Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 387

damian lopes: three new poems, Jacket2

My 24th 'commentary,' "damian lopes: three new poems," is now online at Jacket2.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Gregoire Pam Dick

Gregoire Pam Dick (aka Mina Pam Dick, Jake Pam Dick et al.) is the author of METAPHYSICAL LICKS (BookThug, 2014) and DELINQUENT (Futurepoem, 2009). Her writing has appeared in BOMB, frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, Aufgabe, EOAGH , Fence, Matrix, Open Letter, and Postmodern Culture; it is included in the anthologies THE SONNETS (ed. S. Cohen and P. Legault, Nightboat Books, 2012) and TROUBLING THE LINE: TRANS AND GENDERQUEER POETRY AND POETICS (ed. TC Tolbert and Tim Trace Peterson, Nightboat Books, 2013). Her philosophical work has appeared in a collection published by the International Wittgenstein Symposium. Also an artist and translator, Dick lives in New York City, where she is currently doing work that makes out and off with Büchner, Wedekind, Walser, and Michaux.   

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Regarding my first published book, the main change was getting my work out of my hermit's cell and into the world, where others could read it. That lead to friendships with writers, as well as a public role, a way to contribute. In terms of poetics, it made my tendency to start and abandon long works into a method, since the first book is largely a sequence of such starts. My recent work goes deeper into each thought/tone/language world; the starts are sustained, though with formal variety. The new work is also multilingual; before, it was intertextual but in English.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I didn't come to poetry first; I came to it from writing experimental fiction with short, numbered paragraphs, philosophical reflections, shattered narratives, intertextuality and a focus on sonic, rhythmic and multivalent aspects of language. The move into prose poetry and hybrids of fiction, philosophy and poetry was natural. I like writing that rebels against or plays with distinctions.

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?
Usually I start my projects, begin writing and reading, as soon as I get the idea. Then I develop the concept of the project in the process of writing it. The initial writing comes very quickly, and first drafts are often pretty close to final versions, although there's cutting. There's also a large mass of notes running alongside; since I think by writing, everything has to be scrawled. Books with complicated structures and varied forms/contents require more revision. But there's a life in the activity of writing which I respect and try not to ruin. For me, writing is a type of (private) improvisational performance. So I treat the act of revision with care and sometimes suspicion.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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?
Aside from my first published book, my books are all books from the start. But since the first book's pieces were mostly abandoned starts of other books, even there, in each piece, I was thinking in terms of the book form.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
It has turned out that I really like reading. It's another form of acting (as is writing for me), and obviously it animates the work and lets it animate a body. But public reading doesn't inform or enter the process of writing. If anything, I think more about the words printed on the page, words as tiny ink drawings. The tactile and visual aspects of writing get me excited. So does sound, but in the words themselves, not as a public performance. The public aspect comes into focus later.

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 like to wrestle with questions rather than to answer them. I'm interested in philosophical issues of truth, meaning, ontology, the I and the world, subjectivity, mind and body, time, and in spiritual questions of how to live, how to be with others or alone, how to relate to or conceive of some sort of god even if you don't quite believe in god. I try to fuse the conceptual and the lyrical, expression and artifice, narrative and instant. Right now I'm focused on ideas of oscillation or alternation, what I've called elsewhere translit (trans in a variety of senses), and a type of incest poetics that amounts to making out and off with sibling texts. I like to play and mess around with gender. I like to write rebellious girl or girlboy characters. And I'm exploring the individual, the first person singular, with all the tensions and paradoxes it brings.

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 are many roles; I would never presume to dictate one. For myself, the task is to make something that is alive and deep and questioning, something that feels urgent to me and might perhaps affect or move someone else—ideally, make them feel alive and critically thoughtful as well. This could be through intensity of reflection, of feeling, of form, of content. Again, the idea of an electrifying struggle is key here. A struggle that both is and might increase freedom.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Sometimes it has been great, sometimes difficult or frustrating. I haven't done it very much.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"Stay alive," from a stunning Nicole Brossard poem.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction), even within the space of a single project? What do you see as the appeal?
See the answer to 2, above. I think their different forms, grammars, musics and languages invent/allow for different modes of thought, feeling, being. And the movement between them can spark new, wild modes. I find that freedom inspiring, intoxicating. So all my work is trans-genre.

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 write first thing, break at midday, write in the mid-afternoon to evening. I like having a routine.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I turn to other books; invariably that gets me excited. Or I walk through the city, get blown away by what I see. Sometimes I catch an art exhibition or a film, or I listen to music. Since I work on several projects at once, I can also switch focus from the stalled project to a different one.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Coffee.

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?
I am very engaged with musical aspects of writing (repetition, variation, dynamics, timbre, tonality and dissonance, rhythm, speed shifts, overall structure, etc.). Painting is also an influence. The city offers forms, in a type of urban phenomenology. Philosophy always comes into play—its forms as well as its content. And comic books flap in.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Kierkegaard, Heraclitus, Büchner, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Robert Walser, Kafka, Bachmann, Rilke, Trakl, Rimbaud, Hölderlin, Weil, Michaux, Dostoevsky, the Brothers Grimm, P.L. Travers, C.S. Lewis, Russell Hoban, the Bible, Rosmarie Waldrop, Anne Carson, Danielle Collobert, John Keene...the list is huge and always growing. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I'd like to use more of my visual art in my work—to make something that has an explicit, sustained visual aspect as well as the verbal one.

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 would have ended up being a professional artist or philosopher, but sometimes I fantasize about being a mathematician. I would have loved (I imagine) to be a composer. Or a hermit monk/mystic/scribe/manuscript illuminator. I think I would have liked to be Paul Klee.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Some inner necessity. I started writing very early, then ended up pursuing art and philosophy. But finally, I felt that writing was calling to me (in a purely personal way), demanding that I do it.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Renee Gladman's Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge; Ida, a Polish film directed by Pawlikowksi.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Several prose-poem novels that engage with the work of Michaux, Wittgenstein, Walser and Kafka, among others, while also taking up some questions in Anglo-American analytic philosophy.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Profile of Karen Solie, with a few questions, Open Book: Ontario

My profile of Karen Solie, with a few questions, is now up at Open Book: Ontario.

A short interview with Marilyn Irwin, Jacket2

My 23rd 'commentary,' "A short interview with Marilyn Irwin," is now online at Jacket2.

Today is my Forty-fifth birthday:

Today is my forty-fifth birthday, 8:15am. What a difference a year makes (I’ve said this before). I’ve been full-time with our Rose since the beginning of November, So much of my twenties and into my thirties, composing a ‘birthday’ poem around this shapeless, formless void. One I knew only the shape and the size for the hole that remained.
And my days: Rose tears around the house at lightning speed (managing to fall, often), and never stops moving, even for sleep. We read books, go on outings and occasionally bake (apple pies, apple strudels and scones so far). We receive visitors, often. We await the possibilities of spring/summer and parks and running running running. We sit Saturday mornings at Billings Bridge, with muffins, in-between errands (and running).
Of course, last night was the annual birthday party at the Carleton Tavern (I must be around fifteen annual birthdays there, by now), which this post can’t yet comment upon, but I expect it was brilliant (I mean, honestly). I produced a small chapbook for such (obviously), which you can discover further information about here. A “record” birthday, and a year I’m also seven years past where I was before, and working a longer poem-in-progress, “Sex at Forty-five” [see my recent write-up on such over at Jacket2]. This, I suppose, is how the birthday poem exists during this year’s annual birthday-tally [see last year, the year before, the year before, etcetera], composing something broader, longer and possibly more specific. An excerpt reads:
Skin. Skin. We measure, syntax. Mountains. Into the current, slickly,
where they drift, dismantle. Perpendicular. Up against. Decoding. Twelve poems,
thirteen, fourteen. So much fog, in. Sonneteer. We are made of multiple dimensions:
skin and bone and sand. Where everything made perfect.

Please answer, in the space provided.






Into a block of marble: silence.
The consequences. You know.
More delicate, then. Figurines of glass, of stone. Of something dangerous.
Fills the occasional, space. Alternative. Silence: not dead, only resting.
Sometimes, slow. The meandering race. Such speed.
Writing continues, but with an entirely different set of expectations. Since December 1st, I’ve been pushing hard for my ‘commentaries’ over at Jacket2, posting 2-3 pieces a week throughout January, February and March, which allows for very little else (although I’ve managed to be interviewed, compose an essay or two or three or four or five or six or seven or eight, and multiple other bits of madness). I’ve the poetry manuscript I’m slowly opening, “Sex at Forty-five,” and the possible tail-ends of another, “World’s End,” begun just as we landed at our current digs on Alta Vista Drive [which I discuss here and here and here and here, with excerpts from such here and here and here and here and here and here]. Once the Jacket2 ‘commentaries’ are complete, at the end of March, I hope to dig deep again into the manuscript of short fiction, the poorly-titled “On Beauty” [which I discussed here, with stories from such here and here and hereand here], with a possible manuscript out the door by the end of the year. Maybe?
And possibly a return to rework (taking up Christine on her kind offer of editorial assistance) my post-mother memoir, “The Last Good Year” [links to a variety of excerpts live here]. I’ve a series of scattered notes on/around birth mother, but I really haven’t had time for months to even begin thinking about collecting the random scratchings into anything beyond rough notes (I know I must get on this, soon).
And chapbooks: forthcoming from knives and forks and spoons press, Honeymoon. (sketches, with another, Mouth of the Rat , newly out from Porkbelly Press.
I was able, also, to deliver ON TIME the completed manuscript with introduction for the Phil Hall selected poems with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. And our spring poetry titles through Chaudiere Books—a second collection by N.W. (formerly Nicholas) Lea and The Collected Poems of William Hawkins, ed. Cameron Anstee (with an interview recently posted with the editor on working on the collection)—have nearly gone to press, with launches still in the planning stages. Fall titles include a first poetry book by Chris Turnbull, a second poetry collection by Jennifer Londry, and a third poetry collection by Andy Weaver (we will be confirming parts of 2016 sometime over the next couple of months). I’ve curated a dusie kollektiv, with chapbooks by forty-some poets from across North America soaring through the post, soon to appear online as well, and have curated a “Canadian feature” of Evening Will Come , featuring statements by a dozen Canadian poets, scheduled to post on May 1. What else?
I am full-time with Rose, and somehow seeing more people now than I did before, with irregular visits by Monty Reid, Brecken Hancock (with Winter), Ron Seatter, Michael Lithgow (with Wren) and various others. Nikki Sheppy even came to visit for a week. Susan Johnson (with Matthew) and Wes Smiderle (with Griffin) have been coming by during occasional mornings, as we take turns getting work done, but Susan has already returned to work (Wes doesn’t return to work until August). Rose is getting quite a lot of socialization, and we’ve even still our quiet days, where we exist with books, the occasional Sesame Street, and walks around the neighbourhood, as well as our weekly outing for comic books and muffins in Centretown.
Really, I’m looking forward to the warmer weather, when Rose and I can really wander the neighbourhood, and our array of parks; there are at least four parks within a couple of blocks in any direction. Oh, to be able to simply let her out on the grass to run…

Beth Bachmann, Do Not Rise

privacy
How much harm can enteringdo? One cell, two,
and the whole law is broken in—leg after leg,
the myrtle presses itself up fromthe ground:
stampede. Horse, horse, horse, horse.What are you turning
into? Inside me you murmur so muchpain so much
suffering. What makes the horses golike that—fear
or fire? Circle me. What kills us isnot crush, but push.
Writing on “war, memory, and post-traumatic stress,” there is a palpable anxiety throughout the poems that make up American poet Beth Bachmann’s second poetry collection, Do Not Rise (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). In 2011, the manuscript won the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America for a manuscript-in-progress. In her judge’s citation, Elizabeth Willis wrote:
The collection’s conceptual center—and its most insistent word—is “open.” The poems have a stripped-down, investigatory drive.  Where the manuscript begins, everything “wants out,”and this outward pressure moves the work into a series of shifts, cuts, turns, magnetic pulls. Water on the tongue disappears into snow, snow gives way to a lake. It is as if we could witness the decomposition and refiguring of the world within the decomposition and refiguring of the line. We feel the poems pushing against grammar and logic and into phenomena. Words and phrases break into “fire,” into “splinters,” into “fragments.” At times it is as if we are watching a chemical reaction reset to the rhythm of human perception.  The resulting gaps open the poem to a meaningful range of pauses, hesitations, delays, sonic mutations, reconsiderations. A lapse of one thing makes possible another. A slowing down of time within the poem allows us to enter the folds of its thought. There is so much seeing in its listening.” The flaw is always / breaking away” Always. . . away. Discoveries lie on the verge of departure.
Do Not Rise follows her incredible debut, Temper (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), winner of the 2008 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. I’m intrigued by the cadence of Bachmann’s poems, relaying a kind of breathlessness to her lines, between her use of space and the dense lyric, as well as an intriguing combination of accumulation, collage and precision. As she writes to open the poem “sustainable”:
start here in each         other’s mouth third
in place of speech before it      sometimes it stops there
the fickle birds dropping          what they just picked up cold
Are her lyrics short, precisely because of this breathlessness, or for the possibility of the single punch? Bachmann’s poems strike with considerable narrative force, writing their way around, across and through the ugliness of war and the traumas that can’t help but linger.
humiliation
Where are the woman in this war? The long limbs of the trees strippedare the limbs of the trees. You can’t have a war
without women. Where do you think all that blood comes from?The trees in war are worse than the horses. You can kill a horse.
A horse can kill you. Most men have little use for metaphor.Door go out. All fall down. Baby. Pray
nobody dare says the word. So many trees. The women are skinnyand there are more of you
than stars in the warfield, than shrapnel. Pigs?I haven’t seen a pig for months.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Suzanne Alyssa Andrew

Suzanne Alyssa Andrew is the author of the novel Circle of Stones (Dundurn Press, March 2015). She also writes for digital media, including games, interactive documentaries and cross-platform TV projects. She is a guest associate editor for Taddle Creek magazine and plays bass in an indie rock band. She grew up on Vancouver Island, went to Carleton University in Ottawa for Journalism and English and now lives and writes in Toronto. Visit her online at suzanneandrew.com

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’m so excited to finally be sharing Circle of Stones with readers. It took me many years to write and I’m hoping readers will enjoy the characters as much as I did while I was writing them. For awhile it seemed weird to be done the book, sort of like a major break-up, but I’ve slowly moved on to a new book project, like moving on to a new love.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I’ve always loved storytelling in all its forms and have always written across genres. I have a journalism degree from Carleton and have written extensively for the digital industry—mostly non-fiction, but my digital work is shifting into fictional story-based games and experiences now. What I enjoy about the novel form in comparison is the level of depth you can achieve in it, and the freedom of it. You can take the story anywhere.

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 have tons of ideas for new writing projects always, and my usual problem is there’s never enough time to work on them all. Trying to balance bill-paying work with passion projects is a constant challenge. When I do get down to work on my own stuff my drafting process is slow and painstaking, and I revise a lot. I do write copious notes—index cards are my favourite because it makes it easy to organize them all.

4 - Where does fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
My new work starts with ideas on index cards and then I decide whether a project merits a long effort or a short one. I like the novel form because I get attached to my characters and I want to know more about them. When I started writing Nik and Jennifer, the two main characters in Circle of Stones, I couldn’t let go. I wanted to keep following them and see what they’d do.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Readings used to scare me, but as I’ve done more of them I’ve come to enjoy the performance aspect. Being in a band really helped. I’m not sure whether it’s because I’ve learned to command a microphone, or on the Scale of Things That Freak Me Out singing in front of people is even more terrifying than speaking to them. There are a few sections in Circle of Stones I like performing. You can listen to an online reading here: https://soundcloud.com/suzannealyssa

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?
Universal themes of how to live and how to create, with a focus on what’s happening or lurking in the shadows that might force characters off course or cause them to stop and think. Struggle, because we all struggle. I also like to write about city life and various adventures that keep people moving and changing.

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?
Writers are observers and interpreters. Everyone is concerned with how to live, and writers hold up examples and ideas in the form of ripping stories. I’m doing a guest associate editorship right now at Taddle Creek magazine and I love the variety of points of view different writers bring. Writers provide perspective and give you an inside view on things you wouldn’t normally see or experience.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
The editors I’ve worked with have been so helpful, and it’s a wonderful experience to talk about your work with people who engage with it on a detailed level and care about making it as good as it can possibly be. My editor at Dundurn Press, Shannon Whibbs is lovely, and I also had great insights from Robyn Read.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Keep going. It’s the best mantra for anyone working in the arts. It’s not easy!

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short fiction to the novel to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I write across genres constantly, especially in my digital work. It’s fun for me that way and keeps me challenged. Right now I’m experimenting a lot with writing song lyrics.

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?
Oh, I’d love to establish a typical day, and attempt to do so all the time, but I freelance full-time and am working on tons of other projects, so most weeks are a jumble. Falling into bed happy-exhausted is a good sign I’m getting stuff done.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
My writer friends and the guys in my band keep me going.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Sea salt in the air.

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. I play bass and sing in an indie rock band, and collect records. Music is always on at my place.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
When I need inspiration I look to Jeannette Winterson, Etgar Keret and Haruki Murakami. My writer friends and colleagues are integral too. I like to talk things out.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write lots more books and release an indie album online with my band.

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 would have been equally happy to be a musician with literary aspirations as I am to be a writer with music daydreams.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’ve always wanted to write, and there’s only so much time. I’m squeezing music in, somehow, but it’s more of a flirtation or affair. Writing is the love of my life.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book: American Innovations by Rivka Galchen.

Movie: Tie between 20,000 Days on Earth and Only Lovers Left Alive

20 - What are you currently working on?
A new novel, original songs with my band, digital storytelling projects, a smattering of essays and I have a couple of ideas for other books I’m slowly working out. It’s a lot but I like it this way!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

The Volta Book of Poets, ed. Joshua Marie Wilkinson

SPECULATIVE POETRY
There is no nation but the imagination. Speculative poetry conjures a world that is invisible, a mirage, a false pond. Speculative poetry is the overnight Sims city, a city that is a composite of elsewhere, the city in drag. It imagines the boundless dream metropolis that stitches together factual history and fabulous ethnography. It creates the geopolitical imaginary, building worlds to critique world-building. It makes absurd vatic pronouncements as a means to indirectly apprehend the present. It is the present. The poem speaks in a paper language, a mélange of offshoots, with multiple entryways and exits through its high use of fleeting vernaculars. Its form is code-switching: code-switching between languages, between Englishes, between genres, between races, between bodies. speculative poetry is inspired by music that beat-boxes, that dubs, that samples. Its enemy is the drone. It has traded in the persona for the avatar. Its emotional range is not mono (not mono-sincere, not mono-ironic) but stereophonic and excessive. If for the Objectivist poet, one must look clearly at the world, what is the thing that is the image when we live in a constant state of “image flow”? Speculative poetry interrogates, lyricizes, and captures the dematerialized thing, our dematerializing world. Speculative poetry does not escape nor does it shape one reality, but captures the song of layered realities. (Cathy Park Hong)
I’d been looking forward to The Volta Book of Poets , ed. Joshua Marie Wilkinson (Portland OR: Sidebrow Books, 2015), for some time, an anthology funded, in large part, through a successful Indiegogo campaign. As the press release to the nearly four hundred page volume informs, “The Volta Book of Poets gathers together the work of 50 talented poets of disparate backgrounds and traditions, providing a constellation of the most exciting, innovative poetry evolving today. Named for the online poetics archive The Volta, The Volta Book of Poetsnavigates contrasting styles and forms to showcase poetry in its dissimilar pleasures, presenting difference as a means for inspiring a new way to think about poetry, and to inspire readership for the poetry communities and presses radiating out from the poets collected in this essential anthology […].” The list of contributors is impressive, and includes the work of a number of American poets whose work I’ve been following for some time, with some of the most compelling, challenging and lively writing currently appearing out of the United States (something I can also say of the ever-expanding online journal that Wilkinson curates, The Volta). The variety, as well as the quality, is remarkable, and move through the lyric fragment, confession and prose poems to more formal experiments with the line, breath and subject matter. The contributors include: Rosa Alcalá, Eric Baus, Anselm Berrigan, Edmund Berrigan, Susan Briante, Sommer Browning, Julie Carr, Don Mee Choi, Arda Collins, Dot Devota, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Graham Foust, C.S. Giscombe, Renee Gladman, Noah Eli Gordon, Yona Harvey, Matthew Henriksen, Harmony Holiday, Cathy Park Hong, Bhanu Kapil, John Keene, Aaron Kunin, Dorothea Lasky, Juliana Leslie, Rachel Levitsky, Tan Lin, Dawn Lundy Martin, J. Michael Martinez, Farid Matuk, Shane McCrae, Anna Moschovakis, Fred Moten, Sawako Nakayasu, Chris Nealon, Hoa Nguyen, Khadijah Queen, Andrea Rexilius, Zachary Schomburg, Brandon Shimoda, Evie Shockley, Cedar Sigo, Abraham Smith, Christopher Stackhouse, Mathias Svalina, Roberto Tejada, TC Tolbert, Catherine Wagner, Dana Ward, Ronaldo V. Wilson and Lynn Xu. As Wilkinson opens his introduction:
My goal in gathering poems for this anthology began as a relatively modest one: to cite a constellation of what is being written today by poets whose work I love. Anybody familiar with poetry is readily stunned by the sheer number of poets currently writing and publishing. But for those unfamiliar with poetry, finding a place to start can be intimidating to say the least. I work at a large public university, so I encounter the curious-yet-uninitiated by the dozens: who to read, where to begin, what websites and journals to follow—let alone what to value and why to value it—all become very tricky questions indeed. It’s hardly a failing of theirs, or ours, as educators; whether you think of it as glut or a golden age of poetry, t’s pretty cacophonous out there. Named for The Volta—an online journal and archive for poetry and poetics I continue to run—this anthology aims, in part, to embrace that cacophony and aid anyone looking to get acquainted with an unusual mix of poetry writing today.
In the pages that follow, you will find poets of disparate backgrounds and traditions working in contrasting styles, utilizing forms inassimilable as a group or school. Poetry in its dissimilar pleasures, methods, and weirdnesses. Poets whose writing disarms and bewilders me. Poems that expand what a poem can say or do. Poetry that “resists the intelligence / Almost successfully,” as Wallace Stevens famously said, or as Tomaž Šalamun put it somewhere, “poems that impassionate me.” And, in fact, some writers in this book blur the boundaries of what even gets called poetry.
The curious problem I encountered in curating this anthology was narrowing it down to just fifty poetry, which had sounded like plenty for a compact, teachable book that wouldn’t just become a doorstop. I still barely scratched the surface of what I believe should be read urgently. Consider this just some of the poets whose work I think anyone interested in poetry should get hooked on.
For Cole Swensen, reflecting on American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry , which she edited by David St. John, and responding elegantly to its myriad critics, “To ask an anthology to be inclusive of an entire moment in a culture as large and varied as that of the U.S. is, I think, unrealistic and unwise. For one, it’s an impossible task.” And Ron Silliman, discussing the latest edition of Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology , edited by Paul Hoover, takes this a little further: “It is no longer possible—not even plausible really—for the codex format to represent American or English language poetry in any depth whatsoever.”
This is an incredible list of writers from across the country, published by an array of American small presses, all of whom I would very much recommend: Wave Books, Octopus Books, Omnidawn, Birds, LLC, Ahsahta Press, Nightboat Books, Action Books, Apogee Press, Flood Editions, Four Way Books, Black Ocean, Fence Books, Futurepoem Books, Kenning Editions, Letter Machine Editions, Edge Books, Ugly Duckling Presse, Litmus Press, 1913 Press and a couple of others.
My most recent book, Half of What They Carried Flew Away , is based on two major concerns. The first was to ask how one writes from both a narrative and anti-narrative structure simultaneously. How can one sustain a longer duration in writing without relying on narrative techniques like plot, character, or climax? What else might sustain and propel a narrative? The answer of this book was related to the idea of “residences.” These residences (in the book named: desire, water, emanation, weather, and territory) speak to the different ways language inhabits space or how people inhabit language. These habitations might be intimate, ghosted, alien, contradictory, etc.
[…]
As far as my writing practice goes, I don’t write every day. Sometimes I don’t write for months. What typically happens is I feel a silence, or maybe attention is a better word. I don’t write for months, but I feel something going on at the back of the silence/attention. I read and notice and probably begin to curate some ideas, build some questions, but I don’t know them and then one day I just do, and that’s when I begin writing again. So maybe that is to say that the idea or the question comes from a level of consciousness that is not immediately accessible via language. I wait for it to become accessible and in the meantime I try to nourish it. (Andrea Rexilius)
Part of what really makes the anthology exciting, especially for readers already familiar with a number of the poets included, is the fact that each individual section opens with a “poetic statement,” with pieces running the range from the lyric and the experimental to more formal critical prose. Given that each poet is allowed both poems and statement (which might even be the same, for some contributors), it makes the collection a fantastic introduction to contemporary American poetry, much in the same way my own Canadian anthology, side/lines: a new Canadian poetics (Insomniac Press), attempted over a decade ago. Really, one could say that both poems and statements are individually worth the price of admission alone.
Someone took my book out into the woods and shot it. The book is intimate with violence now in two ways: both as subject matter (violence is what it’s about), and as target. The book reaches the gun as its interlocutor. Or, now the book, with a hole right through the middle, needs to be written again.
But when someone shot my book, I felt it got what it deserved, that it had met its precise right audience. No, I felt the book had received it precise right author. The book had been re-authored, or finally authored, by the bullet. (Julie Carr)
As part of her statement, Brooklyn, New York poet Dorothea Lasky writes that “[…] poetry is always a human thing, in that it is always seeking the human voice among us.” Colorado poet Sommer Browning, in her statement, writes about composing poems as and with terrible jokes: “I hope my poems reflect the way I want to live in the world. I want them to maintain an irreverent reverence at all times, whether that is toward love, beauty, sex, or Being. For me, this is the most honest way I can write, with an askance look toward everything, but with arms ready to embrace it all; so one of my theoretical concerns about all art is that of authenticity, expressive rather than nominal.” In her statement, “RUINS, CAMERA, FLIGHT PATH,” Arizona poet Susan Briante writes:
In “The Book of the Dead,” Muriel Rukeyser famously explained: “Poetry can extend the document.” And in the opening stanzas of that poem as she described a photographer unpacking a camera, she also reminded readers that poetry can be the document. Over the course of that remarkable work, Rukeyser not only chronicles the Gauley Bridge Mining disaster but she contextualizes the event against national legacies of injustice and oppression. By the end, she asks her readers to “widen lens and see… new signals, processes.”
It is the work of a lifetime.

A short interview with Fred Wah, Jacket2

My 22nd 'commentary,' "A short interview with Fred Wah," is now online at Jacket2.

Susan Howe, Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives

The English word “text” comes from Medieval Latin textus“style or texture of a work,” literally “thing woven,” from the past participle stem of texere: “to weave, to join, fit together, construct.” In several notebooks she labeled “Sentences” (1928 – 1929), Gertrude Stein writes: “A sentence is partly softly after they write it. What is the difference between a sentence and a picture. They will sew which will make it tapestry. A sentence is not carrying it away. A sentence furnishes while they will draw. A sentence is drawers and drawers full of drawings. A sentence is an imagined masterpiece. A sentence is an imagined frontispiece. In looking up from her embroidery she looks at me. She lifts up the tapestry. It is partly.… Think in stitches. Think in settlements. Think in willows.”
I continue to be amazed by how American poet Susan Howe constructs her poem-essays as long, complex, singular thoughts, such as in her newest title, Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy ofArchives (Christine Burgin Books/New Directions Books, 2014). Approaching the work from the direction of the poem, her essay weaves through a series of patterns, stitching together ideas of the archive, considerations of the sentence, and how poetry itself can be fashioned into a form most appropriate for its purposes. It is as though she attempts to explore the poem through an essay disguised as a poem disguised as an essay, an exploration similar in many ways to the current explorations Ottawa poet Brecken Hancock has been engaged in via non-fiction on ideas of confession, and utilizing one’s own story. Howe’s work has long favoured the archive, using historical documents, literary fragments, family story and mementos, and a deep curiosity to thread together wayward considerations into a single, unbreakable strand.









Poetry has no proof nor plan nor evidence by decree or in any other way. From somewhere in the twilight realm of sound a spirit of belief flares up at the point where meaning stops and the unreality of what seems most real floods over us. The inward ardor I feel while working in research libraries is intuitive. It’s a sense of self-identification and trust, or the granting of grace in an ordinary room, in a secular time.