics that can account for the dynamic, open-endedco-evolutionary and thickly contextualized relations between natures andcultures?

2.     How might post-2020 theories ofracial capitalism speak to a white writer (Joe Hall) living in a mid-size city(Buffalo) in the imperial core (the United States) to inform municipalpolitical action and the production, distribution, and reception of art withinthat context?

3.     What are the answers when we askthese questions together?

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?

Current? Outside of the big prize-winning Iowa and Ivy-League circle-jerk club and all the people outside thesenetworks bending their best energy toward the delusional goal that they’ll beable to join that club, I think there are a lot more poets than we might thinkwho have, in the last ten years, hooked up with social movements, grass rootsgroups, unions, etc. They’re organizing, being organized in the crosswinds of aprofound post-2020 backlash and proposing through that activity relationsbetween writers and culture. But how to exactly define that relation betweenartists and culture, what’s going to come out of it, part of that is alwaysgoing to be subterranean and part of that, in this moment, is still germinal.That’s cool. We’ll see. But we may not see without more literary journalismgenuinely curious about the full scope of writers lives and theinterconnections between poetry scenes and social movements. So I guess whatI’m saying is that cultural production and political practice should informeach other and we should represent that in non-naïve terms. We should do thatwhile also being skeptical of universalist claims of the politics of any aestheticsoutside of considerations the specific networks a given work circulates within.

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

Essential and desired.

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

I was tempted to quote one of my first teachers of poetry, Lucille Clifton on the necessity of bringing one’s whole self, including their hatred,especially their hatred, into a poem. But since I’ve been seriously ill lately,here’s part of a parable of Chuang-Tzu in the translation I first received itin 2001. In it Master Yu is dying and is attended by his friend:

All at once Master Yufell ill. Master Ssu went to ask how he was. "Amazing" said MasterYu. "The Creator is making me all crookedy like this! My back sticks uplike a hunchback and my vital organs are on top of me. My chin is hidden in mynavel, my shoulders are up above my head, and my pigtail points at the sky. Itmust be some dislocation of the yin and yang!"

Yet he seemed calm atheart and unconcerned. Dragging himself haltingly to the well, he looked at hisreflection and said, "My, my! So the Creator is making me all crookedylike this!"

"Do you resentit?" asked Master Ssu.

"Why no, whatwould I resent? If the process continues, perhaps in time he'll transform myleft arm into a rooster. In that case I'll keep watch on the night. Or perhapsin time he'll transform my right arm into a crossbow pellet and I'll shoot downan owl for roasting. Or perhaps in time he'll transform my buttocks intocartwheels. Then, with my spirit for a horse, I'll climb up and go for a ride.What need will I ever have for a carriage again?

Recognize everything is change (Epicurus, Lucretius, Marx).Approach that change with delight and curiosity as to its possibilities. Thenride your butt-bike into the darkness.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetryto essays to music)? What do you see as the appeal?

At first poetry and song where the same polysemous ball of stuff.Now that the boundaries between poetry and essay can be thin when I’m writingsomething I’ve learned a lot about. A long piece in Fugue & Strike, “Garbage Strike / 🗑️🔥,” crosshatches poems striving for agarbage-compacted density of materials (to create an unpredictable connotativeleachate) with essay—sometimes, elliptical, sometimes not—on histories andfutures of waste and militant actions with waste or by waste workers. An essayI’m writing now on the implication of canonical sonneteers in the earlyformation of English settler-colonialism and racial-capitalism actually grewfrom footnotes on an anti-sonnet a friend suggested I grow into somethinglarger.

The relation between poetry and essay is easy when the subject isthe same. The appeal there is that essays can provide a rich contextualframework to inform a poem’s play.

Okay, halfway through. Take a breather, reader.

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

Age, entropy: no words arrive without an hour of body work after Iwake up. Exercise, stretch the damaged bits, prepare a breakfast that fits mychronic illness. A bit of reading. Then I write. But C.A. Conrad argues writingshouldn’t be like working in a factory (or as an on-demand worker for a taskapp company). I’ve been there. It sucks. So my writing routine only works when Ialso carry that writing beyond the boundaries of that routine and am receptiveto how the messages of the larger world unfolding around me must shape thatwriting. This is why I’m most productive when I go to sleep in thecross-currents of thinking about my days in the world and what I’m going to writein the morning.

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

I don’t know how to answer this question. Sometimes I avoidinspiration and embrace being stalled. There are crucial times I need to avoidother poetry, especially poetry I love, and sink into my life. I wait forfriction with the world to intervene—the social ecologies of my house, myblock, my neighborhood, growing outward. Or sometimes a friend lovingly kicksme in the ass. That’s probably what I need—someone to keep me from revising mybest work into particles.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Burning wood.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, butare there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music,science or visual art?

Forms: I can’t help but think of Bernadette Mayer’s exercise towalk through a city and, on each new block, write a single line of a sonnet. OrMei Mei Berssenbrugge’s idea that the line is generated by the body’s sense ofextension, or periphery in a particular environment. I have the sneakingsuspicion that pandemic-era long aimless walks through Buffalo’s empty,pot-holed roads and uneven sidewalks may be expressing themselves in the longlines of many of the poems I’ve written in the last year. As did a bike path inBuffalo alongside the Niagara River. In stereo: the river flowing and the 190’swhip-sawing traffic.

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

Samuel Delany: The Mad Man,The Motion of Light on Water, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; John Milton’s Paradise Lost and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; a whole world of documentary poetry from Rukeyserand Reznikoff to Susan Tichy, Mark Nowak, and Craig Santos Perez to Janice Lobo Sapigao.

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

Write a book while not worrying about money or time, but, hey, whodoesn’t want that?

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what wouldit be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had younot been a writer?

When I was in middle school in Western Maryland I was asked towrite about a future self I hope to be, and I said I hoped to be working in andoffice and living in an apartment in Ohio. I fucked up. Work sucks. I hate it.Get me cultivating a big, big food and flower garden and doing somebio-remediation in a city with a new, more functional body. I’ll do it withfriends. I’d love that. Is that a job?

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

Where to start? A deeply felt incompatibility with the socialworld. A huge gap between I and thou. In the words of Karen Brodine: "All my life, the urgencyto speak, the pull toward silence." I came up in a disciplinaryenvironment and my parents giving each other loudly and at length the woundsthat would cause them to split. I had weird dreams—a whale corpse, itsmoldering eye looking into my bedroom window, a planet made of condensed, heavystatic, bearing down through a void that couldn’t be more complete.

And alot of time alone as a kid, to roam in the woods we lived beside.

And aninfinitely patient grandfather who lived next door, through these woods, who Icould interrupt, say, while he was splitting wood, to sit down at the kitchentable and talk while he smoked.

Whocan say if this explains it? For a long time it did. How about I was painfullyshy? If I could be alone with language and that would still connect with otherpeople? That would be nice.

Otherthings happened to change the reasons I wrote, thankfully. Then, a sort ofmomentum kicks in.

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

Book: Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, Samuel Delany’s 872 page door-stop about the lives ofpartners Eric and Shit in a black, queer commune on Georgia’s Gulf Coast. A lotof labels have been applied to this novel (like a pornotopia) but the point ofDelany is that none of them quite stick. It’s a novel as ferocious, unsettling,gently, steady, and terrifying as the ocean that is it’s backdrop.

Film: Congratulations, you’ve made it this far, so you get tolearn a secret. For over a decade, my partner Cheryl and I have been recordinga hardly ever advertised podcast about movies. We watch a movie. Wetalk about it. We like the excuse it provides for us to talk at length and withintention about something. Through the podcast, I’ve found myself thinking moreand more lately about Bi Gan’s 2018 LongDay’s Journey Into Night. It’s a mysterious, trance inducing poem in a noirshell. And a great piece of Chinese cinema that slipped by before as theboundaries erected by the U.S. against U.S.-Chinese cultural exchange growharder and harder. Try watching The Battle at Lake Changjin in the U.S. It’s the highest grossing Chinese filmof all time. You can’t watch it. Also, Bacurau rips.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Thesequel Fugue & Strike. It’sprovision and likely to change title:Fugue & Fugue & Fugue. It’s shaping up to be a big book of poems.It goes full Buffalo, inspired by Samuel Delany’ssentences, radical municipalism, and the knot of rage and despair that was andfollowed the people of Buffalo trying to topple the dangerous, centristDemocratic machine here—and losing, for now. The poem, I think, is, in its way,about most small and mid-size, post-industrial cities. Not New York or SanFrancisco: most cities. Help me if I don’t finish it this summer.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Martha Ronk, The Place One Is

 

ANOTHER COUNTRY

The it in with-itshifts & pivots as a compass needle

vetch, clover, brackish seaweedin heaped up smells

bits of pulverized shell,skeletal casings underfoot

fog banks stoked by firesin the central valley,

scrims cover whatyesterday stood as branched trees, a

house barely visible—morememory than memory,

unheimlich as if and asif it had been or could have been

you whom I turn to innear-sleep stumbling over ourselves,

whose arms and legs wasit I thought you called

extracting the changedangle between two norths

a skeleton of rusted carseams laid out on the beach

each step unlinked fromthe one before

each detachable makes upthis country I’m pointed into

Withmore than a dozen published books to her credit, the latest from Los Angeles poet and fiction writer Martha Ronk is The Place One Is (Oakland CA: OmnidawnPublishing, 2022), a collection of prose structures, each of which attend tothe line even through her use of line-breaks. She centres her America acrossthe length and breadth of her sense of California, offering the elements of hergeopolitical and historical space as a stand-in for far larger, ongoingconcerns of colonialism and the Anthropocene, as well as considerations of how geographyis constructed, where one sits and where one needs to stand. “Ordinary bits oflight on neighborhood leaves,” she writes, to open the poem “NIGHT: A PHOTOGRAPHBY ROBERT ADAMS,” “trees passed by, // spattered not-very-white on a randomnumber of them, // the canopy of leaves wide enough to hold multiple bits oflight // and what I can’t help is how pulled I am into the lights as if my eyes// could focus on multiple places at once which I know they can’t [.]” The structureof her poems is centred in the prose-block, and her narratives work to stitchtogether untethered fragments into a larger quilt of individual patterns of commentary,including elements of history and ecological concerns. “the place one is is theplace that is one,” she writes, to open the sequence “PULLED INTO EARTH, AIR,SKY” early on in the collection, “—nowhere else / and although I can think myselfback into some places, / where one is is the only place and everyone’s feet /change underfoot as wet, sand, concrete, pebbles and smooth / operate as adjustmentsor the particular tree out of the window / one branch hanging down [.]”

Thereare moments that Ronk does describe two sides of geographies, suggesting theplace that one is sits in a space simultaneously unknown, offering two elements,two perspectives, on a singular and multifaceted whole: a place of beauty,suffering, constant possibility and perpetual self-destruction, including thatof, as Brian Teare writes as part of his back cover blurb, the “devastatingimpact of settler colonialism on the Wiyot people of Northern California.” “collectedin multiples    piecemeal and over time,”she writes, as part of the poem “SCRAPS OF INDIGENOUS HISTORY,” “stitched withfishing twine    housed in museum vaults// the ongoing    catapulted into watersmoving out to // unfinished sentences [.]” Or, as the opening poem, “TO LET GO,”begins: “imprecise morning as if limbs were only loosely threaded in the coming// and going of tides, in flattened grazing land extending into beach sand //going on until far out of view, the imprint of a foot then another, // the timeit takes for a seeded oyster basket to mature [.]” It is interesting how Ronkoffers line breaks as sentence or phrase-breaks, composed as breaks of thought asopposed to  breath, which allow theaccumulations of her sentence-phrases to pile on like logs into a cabin, constructingthe house of the poem, such as the poem “LEAVING IS ALSO A PLACE,” that begins:

Leaving moves into us,taking us from this place

where we are and from theplace we’re going

into some thirdbi-furcated in-between

as a swollen door doesn’tquite close,

no furniture floatsaround the rooms

but all groundings areweakened

tattered bird wings droopfrom the poles

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, 40 Weeks

 

Nature must be a mother

to pour : thunder : punch

through potholes : hopingthis

will make something :anything

: grow : she must be moths: mouth

wide : wings panting forlightning :

who else would strikeherself : flame

veining the air? who elsewould bear

children to rise inspring : only to feel them

cut months later? themoth’s

charred outline on a log: the double

wound : her children’shead sinking

: left to dry on anothermother’s

windowsill : who elsewould ask

for such a violence?

Granville, Ohio-based poet Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s third full-length poetry title,following (Kent State University Press, 2019)and Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), is 40 Weeks (PortlandOR: YesYes Books, 2023), a book-length poem on pregnancy and the difficultiesof waiting, wanting, catching and becoming. 40 Weeks follows pregnancy,a loss, and a further pregnancy, offering her poem-titles as individual andconsecutive weeks, each named and sized after a corresponding vegetable-to-fetussize, from “Week 4: Poppy Seed” and “Week 9: Grape” to “Week 14: Lemon” and “Week28: Eggplant.” Across this book-length suite, Dasbach composes a mapping of anintimate space, and the emotional and physical complexities and interruptionsof everything that pregnancy, mothering and motherhood involves and surrounds. Shewrites violence and loss, swirls of surrender and survival. As the short single-sentenceof the poem “Week 21: Carrot” ends: “into the street with your sun / still insidehis laughter / brought icicles down / from a neighbor’s gutter / they shattered/ irreparable / far from his body / unprotected and wholly / outside of you /inside / her fingerprints / became / permanent [.]”

Setin a sequence of weeks, Dasbach articulates poems about and around pregnancyand motherhood that ripple out into poems about how precarious and wonderful itis to live, and live deeply, allowing every part of her to surrender to anexperience that overtakes every cell. “Four times they drew,” she offers, toopen “Week 31: Coconut,” “checking blood / for sweetness—how quickly / the bodycan dissolve / what feeds it.” There is such a delicate precision to thesepoems, simultaneously hard-set and tender, as Dasbach composes poems ofbecoming and becoming more; of being and the slow difficulty and clear beautyof pregnancy and motherhood, along with all the confusion, insecurity, heartbreakand all else that can’t help but come. “You’ve been leaking / for weeks now,”the poem “Week 38: Leek” begins, “secreting, sieving, / seeping, sweating even/ in the absence / of heat. You’ve been / leaving yourself / on every fabric, /spending more time / surrounded / by water / so what escapes / comes home.” Dasbach’s40 Weeks really is a breathtaking collection of documented moments inset lyric, even through the rush of attempting to document each moment as itoccurs, before it moves on to the next, and remains in no other form but throughmemory, or here.

Ewa Chrusciel, Yours, Purple Gallinule

 

Tiny Throat Diagnoses

I have been listening toyou, dear loon.

I hear in your trilling amelancholy.
you inherited melancholyfrom your grandparents. How do you
regulate the states ofyour system? Neurotransmitters? How do you
restore your humoral equilibrium?

The point – entelechy? A relationshipbetween real and potential,
with astonishment of feathers.

I’mfascinated by New Hampshire-based Polish-American poet and translator Ewa Chrusciel’slatest full-length poetry title in English, her Yours, Purple Gallinule (Omnidawn, 2022). Following her prior English-language collections (she alsohas three collections published in Polish) Strata (Emergency Press, 2009;Omnidawn, 2018), Contraband of Hoopoe (Omnidawn, 2014) [see my review of such here] and Of Annunciations (Omnidawn, 2017) [see my review of such here], Yours, Purple Gallinule is a book of birds, illnesses and depictions;a book of vertigo, pneumonia, diagnoses and mental aviaries, as well as avariety of temporal spaces. “In the meantime,” she writes, as part of the poem “TinyThroat Diagnoses,” “the larks rolled like scrolls around the pins of their /own laughter. What were they laughing about? They were simply / disciples ofjoy.” There is an opening of time beyond what we know into the knowledge ofbirds, from Hildegard of Bingen to Thomas Jefferson, and translations from theMiddle Ages to the narrator’s “80-year-old dad [who] visits from his nativecountry.” (“Acts of Exile”).

Tospeak of birds, at least in Chrusciel’s hands, is to speak of perpetual memoryand endurance through the complex and woven structures of fragment, short bursts,diagnoses, declarations and documentation. The poems of Yours, PurpleGallinule offer a collection that echoes John James Audobon’s Birds ofAmerica (1827-1838), but if birds were studied as a way to examine, also,the intellectual, ecological and emotional healthy of all life on earth,centred around that binary of birds and human. To heal the world one must firstarticulate the symptoms, in order to diagnose the illness. And, one might ask,are Chrusciel’s narrators the birds themselves? As the poem “And not to spill asingle grain” ends:

Like the centrifugalleaps
of my mothers neurons
make her grasp the inscape
of things.
One needs to be an oracle
to hear an oracle.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Beatrice Szymkowiak

BeatriceSzymkowiak is aFrench-American writer and scholar. She graduated with an MFA in CreativeWriting from the Institute of American Indian Arts and a PhD inEnglish/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the authorof Red Zone (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a poetry chapbook, aswell as the winner of the 2017 OmniDawn Single Poem Broadside Contest, and therecipient of the 2022 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry for her full-lengthcollection B/RDS , published by the University of Utah Press in 2023. Herwork also has appeared in numerous poetry magazines, including TheBerkeley Review, Terrain.org, The Portland Review, OmniVerse, TheSouthern Humanities Review, and many others.

1 - How did your firstbook or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare toyour previous? How does it feel different?

The publication of my first chapbook RedZone was definitely a moral poetry boost! Being a writer means dealing witha lot of rejections, so every publication is a celebration and anencouragement!

Red Zone and my full-lengthbook B/RDS are located on the same ecological axis, and belong to thesame investigative project into the roots and consequences of the Anthropocene:Red Zone through the ecologically devastated lands of WWI, and B/RDS throughthe ecologically shattered skies of North America. Both are experimental andintersect history and science. However, while Red Zone plays with someexternal texts, B/RDS is bringing intertextuality to its full extent, asthe collection was written by erasing the entirety of Birds of America ––theiconic ornithological work of John James Audubon. B/RDS is alsopurposefully much more lyrical, as if a song.

2 - How did you come topoetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

To some extent, I inherited myfather’s love for poetry. Also, what I always have loved about poetry, is itscapacity of dissent, against ideas but also against language itself ––both beingintertwined. Discovering Baudelaire and Rimbaud, two poetry dissenters, was adefining moment for me, as a poet. Baudelaire shattered the idea of beauty anddeveloped a symbolist aesthetic towards Modernism, while Rimbaud shatteredmetric versification towards the Modern free verse, and then, just abandonedpoetry!

I will not abandon poetry, however I alwayshave been interested in non-fiction too. Non-fiction finds its way in my poetrythrough preliminary research and/or through intertextuality.

3 - How long does it taketo start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially comequickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to theirfinal shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It always takes me a while to start awriting project. I do a lot of thinking and research beforehand. For example,for B/RDS, I researched 19th century naturalists and exploredposthumanist philosophy and Object Oriented Ontology (OOO). The work ofphilosopher Timothy Morton (another dissenter!) who wrote the fascinating TheEcological Thought, was particularly influential. Morton’s work led me towonder what could be an ecological, lyrical pronoun, and to experiment with thepronoun “we.”

I still continue researching andreflecting, even after I start the project. I am rather a slow writer. I liketo spend time on a poem, which means that revisions are usually not extensive. ForB/RDS, the revisions were mostly focused on the prose poems and theorganization of the manuscript. The constraint that I had given myself on theerasure poems (keeping the order of words from the original text) made anyrevisions of these poems difficult, so I really spent time on their initialdraft.

4 - Where does a poemusually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combininginto a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the verybeginning?

I like to have a project ––to have arough direction towards which I write my poems. Then, overtime, I redirect,which may lead me to drop some poems or revise others for the coherence of theproject. For example, Red Zone was included in a much bigger project.However, I felt that the project was lacking coherence, so I decided to cull itand keep only the poems related to the ecological and historical impact of WWI.

Poems themselves often begin with animage, a moment, or a word collision. For example, the poem “Vimy” in RedZone comes from the paradoxical, bucolic sight of the sheep used to mow thegrass in the red zones of France. The red zones are former WWI battlefields prohibitedto the public because unexploded explosives and harmful chemicals, from leakingammunitions, riddle their soil. Hence the use of sheep to mow the grass.

5 - Are public readingspart of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer whoenjoys doing readings?

I absolutely enjoy readings! I lovehow a poem becomes different once you voice it, where you recite it,  or how the audience interprets it in so manyvarious ways. Because my poetry projects are research projects, I also like toprovide the background or context that help readers appreciate the poems morefully. It sometimes generates incredible discussions.

6 - Do you have anytheoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are youtrying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questionsare?

My projects are conceived withinpostcolonial and posthumanist theoretical frameworks, and work towardsdeveloping a poetry of ecological awareness. I am particularly interested inenvironmental writing in the context of a critical investigation of settlercolonialism, extractivism, and ecological imperialism. For example, my poetrycollection B/RDS questions the disconnected approaches to themore-than-human world, through a lyrical erasure of Audubon’s iconic Birdsof America.

I am also fascinated by how the lyric“I” can withstand the interconnectedness of all beings, or translate theecological subject. What about a lyrical “we”?

7 – What do you see thecurrent role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? Whatdo you think the role of the writer should be?

In these present times and society, Isee writers as disrupters, inspirers, and/or awakeners. I write with the hopethat poetry can shift perspectives and ways of seeing and being in the world,towards a kinder and more sustainable future.

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

My work always benefits from theperspectives of outside readers/editors. And when the feedback or theconversation become challenging, it means it hit an important question orpoint. For example the final lay-out of B/RDS only came about afterseveral discussions with poets Brenda Cárdenas and Kyce Bello, as well as mywife, who is always my first and bluntest editor. So, yes, feedback isessential and challenging. But, to some extent, if it weren’t challenging, itwould not be constructive!

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

I had a mentor, Joan Kane, whosuggested that before workshopping a poem, somebody else read the poem back to itsauthor. Having somebody else read your own poem back to you, should be part ofany feedback process!

10 - How easy has it beenfor you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see asthe appeal?

Moving between poetry and criticalessay allows me to approach a topic from different angles, so I do see them ascomplementary. I think they also influence each other. The critical prose mightaffect formal choices in my poems, while my poetry might support theoreticalcreativity.

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

I like to have a wide swath of time towrite, because I need to really dive into a poem, to spend time with it. So Ioften write on the weekend. If I am really deep in the mix of a project, mywriting might spill over into the week, whenever I have time. I don’t reallyhave a routine, except a cup of tea, that inevitably gets cold!

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

All my experiences somehow inform mywritings. For example, B/RDS was written during the covid lockdown, whichhad a direct influence on the collection ––the “cages” we were in, the birds wecould hear louder, the death toll, etc. However, to bring these experiences tothe surface, I sometimes need a catalyst: non-fiction and poetry books,podcast, documentary films, etc., and nature. So when I get stuck, I delve backinto these catalysts: grab a book or go for a hike!

13 - What fragrancereminds you of home?

The smell of bread, croissants, andbooks!

14 - David W. McFaddenonce said that books come from books, but are there any other forms thatinfluence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Nature greatly influences my work. Iam particularly interested in the relationship between humanity and themore-than-human world, in its zones of conflict and confluence. I am lucky tolive in an area (Northern Arizona) with magnificent and vast expanses of wildlife, however inexorably encroached upon. For example, the poem “Out of theirBreast / as if” in B/RDS came from hikes in the forest around Flagstaff.

Other great influences are science, history,and art. My poetry is always in dialog with external fields.

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

As mentioned earlier, the work ofphilosopher Timothy Morton has deeply influenced my poetry. My poetry is alsoindebted to the work of many poets: CD Wright, WS Merwin, Craig Santos Perez,Sherwin Bitsui, Joan Naviyuk Kane, James Thomas Stevens, Santee Frazier, Alice Oswald, M. NourbeSe Philip.

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

I would love to work in collaborationwith an artist from another field, or a scientist. I can’t but wonder forexample, what a collaboration with a scientist researching whale songs in thedisrupted oceans could bring. I am fascinated by forms of expression, human orother!

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

I would have loved to be anenvironmental scientist, an archivist, a medievalist, a park ranger, or an astronomer!

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

I am passionate with language andbooks. How fascinating that we can dialogue across time and space throughwriting, or that words can sometimes change the course of history! Think aboutMartin Luther King’ s “I have a dream...”!

Also, I might have leaned towards writingbecause it is an activity I can practice anywhere, at my desk, by a river, ontop of a mountain, etc.

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

The last great book I read was To2040 by Jorie Graham, and the last great movie I watched, Portrait of a Lady on Fire by Céline Sciamma.

20 - What are youcurrently working on?

I am working on a new poetry project and a non-fiction essay.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Amy Ching-Yan Lam, Baby Book

My review of Baby Book (Brick Books, 2023) by Amy Ching-Yan Lam is now up at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sabyasachi Nag

SabyasachiNag is theauthor of Uncharted (Mansfield Press, 2021) and two collections ofpoetry. His work has appeared in Black Fox Literary Magazine, CanadianLiterature, Grain, The Antigonish Review, and The Dalhousie Review. Heis a graduate of the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and the HumberSchool for Writers. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University ofBritish Columbia and the craft editor at The Artisanal Writer . He wasborn in Calcutta and lives in Mississauga, ON. www.sachiwrites.com. 

1 - How did your first book change yourlife? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feeldifferent?

Back in2006, when I published my first book I was uncertain – what did I write? Is itany good? With my recent title, Hands Like Trees (Ronsdale Press, 2023),I am still full of self-doubt. So, what changed? I think the nature ofuncertainty changed. Much like copper fresh out of the mill greens with time,acquires a patina, I found newer things to be anxious about. Luckily though, mymost recent work deals with similar questions as my first title – questionsabout identity; belonging; the true nature of heroism – hopefully the answersevolved with time.

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

I came topoetry for my love of language – the sound of words and the relationship ofsounds to meaning. Also, because poetry can fulfill you immediately; instantgratification keeps you hooked. During the early phases of my writing, thatinstant and guaranteed payback was vital for me to continue.

3 - How long does it take to start anyparticular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is ita slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, ordoes your work come out of copious notes?

Some formsare relatively easy for me, some are harder. I find short fiction, for instance,particularly hard. I take a long time to craft a story. My most recent title forinstance – it’s about 200 pages and includes nine stories, involving one familywhere characters repeat, yet it took me eight years from start to finish. Why?Because there are more than a dozen ways to write each one. Some writers take along time to write anything. I belong to that category for the most part.

Sometimes astory comes quickly and is pretty bad. Sometimes it comes quickly and is about okay.I think, for me, in general, everything cooks on low flame, as I like to takeeverything through the same alchemical process – something burns somewhere, youwatch it become ash, you dissolve it in water, extract the hard pieces from thedistill; mix them again and something else forms…and now something else burns,somewhere else and you start over.

My firstdrafts are rough. I rarely look at them again. I find note-taking as a processto get stuff off my brain. It’s a good method for my mind to stop wandering andpay attention. But I easily forget the notes I have taken. Good ideas usually stick,they never leave the brain.

4 - Where does a poem or work offiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end upcombining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" fromthe very beginning?

For me, poemscan start anywhere – a washed-up grocery list; a weird arrangement of shoes;late blooming tulips; the neighbour’s cat; the sound of a word; an image, realor imagined. Meanings inside poems have to be mined, so one can be courageousto start.

Stories,for me, usually start with an idea, not fully formed, but something with a headand a tail and I pickle it in a bell jar; let time work out the middle before Iapproach it again.

By thetime I start the actual writing, I usually know what it is going to be – astory or a novella, or a poem. Of course, each form requires a differentapproach. I don’t think of a “book” at first.

5 - Are public readings part of orcounter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doingreadings?

I thinkit’s important to get out there and read. It’s a great way, if not the onlyway, to listen to the sound of one's writing. I don’t do that as regularly asI’d like. I intend to do it more often.

6 - Do you have any theoreticalconcerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answerwith your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I liketheoretical constructs about writing to stay in the background, in the Jungianunknown. I don’t like to think of my writing as a response to anything otherthan my urge to string up words and hopefully make sense. I don’t carry apredetermined set of questions. I believe new questions emerge from the same oldquestions whether such questions were once answered or not.

7 – What do you see the current role ofthe writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you thinkthe role of the writer should be?

I feel thewriter’s role in culture is to keep telling stories. Stories are so important,we couldn’t live without them for more than three minutes – the time it takesto be completely breathless. While telling stories, one may discover storiestend to repeat. So then, I think, the writer’s role is to keep finding newerways to tell the same set of stories.

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

I feelit’s essential. The editors I have had the chance to work with were all sogood. They often did for me what a good photographer does. They made thematerial look better; removed inert bits; made sure the balance between spaceand conflict is optimal; challenged me for clarity.

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

Show up.Writing will happen.

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

I like theidea of it because, first of all, it’s a great way to push something awaythat’s breaking the brain. It’s liberating. But I like to not overdo it as I ameasily distracted. If I don’t move between two ideas or two pieces of writing carefully,I fear, I might be so consumed by the new stuff, I might never come back to thething I was doing when I got deflected.

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

A typicalday for me starts with a cup of piping hot Darjeeling tea with 2 green cardamompods, 2 cloves, 3 black peppercorns, and a piece of cinnamon stick, the size ofmy thumb. Other than that, I don’t like routines.

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

When mywriting gets stalled I like to read. That’s where a good bit of my inspirationcomes from; some of it comes from films; and the rest comes from sitting by awindow, doing nothing. I also like to listen to podcasts about wasps andbutterflies.

13 - What fragrance reminds you ofhome?

Home is acomplex idea for me and it means many things – identity, separation, alienation,rift, etc. Honestly, no one fragrance can capture the whole essence of the word‘home’. It means different things at different times and carries many differentfragrances.

14 - David W. McFadden once said thatbooks come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work,whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I agree. And to add, Cormac McCarthy said "Books are made out ofbooks, the novel depends for its life on the novels that have beenwritten." I depend a lot on books. And sometimes on films, nature, music,science, religion, people, art, and a host of things that are too many to list.

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

Other writers important to my work are far too manyto list. I like returning to Tagore – who I listen more often that I read; Premchandwho I like to read in original; of course Borges who continues to amaze mealways; and Marquez, Cesares, Alice Munro, Atwood, John Williams, Don Delillo…it’s a long, long list. I easily forget the books I read and have toreread the same books many times over, only to realize I wasn’t payingattention the first time. I think, for artists, the boundary between life andart is so fluid, it’s impossible to recognize where ‘life’ starts and the ‘story’stops.

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

LearnSpanish so I can find out what I missed in the translations of César Vallejo, Roberto Bolano; Neruda and Antonio Machado; Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa to name afew.

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

If I couldpick any other occupation aside from writing, without a doubt, it would have tobe a farmer’s; I love the idea of small scale farming.

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

I thinkthat’s because it’s one of the few things I can do well.

19 - What was the last great book youread? What was the last great film?

I finishedreading Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold last week,before that I read Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand. Last great film – Iwatch a lot of Bengali films – Kaushik Ganguly’s Nagarkirtan about genderidentity; Atanu Ghosh’s Mayurakshi about home, place, and time; GoutamGhose’s Shankhachil about borders and belonging; Indrashis Acharya’s Pupaabout euthanasia. I also like revisiting older films – Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Michel Gondry’s EternalSunshine of the Spotless Mind, Christopher Nolan’s Memento to name afew.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I amcurrently working on a novel about a place that no longer exists, where I believeI had lived briefly, many years back, perhaps in a previous life.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Douglas Piccinnini, Beautiful, Safe & Free

 

There, in my mistake. I ampresent. The present
lifted over itself. A daylike grout
in the tiles suddenlybrittle suddenly breaking
down this pattern. A dateyou remember
smeared in the pages of acalendar.

That was pleasure once. Sure-fit,needled
existence and as thenerve brough forward
a yellow seam in thesilence. Silence thrust
its burning face to theglass—
that kind of domain. (“AWESTERN SKY”)

NewJersey poet Douglas Piccinnini’s [see his '12 or 20 questions' interview here] third published book and second full-lengthpoetry title, after Blood Oboe (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2015), is Beautiful,Safe & Free (Palm Desert CA: New Books, 2023). The poems that make up Beautiful,Safe & Free, including the sequence previously published as thechapbook A WESTERN SKY (Greying Ghost, 2022) [see my review of such here], are constructed through notational accumulation: short lines, phrasesand sentences are clustered together to form shapes of meaning and purpose,composed along the frayed and dusty edges of American civilization. “day afterday mine silage / stuffs the animal vassal,” he writes, as part of the poem “CASHFOR GOLD.” Piccinnini composes his poem-clusters out of scraps and fragmentsaround placement and uncertainty, declaring where he, the narrator, is situatedin this montage of contemporary America, through all its devastation, contradictionand absolute beauty. “one is a mind in refrain shelving the days,” he writes,to open the poem “FLOWER SHIELD,” “as the throat of where you’ve been speaks //as the once between of boundaries / becomes particular to retain an abandon [.]”Piccinnini’s poems appear to skim across an endless surface but instead revealsuch depths as can’t be fathomed, offering echoes of Canadian poet Hugh Thomas throughhow the accumulation of ellipses can provide a perfect outline of anarticulated absence.

INTERROBANG

as if—stuttering
a percentage of glyphs
inflates you like aflower

in a loveable number
zeroed—whole—round

fit into you in what
like a splinter

milked from division

like an anthem jerks up—
to follow you everywhere

in every mask you slip on
to make meaning

Jake Byrne, Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin

My review of Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin (A Buckrider Book / Wolsak and Wynn, 2023) by Jake Byrne is now up at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.