Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 122

Rae Armantrout, Finalists

 

I’ve been finding it difficult to keep up with the production of American poet Rae Armantrout (he writes, fully aware of the irony), just now getting into her latest collection, Finalists (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2022). Since discovering her work more than a decade ago, with already a dozen titles published by that point, I’ve already a significant list of further titles I haven’t properly engaged, including Conjure (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), Wobble (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), Entanglements(Wesleyan University Press, 2017) and Itself (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), having at least, worked through her collections Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001 – 2015 (Wesleyan University Press, 2016) [see my review of such here], Just Saying (Wesleyan University Press, 2013) [see my review of such here], Money Shot (Wesleyan University Press, 2011) [see my review of such here] and Versed (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) [see my review of such here]. Billed on the back cover as “A double book,” Finalists is a paired collection of what could easily have been two separate collections of short lyrics—“Threat Landscapes” and “Finalists”—packaged together, perhaps, for the sake of publishing (or even compositional) ease.

Her poems are simultaneously meditative and punchy, and there’s a layering I’ve long appreciated in her work, the ways in which she composes her narratives from thought to thought, moment to moment, akin to watching dots of colour by Seurat form and accumulate. As the opening poem, “Hang On,” ends: “A plaque of barnacles / on top of a toilet— / this cluster / of brittle puckers, // clinging / to its old idea, // these craters striped / pale lavender // for some / unlikely eye.” Each poem is composed out of that assemblage of small pieces, small moments of thought, into something larger, in the same way her poems assemble together to form groupings and manuscripts of larger structures of critical examination, reporting on the movements and minutae of living, social interaction, politics, perception, finances and the weather. Seen as a singular unit, her published books to date, one might say, are about everything: examining and questioning our perceptions of the world, turning around and over ideas akin to the domestic lyrics of Robert Creeley, offering what appear to be quick, short takes that shift how we might encounter or experience the familiar. She writes the spaces between words, between stanzas, sectioning poems in such a way that one might wonder how her work might read in a different order of sections and poems, if there might be something different articulated if the ending of one poem, say, was simply switched out for another. In many ways, Armantrout’s poems aren’t what exist on the page, but what connections the mind makes when assembling each section of what she has crafted. Her poems offer shifts in perception and cadence, composed with pinpoint accuracy. As the end of the poem “Instruction” reads: “The child in her crib / turns her head restlessly, / says, ‘aaah, aaah’ / like an engine left running.” Or, as the poem “In Response,” close to the end of the collection, ends:

I pop,
                  pop
pop 

that question.

Or I coalesce
around it

as ice crystals

form around specks
of coal dust

or pollen.

I begin
to self-report.

 

Ongoing notes: later June, 2022: Natalie Simpson + Hanae Jonas,

Given above/ground press turns twenty-nine years old in July, I’m toying with a BIG SUMMER SALE (although 2022 subscriptions are still available, which I would obviously back-date to January 1st). What else is happening? Our young ladies close out another year of e-learning (less than a week left!), with the hopes that they will emerge into in-person this fall (for Aoife, her first time attending in-person school, after two e-learning years of junior and senior kindergarten). I am curious to see how they might manage. And what might our summer bring?

Calgary AB/Toronto ON: I am very pleased to see new work by Calgary poet Natalie Simpson, her post spell (Gap Riot Press, 2022) [she had a chapbook with above/ground press earlier this year, as well]. Composed as fourteen pages of short, self-contained fragments in sequence, “post,” along with a final, short end-poem, “spell,” Simpson’s work has always reminded slightly (and vice versa) of Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley [see my review of her most recent here]. Both poets, have long existed as curious echoes of each other, appearing as poetic outliers (ie: no one else writes like either of them, and it is hard to easily determine influence or lineage through their lines), and through the ways in which their language is reworked and rearranged from straight lines and long passages to short, staccato bursts, accumulating turns of unexpected and impossible phrase. “trim ducklings // and tit wings,” Simpson writes, in the second section of “post,” “temporary galaxies // collapse // into referents [.]” One word shifts into another word, as meaning and sound resonate the differences between. I’ve always appreciated the way Simpson gathers phrases and thoughts, seeking an assemblage far more than the sum of its parts, and this sequence set with a curious kind of coda nearly as closure, a stitching-together of closing statement, as “spell,” indeed, offers:

      turn eros into store, flaw into wolf, turn fallow to
laughing, lop to plod, lope into implode, feel into elf,
tether into wrath, cloud into dour, terse to rest, nothing
into other, final into lymph, turn simple into bliss, limp to
prim, turn tin to skint, bother to shod, caustic into tossed,
suture into rust

Charlottestown VA: The second title in Albion Books’ eighth series is Vermont poet Hanae Jonas’ chapbook debut, LOWLANDS(Charlottestown VA: Albion Books, 2022). Produced by Brian Teare in a numbered edition of one hundred and sixty-five copies, LOWLANDS writes an ecopoetics of spare, slow meditation, writing landscape, exile and intimate spaces, seeking space, ground and foundation. “When the Puritans came to New England,” she writes, as part of the sequence “Dusk,” “they left graves unadorned. // A loathing of icons, historians say. // But the sense is that the soul has flown away— // Here lies nowhere      snowed-over echo      the enduring / source of night.” There is something of the affirmation in her meditations, something spiritual that calls, rhetorically, out into the universe, seeking resolution to impossible questions. There are also echoes of the lyrics of American poet Rae Armantrout in the way Jones composes her length of meditative pinpoints, accumulating moment upon moment, albeit utilizing longer, stretched-out narrative moments into threads. Her poems pause, hold, pattern and patter, offering a casual stroll along the line in really striking ways. Oh, I would like very much to see more work from Hanae Jonas. As the second half of the poem “Imagining a Forest by the Sea” reads:

Have I reached the periphery of my survival

on romantic sweep?

The lush undergrowth of his care

proportional to the exit of urgent images

which once I spilled freely,

excess trash around town.

I am not special, not even

very psychic.

Just shutting my eyes

for long periods of time.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lawrence Giffin

Lawrence Giffin is the author of several books of poetry, including Untitled, 2004 (After Hours Editions, 2020), Plato’s Closet (Roof Books, 2016) and (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012). He is a co-editor at Golias Books.

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, Christian Name, changed my life in two ways—for the better, because I was finally done with it and done wondering whether or not I was really a poet, and for the worse in that it fooled me into believing I was really was poet.

Certainly, publishing has nothing to do with being a poet (I’m unclear how one is ever a poet when not actively writing a poem); still, as meaningless as it is, it really is everything. As far as how my work has changed, I’m not sure I’m the best judge, since I can only describe my side of it. There is a greater desire to say “something real,” but also a greater suspicion as to the very possibility. There is a greater fear of turning out to be a bullshit artist and greater recognition that likely this is the case. Does any bullshit artist think of themselves as such? The value recognition or praise, even simply in the form of a publisher’s willingness to print it, inevitably diminishes, and one is forced to reckon with the various motives, noble and ignoble, that have been driving one’s practice for so long, often unconsciously, and which now may appear shameful or misguided. This revaluation generally has a positive effect, but it is equally painful and frightening.

It’s good to have something else to fall back on. Adam Phillips tells a story of a poet who told him it’s good for poets to have day jobs, “otherwise they start to believe that they really are poets.”

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I didn’t. I tried my hand at fiction first, but I wasn’t very good at it, and I didn’t have the smarts or attention-span to write non-fiction or, god-forbid, philosophy, so I became a poet. I have a hard time putting myself in the reader’s shoes, and poetry rewards that.

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?
If the work comes at all, and it does, though rarely, it comes out fairly close to its finished form. For me, if a poem requires heavy revisions, it’s because something isn’t working on a fundamental level—in my case, usually, it’s trying to do too many things at once, without a cohesive frame—and quickly falls apart under the tiniest of revisions.

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 begin by writing. It always begins with actually writing something, whatever, on and on—abandoning some poems, returning to others, starting over—until something takes, that is to say, a line or a phrase, some actual string of words, seems to me compelling and generative, and then I follow that until I get bored or feel like it’s over. It doesn’t mean that while I write will be any good, only that I have to stumble on it—I can’t plan it out ahead of time. I hardly ever come to the page with an idea or theme. I always have to start with some bit of text that happens to evoke more text.

I rarely set out to write long poems or short poems. Since I never set out to write this or that kind of poem to begin with, it’s equally unknown ahead of time how long a particular poem would be. I’d like to try writing shorter poems because I think most people prefer to read less rather than more.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don’t often enjoy attending them, and rarely enjoy giving them. That said, they aren’t counter to my process any more than they are necessary to it.

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?
Nothing explicit, though I certainly have interests and preoccupations which cannot fail to give the work a vague sense of coherence. Poetry is particularly poor at answering questions (or even forming them), and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you a load of bullshit. If poetry is anything, has any being, it can’t be the sort of discourse about which questions can be posed ahead of time, as if the answers already exist and are merely waiting to be uncovered. People who look to poetry for answers to life’s most pressing questions are already beyond help.

I do think poetry can bring us into contact with our insignificance and congenital fragility without turning it into the substance of a supreme (and supremacist) nihilism, though it might do that as well (the Iliad is an example of this danger, though Thersites’ objections to the war and his subsequent humiliation gives the poem a whiff of the absurd). Poems make fools and knaves of us all, writers and readers.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Clearly the role of the poet is to assuage our fear that, really, no one knows what is going on. Poets relieve us of having to hope or believe ourselves. They believe for us, on our behalf. Maybe this answers Hölderlin’s question, “what good are poets in lean times?” They get us through rough patches by spouting reenchantment propaganda.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Both. Neither.

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

10 - 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 can’t keep any routine at all, much less one around an activity as frustrating and demoralizing as trying to write a poem. I long ago gave up on the hope that I would learn to schedule things with a sufficient level of granularity or wake up early to compose my silly little verses. As long as my kid is safe, my partner feels supported, and the laundry is done—success. Were poetry a similar prerequisite, I’d have given up long ago.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
If the writing gets stalled, it’s usually because I’m trying too hard. The only way out I know is to keep writing, to stop trying to write and write, whatever comes out. Like I said, something has to take, but that something has always to be already written before I can stumble upon it. It's a dilemma, like Baron Munchausen pulling himself up by his own ponytail, and one which can be addressed only by a mad scribbling.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Foul river mud. Diesel exhaust. Casseroles.

13 - 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?
Philosophy, physics, psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, game theory, algorithmic information theory, Greek mythology.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Perennially returning to Bataille, Heidegger, Schuyler, Ashbery. Have of late been reading Wittgenstein, Adam Phillips, Montaigne, Nicole Loraux, Seth Benardete, Hans Blumenberg. Diderot still manages to scandalize me. Recent poetry that sticks out includes the late Iliassa Sequin’s collected, John Coletti’s Deep Code, Josef Kaplan’s Loser, Denise Riley’s Say Something Back (reprinted by NYRB with the remarkable Time Lived, Without Its Flow), and Gordon Faylor’s Want.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Inherit a fortune.

16 - 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?
Who can say? For one, writing is not my occupation, if that means what occupies the greatest amount of my time or where I get my money. Certainly, thinking I am a poet occupies great swathes of the day, but actually writing, no.

Were I not who I am—every capricious decision and accident of fate—I would be someone else, and since there are plenty of other people, I am already doing all the things I would be had I been somebody else.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’ve always found reading—holding onto an idea, following a thread, understanding the stakes—difficult. And people are a mystery to me—their motives, why some things make them happy and other things sad, why they want the things they want. I suppose writing addressed those twin mysteries and promised not only access to them but the privileged access of a poet. But such access is not truly possible, and even if it were, certainly poetry would not be the means.

I find the idea of a reader to be utterly incomprehensible, so that when I try to write for an idealized reader, the figure in my head quickly becomes monstrous, and when I don’t write for the reader, I seem to default to addressing some bitter and hateful deity.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was either Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy or Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past. I think Thor: Ragnarok was probably the last time I left the theater perfectly satisfied.

19 - What are you currently working on?
Either a pretentious and likely fatuous book on the uselessness and unavoidability of mythic delusion in daily life or an inspired and fascinating book on the uselessness and unavoidability of mythic delusion in daily life. Regardless, it will never see the light of day.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Marwa Helal, Ante body

 

napoleon shot the nose off the sphinx
            they broke the noses off the statues to hide their creators’ race
            they broke the noses off to deactivate the statues’ supernatural powers
napoleon overcompensated for his lack of height
napoleon sought power war conquest
napoleon got a complex in his name
western psych (read: sike!) wants you to think it was because of his height
but really, it’s because he was white

I’m absolutely fascinated by the delightfully-complex chorus of Marwa Helal’ssecond full-length poetry title, Ante body (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022), a follow-up to her debut, Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019). “Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt,” her author biography offers, and currently living “everywhere,” Helal’s Ante body writes gymnastically around the remixed borders of language, colonial drift, theory and memory, composing fragments into a layered text of overlapping and repeating image and sound, less a collage than a series of steps in sequence that write on crisis and in unison. “the apocalypse isnt loud explosions,” she writes as part of the opening section, “ante matter,” “it is / wearing headphones and avoiding eye / contact as we endlessly scroll into an / abyss wearing polo shirts marked // STAFF driving each other from gig to / gig in ubers vias and lyfts while we take / deep drags out of vape pens /// this future would have been prevented / had we all read fanon [.]” Helal writes out a complex examination on colonial impact, immigration and conflict, riffing on politics, gender and culture, offering: “what is a man without patriarchy? who / decides if the sacrifice was worth it? / the one being sacrificed for or the one / doing the sacrificing? or is it the one / being sacrificed? if so, how have you / participated in your own //////// objectification?” Helal offers a lyric mix and remix around agitation, humour and tilt, writing out a solid layering of sound and language; and even, at one point, an ambient play on the abecedarian. Or, as the opening poem offers:

why I so wise

it wasnt so much a doubled consciousness, but more akin to a doubled gaze. i didnt leave my body when it would happen. but it was like i could see myself seeing them see me. and i must admit, i got a rise out of it: their feelings of insecurity. they were so obviously intimidated by the work they knew they could never do. and would never be able to make. this is how beasts are made.

Marwa Helal, Ante Body

 

napoleon shot the nose off the sphinx
            they broke the noses off the statues to hide their creators’ race
            they broke the noses off to deactivate the statues’ supernatural powers
napoleon overcompensated for his lack of height
napoleon sought power war conquest
napoleon got a complex in his name
western psych (read: sike!) wants you to think it was because of his height
but really, it’s because he was white

I’m absolutely fascinated by the delightfully-complex chorus of Marwa Helal’ssecond full-length poetry title, Ante Body (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022), a follow-up to her debut, Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019). “Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt,” her author biography offers, and currently living “everywhere,” Helal’s Ante Body writes gymnastically around the remixed borders of language, colonial drift, theory and memory, composing fragments into a layered text of overlapping and repeating image and sound, less a collage than a series of steps in sequence that write on crisis and in unison. “the apocalypse isnt loud explosions,” she writes as part of the opening section, “ante matter,” “it is / wearing headphones and avoiding eye / contact as we endlessly scroll into an / abyss wearing polo shirts marked // STAFF driving each other from gig to / gig in ubers vias and lyfts while we take / deep drags out of vape pens /// this future would have been prevented / had we all read fanon [.]” Helal writes out a complex examination on colonial impact, immigration and conflict, riffing on politics, gender and culture, offering: “what is a man without patriarchy? who / decides if the sacrifice was worth it? / the one being sacrificed for or the one / doing the sacrificing? or is it the one / being sacrificed? if so, how have you / participated in your own //////// objectification?” Helal offers a lyric mix and remix around agitation, humour and tilt, writing out a solid layering of sound and language; and even, at one point, an ambient play on the abecedarian. Or, as the opening poem offers:

why I so wise

it wasnt so much a doubled consciousness, but more akin to a doubled gaze. i didnt leave my body when it would happen. but it was like i could see myself seeing them see me. and i must admit, i got a rise out of it: their feelings of insecurity. they were so obviously intimidated by the work they knew they could never do. and would never be able to make. this is how beasts are made.

Sommer Browning, Good Actors

 

In Alice Notley’s Waltzing Matilda the narrator reads a friend’s poems, contends with the ambivalence of marriage, tends to sick children, gets hammered, makes an ass of herself, worries about making an ass of herself, reads the news, frets about money. Good god, am I describing my life or a book of poems? This book was published in 1981. I was published in 1976. (“Denver is Home to the World’s First Quiznos”)

It really is a delight to see a third poetry title by Denver poet, artist and gallery entrepreneur Sommer Browning, her Good Actors (Birds, LLC, 2022), following her collections Backup Singers (Birds, LLC, 2014) [see my review of such here] and Either Way I’m Celebrating (Birds, LLC, 2011) [see my review of such here]. Good Actors is a collection of first-person narratives that work through and around the ways in which we present and perceive ourselves, offering commentary and contusions and confabulations, from the poem “To Drunk To Fuck” (possibly referencing the 1981 single of the same name by the Dead Kennedys), rife with its suggested drunk-level of typos, slurred speech and flailing, to the poem “People I’ve Gone to the Movies With,” a piece simply listing the first names of those she has presumably gone to see movies with. She writes an intimacy, articulating out private moments of connection as well as moments of foolishness, depression, isolation, single parenting and multiple definitions of freedom. She works through pop culture references, from the original Twilight Zone to Alice Notley poems to the documentary Grey Gardens, as she writes to open the brilliant “Into-an-Empty-Swimming-Pool-Diving in Love”:

I think Grey Gardens(1975) is a perfect movie. It also happens to be good. Grey Gardens is a documentary about a mother and a daughter, both defunct relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and their poverty-stricken lives in a run-down mansion called Grey Gardens. They are both named Edith, but the mother is called Big Edie and the daughter, Little Edie. There is no movie more about women than this movie. This movie is about what happens when women are permitted to become feral. What happens when women are permitted to revel in their own psychology and plumb it (plummet), free from some parts of their panopticon. I see in these women my entire life, not the details of course, but a thick layer of it: the worries and obsessions and deep connections and fluctuating esteem.

When Little Edie talks about feeling trapped at Grey Gardens, Big Edie says to her, You can’t get any freedom when you’re being supported.

Little Edie says, I think you’re not free when you’re not being supported.

Then a bit later Little Edie adds: It’s awful both ways.

I think it interesting how, as her narrative progresses, she identifies with both characters, whether in turn or simultaneously, as she does in her poem referencing early Alice Notley poems: seeing herself, at first, in Notley’s narrator, and later, in Notley’s husband, Ted Berrigan (as portrayed in Notley’s poems, at least). These are poems that claw at possibility and salvation, at losses both intimate and isolating, and how love can simultaneously rescue and fail. “I care little / For shame.” she writes, as part of the poem “The American Night is Young,” “You were happy until / You weren’t. // You are / Until you aren’t. // A lover’s mouth in your ear / Isn’t a wet willy, // It’s communication.”

A dark and ridiculous humour reminiscent of that of the work of Vancouver Dina Del Bucchia, Browning’s is a poetic shaped by perseverance and bad jokes, observations and commentary, much of which seem to focus on the simple refusal to be knocked down by anything, even down to the title of her debut. “To me,” she writes, to end the poem “Life: A Draft (Prologue),” “I’m surprised I’m still alive. // An aphorist who hates aphorisms. A self-helper who hates the self. // Every tornado begins as a cartoon dog fight. // The joke is you’re born. // That’s why they call it a delivery. // Numb nuts.” Her poems are scrappy, smart and self-aware. She seems attracted to characters relegated to side or minor characters, even within their own stories; who rebel against their own erosion or erasure, refusing to sit quietly, insisting on fighting, even flailing, against the darkness, or even their own best interests. The poems are both revealing and deflective, and there are moments where it is difficult to know if she is writing from a deeply personal space, or writing the outline around it. As the poem “Anxiety” begins: “If I write the script / You know I’d have you say, Hold these melons / in the produce aisle. // And you also know, one of us will have to / grab your crotch. / Life is like that.” Perhaps, in the end, it is all “good acting,” as the characters she references (including her narrator) are occasionally aware of how they require to present themselves, as though everything is, in fact, not actually crumbling around them.

As well, she offers a thread through the collection of commentary akin to a Greek chorus, every poem followed by another offering of “If you tell me which Twilight Zone episode you remember best, I can tell you what your problem is.” Each of these is followed by a description of another classic episode, as well as her corresponding commentary, offering exactly what the opener describes. One of mine, for example, is offered: “Your problem is: You are in conflict, because you believe in justice, but also think the world is meaningless.” The thread through the collection opens as a sequence of self-contained one-offs, but eventually move into a narrative of its own, with interesting conclusion.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sanna Wani

Sanna Wani [photo credit: Hamzah Amin] loves daisies. My Grief, the Sun (House of Anansi, 2022) is her first collection of poetry.

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 chapbook made me feel like publishing for me was possible, which I grew up thinking it was not. It felt like a miracle. My most recent work makes me feel like publishing is not possible again but in a different way. No book is ever complete: every book is a failure: a crystal of time, like most things.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or nonfiction?
My grandfather and a very particular substitute teacher in sixth grade. They encouraged me and encouragement means a lot to children. And then, emotion. I think poetry has a capacity to hold feeling in a way fiction and nonfiction do not. I really needed that in high school, in difficult moments of my life. Poetry saved me. It helps me feel, so it helps me live.
 
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 takes me a long time to start. I like to dwell, to dawdle. But then when it comes, it comes like a tidal wave. First drafts sometimes look like their final shape, sometimes they change entirely. A lot of my work is full of copious notes. I love citations because I love connections.

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?

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
No! But I like people, and it's a good way to engage with poets. Performance is not my strong suit but community is. I wish I could design a reading that was like speed dating. Poets reading one on one to each other in a circle, talking about their work with each other, slowly building up to a group of three then four then everyone comes together again, maybe. Something less watch-one-person-on-a-stage.
 
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?
What is a theoretical concern? What is a question? What is my work? How do I live?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The writer has never had a role. The writer escapes purpose. Story is so much bigger than culture and, well, I was trained as an anthropologist so don't get me started on "culture." A book is a gift, like a flower or a fountain.

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

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
The poem that you need to write is the poem that knows you will die. The poem that you need to read is the poem that turns you into a different person at the end of it.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?
Very hard. Writing fiction is like fighting. The appeal is that the story can get bigger, can make a world. Though I don't like the term world-making any more because of this great essay by Callum Angus. But prose, to me, is like the public reading. I want to practice it in a new way. I want to make something new.

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?

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
People. When I leave my desk, or my phone, behind, and I just spend a good few days in nature and with people, something will come back to me. It always does. I also reread this by Louise Gluck.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Sandalwood. Freshly cooked rice. Walnut. Clementines.

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?

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Too many. Lately? Lily Wang, Manahil Bandukwala, Victoria Mbabazi, Sennah Yee, and Faith Arkorful. Sarah Ghazal Ali, Hua Xi and Patrycja Humienik. I read Anna Swir's Talking to My Body every night. Dionne Brand and Billy-Ray Belcourt. Heather Christle's The Trees The Trees, Yanyi's The Year of Blue Water, Bhanu Kapil's Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. Fatimah Asghar's poem "Kal." Natalie Diaz's "The First Water is the Body."

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Climb a mountain.

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?
Probably becoming a doctor. Maybe I still will.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don't know. I don't think we're supposed to.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just watched Paterson the other day and I'm notoriously bad at watching movies. It had me hypnotized. It was so patient and gentle. The listening. I still don't like Adam Driver though.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A short story about my family and a ghost. It's for the KAL fiction anthology.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ted Rees, Dog Day Economy

 
 

He would sniff Ajax just to feel the burn
asynchronous to my youth in ditches
the grey matter of free will crunching
its way through the forest of worship
shame of clashing melodic intervals
self on screen not always so synched
but fun for a while ‘til a fanatic walked,
they all walk.

It’s why our scrambled intention to learn
how to trache the horizon was initiated.
Sadly, its execution was tragicomic,
deeply compressed yet histrionic, accurate yet
subject to the whims of the board
on which we all opened fire. Damn Ambien,
fucked five ways to Friday keep it down down,
landed into a house that ain’t mine,
baton gauntlet psychic scan
and where are my contours, my slop?

Did you reel in the sandtrap rubbing slamming
against illusive green? (“Economy, a Reshaped Spit”)

From Philadelphia poet, essayist and editor Ted Rees comes Dog Day Economy (New York NY: Roof Books, 2022), a suite of paired suites: from the sixty-odd page sequence “Economy, a Reshaped Spit” to the triptych “Dog Day Scrolls”: “I: Dog,” “II: Day” and “III: Scrolls.” There are curious echoes of Kootenay School of Writing language gymnastics in Rees’ articulations, one that has rippled across multiple writers in the interim, including Jeff Derksen, Colin Smith, Louis Cabri (who studied in Philadelphia in the 1990s), Colin Smith and even Philadelphia poet ryan eckes, blending a collage of sound and meaning across critiques of politics and policy, social justice and late capitalism. Rees composes collage-poems of despair and shifting foundations, poems that articulate a deep uncertainty and urgency, each of which feed off the other, writing savage, slant and skant across the body of a culture infused with its own sense of self-annihilation. “One day we’ll tickle again,” he writes, towards the end of the opening section, “but cold gin, / automatic rifles, discerning smiles / beneath masks, my binky.” His poems articulate simultaneously a savage, pessimistic critique and a hopeless, even desperate, optimism. As he offers in his “Notes on the Poems” at the back of the collection:

The poems of Economy, a Reshaped Spit were composed by writing with and around language that was physically cut and pasted from issues of The Economist magazine and Wikipedia articles on people who have disappeared mysteriously, with special attention given to those who seem to have disappeared voluntarily. They were written in Philadelphia between November 2019 and May 2020.

The poems of Dog Day Scrolls were first composed on large sheets of butcher paper utilizing luggage markers, permanent markers, packing tape, scraps of paper, and pens, in a rather physical process. They were written in Philadelphia between 2020’s summer solstice and autumnal equinox.

Tasnuva Hayden, An Orchid Astronomy

 

Tumbling towards the centre of the galaxy, at the birth and death
place of millions of stars, it’s a little clot of blood that forms.

  

 

                                    I no longer associate sunshine with drowning.

 

 

            The ice is melting faster and faster now.

            Every year, faster, the orchid agrees.

 

 

On the morning they found Sarvvis wrapped in kelp and
seaweed, I’d caught a cold.
                                    (“SCHOLARS AND REINDEER”)

Calgary-based Tasnuva Hayden’s full-length poetry debut is An Orchid Astronomy (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2022), a book-length narrative around “the story of Sophie, of her personal collapse and of climate catastrophe, told in striking experimental poetry.” The back cover writes that “Sophie grew up in Veslefjord, deep in the Norwegian North, where the ice stretches to the horizon and the long polar night is filled with stories about the animals of the sea, ice, and sky. Now the ice is melting and the animals are dying. Sophie’s mother is also dead, leaving behind a daughter and a lover on the melting permafrost.” Hayden composes her Orchid as a sequence of lyric pinpoints, lines set as constellation across the page, linking stars to further starts to form her images, her stories; enough to hold the world together, simultaneously brief and sketched and across the vastness of narrative time. Through An Orchid Astronomy, Hayden has composed fifteen poems of varying length, breadth and scope, most of which are named for constellations, as well as occasional stars and other celestial offerings. Ranging from lengthier stretches to short, scattered bursts, the structure of the collection is held by a narrative through-line writing itself across a tension of expanding-and-contracting lyric. “What is civilization without / literature?” she asks, early on in the collection. “From the windows, watching stars. / Sand sugared across shoulders. // Hands or hooves?”

LYRA II

binary stars collapse eclipses

vibration strings discrepancy in mercury’s orbit—
flawed newton’s gravitation

arctic mechanics and quantum winds
codify meta-energy mathematics
dead-tissue harmonics permeate every life form—
with the exception of ginko biloba
evolved from precambrian juggernauts
four thousand million years past

a fractioned second gravitates north
coughing up scant bearings
spins the compass needle to post-modern mass extinction
narhwals logarithmic-spiral towards the ocean floor
jaws heavy with decaying flesh
above the pressure of the frozen meniscus
radiant dragon tears evaporate past vega

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with David Greenspan

David Greenspan is the author of One Person Holds So Much Silence (Driftwood Press). He’s a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi and earned an MFA from UMass Amherst. His poems have appeared in places like Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Prelude, and others.

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?

I published two chapbooks with micro presses years ago, but those are long out of print. So, this feels like my first long-form publishing experience. It’s kind of amazing to think my thoughts, anxieties, and obsessions may find their way into random people’s hands. That feeling alone is enough to momentarily change my life. On a larger scale, One Person Holds So Much Silence was my MFA thesis and represents three years of reading, writing, and being in conversation with other writers and thinkers. In that sense, the book hasn’t so much changed my life as serve as a record of that life.

My more recent poems feel more associative. I’ve started to give up a bit on narrative. Don’t get me wrong, I love narrative. I love to read it and find it hard not to incorporate it in my writing. Giving up a narrative coherence, which is to say a literal and linear coherence, in favor of sound, image, emotion, and experience, though, is what I’ve been trying to do lately.

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

Through spoken word poetry, open mics, poetry slams. After a couple of years of trying, and failing, to be a good performer, which is to say using performance to deepen the written poem, I admitted I was much better suited to writing full stop. I haven’t looked back since.

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 slow drafter who needs lots of time and revision to get a poem from “initial cool idea” to something public facing or publication-ready. That said, sometimes a poem will just come out fully formed, or very close. Those are the best poems and their memory keeps me writing when everything else about the process drags. I also tend to get hung up on line-by-line concerns. I’ll spend too much time trying to get one individual line to stand on its own, independent of the lines before and after it. That definitely slows down my drafting process.

On the subject of notes, copious or otherwise, I took a workshop with CA Conrad where we used ritual to write poems. We took notes during these rituals and the resulting poem (the third section of my book, “A Poem to Pass the Time”) was built from those notes. Since then, I’ve been asking myself at what point the notes become the poem. It’s kind of wild to consider and takes some of the pressure out of approaching the page.

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 almost always start with a line or image and build from there. My experience on larger projects – books, chapbooks, longer poems, or even suites of connected poems – is that they’re the same. I’ll start with a poem, add more poems, keep adding poems. After a period of time, I’ll see what I have and start cutting. The project takes shape from there. What poems connect? What poems are interesting but not right for this particular frame? What poems aren’t working at all? And so on.

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

They used to be, but no so much anymore. Part of this is my intense dislike of being the center of any sort of attention. Please do not perceive my corporeal form. This dislike was almost certainly born from my fumbling experience doing spoken word. Performance is an art and one I’m not very adept at! That said, readings are important. They’re a way to build community and sociality around the intensely private work of writing. I like attending them and getting to talk to poets and writers afterwards.

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 didn’t have any theoretical concerns until I started reading Sean Bonney. His poems are so direct, so powerful, and make such graceful use of thinkers like the Situationists, that I had to find out who they were. That led to reading more classical Marxist texts. I hope I’ve incorporated these concerns – political economy, cultural criticism, literary criticism, questions around gender and classification/hierarchy, ecological theory – into my poems in a way that mirrors Sean. That is to say I hope I’m not being didactic.

Along those lines, I don’t think I’m answering any questions in my poems. The question I’m left considering as a result of reading and writing, however, is what it means to be a human alive right now and all that entails – existing within an unfolding and expansive set of capitalist social relations, how to push against those in my life, how to be in conversation with other writers and thinkers attempting the same, how to slip past the commodity form, etc.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think a writer’s role has to be to question, probe, explore. To find the fissures, contradictions, and worry them. I’m thinking about running my tongue along a tooth with a crack in it and how after I’ve found that crack I can’t stop returning to it. That’s what a writer should do.

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

The process of editing One Person Holds So Much Silence was really wonderful. Jerrod Schwarz, Driftwood’s Poetry Editor, had really deft edits which made particular poems that much stronger. That’s been about my entire experience working with an editor. I will say that I’ve been in workshop continuously for the past four years and getting that kind of deep, thoughtful feedback has been indispensable for my poems.

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

I’m really tempted to say the generic “be ruthless when you cut.” My poems have benefited so much from cutting individual lines, images, fragments that I might love but aren’t doing anything in service of the larger poem. The advice to read as much as you can, though, has been even more helpful. Reading is as important as anything else (workshop, literature seminars). I write my best poems, or what I consider my best, when I’m reading ceaselessly. Poetry, for sure, but fiction, academic texts, cultural criticism, whatever.

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

Any routine I manage to put together changes semester to semester. My favorite is when I’m able to wake up and immediately start reading and writing. That’s not always the case, though, and definitely isn’t this semester. The steadiest routine I’ve been able to keep is to read right before I write. I usually have a few books I’m reading at any given time, alongside articles for class/teaching, and will read at least a couple of pages before getting started. This gestures back to my answer above, but reading to “recharge my creative battery” is critical. Plus, it broadens my subject matter. If left to my own devices, I’d write the same poem over and over. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it would probably get boring.  

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

If I have some sort of a routine going, then I’m usually able to fall back on that if I’m feeling stalled or stuck. I’m so used to doing X, Y, and Z and then writing that it just happens even if I don’t feel great about the words I get out. During times when I don’t have that momentum, I don’t have anything I do to get inspired. I’ll read, but sometimes the poems just won’t come. I’ve been writing long enough to know that this passes, but it’s still frightening and disorientating in the moment.  

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Coal tar. That sounds somewhat mysterious, but the boring truth is that my entire family uses t gel shampoo, which is made with coal tar.

13 - 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?

So many! Nature has had a huge affect on me as a writer and human being. I lived in Western Massachusetts for three years and spent a lot of time walking around the woods. That was an incredible creative practice. Music, too, though in more of a “background soundtrack” type of way. I like listening to podcasts and use them as another form of reading. So that might just be saying “books come from books” in a roundabout way.

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

Too many! In the back interview in One Person Holds So Much Silence, I listed a bunch of poets like Bhanu Kapil, Larry Levis, and John Murillo. To that list I’d add Bill Moran, Mathilda Cullen, Hoa Nguyen, Terrance Hayes, Sarah Rose Nordgren, Melissa Broder, Mary Ruefle, Danniel Schoonebeek, Lucie Brock-Broido, Juliana Spahr. Prose from Jenny Hval, Leopoldine Core, Lidia Yuknavitch, Brad Phillips, Denis Johnson, Max Porter. Theory/academic writing from Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Tithi Bhattacharya, Susan Ferguson, Lauren Berlant, Mark Fisher. My grad school classmates and their work.

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

Skydive. That sounds like a dumb, thrown off answer, but I’m serious. I’m terrified of heights and the idea of jumping out of a plane is one of my worst nightmares. That said, I want to skydive so much. I don’t know if it’s the very human drive towards what most scares us, some personal compulsion/pathology I have yet to understand, or something else entirely, but I must jump out of a plane.

16 - 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?

That’s an interesting question in that writing isn’t my occupation. That is to say I don’t sell my labor in the form of writing in exchange for a wage. I’m a grad student and teach comp, so writing is central, but it’s second to being in the classroom (in person or virtual), talking to students, helping them see what their writing is doing and not doing, and so on. Still, writers so often end up teaching that it does feel like I’m being paid to write.

I’m not sure what I’d be doing if I didn’t write. I worked for years in content marketing and hated it. I’d come home with that part of my brain and spirit sapped. I worked for a while as a behavioral health tech, which is fancy word for orderly, in the addiction treatment industry. I liked that a lot and would gladly do it today. 

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

A mix of being a bookworm as a kid and being encouraged to write during formative times. Plus, it seems like lots of writers are just built for it. Enjoying solitude, tinkering endlessly with writing from poems to emails, reading things from multiple perspectives (be it a poem or, again, an email), and so on. All of these personality traits made it almost impossible for me not to write.

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

I’ve been making my way through Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy and loving them. Not only are they well written, but their ambition is breathtaking. The last great movie is harder! I don’t watch a ton of movies outside of the horror genre which doesn’t always have “great” movies. Lots of them are objectively bad, but give me so much pleasure from a visceral/nerves/almost stimming perspective. The last horror movie I watched and loved was YellowBrickRoad.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Just poems. I have somewhere between a chapbook and full length collection’s amount of poems and am slowly adding to that.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;