Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 106

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rebecca Hart Olander

Rebecca Hart Olander’s poetry has appeared recently in Jet Fuel Review, The Massachusetts Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere, and her collaborative visual and written work has been published in multiple venues online and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her books include a chapbook, Dressing the Wounds (dancing girl press, 2019), and her debut full-length collection, Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press, 2021). Rebecca teaches writing at Westfield State University and Amherst College, and works with poets in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is the editor/director of Perugia Press. Find her online at rebeccahartolander.com or @rholanderpoet.

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

Publishing my first full-length collection Uncertain Acrobats in November, 2021 has led to some great opportunities for me, such as being interviewed by you, for one, and getting to read with some folks I really admire at places at which I’ve been honored to read. For example, last year, the month the book came out, I was lucky enough to read with poets Doug Anderson, Tina Cane, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths at McNally Jackson Seaport Bookstore in NYC. Without a book, that would never have happened.

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

I’ve been told in the past that I should try writing fiction, but I’m entirely not interested in writing fiction, even though I love to read fiction. I wrote my first poem at seven, so I feel more like I’ve always been doing it than I “came to it.” My stepmother is the poet Christopher Jane Corkery, and so poetry was around me from a young age in a way that unquestionably influenced me.

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

It really varies. There are those odd duck poems that arrive fully-fledged and almost ready to fly, but that’s only happened to me a handful of times. But my work also doesn’t come out of copious notes. I’ll either write when inspiration hits me over the head and forces the issue, or I’ll generate a draft through a prompt.

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

I don’t generally have “projects” that would lead to a book from conception to birth. My first book was actually a project book, but it happened by osmosis vs. setting out to accomplish said project. I sort of pine for projects because I think they are cool, but for me I tend to write individual poems over a long period of time and then try to locate their confluences and relationships and work the project shape out of the material at hand vs. starting with a project concept.

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

I love public readings! It’s such a gift to have people come out to receive words I’ve written, and it’s really affirming to be able to interact with readers and also to listen to other writers read their work (so, I’d have to say my favorite readings are group readings). I love the surprise of an open mic, too, when you don’t know who’s going to read or what they’ll offer on a given night. Surprise is so important to good writing, and open mics kind of introduce that element to readings, I think.

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

One of my main concerns is the passage of time and what that does to legacy, and memory, and even to living in the present moment. An awareness of transience is important to me, as is a desire to memorialize people and places and moments that have been important to me and that I think will have, or do have, some resonance for readers as well. So, I’m concerned with the tension between things passing and wanting to hold on to them. Hmm – for the last bit, do you mean what are the questions of the day, or what are MY current questions? I guess, either way, I believe in trying to be kind to others and affirming and inclusive when writing. So, good questions to ask ourselves when writing/publishing/performing would be who is being heard and who is being silenced? Who is being celebrated and what is being revered? What is being diminished or seen only partially or misunderstood? Generally I like playing with rhetorical questions when I write, and I do employ a lot of questions in my poems, but these are not rhetorical questions. These seem more necessary to ask and to answer when striving to be an ethical writer.

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

Writers can ask those hard questions, and others, and model doing so through how they share their work. Writers can encourage empathy, by expressing stories that widen perspective and understanding. Writers can bring joy by reminding us to feel joy and gratitude, or by distracting us from the mundane. Writers help inspire imagination and creativity. They can foster community by inviting dialogue and voicing what is necessary and hard to say in other ways/spaces.

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

Essential, absolutely. Sometimes I have to sit with edits before embracing them, and sometimes I don’t take editorial advice, but for the most part I only feel deep appreciation when someone reads my work on a cellular level and wants to help me make it the strongest manifestation it can be.

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

Persist! Uncertain Acrobatswas submitted something like 60 times before it was accepted. If I’d let rejection get to me, I wouldn’t have published this book, which is all the stronger for having been revised and reshaped over the course of those many rejections, and many years.

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

I really love the idea of hybrid texts, so I think experimenting with writing different genres helps breed that eventual hybridized result. I no longer write book reviews because I don’t have the time—and I would write them with a LOT of care and time—BUT, writing them and getting inside the books of others in that critical way helped my own poetry writing without a doubt. When I have moved between creative genres, it has been less traditional genres. For example, I like to create collages with visuals and text, and I like writing in epistolary form and exchanging that writing. If I ever do shift genres, it feels fun and fruitful all at once. And I love collaboration as a method of creating. The appeal of that is the emphasis on play, community, and surprise, and it’s an avenue to openness.

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

I don’t have a daily routine. My routine is more dictated by the seasons. Since I teach, I tend to have more time between semesters and in the summer. That’s when I make a point of creating routines so that I can milk every moment out of the possible time I have available to me.

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

Reading poets I admire is one steadfast answer. I also love traveling to new places, even local places I haven’t seen. Something about seeing new things tends to inspire me. Prompts also really work for me – I don’t tend to get stalled as a stop to my writing as much as I can’t find the time because I am otherwise over-committed. But when I have the time and want to write, I make it happen by going out in nature, reading, or responding to a generative prompt.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

My original home is Gloucester, a small coastal city north of Boston, MA. So, when I smell salt water, especially the ocean, it always reminds me of home and also relaxes me and brings me joy, two feelings that, if we are lucky enough, are associated closely with home.

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

Yes, this brings me back to my other answer about inspiration. I also love going to museums and writing ekphrastically, and sometimes science inspires me if I hear an interesting radio piece and learn something that blows my mind and makes me think about the world in a different way.

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

Even though I don’t write fiction, I think I get the most pleasure out of reading fiction vs. any other genre. I love the feeling of getting lost in a great novel and never wanting it to end and being totally absorbed in it. I can’t really read that way during the academic year while I am both teaching and running a small press, so those moments are saved for summertime and January. The writers that are most important to me are the ones I share writing communities with – the Perugia poets I publish, and the poets I am blessed to share writing groups and friendships with. It’s the sharing of work, but also the sharing of the writing life, that sustains me.

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

My first thought is travel to places I'd like to see that I haven’t: Greece, Turkey, British Columbia, and some of the states and places I haven’t seen here in the US, like Hawaii, Montana, New Mexico. I’d love to walk the Camino de Santiagoin Spain/France/Portugal. It would be cool to snorkel, and ride on a glass-bottomed boat. I’d like to be a grandparent. I’dlike to publish another book.

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

I have two jobs besides being a writer now – being an editor and a teacher. I don’t usually think of writing as my occupation, but I also don’t think of it as a hobby. It’s my life, the way I breathe. I’ve always loved libraries and bookstores, and I dig organizing things, so maybe owning a bookstore or directing a library. Or something to do with travel.

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

There’s not an option – it’s how I navigate the world.

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

The last great book was Anthony Doerr’s latest: Cloud Cuckoo Land. I loved it in a deep, abiding way and it felt necessary, enjoyable, enriching, surprising, and sustaining all at once. I watched some pretty great films online in the “virtual cinema” hosted by my local movie theater during the pandemic. I really enjoyed Karen Dalton: In My Own Time, Beans,and Hive. Based on those picks, I guess I prefer protagonists who are women and girls, stories that are based on true events, and films that teach me something new.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’ve just launched the annual contest for Perugia Press, which invites submissions of first and second full-length manuscripts from women-identified poets. We’re also about to release this year’s book, American Sycamore by Lisbeth White, so that’s exciting! I’m prepping my fall courses as I’ll be back teaching in a couple of weeks. For my own poetic work, I’m looking forward to going back at revising my second full-length collection, which I hope to submit for publication this fall.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Edward Byrne, Tracery

 

Behind the weather
the storm

behind a
rhetoric of clouds

Behind capital
the war

at odds
with the adages
argument conceals (“(TRACER)”)

I’ve been enjoying the poetry collection Tracery (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2022), the latest from Vancouver poet and editor Edward Byrne, a lyric meditation of in-transit pinpoints and sequences that collect together to form a kind of thinking portrait of daily and domestic thinking. His poems are composed via short takes and phrases, accumulations of hesitations, pauses and small points, akin to a lyric reminiscent of the poem-length lineations of Monty Reid, Cameron Anstee, the late Nelson Ball, or possibly Robert Creeley: each poem offering a meditative slice of dailyness composed through a single, ongoing, staggered line. “You are a point of no return,” he writes, in part six of the numbered thirty-poem sequence “MORNING SONGS,” “this and every morning / where my thoughts / exit from dream’s grasp / never grasped / all the little signs / all your stars blinking out [.]” Byrne composes a precision of small points along a continuous thought, offering a pacing of slow, accumulative and artful steps, each one carefully set. As the first poem in the six-poem sequence “(TRAME)” reads: “This morning on Union Street / I saw Arthur Rimbaud on a girl’s bicycle // And then / close behind him / Jean Seberg // They smiled at me and waved // Then came Antonin Artaud / weaving and shouting curses // None of them wore helmets // I worry about their heads / which I adore [.]” Byrne’s pacing demands an attentive eye, composed with care across each phrase, each line. His poems exist simultaneously in the present moment as well as across vast distances, allowing the short form to contain such enormous volumes. Composed, as the back cover offers, “in a time of plague, through dreams and daily life,” Byrne moves easily through his translations of lyric form and the shimmering space between dreaming and daily tasks, catching memories across the dawn’s sweep of early morning clouds. He traces his lyric, one might suggest, around and through the minutae of his present moment. And, closing the collection, his engagements with responding to works by poets such as Blaser, Aragon, Rilke, Artaud, H.D. and Dante allow for the shape of not only influence but response, offering a lyric of experience and fine craft:

The wayward conveyance
of these small songs
against the fog of morning
before the rain
by slight of hand
where the letters are mobile
a variant turning
by the ear’s fine judgment

There is something curious about how so much poetry out of Vancouver is centred on movement, whether Bryne’s compositions while riding BC Transit, on bicycle or on foot, comparable to Meredith Quartermain’s walking [see her 2005 collection Vancouver Walking] or George Stanley riding a similar Vancouver bus route [see my review of his 2008 collection Vancouver: a poem here], to George Bowering thinking his way through Duino Elegies via Kerrisdale. In comparison, there aren’t many poems I’m aware of composed overtly across the lines of the Montreal Metro, or Toronto’s GO Trains, let alone their expansive subway system (although bpNichol famously spoke first-draft thoughts into a hand-held tape machine while driving the distance between Coach House and Therafields). In certain ways, there’s almost something comparable to Vancouver’s transit-poems to England’s handful of poems composed on foot, responding to the uniquely-English meditative tradition of walking vast countryside distances [see my review Mark Goodwin’s 2014 collection Steps, for example, here]. Frank O’Hara may have composed a collection of poems during his lunch break, but, more recently, Mary Austin Speaker composed her 2016 collection, The Bridge, while riding daily commuter distances across New York’s Manhattan Bridge [see my review of such here]. How much, we might begin to ask, has literature been shaped through the physical requirements of each author’s particular geography? As Byrne offers as part of “MORNING SONGS”: “I saw Kirilov / fifty years ago / on the Barton Street bus / and again this morning / on 6th Avenue // One of us hasn’t changed / in all those years [.]” Or further in the same sequence, writing:

Woke this morning
without the burden
of love and loss

Cold air of October
ate my hopes
as I returned
to where I fell

The crows
at war
in the high branches

Laura Jaramillo, Making Water

 

I’ve never liked anything more than time. The rites of spring in the strip mall parking lot. What flesh can do in masses with the violet day through the slats. A tendency to float de-realized above the afternoon, bodies on the gravel.

*

People ask if in America we only eat hamburgers. Dust that traverses the sun’s rays down to its depth (“QUARRY”)

The latest from Queens poet and Durham, North Carolina resident Laura Jaramillo is the poetry collection Making Water (New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2022), a thread of fifteen extended sequences constructed via short lyric bursts of prose layerings. “Failure not visible on body’s surface yet.” she writes, early in the poem “AUTOIMMUNITY,” “She picked up a small magazine called Time Cuts Us into Pieces.” Her second collection, appearing a decade after the publication of her full-length debut, Material Girl (subpress, 2012), Jaramillo’s Making Water writes across and aside narratives, composing an extended, taut, lyric book-length sentence as an indictment on language, poetry and community; of poets, readers, relationships and other losses. “I sold most of my books.” she writes, early in the poem “BAD MAGIC,” “The city will forget my face tomorrow [.]” Two pages further, she offers: “I will never be so alone again as I was then / and it aches [.]”

Through this book-length sentence of accumulations, Jaramillo works the long poem to articulate desolation, agency, nostalgia, loss and longing that extends through and across poles of trauma and melancholy. These are poems on love that articulate being, and the aftereffects and conditions of heartbreak, while seeking out, fully and finally, a most difficult sequence of possible truths. There is such an elegant tension to her lines, such a lush and beautiful anxiety through her extended lyric. The only way around, one might say, is through, and she articulates her progress with such delicate, difficult beauty. As the poem “BAD MAGIC” continues: “All of history the story of its retraction. The squats and encampments taken over by the knifey glamour of filial names and economics, the ecstasy of class and mirrored display. If the storage unit throws our clothes and our letters in the trash, let us not live / in remembrance of them [.]”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Garin Cycholl

Garin Cycholl’s 2022 novel, Rx , is a play on The Confidence-Man, a man practicing medicine without a license in a Dis-united States. His recent work has appeared in The Typescript, ACM, and The Dead Mule of Southern Literature.

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

My first book was an unpublished novel from the mid-1990s, The Kerry Way and the Pentecostal Counterculture.  It was a local exploration of the shifting political tide in the United States and the pervasive influence of whatever Christianity has become, set in rural Missouri.  I’ve never been able to finish it.  The book taught me that I have to work slowly and deliberately.  That experience helped the development of Blue Mound to 161, my first book-length poem.  The more deliberate pacing gave me time to invite more historical strands into the narrative as well as more space in which to re-imagine the work’s larger shape.

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

I always say that I’m a novelist disguised as a poet.  I like to work within an epic impulse—long poems that explore trajectories in American history and culture, blowing the local up and rethinking connections.  It’s what Charles Boer called the “annalic” impulse—working with a story that’s both epic and local in scope, while recovering the mythic qualities of figures in personal and common memory.  It propelled his great book, VarmintQ.

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

I’m a sentence-writer, so it’s a laborious process.  A friend compares it to being a stone mason building a wall.  You pick up one stone after another, examine their shape and re-imagine their place within the wall.  You have to fit them in a process of trial and error to get the thing built.  The editing challenge is that often I’ve worked so long on some sentences that it’s difficult to shed them in the revision process.  I need a grade-school English teacher around to slap my knuckles.

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

Lyric poems (and short stories) tend to be diversions when I’m stuck within a longer project.  I typically want to follow the fuller line of an idea.  I get distracted too easily as a writer.  I wish I had more of that obsessive impulse that carries projects to completion.  For instance, for years I’ve been piecing together a novel about a Thoreau ancestor who lives in a high-rise condo above the Lake in Chicago.  He keeps getting distracted from the Lake though, more focused on the microbes crawling through his colon.  Psychologically, I guess it’s a figure of my writing process that emerges there.

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

Readings can be fun, although the hierarchy that can be inherent in a lot of readings is annoying.  I prefer reading with others “bluegrass” style, trading licks one poem or paragraph after another, focusing on the writing rather than the voice.  I think that in jazz Ralph Ellison called it “antagonistic cooperation.”  More of a conversation than “I liked your poem.  Now what do you think about my poem?”

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

I was a kid in the Nixon era so the shifts in American (writ large, in the sense of the Americas) politics are both horrifying and fascinating to me, the anxieties and narratives that late capital feeds on.  I grew up listening to a lot of distant radio (particularly from New York, Detroit, and Toronto), so I’m curious about the relationship between geographical space and culture there.  In school, I’ve tried to develop a grasp of the range of political developments in Latin America across the past decades.  In the United States, politics has devolved into root points of identification, often more about anxiety and psychological stasis than polis.  At present, I’m wondering if the whole Trump phenomenon simply reflects not only a racist impulse in American culture, but the situation of American men who felt ambiguous feelings or even outright hatred from their fathers.  That hatred offers a terrifying point of identification.  How else does one understand the “sons of Trump?”

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

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that the communal place of writers was to recall and retell the common stories.  Of course, writers have been displaced in contemporary culture by other “tellers”—TV, Hollywood, and now, streaming services.  Vonnegut claimed that this situation left writers with only one place in the culture—getting drunk at weddings and dancing on tables.  I gravitate towards that communal role.  It’s seems essential.  I’m continually amazed by the great writers who offer a means of re-imagining the world around me—writers like Rebecca Solnit, Ed Roberson, Dan Egan, Cecilia Vicuña, and the late Muriel Rukeyser.  All writers who remind me about the “roads that lead back into my own country.”

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

I’ve rarely had challenging experiences with editors.  Work always feels like “another rough draft” to me, so it’s generally an easy process to embrace revisions.  That said, I feel funny asking friends, “Hey, would you give this a read and let me know what you think?”  Great readers are perhaps even more rare than great editors.

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

Michael Anania: Great writers rarely appear by themselves; they more often appear in groups.  His words and teaching have fostered a generous, collaborative spirit in workshops and friendships. 

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

I need to work between poetry, fiction, essay, and script as a means of working out challenges and impasse in projects.  Script-writing has influenced the way in which I imagine characters.  Narrative forms have impacted my sense of lyric play in poems.   Adaptation between genres has offered me a means of revision.  Translation offers a means of inhabiting someone else’s thinking.

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

A great deal of my work gets done in the margins and back pages of books.  I string together sentences and paragraphs in those spaces as a means of starting more sustained pieces.  That process generally avoids the dread “blinking cursor” for me.  I used to write a lot in the early mornings, but that time has generally been absorbed by teaching online.  I miss that open space.

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

I’ve been fortunate to avoid prolonged stalls by moving between genres.  If I’m stuck on an essay or fiction, I’ll work on a poem or review.  Reimagining fiction passages as scenes on stage or screen helps, too.   

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Honeysuckle, wet sneakers, and chlorine.

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

Maps, memory and place.  The Illinois poems (Blue Mound to 161, Hostile Witness, The Bonegatherer, and the forthcoming prairied) all get their impulse from one stretch of road or another.  I traveled a lot by car and those glimpses from the windshield (and the parallel mapped lines) are always close at hand.

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

In terms of poetic voice and impulse, Michael Anania, Rosmary Waldrop, Ed Roberson, and Barbara Guest have been significant in my work.  For fictional terrain, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Barry Hannah, and William Gay.  I also still really love Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle.

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

A socio-cultural or political biography of a Chicago figure.

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

I worked in pastoral ministry and Hospice chaplaincy for twenty years before moving solely into teaching and writing.  I enjoyed the range of that work—maintaining a communal center, counseling, teaching, and of course, getting some time each week to say what was on my mind.

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

My only means of making sense of things.  I would be loathe to give up the conversation in reading and writing.

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

I really loved Meghan Lamb’s Failure to Thrive.  Really strong Rust Belt storytelling.  In terms of poetry, I was struck by Ed Roberson’s To See the Earth Before the End of the World and Sylvia Legris’s Garden Physic.  Also, I recently watched Cecilia Vicuña’s films in the retrospective on her work at the Guggenheim.  Short pieces on quipu knots, sound, and seashore.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A review of Vladimir Sorokin’s Telluria, holy war and hallucinogens in post-Putin Russia.  I’m also trying to find traction on a Chicago mystery and some love poems from a surveilled city.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Phil Hall, The Ash Bell

 

1. After Bashō

  To see a rice paddy    planted    with rice-planting songs
was the first elegance   on my journey

            ~

  I left the willow   So-So wrote under

through half of the sun   over fallow land   toward warm windows
  each step makes the earth boom   its guttural yodel in the old air

such toy arrogance

            ~

  Instead   I borrowed   at midnight   the scarecrow’s kimono
became a puddle drinker   with a side-road heart

  start with a tree   end with a hat

            ~

  Now sober 26 years
I own two pairs of sandals   & a hidden medallion

  bored by lightning
I watch fireflies   & am tipsy   as a boatman

 

The latest from Ontario gothic and Perth-based poet and editor Phil Hall is The Ash Bell (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2022), a sequence of thirty numbered and extended meditations/poem-essays in a lyric structure as much adapted by him as established. Collected and compiled by innumerable fragments of conversation, reading, recollection and meditation, Hall’s lyric always gives the impression of being constantly in flux: reworked, rearranged and repurposed. Over the past twenty or so years, Hall’s collage-poems have become increasingly carefully and thoughtfully stitched-together, providing a casual, almost “aw, shucks” manner to an intricately-precise poetic and purposeful lyric. “A boy is peeing,” he writes, as part of “18 Verulam Revisited,” referencing the sequence that originally appeared as above/ground press chapbook, later part of his award-winning Killdeer(Toronto ON: BookThug, 2011) [see my review of such here], “in a woodshed // & staring at a doe’s tongue    as it drips blood / she hangs    by her hind hooves    from the roof // her tail open    to write    north of anecdote [.]” Anyone familiar with Hall’s prior work will not only recognize familiar subjects in his work, but certain elements of call-back, as he thinks through his lyric across childhood abuse, Emily Carr’s artwork, conversations with Robert Kroetsch, parenting, correspondences, Charles Olson, the Rideau Canal Museum, photography, local history, memorials and multiple other threads. His lyric seems unique, in part, through the sheer amount of simultaneous conversations with other writers, artists and works that his poem-essays engage with, many of which are conversations that have been going on in his work for years.

The late Saskatchewan poet John Newlove once wrote that “the arrangement / is all,” a mantra that perfectly summed-up his own brand of meticulous placement, whereas Hall’s precision appears deliberately nebulous: a poem and a book arriving at a particular point through particular means, one that might even shift through the process of reading. It is one thing to build a strong foundation, but another thing entirely to construct one that holds together just as well, with an innate refusal to remain static. Across one hundred and forty pages of lyric heft, Hall’s The Ash Bell weaves in and through his reading, stories, interactions and queries, opening up a wide expanse of possibilities, seeking, at times, every direction simultaneously. “I am    gerund    at the lake    out the bathroom window,” he writes, to open “11 An Egregore,” “or I am   gerund   Kroetsch   at random   from Advice to My Friends [.]” Or, as a further part of the same poem offers:

               I thought I am    was aim
from outside    the door I slammed    sounded like doorlessness

my arrow    loosed    made home    a magnified name    on a map

  I insisted    I am out of here    but kept looking behind me
                long gone    an arrow

circling    Bobcaygeon    unable to land

  I see I have been woven in
or have woven myself in    by many awkward bows

  flight    is basketry

rob launches the pandemic essays in toronto on dec 5th! with other mansfield authors launching! you should come out!

Mansfield Press
Book Launch — Join Us! 

Toronto: Monday, December 5 · 7:00 pm
Monarch Tavern, 12 Clinton St.

Stephen Brockwell
Immune to the Sacred [see my review of such here]

Amy Dennis
The Sleep Orchard

Candace de Taeye
Pronounced / Workable

rob mclennan
essays in the face of uncertainties

Corrado Paina
Changing Residence

Anton Pooles
Ghost Walk

For media enquiries or further information call 416-532-2086

or contact info@mansfieldpress.net

www.mansfieldpress.net

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Manahil Bandukwala

Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist originally from Pakistan and now settled in Canada. She works as Coordinating Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine , and is Digital Content Editor for Canthius . She is a member of Ottawa-based collaborative writing group VII. Her debut poetry collection is MONUMENT (Brick Books).

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

My first book, MONUMENT, is a collection of historical speculative poetry. It’s the first space I’ve actively started to think about my writing as speculative as a whole.

It’s a little too early to know how it “changed my life,” but I don’t doubt that it will be life changing. Publishing MONUMENT feels like the culmination of years of writing poetry, learning from other poets in my community, and coming into my own style.

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

Since, MONUMENT, the concept of working on a “book” from the beginning has come up more and more. Individual poems always seem to be part of a larger “voice” or collection. Now, I’m trying to scale back and enjoy working on individual poems without any expectation of them ending up as some part of bigger project.

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

I have a lot of stage fright so public readings are incredibly scary. But at the same time, they’re so helpful in improving craft, working on musicality in poetry that’s difficult to see on the page, and in making my work reach audiences in the way I intend. They’re an obstacle, but one that is worthwhile to overcome.

4 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

How do we survive in the current state of the world?

This was the first thing that came to my mind and I turn it over every day. I recently attended a talk between Matthew James Weigel and Omar Musa at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, where the moderator, Jennifer Alicia Murrin, asked about poetry’s place in politics. The conversation that emerged from that question speaks to the theoretical concerns of my own writing. Omar talked about how we end up either overstating or understating the power of poetry. But it does have a certain power.

Is poetry more powerful than other art forms? No, but it is the medium that we (to use the royal we here) have chosen to engage with the “big questions” that each of us carries.

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

Definitely essential. MONUMENT is the book it is thanks to my editor, Cecily Nicholson. Having feedback from an outside editor was instrumental in figuring out how to blend fact with poetry and how to find which parts were confusing. I 

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

Easy enough, because when one medium seems to dry up in inspiration, there’s something creative lying in another. Collaboration is the easiest to shift into, because suddenly the pressure to create something is lifted and it instead becomes about having fun with friends.  

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

Lately I’ve been learning not to panic when my writing gets stalled, and to trust that I will have things to write about. I tend to put the pen down and go wherever creativity wants me to go. Lately, that’s been felting tiny llamas from sheep wool and making raccoon linocuts.

8 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Baking bread.

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

All of the above. Lately I’ve been writing a number of poems in response to Star Trek. This is a response to how the series predicted our future to look like versus how it’s currently going, which too often feels rather bleak.

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

This list is so long but the answer I always come back to is that my writer friends always inspire me. My partner Liam Burke, my friends in VII (Ellen Chang-Richardson, Chris Johnson, nina janedrystek, Helen Robertson, Margo LaPierre, and Conyer Clayton). natalie hanna, who is an inspiration to so many of us.

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

Art museum or gallery curator.

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

Not to be cheesy with this answer, but Ottawa and the poetry community. I started seriously writing poetry because of the writers in Ottawa and at Carleton, and kept going because there was always something to keep going for.

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

Everything Everywhere All At Once. I cannot stress enough how life-changing this film is, and am grateful I got to experience it.

14 - What are you currently working on?

A collection of science fiction love-ish poems.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance

 

Yes & No

Driving, alone, at night, with music
Is safe. No visible stars.
A blood orange moon and then Mars. 

Lying, in bed, alone, is safe.
Keep your hands clean,
You can touch your own face. 

Keep the windows shut. No opening
For spirits: Influenza, evil eye,
Miasma, killer bee. Stray bullet. Flea. 

Everything comes back normal.
The image of the aster,
It’s all in mental space. 

How sublime the moon.
How sublime, the mossy ruins.
The fear and the fear itself.

American poet, critic and essayist Elisa Gabbert’s [see her 2016 "12 or 20 questions" interview here] latest poetry title is Normal Distance (New York NY: Soft Skull Press, 2022), following The French Exit (Birds, LLC, 2010), The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013) [see my review of such here] and L’Heure Bleue or The Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016) [see my review of such here]. Given her last few years have been moving further into the realm of non-fiction, having published the essay collections The Word Pretty (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2018) [see my review of such here], The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays (FSG, 2020) and the forthcoming Any Person Is the Only Self (FSG), the appearance of a further poetry title, returning to a particular leaning of form, is both exciting and intriguing. It is also a bit of a relief, admittedly, as numerous who venture across the boundary of poetry to prose so often do not return (or return further down the road, less sharp in the form than they once were).

Gabbert’s meditative lyric, one simultaneously easygoing and highly crafted, has always leaned into more narrative forms, with her two compositional strains sitting on either side of a seemingly-arbitrary boundary: the “essay-poems” of her poetry collections on one side and the “essay-prose” of her non-fiction works on the other. As her essays more straightforwardly articulate the feeling out of a particular argument, her poems, in their way, narrate more of a short-form of her thinking, displaying a larger lyric across a wide canvas, providing direction enough that the spaces between can be perfectly navigated. As the first half of her opening poem, “Prelude,” writes: “Every year, when the lindens bloom, I think of the year / when the lindens didn’t bloom. // This year, so far, the lindens haven’t bloomed. // I think of the year when the linden didn’t bloom. // An idea almost comes, or it comes in disguise—it’s the / same old thought, but today it is startling. // The way you fail to see, or recognize yourself, in a mirror / at strange angles. // Thoughts almost arrive.” She writes of distance, of memory and of fear, subject matter that runs through, whether overtly or underlying, seemingly through the length and the breadth of her published work. She writes of perception, striding along the boundary between utopia and dystopia, and the possibility that that may or may not be all that there is. There is such a fine pacing to her lines, allowing for enormous amounts of space between lines, between thoughts. One step and one further step, allowing the ideas to connect themselves in the spaces between, and throughout. In this way, she tells you directly what she does not say, if you are open to hearing it. As well, there are moments as though her writing can see into the future, attempting to explore, fully, each particular direction. “Sometimes the dystopia was boring.” she notes, towards the end of the six page poem “New Theories on Boredom.” “At least everyone was boring at the same time about / something inherently interesting. // Sometimes it feels like if I’m not fascinated, I’m bored.” Or a fragment of the three-page poem “I’m Not Mourning (There Is Voids),” that reads:

In the mourning journal he wrote in the months following his mother’s death in 1977, Roland Barthes quotes Donald Winnicott: “The catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened.”

Less than three years after his mother, Barthes died from injuries sustained when he was hit by a laundry van while walking through the streets of Paris.

Spotlight series #79 : Victoria Mbabazi

The seventy-ninth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown and Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker.
 
The whole series can be found online here.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Laura Jaramillo

Laura Jaramillo is a poet and critic from Queens, New York living in Durham, North Carolina. Her books include Material Girl(subpress, 2012) and Making Water (Futurepoem, 2022). She holds a PhD in critical theory from Duke University. She co-runs the North Carolina-based reading and performance series Paradiso.

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

My first book Material Girl didn’t change my day-to-day life much because I was a broke grad student when it was released and couldn’t do much to get the word out about it, but over time, the book found its audience and connected me to other writers and thinkers who I eventually felt I was writing with and for. Material Girl now feels like a digest of my influences at the time, a very New York School inflected-book about living in New York, montage-y, talk-y poems. I think my new book Making Water tries to make a new form, one that is maybe less inherited and more my own. My poetics up to now have been grounded in geographical place, and I wrote Making Water while living in North Carolina, which is a little bit urban, a little bit rural, and a little bit suburban all at once so I wanted to write something that really reflected the experience of moving through this new swampy viney parking lot-filled landscape. I think there’s an idea from people who live in major cities that moving to the south is giving up on being part of culture, or something, but what I found in living here was that having more time and space for study gave me the capacity for an expansiveness to my writing that I has lacked living in cities. I reflect on this in the new book: “Give it up for space // transmuted into time // By year three // Memory will become // Imagination tall as // loblolly pines

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

When I was teenager, I liked the spoken word tracks on punk and riot grrrl albums, and the emotional screeds in zines, and poetry seemed like the closest form to that so I started writing it. Poetry has always just felt the right amount of flexible for me in the sense that I can use so many different voices and different materials in poetry. And also, poetry never feels unrelated to “non-fiction” to me. There’s a way that a poem has to be “true” to work even if the poem is totally abstract or fictional, and that sense of intuitive truth value has been a guiding principle in my writing across genres. Fiction, on the hand, has just always seemed like an impossible amount of infrastructure to manage.

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

I take notes for years and look for patterns in the notes and those notes congeal into poems. Once a few poems are drafted, I start to poke around and see whether there is a conceptual foundation for a book. Once I feel like I am speaking to a specific set of questions, then some of the poems compose themselves in my head and some are works of obsessive revision. The initial process of shoring up the foundations can take me three to five years and then the end stages of drafting and editing takes a year.

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

I am working on a book from the beginning, even when I try to write one-off poems, it almost never works, it always turns into a series and the series expands into a chapbook or a book. I feel that whether I consciously embrace it or not, I am always kind of in the vicinity of the long poem tradition. 

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

I consider readings one of the most valuable tools for editing and shaping my work, both in terms of listening for the parts that are getting the audiences’ attention and where there are disconnects, as well as conversations that spring up after readings. When a reading is organized in a manner that makes readers and listeners feel welcome, they’re one of the rare opportunities for intellectual exchange and connection in what I feel to be an otherwise hyper-atomized U.S. literary landscape. Readings are kind of democratizing because you can’t hide behind prestige or credentials–the audience is with you or they’re not. 

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

My work is animated by roughly two theoretical concerns which are more like infinitely generative questions that never get fully answered in my work and often overlap. The first question is how can I write sensation when our sensoria are constantly changing through technology, trauma, historical change, etc.? Gender is very central to this aspect of my writing–I am perpetually writing from the porosity of the female body. The second question that I am constantly circling is: how do we sus out reality in a world of images? The problem of images is that there is much pleasure and so much illusion in them, so the question of what the feeling of reality is under those conditions interests me.

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

I find it interesting that lots of young people still want to be writers despite a vanishing readership for literature and the destruction of literary infrastructures through austerity politics, so there seems to be some drama that the role of “writer” is playing out in the culture, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what it is. A great mystery of our time.

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

I have never worked with an outside editor but I would welcome the chance. There is too little editing in contemporary U.S. poetry! Too few critics and too few editors. 

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

“Don’t process it too much”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to cultural criticism to film/media writing)? What do you see as the appeal?

I wrote poetry first and criticism much later, but learning to write scholarly critical prose and also film criticisms for a newspaper made me a better poet. The act of learning to describe films concisely made me sensitive to how easily visual description becomes overwhelming for the reader. So now when I write poetry, I have an even more urgent sense of “ok, let’s make every word on the page count!” Visual description is both the precursor to any critical observation and the basic unit of building “the world” of the poem, so I am pretty obsessed with this slippage between description, world building, and critique.

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

I only have a set routine when I am very close to being done with a piece of writing. Otherwise, there is no routine to speak of. My writing is sporadic and woven into my day or chunked in however it fits at any given time.

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

Although it’s a bit embarrassing, my high school love of T.S. Eliot endures and whenever I’m stuck, I go back to Eliot, especially “The Wasteland.” 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

A specific ratio of gasoline to earth reminds me of one of my former homes, Bogota, where my family is from.

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

Photography, film, visual art, fashion tend to be at the center of my writing. I grew up in a family of photographers so it was expected that I would also be a photographer but instead I am a visually driven writer. 

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

Though I’ve never thought of becoming a fiction writer, reading fiction is incredibly important to me and to this day the most relaxing thing I can think of is having nothing to do except read a massive nineteenth-century novel. When I was a kid my parents would send me to Colombia to visit relatives every summer and I did nothing but read so the deep absorption in big novels like Jane Eyre, Les Miserables, In Search of Lost Time probably really shaped my sensibilities as a person and as a writer.  

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

I would like to write a multi-volume memoir.

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

If I wasn’t a writer, I’d be an interior decorator or a make-up artist. 

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

Writing doesn’t cost anything.

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

The two last great books I read were Akilah Oliver’s Flesh Memory: The She Said Dialogues and Karl Larsson’s Form/Force. The last great film I saw was American Honey (2016) by Andrea Arnold.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am currently working on several things: a manuscript that will be a diptych with Making Water, tentatively titled Burning Sequence, which is loosely about post-9/11 American culture and the pandemic. I am also working on a book of essays about the decline of Colombian cinema during the War on Drugs. The essays blend my family’s stories, my own experience as a diasporic Colombian, and key moments from Colombian film and television history to narrate how the war psychically shattered the country. I am also writing a suite of bilingual sonnets culled from classical and modern Baroque Spanish-language texts called The Cannibal Sonnets. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;