Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 141

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Joey Yearous-Algozin

Joey Yearous-Algozin is the author of A Feeling Called Heaven (Nightboat Books), Utopia , and the multi-volume The Lazarus Project, among others. With Holly Melgard, he has co-authored a trilogy of books: Holly Melgard’s Friends and Family , White Trash , and Liquidation . He is a founding member of the publishing collective, Troll Thread. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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 don’t really think of having had a first book, but a first series of books or new ways of distributing text. Rather than thinking of publishing a discrete book, my earlier work was part of reimaging what publishing and writing are as activities. With Troll Thread – a Print-on-Demand/Tumblr press I helped start in 2010 – we were interested in testing the boundaries of printability and the book as a container for information or knowledge. My most recent book, A Feeling Called Heaven (Nightboat),is a book length poem on extinction and intimacy loosely following the form of guided meditations. In a way, the new work extends these ideas of immediacy and direct communication on a more local level.

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

My dad’s a writer and was always working on a novel, so I was surrounded by books growing up. I liked stories, but there was something about poetry that made more sense to me. It’s wasn’t an intellectual proposition, we’re drawn to what we are drawn to, but I suppose poetry made a kind of intuitive sense. I remember loving the mystery behind hearing Stephen Crane’s poems, say, and wanting to make something that felt like having them read to 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?

Mostly, it’s ideas for a project that morph over time. I’ll write something out, edit it later and then build on that from the notes I take as I’m turning the idea over and over in my head.

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?

With Troll Thread, we could publish a book with as little as three pages or as many as multiple thousands. After that the difference between a single poem or book stopped making a lot of sense.

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 normally write something for a given reading, but A Feeling Called Heaven got its start when Shiv Kotecha asked me to read for a series he was running in Codex Books in Manhattan. I’d just finished my dissertation and hadn’t really written anything else that year, so I had to write something new for it. Also, something had changed for me as a writer. I felt this urgent need to talk to people, at least those closest to me, to address them directly. For that reading, I wrote the guided meditation that became the closing of the book.

More generally, I like to read because it’s a way of sharing the things that I’ve made with others. It can be an act of great pleasure and permission to read out loud to a room of people. Also, one thing I learned over the last year is that there’s no substitute for the experience of sitting in a room with a group of people, everyone engaged in a mutual act of attention.

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 new book explores climate collapse, extinction and intimacy, asking what remains if we divest ourselves of the hope of a future. Rather than constructing a series of possible futures in a world-to-come, I wanted to write in a way that paid attention to the present moment as it sits under the shadow of extinction. While I was finishing the book, I was diagnosed with a very manageable kind of lymphoma. So, there’s also a question of what it means to manage and live with disease and the physical knowledge of mortality.

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?

No, probably not.

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

A Feeling Called Heavenwas my first time working with outside editors and I was extremely lucky to have Kim Calder and Evan Kleekamp as my editors. They helped me distill this work from a somewhat sprawling manuscript, stripping it down to its essential parts.

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

Someone I met on the bus in Wisconsin where I grew up told me a story that is a kind of advice. The story takes place in a small town during a plague. Amongst so much death, the people of this town came to the conclusion that god had forsaken them and had stopped attending church. That was until a group of flagellants marched through the town, whipping themselves as they walked. When they got to the center of the city, one of them spoke to the people who had come out to see the parade. This flagellant told the townspeople they were wrong, they hadn’t been forsaken, but that the plague was in fact what god’s love looked like. He told them that they had to go back to worshipping god, performing their familiar rituals, even though it wouldn’t do them any good, it was too late for them to be saved. After his speech, he fell back in line and the line of flagellants walked out of town. But something in the air had changed and the next Sunday, the church was full again.

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?

No real routine, writing’s a constant preoccupation that I do when I can.

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

I love open world video games like Breath of the Wild. I learned more from Breath of the Wild about how the conscious mind embeds itself in a simulated environment than anywhere else besides maybe New Age music.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Honestly, I’ve mostly just been home since Covid started, so I haven’t had a chance to be reminded. Maybe Holly’s deodorant? She says it’s the catbox but I’m not sure I can really smell that anymore.

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?

New Age music taught me a way of understanding how time moves in a poem. Poetry is a time-based art, meaning that it occurs over time, and in slowing down the pace of the poem, you can feel time move in it almost independent of its language. In those moments, you can feel it taking place with something like the noise of the world.

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

I’m lucky to count some of my favorite writers as my dear friends and I don’t want to randomly forget anyone here as I’m typing this, so I’ll leave it at that.

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

Run around with my nephew, who’s started walking since everyone stopped going anywhere.

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?

Writing’s not my occupation. I’m an adjunct professor, working at 3 different schools in and around New York City throughout the year. I love teaching, but American higher education is structured so that I both am and am not a teacher at the same time. So, instead of an imaginary other job, I’d just like a real version of the one I have.

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

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be the kind of person who made books.

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

I re-read Alli Warren’s Little Hill this week and its low key a masterpiece. I just watched Ivan’s Childhood and the scene is the birch trees is one of the most beautiful shots I’ve ever seen.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’ve got some ideas, but nothing worth talking about yet.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Castle Grayskull: a magazine of ‘verse

 

Dick Gallup’s Things to Do

Modulate your feelings

Make the spaces real 

Keep the intellect in tune

Charge your batteries regularly

Remember what happens. (Donald Guravich)

Patrick James Dunagan was good enough to send along a copy of the first (and possibly only) issue of Castle Grayskull: a magazine of ‘verse (San Francisco CA: fall 2021), a side-stapled full-size journal containing an incredible wealth of contemporary poetry, many of whom are either San Francisco-based or have publishing relationships with City Lights Books (or: both). The list of contributors is over fifty names strong, and includes Clark Coolidge, Gregory Corso, Margaret Randall, Edmund Berrigan, Ammiel Alcalay, Joshua Beckman, Norma Cole, Kit Schluter, Cedar Sigo, Stacy Szymaszek, Ryan Newton, Sophia Dahlin, Eileen Myles, Philip Lamantia, Gilliam Conoley, Chris Carosi, Anselm Berrigan, Dunagan, Jeffrey Joe Nelson, Will Alexander, Josiah Luis Alderete and Diane Di Prima. At sixty pages in length, the scope of this collection is stunning. Published by “S. Keletor” and edited by Micah Ballard and Garrett Caples, the second of whom a poet who also edits at City Lights Books, there is a simultaneous element of established and subversive elements mingling through this collection, from elements of form and production, to some of the well-established contributors running through a printed, side-stapled offering. “even the / sense / sets beat,” Norma Cole writes, to close her short lyric, “from Lost Dance.” Or “Stranglers in Love” by Julien Poirier, an extended, single-page rush to a punch that ends with: “where you and I were once locked / midair / like a couple of sumo wrestlers / in a soap bubble / like a couple / of spelling bee finalists / in an elevator / demolishing each other in a fury / whose key ingredient is trust. / It was exhausting / but we got what we came for.” Or, as the final stanza of Edmund Berrigan’s “Dream with Doug in It” reads:

Trust no one’s advice, but know their point of view,
see the world through other eyes, can I borrow
your vision, so much repeats from stage to stage,
borrowed wisdom with age expanding the shroud.

How could anyone not be charmed by an editorial, “From The Desk of Skeletor,” that opens: “Every now and again, I get the urge to read poesie, and yet all the landscape of poetry publications these days is a vast wasteland of online nothingness, very often just a PDF of a bunch of poems with so little editorial investment the poems appear in the same font in which the poem submitted his or her or their work! WHAT?!?! This is unacceptable in a day and age in which an editor has so much at hand, so many fonts that the editors of yesteryear would have given their eyeteeth to have at their disposal. It won’t do, my friends, it won’t do.” This is a publication put together relatively cheaply by someone (or multiple someones) with a remarkably good (combined) editorial eye (or eyes), able to produce a single-issue (possibly) one-off of work that is just too good to not get out into the world. There is the sense of what bpNichol referred to as “serious play” in the work of all of these writers. While those who found and continue poetry journals, there is something uniquely wonderful about the oddly-distributed one-off, reminiscent, slightly, of the sequence of journal one-offs that Stuart Ross has been producing over the years ( The Northern Testicle Review , for example), or even some of the more ongoing, occasional and sadly-defunct journals such as Vancouver’s TADS (George Bowering et al) or Toronto’s COUGH(Victor Coleman, Michael Boughn et al) [see my review of the last one I saw here], or even our ongoing The Peter F. Yacht Club (although the editorial suggests that “Skeletor” might not approve of my design work on such). There is just some incredible work here, some of which really needs to be seen to be believed.

Naturally, there’s no contact or ordering information anywhere in the publication, although I would suspect that copies might be possible through the Bookstore at City Lights.

the answer to everything: Selected Poems of Ken Belford

My review of the answer to everything: Selected Poems of Ken Belford (Caitlin Press, 2021), edited by Rob Budde and Si Transken, with consulting editor Jordan Scott, is now up at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sharon McCartney

Sharon McCartney is the author of Villa Negativa (2021, Biblioasis), Metanoia (2016, Biblioasis), Hard Ass (2013, Palimpsest), For and Against (2010, Goose Lane Editions), The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2007, Nightwood Editions), Karenin Sings the Blues (2003, Goose Lane Editions) and Under the Abdominal Wall (1999, Anvil Press). She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

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

In practical terms, my first book did not change my life in the least. At that point, I had three children under the age of 10 and three part-time jobs. At the University of Victoria, I had a .75 appointment as a co-op coordinator and a .5 appointment as an instructor in the law faculty, so I was the equivalent of 1.25 people. As well, I was a member of a federal administrative tribunal, which sat for approximately six days each month. It was a busy time. Brian Kaufman and Anvil Press hosted a launch for the book in Vancouver in the first week of January 2000. I stayed overnight at the Sylvia and saw a few people. That was fun, and then I went home to Victoria and got back to work.

In creative terms, that book changed everything for me. I grew up in a very patriarchal, misogynistic world. I believed what I had been told about the value of women’s work and voices, which was that they were nothing compared to the work and voices of men. White men, of course. When my third son was born, in my third c-section in four years, I hemorrhaged on the operating room table. I thought that I was going to die. But I didn’t, and when I recovered, I found myself writing poems about childbirth. The urgency of speaking about that experience, of understanding it, overwhelmed my early indoctrination. Publishing those poems in Under the Abdominal Wall with Anvil Press (thank you Brian) meant so much to me. It was me saying I’m here, and I matter and what happened to me matters. That formed the basis of all my subsequent work.

My recent work is completely different from my earlier books. I am no longer capable of writing those one-page set pieces that I used to write. I don’t know why. They just seem so artificial. So contrived. All I want now is to say what I want to say. I don’t care whether or not it seems like poetry. I called my most recent book a memoir in verse. It’s ironic, of course. The writing bears no resemblance to verse. A recent reviewer missed that joke. Perhaps it was too subtle. But it makes me laugh.

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

I recall writing poetry as far back as elementary school. I was a lonely child who loved to read so writing came naturally, but it was always short pieces – poetry, rather than prose. I’m not a very patient person (at all). Prose requires patience. I just want to get the thing done and move on. I want the pay off more quickly than is possible with prose. 

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 always have a manuscript on the go. I add bits and pieces to it gradually. Sometimes a lot at once and sometimes nothing for months. Revision is a constant, ongoing process. Finding more interesting words. Moving lines around. That’s the fun part.

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?

All I need is one line to get going. For my current manuscript, it was something that a boy said years ago in Iowa City, when I walked past him at a 7-11. He looked at me and said, “Hey trouble.” I was secretly pleased to be flirted with, but I kept going. I think I was kind of a prude. That line stuck with me though – how we are attracted to trouble. To trials and tribulations.

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

Readings are so much fun – sometimes too much fun. The last poem in my book Hard Ass is titled “On Getting Drunk and Passing Out at My Own Book Launch.” I laugh, but, of course, it’s not funny.

I really do enjoy readings though. The poetry world in Canada is such a small community that readings are more like gatherings of friends than performances. If I get a laugh or two out of the crowd, I’m happy. And then we all hang out together and talk about everything except poetry. Or, at least, we used to in the pre-COVID world. I hope that we can get back to that somehow, some day. 

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

The question I am always trying to answer with my work is simply this: who and what am I?

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 arts are how we connect. Money and the world of commerce pulls us apart. Art shows us what we share. I have no opinion as to what the role of the writer should be. My writing is only political in the sense that I am trying to convey what it means for me to be human and flawed and to be in this world and keep going no matter what.

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

I have had excellent editors over the years, and I am enormously grateful for good editorial advice. What a luxury it is to have someone pay close attention to your work – someone whose purpose in reading your work is only to make it better. I love to be challenged by an editor, and I am able to say no when I need to. That’s such an important part of the editorial process.

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

In his 2004 TS Eliot lecture, Don Paterson says that the greatest risk that a writer can take is clarity. Saying what you mean and being willing to be understood. That is what directs all of my writing.

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’m a morning writer. I get up usually around 5 a.m., when the world is quiet. I drink blessed glorious coffee. Sometimes I write, sometimes I just play Solitaire on my phone. All good.

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

Getting stuck is a failure of nerve. Nerve rejuvenators include Louise Glück, Charlie Smith, Sharon Olds, Franz Wright, Paterson, Four Quartets, Ai, Peter Everwine, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Jen Currin, Larry Levis, “The Glass Essay.” Kathryn Mockler’s Onion Man. Robert Frost’s “Directive.” Even prose works – Barry Hannah’s “Testimony of Pilot” from Airships has the best last line ever. Never fails.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Mostly car exhaust. My early years were spent in a typical suburban tract home. There was an attached garage, and the family car was an enormous Chevrolet Kingswood Estate station wagon. When my mother pulled the car into the garage, the sweet odor of exhaust permeated the house. In my bedroom, that aroma told me that my mother was home. If she had been at the grocery store, there was likely a treat for me – Oreos or Hershey’s kisses or something like that. I have only good associations with the smell of car exhaust.

There’s also the smell of salt air and palm trees that hits you at a certain point when the aircraft descends into Lindbergh Field in the San Diego harbour. That’s the smell of home for me as well.

And Cashmere Bouquet talcum powder. That’s the scent of my long-gone beloved mother. They don’t make it any more, but I can still smell it.

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?

As a dog owner, I do a lot of walking. I don’t listen to music while I walk or look at my phone. I pay attention to the dog and the natural world and lines come to me. That happens whether we’re on city streets or in the woods. In Fredericton, the dog and I walked often along the Wolastoq river. Fredericton has a wonderful system of trails that are usually almost entirely people-free. I learned that the river is different every day, even in the winter when it’s frozen. The river didn’t necessarily make its way into my poetry, but those walks helped me to think and allowed lines to come to me. Now that I live in Victoria, the dog is very old and can’t walk as far or as fast. We do make it fairly regularly to the off-leash dog park on Dallas Road though. There, I let the dog take his time sniffing weeds and grass and other dog’s butts, and I enjoy the view of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Olympics across the strait and the sun on my face. And lines often come to me.

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

The writers who are important to me for my work are those who stake out their own territory, who write like no one else. Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” was revelatory, the first time I read it, and changed the way I wrote. She just says what she wants to say and she doesn’t give a shit about us. That’s permission to do the same, if you need permission, which I did. Knausgaard is another one. That complete focus on the self – that is what carries you out of the self. And Franz Wright for his simplicity, his directness, how he is able to transmute pain into beauty.

There are a few books that are very important to me outside of my work. One is Anthony de Mello’s The Way to Love. He says, “Imagine that they are all dead. Imagine that everyone you love is dead.” His point is that you’re still the same person and you still love those people. Death doesn’t kill love. That’s why grasping and control and possession and jealousy have nothing to do with love. Love is not corporeality; it’s freedom. I learned from Anthony de Mello that when I’m feeling something like jealousy or abandonment, what I’m feeling has nothing to do with love. When you love a person, you want what is best for that person, how they would define it. Not how you would define it.

The other book is Erwin Schrödinger’s My View of the World. What a marvellous book! He says we’re all one, and I believe him. He says that we are all one consciousness. He points out that you can never add one consciousness to another. You can’t pile up consciousnesses or split one or subtract one from another. That’s because there is always and ever only one. Goddamn.

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

I would love to work with a Jungian psychoanalyst. As long as it takes. I would like to get past my limitations as a person. Despite my age and experience, I still get tripped up by anger, anxiety, fear of authority figures, resentment, envy and all kinds of negativity. The black dog dogs me. What would life be like without those heart-constricting episodes? I would love to work with someone who could help me to understand who and what I am and how to be consistently generous with all people and all things. Unfortunately, this kind of therapy is a luxury item. It costs a lot of money that I don’t have.

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?

If I’m being realistic, I think that I should have been a librarian – perhaps a law librarian because I do really enjoy legal research. As well, I’m a helper, rather than a leader. I enjoy finding information for people, solving puzzles, anything that involves that kind of analysis and resolution.

If I’m being utterly unrealistic and entirely romantic, I think that I should have been a jockey. I’m too tall though and weigh too much. As athletes, jockeys have to be both light and strong. I grew up near the Del Mar racetrack in California and used to watch the races regularly. My first crush was a jockey. I know that it’s a cruel sport and the horses suffer greatly, but their beauty and power is so alluring. I will never forget watching Secretariat win the Belmont in 1973. My sister Stephanie and I watched it live on TV. He was all alone at the finish line, airborne – as if he was another creature entirely from the rest of the pack doddering along over 30 lengths behind him. I get chills thinking about it. I rode a lot and had a horse of my own, a steady old trail horse, for a brief period when I was teenager. I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to balance astride a galloping horse – to know that joy and power and freedom.

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

Because I was praised for doing it. I was a decent writer early on mostly because I read so much. My parents were good people but both were very emotionally remote and quite busy. I had a privileged childhood in terms of material resources, but I didn’t get a lot of attention or praise. The focus in my childhood home was, naturally, on my oldest sister who was very ill for many years and died when I was 20. Teachers praised me for my writing. That felt like love. It’s as simple as that. When my high school English teacher, a lifelong friend, died in January 2020, I felt that I had lost my real father.

But I read so much when I was young because I loved what good writing does – I loved the connection that I felt with the author of any book that moved me and I loved learning about other people’s lives, other worlds. So while praise helped me down that road, my curiosity and the connection is what kept me going and keeps me going now. I’m very much alone and always will be, but I’m never lonely. I have my manuscript or other people’s books to go to and that is like having one long conversation with the world. It’s company and solace and exploration and growth.

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

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara was the last truly great book I read. This was a few years ago. It grabbed me and changed me the way Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance grabbed me. I felt like a different person at the end, like I had been through something both grand and horrifying with people whom I loved.

I think that the last truly great file I watched was the Danish TV series, The Bridge. It’s spooky and dark and beautiful. Saga is a weird, haunting heroine for the ages. I loved her. I’m also really enjoying Mare of Easttown. Very dark as well. And Kate Winslet’s anti-unattainable beauty standards campaign is much to be admired.

19 - What are you currently working on?

My current manuscript is titled “Hey Trouble.” A few excerpts have been published (Thanks Fiddleheadand the Karen Schindler-edited G U E S T!), but it will be another long piece, a book-length poem, if it is ever published in book form.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: mid-December 2021: Pearl Pirie + Jennifer Baker,

You can’t keep a good chapbook reviewer down, it would seem. 

Don’t forget: 2022 subscriptions are available for above/ground press, yes? Can you believe the press turns twenty-nine next year? Gadzooks!

Ottawa ON: The latest from Pearl Pirie (formerly of Ottawa but now living in the wilds of Quebec, somewhere just across the river and provincial border) is RAIN’S SMALL GESTURES: POEMS (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2021), a small and graceful edition of eighty copies produced by Cameron Anstee’s Apt. 9 Press in September. Over the space of four full-length collections and “dozens of chapbooks,” Pirie has long been attentive to the small and condensed poem, in part through her engagement through Ottawa’s KaDo haiku poets. She has long been attentive to the shape and the scope of such small works, but this is one of the few times she’s put together a collection deliberately leaning into the gesture of the small moment. Or, as she writes as part of her notes at the back of the collection, citing a list of influences and inspirations “who model how to keep it small but meaningful.”

IN THE KITCHEN

the doors
are open as if
the cabinets are poised
to fly away from the house

The poems here are short and sharp, requiring a measure of attention. Reread these, please.

Victoria BC/Ottawa ON: It is good to see a new chapbook of poems from Ottawa poet and critic Jennifer Baker, following her debut, Abject Lessons (above/ground press, 2014): her Groundling (Victoria BC: Trainwreck Press, 2021). Baker’s poems in Groundling utilize erasure and open/empty space a bit more than her work has prior, at least from what I’ve been aware. The poems here offer halt and hesitation, pause and the myriad possibilities of the unwritten/unspoken. “know that my gods are / patience      distance       & hunker down,” she writes, as part of the four-page accumulation, “imbibition.” In certain ways, Baker appears to sharpen poems out of cobbled-notes, erasures, accumulated fragments and salvaged correspondence, including three poems, according to her own notes at the back, produced as “erasure poems generated from apology letters, personally received or sent.” One of those is the sequence “how it ended,” which opens with a fractured lyric that, as the sections progress, erase down to smaller points, opening with:

Thanks for accepting                     I was going through some
Stuff                                                          you                     got me
Thinking about the past      I wanted to apologize
            I know it’s ancient history              I still wanted
I           wanted to see          you
  hope

And progressing, by the third section:

                                                               I was going through
                                                                            you
Thinking                            I wanted
                                                         I still wanted      

Given how she suggests this work a project of different iterations, I am hoping that this short collection of pieces might be but a teaser towards something further, down the road.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rachel Mennies

Rachel Mennies is the author of the poetry collections The Naomi Letters , released in 2021 from BOA Editions, and The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards , the 2014 winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry at Texas Tech University Press and finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. Her poetry has recently appeared at The Believer, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere, and her essays, criticism, and other articles have appeared at The Millions, The Poetry Foundation, The Kitchn, LitHub, and numerous other outlets.

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, and only, chapbook came out in 2012—No Silence in the Fields, a digital-print hybrid—and I remember the joy of mailing around postcards with the cover and URL on it to friends and seeing them move around the country. It showed me that creating a work that others might love was possible.

The Naomi Letters, my most recent work, feels distinct from all of my other previous works in its formal approach. It’s a book entirely composed of epistles, and I’d never undertaken a full-length project that dedicated itself to a single poetic form before this book. I love that I’ll probably never write another book like this one again, either. A singular creative moment.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Poetry found me, and it’s never left me. I can’t take any credit for it happening, and I don’t understand why or how it did.

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 try to write into an unknown space for as long as I can before calling it a “project,” lest I cut my imagination off too soon. This is an impulse I’ve had to work towards, to learn, as my MFA (like most, I would think) coached me to write a thesis, a chapbook, a book, as opposed to writing into something you can’t fully yet see or name.

The pandemic has corrupted my writing practice, for sure, but I’m finding my way back by writing in small spurts early in the morning, by hand, a few days a week when possible.

My poems change a whole lot in revision, especially when I’m going from a first draft or a pre-draft into a second or full version. I work from notes, reading, and research heavily, even if I’m not “researching” something deliberately. I also do a lot of opening beloved collections to random pages and writing back to a line or two, especially when I’m stuck. Striking up a conversation, perhaps.

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?
The former. Even with The Naomi Letters, whose formal uniformity may make it look like the book arrived whole as a project, I was writing these short letter-fragments for a few months before I was willing to call them a “book,” or even a singular project. I try to commit to a blank, open mind in the early writing stages, to serve what comes on the page without a previous agenda. It’s hard, but it’s important for my work.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I have come to love virtual readings, which are a hallmark of our current world. Before COVID, I would get pretty nervous before readings, especially if I were the featured reader; I wouldn’t call them part of my creative process, but I do love hearing others read their work, capturing that key aural dimension of experiencing poetry.

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?
With The Naomi Letters, I felt preoccupied by the question What does who you love, and how you love, tell you about who you are? In the new space I’m tentatively writing towards, the question has become What does my brain’s suffering mean, and how does it matter? I’m feeling more drawn to examining the stakes of my mental illness, of connecting fear, joy, and grief together along the thread of my particular biochemical inflections.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
There’s no one answer to this, as I believe that different poets approach their relationship to culture and the world (importantly) differently. For my own poetics, I’m ongoingly drawn to Carolyn Forché’s lens of the poet as witness, though I’ve been asking myself lately, in the wake of the pandemic, about an “interior” poetry of witness, which dovetails with the confessional to consider how what we might witness, honestly, about the self could (possibly) bring light to communal struggles or suffering, in my case along the lines of mental illness.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. Essential, always. I cannot ever express my gratitude to the editors who’ve helped to steward my work into the world.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Write without an agenda for the eventual outcome of your writing. Be willing to discard drafts, manuscripts, to move on when you’re ready; to serve the work and not the vita.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?
I don’t move out of poetry all that much, and to be honest, a lot of the essay writing that I do I see more as part of my “day job,” my freelance writing work, as opposed to the spaces where I take the most risks and play the most freely. But I dream of writing an essay collection, or something like it, someday. I took Alexander Chee’s nonfiction writing workshop virtually this past fall, and I still fantasize about how generative his prompts were, even if they ended up taking me to poetry-based places.

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 feel the most alchemical, when it comes to seeking inspiration or beginning from “nothing,” a blank page, early in the morning—as close to dawn as I can manage. Anxiety chases me pretty quickly, especially if I feed it (news, social media), so if I can outpace my neuroses, I write with the most focus and am then the most “likely” to begin somewhere I wish to keep following.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
The work of other poets I love. A closed computer, a long walk.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Freshly baked bread. Lavender.

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?
Music is a huge one for me. I cannot write in silence, so I often rely on music to help me set a mood and keep my focus when I’m working. One of the things I miss the most about pre-pandemic life was wandering around art museums with a notebook, also, hoping to catch an idea. Being around visual art always makes me hyper-attentive to language.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Where to begin? I’ll keep it short, lest I fill up a whole page: I’d say the poets whose work made mine possible are Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Toi Derricotte, Li-Young Lee, and Robin Becker. There is no poetry, for me, without their example.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Maybe someday, write a book of nonfiction. I’d like to learn to ride my bike better, and to bake a Paris-Brest, and to travel more. I feel starved for temporary life in a new city other than my own after the past year, to live somewhere just for a week or two.

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 fantasize often about becoming a baker. I have no idea what I could possibly have done if I hadn’t been a writer, though. I have no imagination for a life outside of writing.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I genuinely have no idea.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m reading Anne Carson’s NOX right now, which is helping me to grieve the past year, to understand the shape and texture of my grief. Once I finish it, it will be one of the greatest books I’ve ever read, I already know this.

Two dear friends of mine, the poets Sumita Chakraborty and Sara Eliza Johnson, and I have started an informal horror-movie watch-club, thanks to all the new COVID-spawned shared streaming-from-afar technologies—they’re seasoned experts in the genre, especially Sara, whereas I’ve always avoided horror movies, partially out of anxiety. We watched Midsommar and Hereditary recently, and both films leveled me. I still catch myself thinking about moments in Midsommar at random times. The first major-plot scene especially, which I will not describe both for spoiler and trigger reasons—the enormity of the pain that he captures there, Florence Pugh’s reaction and how it echoes throughout the remainder of the movie, it’s something I flash onto when I think about grief, illness, and pain in my own writing.

20 - What are you currently working on?
The most true answer is nothing, but I am writing. I’m beginning to write again after not writing much for the past year. I’m sitting at the work’s feet waiting to see where it takes me.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Samuel Amadon, Often, Common, Some, and Free: Poems

 

ADVANCED FANTASIES OF THE CROSS-BRONX
EXPRESSWAY

Here the Crotona Pool should be, here still
It is. We don’t erase ourselves. We don’t
Ply our bodies with asphalt and barriers.
Our walls are pinned with some of what
Exists, but one cannot notice every tulip.
All the flora and fauna given a name
Hasn’t been given one by us. The people
List as traffic. Thus traffic grows. It roars
When locked in place, then when it moves.
It piles around us, above us, like papers
We haven’t attended to. We have too many
Solutions. Nights our offices pool with
Us. We overflow ourselves, and cannot
See from where we are about to go.

The fourth full-length title from South Carolina poet and editor Samuel Amadon is Often, Common, Some, and Free: Poems (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2021), following his debut, Like a Sea (University of Iowa Press, 2010), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, and subsequent collections The Hartford Book (Cleveland State University Press, 2012), winner of the Believer Poetry Book Award, and Listener (Solid Objects, 2020) [see my review of such here]. Structured in five numbered sections—three sections of shorter lyrics surrounding a pair of longer sequence-sections—Amadon composes carved moments of narrative thinking, offering poems that perspectives and clarity on two fronts: a selection of straightforward narratives around pools, and a far deeper conversation on being and contemplation. “You can do the work just by starting it.” he writes, to open “POEM THAT WANTS TO BE CALLED THE WEST SIDE / HIGHWAY,” “You can / do whatever you want. A bill / is drafted on a train to Albany, or in a black / limousine. Like how one day I walked / the entire length of Manhattan, except I didn’t.” There is something in the way he writes of pools and twists of geography, surface tension and light to offer a depth simultaneously unfathomable, and slightly out of reach. “Here I am with all the words / I didn’t used to know.” he writes, to open “AT MCCARREN POOL.”

The poems that make up Amadon’s Often, Common, Some, and Free offer a familiar ease, one presented nearly in a conversational manner, offering a unique complexity through straightforward means. “The clarity of the granite,” he writes, to open the poem “AT THE BREAKWATER,” “each piece fit, as if it is / Blue, silver, red as somehow the same color / That holds it together. Last night, I stood in the cold / Across the street from a small white house, held / My fingers up against waves of conversation, warm / Light from table lamps, watched people who didn’t / Want to go in there, but had forgotten.”

Spotlight series #68 : Aja Couchois Duncan

The sixty-eighth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan.

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 and Kingston, Ontario poet and critic Dale Tracy.
 
The whole series can be found online here.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Brian Simoneau

Brian Simoneau is the author of the poetry collections No Small Comfort (Black Lawrence Press, 2021)and River Bound (C&R Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Four Way Review, The Georgia Review, Mid-American Review, Salamander, Waxwing, and other journals. Originally from Lowell, Massachusetts, he lives near Boston with his family.

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

Well, one of my daughters says it made me famous, but of course I really didn’t expect the first book to change my life. It did, however, bring some wonderful people into my life. I did a bunch of readings from River Bound when it came out—in New England and New York and Washington, D.C.—and along the way I met some poets whose friendship has become really important to me. Knowing our work is all out in the world together, that feeling of being in community with other poets and writers, was probably the best thing to come from publishing that book—especially as I worked on this new one, which does feel very different to me. Many of the poems in River Bound are elegies for my father and for the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, where I grew up, but No Small Comfort gathers poems about moving past grief and becoming a father and trying to make a home wherever I find myself.

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

I came to poetry mostly through music: listening to the radio and records and 8-tracks and always, always, always singing along. My mom in particular listened to all sorts of music—Peter, Paul, and Mary, Bob Dylan, James Taylor, Carole King, The Bee Gees, Diana Ross, Barry Manilow, Van Morrison, the Jackson 5—and I’ve never stopped. As a teenager, I listened to anything and everything, and I wanted to absorb it all: the music, the lyrics, the different perspectives. Growing up in Lowell, I’d learned about Kerouac, so some of the first poets I read included Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, and then I just started exploring poetry the way I’d always scanned the radio or searched the CD bins at Newbury Comics.

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?

My process is so slow. I keep a poetry journal where I collect ideas and lines and drafts, but then I might wait months (or even years!) before typing something up and thinking of it as an actual poem. The final poem in No Small Comfort, for example, started way back in 2003 as pages of notes on a yellow legal pad; by my count, it went through more than twenty drafts before I “finished” it last year. It’s not usually quite that bad, but I do let drafts sit for a while. 

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?

Each poem begins somewhere different for me: a line from another poem, a song lyric, something I see out the window or during my walk to work. I definitely work on individual poems, and then every once in a while I look for connections or threads, obsessions that might allow for the poems to fit together as a larger whole.

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

Readings make me really, really nervous—I’m always tempted to get up there and start reading other people’s poems instead of my own—but once I’m there, I do enjoy them. I love reading alongside other poets and writers, and I love hearing their work and chatting with them during a Q&A—it’s that feeling again of being in community with writers and readers.

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’ve always struggled with a sense that my life has moved between two worlds: a working-class community where I grew up and a community of writers and teachers where I’ve made a living. And so, for a while, I tried to write from a Marxist framework, and my work explored how poetry itself might become an artistic and political representation of class consciousness. I’ve always been sort of obsessed with the elegiac tradition, too, and eventually the poems that would become River Bound started exploring both my relationship to my hometown and the process of grieving my dad’s death. Especially since becoming a dad, I think often about the future my daughters will inherit, and I’ve been writing more and more about ways urban and suburban places conflict with our ideas about nature, about ecology and the ongoing climate crisis, about the violence we bring against our environments and against each other, and ultimately about the moments of beauty that can be redeemed amid so much conflict.

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 do think that writing poems is itself a political act, that it’s impossible to separate my writing from the cultural moment in which I’m making it. For me, writing then becomes a way of creating space for the imagination, of insisting that the imagination be a part of every day.

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

I love working with editors, and I’ve been lucky to work with some incredibly generous ones, including Jody Bolz at Poet Lore, Stephen Corey at The Georgia Review, Allison Joseph and Jon Tribble at Crab Orchard Review, and, of course, Diane Goettel at Black Lawrence Press. I’m grateful for all the ways they’ve made my poems better, but it’s also been essential for me to become an effective editor of my own work.

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

I have a newspaper clipping a friend sent me when I was in graduate school. Stanley Kunitz had just been named poet laureate at the age of ninety-five, and in this article he says, “I don't believe in writing every day, though I’m at my desk every day. So much of writing is thinking before you write, reading or simply brooding.” For me, it’s been all about the “brooding” ever since.

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

I always wish I were better at making time to write more critical prose, but I’m even slower with prose than I am with poems. For me, the two fit together in really important ways. Writing book reviews makes me think explicitly about what I expect from poetry, which in turn helps me articulate what I want my own poems to be doing. Plus, writing reviews gives me a chance to spread the word about some of the books I love.

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 try to stick to a reading routine—I aim to read one hundred books every year—but I tend to write drafts in bursts. At least one month a year, I gather online with an amazing group of friends and try to write a new poem every day; we post brand new drafts to a group blog, we borrow and steal lines and titles and prompts from one another, we offer encouraging comments, and we usually come away with lots of good beginnings. Other than that, I don’t have much of a writing routine, or maybe it’s that my routines have constantly changed with each new stage of my life. Also, I’m a terrible, just terrible, morning person, so my typical day begins very slowly, and then we get our daughters off to school, and I usually have a first-period class to teach. I’ll sometimes make time for writing in the late afternoon or at night, but a lot of my writing comes on the weekends.

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

I mostly turn to poems that are new to me, or to music. Walking beside a river helps, too.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Popcorn popping on a stove top. An auto repair shop’s floor—a mixture of oil, grease, and automotive antifreeze. Lilacs.

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?

On any given day, there might be any number of forms that help to shape my writing: the visual arts, nature, baseball, Twitter, sitcoms, scientific fields like astronomy, geology, and ecology. It surprises me, but I’ve come to think prayer has also been a big influence on my poems. I’m no longer religious at all, but I grew up in a Catholic family in a Catholic neighborhood and went to Catholic schools through high school, and I think I took away something about litany, about ritual incantation, about story and reflection occupying the same breath. Of course, music has always been the biggest influence for me: my earliest poems were bad impressions of Kurt Cobain’s lyrics, and I listen to music whenever I write—even now, answering these questions, I’ve been listening to albums by Sharon Van Etten, the Pixies, and Durand Jones & the Indications.

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

This answer feels like cheating, but everything I’ve ever read has been important for my work in some way. Philip Levine and Gwendolyn Brooks are some of the first poets whose work felt like permission to write poems about myself. I’ve learned so much from John Donne’s poems, from the Old English riddles in The Exeter Book, from essays by James Baldwin and Barry Lopez. There are so many poets—like Larry Levis, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Campbell McGrath, Li-Young Lee, Ross Gay, Diane Seuss, Major Jackson, and my teacher Dorianne Laux—whose work I go back to again and again and again. And then there are too many friends to name, both in “real life” and online, whose work as poets and teachers and parents sustains me daily and helps me feel part of a community. That list would go on and on.

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

I’d like to see the northern lights. I’d also like to see a moose.  

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’ve always thought I might like to try music production—I’m a reasonably terrible musician, but I think I have a pretty good ear for how sound comes together, for how different pieces become something whole—but I teach high school English, and I’m pretty sure I’d be doing this job whether or not I’d kept writing after college.

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

So many of the people I’ve loved have been writers in some way or another—the singers and poets and novelists and teachers and storytellers—and I’ve always wanted to be in community with them.

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

I recently read The Galleons by Rick Barot and couldn’t resist stopping to re-read every single poem. I tend to watch more TV shows than films, and I really love BoJack Horseman. And I can’t resist sharing a music pick: Julien Baker’s Little Oblivions is absolutely brilliant.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Poems, always (I hope) more poems.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Douglas Kearney, Sho

 

WELL

 

I can’t reckon, so I shake my head
to a woolie of ears and shut eye continu
-um. But I come to what I must want to be
: a well.

            By I I am to call we,
            by we mean what’s at the bottom
            of what I want to be—but that’s not just
            So.
Well, I could find myself
a mountaintop to get to, to there on. Would I
Then rung down myself to that stood water,
To what’s drowned down in it
              —by which I mean us
        us

                        us

The latest from Saint Paul, Minnesota poet Douglas Kearney is Sho (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2021), a collection rife with a playful bounce of cadence and language writing on the body, the traumas of contemporary and historical racial violence and the traumas of history itself. As he writes as part of the poem “PROPERTY VALUES”: “That my sweat, alchemical— / of shit, makes gold? Factual. // Consider spent plantation dirt, / arena turf, recording booth— / what transmogrifies these / sans my properties? / If it could it should it’s been bottled?” Kearney plays with vernacular and the collisions of sound and rhythm to explore dark questions, histories and implications, and how one is supposed to navigate a system so obviously constructed to work against the very idea of blackness. “Systems are the end of a rope,” he writes, to open the poem “FIRST, SHE CUTS THE STEMS,” “and the rope. Measure and border / between out, in. What desire’s / entwined there.” Later on, in the same poem, writing “Systems are frictions / that flimflam as liquids. They abrade / skin. In some systems, / skins are tenor. Vehicles, elsewhere. / In, out?”