Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 39

Amy De’Ath, Not a Force of Nature

 

No community is to me
            as I once
caved in to you I said
beware! the Diversion ofthe Populace
            who were think is nice, maybe
unscrolling after death

and shut out of a more
            screen-time time
a common day of breathing
            the cacti the glass windows
and through them ourlungs.
And through them all ways
of unseeing ourselves

            and through them (“That Well of Tears is Mine”)

Theauthor of a handful of smaller titles over the past fourteen years, thefull-length debut by Suffolk-born UK poet, critic and editor—she co-edited theanthology Toward. Some. Air. (Banff AB: Banff Centre Press, 2015) withFred Wah [see my review of such here]—Amy De’Ath is Not a Force of Nature (Brooklyn NY: Futurepoem, 2024), an expansive collage of lyrics set as moments,declarations, expositions and accumulations. “It’s a good night to stay home& work a delivery tread / on the yeast farm,” she writes, to open the poem“Force Of Nature,” “then pour oneself into a plaster-of-Paris / model of ourown activities. It’s a fine night to entertain!” Her poems are incrediblysmart, self-aware and gestural, offering commentaries and notes on ecologicaldisaster and how capitalism reduces human capacity. “When you’re walking on astage / The affirmation of a union / Should living offend the dead,” shewrites, to open the poem “Transferable Skull,” “Or should I avenge thee / Whenyou’re walking on a star / Managed not to get pregnant / I lied, I don’t know whoyou are [.]”

De’Athwrites of and on catastrophe and collapse, including a critique of EdwardBurtynsky through her poem “Institutional Critique,” that includes: “Burtynsky Itold you I’m not / trying to editorialize, this is not / an indictment of theindustry, this is / what is it? / we are compelled to progress / to a dry toxicwastebed / Burtynsky I’m one of the foot soldiers / in the war on sustainability[.]” Structured in four sections, the collection holds two untitled bookendclusters on either side of the sections “EIGHT LOVE SONNETS” and “EIGHT WORKEMAILS.” “By refusing to sign the new contract you are / Not acting in thespirit of the contract.” she offers to open the poem “Dear Simon,” a piecesigned at the end by Simon himself. In many ways, the poems in Not a Forceof Nature are composed as a collection around voice and constraint, such asthrough articulating a sequence of characters that seemingly compose work emailpoems to themselves, whether hoping to catch or correct their own behaviours. Or,as “Simone” writes to herself in “Dear Simone,” “It’s wrong, what PatrickSwayze said / in his penitential prayer: this is your space, / but that’s yourstoo. Every time I think I’m / getting close to you we lose our touch.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Julian Carter

Julian Carter writes about touch, complicity, recognition, and temporal change. Hisnew choreotext, Dances of Time and Tenderness (Nightboat, 2024) is atranspoetic story cycle linking  art,death, and kinky sex, through which he partners readers in intimate encounterswith trans/queer histories from Neolithic burials to coffee in present-day SanFrancisco.

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

My new book, Dances of Time and Tenderness, began inqueer art and political community and grew and shifted in conversations withboth dead and living people. It's been a relational project all the way along. Incontrast, my first book was lonely lonely work. It was my dissertation. I wroteit without an advisor and then revised it from the ground up 5 times over my 9years on the academic job market before finally using it as a tenure book. Idon't recall the editor who picked it up for Duke University Press talking withme about it beyond asking who should blurb. That book, The Heart of Whiteness, isnot bad at all, and it's found some audience over the years, but the processfelt contaminated. I didn't even consider writing another book for almost 20years. Which was ok.

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

I started with poetry& switched to critical prose as a grad student (sadly, Ph.D. in history,not an MFA). My elegantly WASPy undergrad poetry professor liked me because Iwas interested in formal mastery; I was too innocent to realize that meant hemight not be the best reader for a long, unmetered, explicit piece situated onthe edge of sexual consent--I was contemplating the erotic and community repercussionsof anti-dyke violence. When he told me this wasn't a poem at all, but amanifesto, I assumed he knew what he was talking about and turned my attentionto writing critical theory and historiography. I've never stopped writingpoetry, I just dropped out of the craft conversation.

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

Words spill out of me. Ihave to do a lot of pruning to find the moment of silence inside, or alongside,the swirl of language. That's the point when I understand what I'm doing.Sometimes it takes years.

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

Usually I latch on to aword or an idea, or one latches on to me, and then follow it until I and my friendscan't take any more. I've just written my third long critical essay structuredlike a miniature book, with three tiny "chapters" developing a coreimage from different angles. I didn't start develop this form on purpose. Ithappened because I think most non-fiction books should be about 20% of theirpublished length, and I hate the idea of someone reading my work and thinking"oh, he should have cut that out, he's just quacking away." I dislikefiller.

Recently my poems havemostly been stories that began from something I overheard. I would like to makeenough of these to assemble these into a cycle--something with an arc that letsyou feel like you've been someplace. That sounds like it might be heading in abook sort of direction.

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

I adore doing readings! Asa kid I learned how to read aloud in church, and also my mother read stories tous with different voices for different characters. I put care into the music ofvoice--modulating tone, playing with tempo--things like that have everything todo with how we receive meaning. I also read aloud to myself while I write. Ittells me when I don't know what I'm saying yet.

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

My big questions havealways been historical, or even mythic: how did we get here, and how has our roadbeen laid out for us? My current questions are about how we survive. I want toknow whether there will be anyone to care about the past.

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

We open windows.

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

10% essential. Sometimesdifficult also. Like any intimacy.

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

Take the advice you'd giveto a student.

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

I am feral as a poet andprofessional in prose. I have mostly kept the feral under wraps; allowing it tolead is both exhilarating and scary. That risk is the appeal.

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

I use birdsong as an alarmand prefer not to speak or be spoken to until I've had two cups of decaf, abowl of plain oatmeal, and 45 minutes of writing by hand. The cat has opinionsabout all of the above. So do my children, partner, students, co-parent, departmentchair, writing partner, colleagues, therapists, garden, sourdough starter and aseries of friends--though to be sure these have fewer feelings about the birds.My life is a constant series of relational interruptions. This means that ideaswander out for a long time in loose spirals and then the real conceptual andcompositional work has to happen in highly disciplined spasms.

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

Open sky, other writersdoing craft talks and interviews, and the Oxford English Dictionary.

13 - What fragrancereminds you of home?

My own body.

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

Dance has shaped more ofmy life than anything else except maybe growing up in the country. Ballet,tango, contra, country-western two-step and line dance, country waltz. Theattendant somatic practices (Feldenkrais and Pilates), physical therapy andcross-training, and bodywork are all techniques for increasing bodily awarenessand self-presence, so that you know what you are feeling and what you aredoing: a dancer is a way of being, like a writer is a way of being, onlydancing for me cultivates enormous curiosity and joy that happen almostentirely outside of language. Like dancing, writing comes from deep attention,curiosity about what is, and joyous moments of not-thinking. For me, times ofnot-writing and not-talking sponsor being-in-words on pages.

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

Subject to change in aflash; yet a few things stick around. I learned to read from Dr. Seuss's OneFish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. T.H. White's The Once and Future King and Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish bothinform a great deal of my thinking and voice. Both books dig into therelational nature of power; White's sentence structures and tonal variation resonatein my own, and I love and emulate the style with which Foucault loops back andforth from broad strokes to fine lines, vast epistemes to single images from asingle moment.

16 - What would you liketo do that you haven't yet done?
Study literary form (as opposed to following my inner metronome). Maybe evenwrite a villanelle.

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

I am already so many otherthings--if I could choose anything it would be *only* to write. And read. Preferablyunder trees.

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

I couldn't help it?

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

I think more in terms ofgreat reading experiences rather than great books. The most recent book thatpulled me entirely into its world was Christine Smallwood's The Life of the Mind; the most recent tomake me read sections aloud to friends was Selby Wynn Schwartz's After Sappho. Not much into film.

20 - What are youcurrently working on?

I've just finished a shortscholarly/creative hybrid-genre art-historical essay called "Kissing theCavalier." It looks at van Dyck paintings, the history of lace, and theLost Cause of the Confederacy to tell a story about how aesthetic response canloop us into systems of power we wouldn't have chosen to touch if we'd knownwhat we were doing. I'm edging inexorably into a Southern Gothic book based onstories from my father's incredibly pathological Virginia family.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part one, : Devon Rae + Norma Cole,

Oncemore, Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press helped curate and organize the annualSmall Press Market as part of the Toronto International Festival of Authors! AndI was totally there for that, with a swath of recent above/ground press titlesand my new short story collection with University of Alberta Press andChristine’s new hybrid memoir with Book*hug Press. Naturally, there were plentyof amazing publishers and items there as well [see my two notes from last year hereand the four posts I made around the first year here], including Anstruther Press,Gap Riot Press, knife|fork|book, Gordon Hill Press/The Porcupines’ Quill, Inc.,room 302 books, Proper Tales Press, Book*hug Press, Nietzsche’s Brolly, serif of nottingham, etcetera (with Simulacrum Press and Puddles of Sky Press unableto attend this time around). Don’t you wish you could have made it? At least there’s another small press fair coming up in Toronto (Mississauga, actually)that I’m participating in soon, for those folk who wanted to catch some further small press excitement (where Christine is on a panel with her new book as part of the same event/festival that day). And you know about the 30th anniversaryedition of the ottawa small press book fair happening on Saturday, November 16,yes? OH, AND IF YOU ARE IN OTTAWA COME OUT TO THE LAUNCH OF MY SHORT STORIES TONIGHT!

Hereare a couple of items I picked up at this year’s event:

Vancouver BC/Toronto ON: I’ve been an admirer ofthe work of Vancouver poet Devon Rae for a while now [see my interview with hervia Touch the Donkey], so was very pleased to see a copy of her chapbookdebut, THIRTEEN CONVERSATIONS WITH MY BODY (Toronto ON: AnstrutherPress, 2024). Rae’s work, at least what I’ve seen, is leaning into what I presumewill be an eventual full-length collection of very sharp prose poems around thebody, with titles such as “My Lips,” “My Left Leg,” “My Left Shoulder” and “MyBreasts,” offering narrative threads and conversation almost as a kind ofupdate on what the late Toronto poet bpNichol (1944-1988) was playing withacross his Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography (Windsor ON: BlackMoss Press, 1987) and eventual, posthumous, organ music: parts of an autobiography(Black Moss Press, 2012). Rae’s poems offer a conversation with and around bodiesvery different than Nichol’s serious play, one instead that works through andwith the differences and culturally-loaded complications of women’s bodies; shewrites bodies as both physical and emotional space, one impacted far too oftenfrom the outside. “That elsewhere so close we can almost / touch it.” shewrites, as part of “Conversation with My Night Body.” These prose poems aredamned sharp, and you should be paying attention to them. Rae packs enormousamounts in very small spaces, yet her poems are composed with a deceptive easeof lyric and propulsive flow. As the poem “Conversations with My Uterus” reads:

You are shaped like thechild I may not have. I think of myself curled up inside my mother years ago –the fullness of her uterus and the emptiness of mine. Sometimes, I want toreturn to that dream place. I know she loved being pregnant, I’ve seen thephotographs, belly swelling in an Armani dress. And I wonder if I too willbecome a kiln or remain a vacant room.

Dani Spinosa, Gap Riot Press

San Francisco CA/Toronto ON: Oh, the delight of a newtitle by Toronto-born American poet, translator and visual artist Norma Cole [seemy review of her 2010 To Be At Music: Essays & Talks here], her chapbook RAINY DAY (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2024). Another of Toronto poetand publisher Kirby’s gracefully-produced items, RAINY DAY is acollection of twenty-one short, sharp lyrics offering a myriad of narrativedirections across few words and very short spaces. As the poem “Critical Miss”begins: “permanently / beyond chagrin // intrinsic—what is / trinsic?” Alternatingbetween prose poems and slightly longer sequences against short bursts, Colecomposes the long line of each poem across a kind of condensed point-form,offering a rhythmic sequence of bursts held in breath, almost as hesitations,or a lyric caught in the lungs. “the darker / room // he talks / blocks,” theunpunctuated four-page poem “NO ACCOUNT SYLLABLES” writes, “of space / and //books of / time // I think / your // hand on / paper // least exercise / leaves[.]” Her lyric compactness clusters, stretches, holds breath. All of which, ofcourse, makes me eager to think that we might be closer to a furtherfull-length by Cole at some point soon, hopefully.

Mum’s the Word

saturation not able insidethe magnitudes
scorpion suppressionoppression falling failing
oblivious silent objects

Liz Countryman, Green Island: Poems

 

Now, to be 40 is to be acomb someone else’s hair moves through.

I sense but can’tdescribe some other, newer kind of openness
contorting me—

Now when I set the cerealboxes on the counter
when I make a shape ofthem

what prior arrangement—whatimpulse disguised as practicality—
do I refute? And what ofit?
do I refute, and what ofit do I carry forward?

What of that stubbornshape around me back then
Do I know replicate, evenas I refute it?
Or has one simply grownup from beneath the other
But stayed one thing

Like the skin of a hand?(“NARRATIVE POEM”)

Thelatest from South Carolina poet and OVERSOUND co-editor/co-publisher Liz Countryman is Green Island: Poems (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2024),following on the heels of her full-length debut, A Forest Almost (BoulderCO: Subito Press, 2017) [see my review of such here]. Winner of the BerkshirePrize through Tupelo Press, as judged by Julie Carr (Countryman’s debut was alsoa prize-winner, published as part of the 2016 Subito Press Poetry Prize), GreenIsland is a collection made up of seventeen poems set in two clusters on eitherside of a longer sequence. Throughout the collection, I’m intrigued at how eachof her poems stretch to articulate the length and breadth of a landscape, bothinternal and external. “The saddest thing,” she writes, as part of the sequence“A CLEARING,” set in the centre, the emotional eye, of the collection, “whensomeone’s gone, is land. // No amount of accuracy will bring what I see closer.// Its arms seem open but it keeps receding as I move.”

Thereis a patter that connects her domestic to her physical landscape, holding thetwo as not separate, but intricately connected. “I felt the authority of thearrangement: // how flowers with light behind them,” she writes, to open the six-pagepoem “NARRATIVE POEM,” “hanging plants / near the phone in our house / framedthat phone, the window, // our family dog chained in the shade of pines / andsoft needles beyond the glass. // The phone like a faucet. / A little grime inits grooves.” Countryman writes in meditative stretches, lines collected intoclusters around a thought or a series of thoughts that cohere into somethinglarger, offering meditations of walking, of moments, across great distances,and narratives-as-accumulation. One step follows another across these poems,offering moments stretched out, the big canvas of constellation that makes upthis collection. “I sweep a lot of gripes around the floor,” she writes, aspart of the poem “HOMEOWNER,” “thanking each Cheerio with trepidation.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Katie Naughton

Katie Naughton is the author of the poetry collection The Real Ethereal (Delete Press, 2024), and the chapbooks Study (above/ground press, 2021) and A Second Singing (Dancing Girl Press, 2023), and Debt Ritual (Bunny / Fonograf, forthcoming 2025. Her poetry has been published in Fence, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is an editor at Etcetera, a web journal of poetry and poetics (www.etceterapoetry.com) and a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program at SUNY – Buffalo.

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 really liked having a chapbook (my first, Study, from above/ground press) because it gave me something to give to other poets when I met them. Incidentally, a lot of the work in my new book, my first full-length collection The Real Ethereal, predates the work in Study, which was both composed and published relatively quickly. The Real Ethereal is poetry, whereas Study is a kind of essay form.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I read a lot more fiction as a young person, and hardly any poetry before college, so it was a bit of an accident to become a poet. I found, though, that my attention was inherently attuned to detail, the momentary, and the sound of language, more than narrative or character.
 
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 tend to draft a poem fairly quickly and in a form close to its final version, but it takes me a long time (a few years) to figure out how to frame a collection. So far. I don't know how my next big project will start and am interested in exploring other methods. I've been inspired recently by reading Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's drafts for Empathy at the Beinecke Library and seeing how the poem emerges from notes, sustained and direct inquiry into them, and iterative drafts.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I'm not necessarily working on a "book" from the very beginning, but I am thinking about the questions or possibilities a collection of short poems operate in and what else I need to write to fill out that line of inquiry.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I am moved by the hushed quiet of a room of people listening. I haven't done too many readings yet, but they feel like a good way to gather with other poets and bring the poems into the mouth.
 
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'm interested in perception, the relationship between thought and feeling, the relationship between language and experience, and how any of this can become relevant and present to others.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think writing can help expand the possibilities of perception and change, even if often only slightly, the way we experience the world and our lives. Writing can also be a friend, sometimes a funny one, to keep us company.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think it's such a generous use of an intelligence to work as an editor. I appreciate that someone is thinking with me about what I've made and that I can use their attention and vision as a tool to refine or strengthen the work.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Read more than you write; risk sentimentality. Both Susan Howe via Sasha Steensen, at least as far as I remember it.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
 My thought in poetry is never more strongly animated than when I am reading and writing critically, and my work as a critic is deeply informed by the experience of writing poetry. I do tend to have seasons for different projects, though, only because I like to place priority on one thing at a time to keep from feeling overwhelmed.

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'm not very good at routines, but I prefer the house to be put in order before I sit down to work. I have to clear a space, for better or for worse.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Reading, bodies of water, but also, I just wait.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Unfortunately at the moment, stale cigarette smoke that comes through our apartment walls from some untraceable source. I would prefer my answer to be warm pine wood, lake water, or traditionally milled French lavender soap.

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?
Other human structures, like money and cities. I like how visual artists often think iteratively about material or process and would like to emulate this but don't know if I do.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Bernadette Mayer, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lisa Robertson, Cass Eddington, Allyson Paty

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Surf (regularly/well)

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?
Maybe a historian. Which is still a kind of writer. All the other occupations I would have other than writer I do have (teacher, editor, arts administrator, grant writer, publicist . . .).

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It was what I was best at making, and it was thrilling to make something that I liked and that sometimes other people liked too.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I'm currently reading Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, though it has moved away from Hardy-the-poet writing about sheep farming and deeper into the romance plot and I'm becoming less interested. Have been neglecting film recently, accidentally, though there are so many good theaters now that I am here in NYC. Enjoyed some Ernie Gehr shorts at the Met earlier this year, with the filmmaker in attendance, and seeing the parallel world of avant garde film and its audiences, glad to know they've been there all along, too, while I've had my nose buried in poems.

20 - What are you currently working on?
My dissertation -- on opacity as a component of experience, and how this is used in poetry.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Nat Raha, apparitions (nines)

 

[ i/5 ]

 

grrrl // if we arecitizens
of nowhere, a threat tothe tone &
image;; composed / lacecute
we divine femmes no hereto disse
-ct your impositions >>
so late in the day, barkorgans
in casual violence: yourpleasure
excruciate living / &
the beauty about oureyelines

Thelatest from Edinburgh, Scotland-based “poet and activist-scholar” Nat Raha isthe poetry title apparitions (nines) (New York NY: Nightboat Books,2024), a fragmented, fractalled, book-length sequence. This collection wascomposed, as she writes in her four-page “Afterword,” “during a periodexperienced as temporal reversal, rupture and compression, 2017-2021. On June14th, 2017, seventy-two people—the majority of who were Black andbrown—were killed in the fire at Grenfell Tower, a twenty-four-story apartmentblock in West London. For many of us engaged in housing struggles, and in theradical history of London and the UK from anti-racist and anti-colonialperspectives, Grenfell was the amalgam of everything we knew regarding the ‘organizedabandonment’ and neglect that comes with private property oriented towardsmaximizing profits and a state that considers poor Black and brown people,especially Muslims, to be disposable.”

Setin nine sections of nine, each poem-fragment comprised of nine lines, offeringstaccato and stagger of word fragments, twisted syntax, and flagrantpunctuation and hesitations, she writes small moments, accumulated andelectrified, punctuated and piercing. “detached / formulaic / our / saturateeyes / chroma,” she writes, as part of “[ iii/7 ],” “-tic , brittle  , split, flaked w/out [.]” Her poems are expressive,and gestural, blending lines and references from other sources when required,whether a poem “after Anne Boyer,” or “with lines from Frank O’Hara’s‘Homosexuality’,” as Raha’s accumulations provide a layering effect acrossher narratives around social upheavals, human requirements and demanding,despite capitalism, that humans treat each other with at least a modicum of respectand dignity. “schema di/vesting black & brown / breath burnt ab/andoned /nest synthetic pale on pray / screech bitter salvation prized,” she writes,through the poem “[ vi/6 ],” “light disdain calls benevolent / neoliberal tearscellular / carbon based/carbon torn / stones & plaster time contained tofail // continues its ordinary [.]” Her narratives, as apparitions, shift withthe difference of light, of shadow, as she closes her “Afterword”:

            The poetics of the last one hundred plus years have demonstratedpoetry’s power as a direct mode of communication that can cut through times ofdiatribes and violence. The niner is a form attuned to speed and constraint. Theyare brief containers to feel through, polemicize, and remember—to communicatethe stakes of the everyday harassment and structural violence that are thelives of ourselves, our friends and our loves. For possibility, contradisposability. They shed light on the glitter and heat of our creopolitian,queer, and trans lives, in and through their collective formations.

Thepoems are staccato, and highly structured, as visual as they are performative,and I’d be curious to hear how any reading of these pieces would hold to thevisual notations sparked across these pages. As she writes at the opening, in“A NOTE ON THE FORM”:

The niner is acontemporary form of the nine-line poem, typically in sequences of nine poems.More recently, the niner consists of lines of nine syllables and/or othernumerical orderings in the number of sounds or words related to the numbernine.
            Coined by the poet Mendoza and adopted by variousinnovative writers, the niner is seemingly a “sonnot,” resembling a sonnetwhile radically departing from its conventions; a perverse sounding that adoptsa masochistic containment. In this book, the nine-syllable line reads as abrash, punk, or post-punk response to the metrics of Anglophone verse. The formhas allowed for experiment and study in dialect and accent, and their effectupon the language, contained in a line of nine syllables or beats.

my interview with David O'Meara, English-language Poet Laureate, City of Ottawa,

My interview with David O'Meara, recently announced at the English-language poet laureate for the City of Ottawa, is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics . Both Ottawa laureates, English and French, will be giving their first official reading as Poets Laureate as part of the John Newlove Awards and Ottawa Poets Laureate event through the Ottawa International Writers Festival, Club Saw, 67 Nicholas Street, Ottawa on Tuesday, October 1, 2024 at 6:30pm. This event will be free to the public. And don't forget that Christine McNair will be launching her hybrid memoir, Toxemia (Toronto ON: Bookhug Press, 2024)  at the event immediately following!

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Vincent Toro

Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, andprofessor. He is the author of two previous poetry collections: Tertulia andStereo.Island.Mosaic., which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma FarberFirst Book Award. He is a recipient of the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile deJonghLiterary Prize, the Spanish Repertory Theater’s Nuestras Voces PlaywritingAward, a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York State Council on theArts Fellowship in Poetry, and a New Jersey State Council on the ArtsIndividual Artist Fellowship for poetry. His poetry and prose have beenpublished in dozens of magazines and journals and have been anthologized inChorus: A Literary Mixtape, by Saul Williams, Puerto Rico en Mi Corazón, BestAmerican Experimental Writing 2015, Até Mais: Latinx Futures, and The BreakbeatPoets Vol. 4: LatiNext. He is an assistant professor of English at RiderUniversity, a Dodge Foundation poet, and a contributing editor for Kweli Journal.

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

I think participating in the process of art making is always lifechanging, even when there’s no final product. There were many tangible andintangible changes that came with that first book finally being out in theworld, but two stand out to me. The first change was psychological. Before thatbook, there was a general disquiet I was carrying, a vexing sense of urgency.It was a long road to getting that first book published. There were 20 years ofdetours and setbacks, which included starting an MFA program that I could notafford to finish. Through most of it I had to work two to three jobs, and I wascoming from a working class background where I didn’t have many connections orguides to help get me there. When at thirty-six I decided to try an MFA programa second time, I was already trying to come to terms with the reality that itmight not happen, that maybe I just didn’t have it in me to finish and publisha book. So when I finally got there, publishing my first collection at the ageof forty-one, some of that panic of “what am I doing here?” subsided. Itbolstered my confidence to know that I could make it happen, and that feelingended up extending into other parts of my life, my relationships, my teaching,how I went about my day to day.

Another way in which it changed my life was that it got me “in theroom.” Having a book out helped me gain access to the communities of writersand artists that I admired and respected and wanted to be in conversation andin collaboration with. My central desire has always been to live a lifepopulated with art and artists. That first publication rendered me visible togroups of people who quite literally did not see me before (even though I wasin fact there). My new found visibility brought me in contact with the kind ofpeople I wanted to be around, and provided opportunities that made my desire tobe immersed in a world of art a reality. 

Each of my books are (to my view) quite distinct from one another. Butthis third book is a huge leap from what I am doing in the first two. There hasalways been an experimental aspect to my writing, but with Hivestruck I took a lot of risks with regard to what I was writing about and in themethods I used to create the work. In fact, I made it a goal to write poemsthat were not like the ones in my first two books. Those books very much grewout of my experience as a spoken word/slam poet and stage performer. They weredriven by sound and orality, poems to be performed in a public space. WithHIVESTRUCK, the starting point for the poems was not musicality and orality.Instead, I began composing with a focus on what I would call the “conceptualarchitecture” of the poems. That is, I treated the poems like art objects thatmight be mounted in a gallery, where the physical structure and the look of thepoem is central to making meaning. For some poems, I even gave myself thechallenge of writing a piece that couldn’t be read aloud or performed (knowing,of course, that all language can be pronounced and recited).  

I also made the decision to write a “book,” rather than a collectionof poems. During TERTULIA’s release I did a podcast conversation with Willie Perdomo where he said that he doesn’t write poems anymore, he writes books. Forsome reason, that hadn’t really occurred to me before, and that notion sparkedsomething in me. I connected what he said to the work of The Mars Volta, a bandthat I am unabashedly obsessed with (honestly, I can’t believe it took me thislong to mention them). Early on, their albums were all concept albums whereeach song is woven into a larger unifying idea, more symphony than a series of“singles.” This spurred me to make it a goal to write HIVESTRUCK as a “conceptalbum” rather than a bunch of “singles.”

Moreover, my first two books were very much about Puerto Rican andLatinx Identity, the poems coming out of my work as a social justice artseducator in New York. These are themes and fields that were already a part ofmy body, ideas and histories that I lived and that I already knew quite a bitabout. But HIVESTRUCK is engaging with issues related to technology, astronomy,math, and computer science. Though I had a long standing fascination with thesethings, I possessed only a very rudimentary education about them when I startedto construct the book. The learning curve was a long one to get me to where Ifelt I could write my way through these subjects meaningfully. I had to spendabout a decade reading and researching to become an “amateur expert.”  As a result of all this, this book feelsradically different to me, almost as if a different author wrote it.

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

I came to poetry first because I came to music first, and poetry is,above all things, music. My fascination with music goes back to when I wasmaybe three or four years old. As my mother tells it, I would go about thefamily apartment belting out a toddler’s cut-up version of the chorus toSantana’s “Black Magic Woman” and Frank Sinatra’s rendition of “New York, NewYork.” I grew to not only be fixated on singing and sound making, but alsolyrics. In middle school, my amigo Terry and I were fanatically memorizing andspitting back to each other lines from the raps of Public Enemy, Run DMC, andIce T. This was all a prelude to when my first mentor gave me a copy of PedroPietri’s Puerto RicanObituary when I was fifteen years old,which led this scrawny Boricua kid who grew up in a house without books todecide that he was going to be a poet.

In hindsight, I can see that I had always been thinking and operating“poetically,” even with no frame of reference for it back then. In elementaryschool, I was reprimanded several times by teachers because I refused to writein paragraph form. Stanzas felt inherently natural to me, while I still feelrelatively uneasy with the paragraphs of prose. But I do have a real love forfiction. By the 5th or 6th grade I was reading a dozen orso novels a year. I take great pleasure in reading fiction, I just never hadtoo much interest in writing it. When I am compelled to create something thatneeds more conventional narrative methods, I turn to playwriting, which sharessome elements with poetry, such as the emphasis on sound (voice) and a layouton the page that is not the paragraph. But it goes well beyond just preferringthe stanza whenever I take up a pen. I think and communicate in ways that justseem instinctive to poetry. Poetry is my operating system. It is how I processand engage with the world.    

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

The short answer is it takes forever and is incredibly slow. Pero thething is, a “project” is a “product,” and I can’t really say I am focused onproduct making most of the time. Like I said, poetry is just my way of being inthe world (and of coping with it). The process elements of reading/researching,drafting, revising, and performing are components of my day to day existence,so it is hard for me to pinpoint when a specific contained work of poetry“begins” and “finishes.” I am also the opposite of a creature of habit. I amrepelled by habit and routine, so these process stages of my art happendisproportionately and in rather varying time intervals. It’s more of a bingeand purge, feast and famine situation with regard to my writing habits. A lotof time is spent collecting language and references, sketching ideas, andplaying with sound and text. There is a fair amount of improvisation and playinvolved, and an absolute excess of reading. I suppose I typify Roberto Bolaño’s satirical characterization of the Latin American writer as one whoreads a lot and publishes a little. It’s more like sculpting to me. I dedicatesubstantial time and space to “make clay” or to gather materials for mysculpture. 90 percent of the process is making clay.

I do eventually get to a place where I have all this “clay” sittingaround in my notebooks and different computer folders. Then I will start toreview it all, shuffle, dice and splice things until something like a morefully formed poem begins to reveal itself. Then I expanded this method intoweaving a series of poems, then sections. At some point in all this I do getproduct minded and take up shaping what I have into a book. An effect offunctioning this way is that the work for all three of my books happened on anoverlapping timeline. So the earliest poems in STEREO.ISLAND.MOSAIC. can betraced back to spoken word pieces I was performing under the title GODS ANDGUNS back around 2000 and 2001, with the last poems written in late 2015, aboutsix months before the book was published. TERTULIA’s earliest pieces werecomposed around 2006, when I was living in Texas and working as the theaterdirector for the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, with the most recent poems inthat collection completed in February of 2020. There is a poem in HIVESTRUCKthat was initially sketched out in 1998, but I really started creatingmaterials for this book around 2011 when I started my MFA at Rutgers. The lastpoem I wrote for this book was composed in January of this year. I figurethat’s about a ten to fifteen year arc for each book from beginning to end, ifI had to pin down specific moments of inception to publication. I got compadreswho hammer out a book a year, so it seems like I do have quite a long, slow arcin my process by comparison.      

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

Oh, I think I might have answered this one cumulatively in my previousresponses. So I’ll just reiterate that I find it difficult to pinpoint where abook begins or ends for me, and that for my first two books, the focus was onwriting solid singular poems that I later worked into collection, finding theconceptual framework only after most of the poems were written. Whereas withthis new book, the intent was to write a book from a fairly early stage in theprocess. 

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

This might be the simplest and easiest question to answer: Yes! Claroque si! Absolutely!

I am theater trained, and I got my start in poetry doing slam at theNuyorican Poets Cafe. Performing and writing are inextricably linked for me.They are not separate things. I would even go so far as to say that theperforming of the poem is THE thing, it is the reason for even writing thepoem. In the poetic lineages of BIPOC people and people of the Global South,poetry’s essence resides in the oral tradition. It’s music! It’s theater! Andthe reason for all of it is to create and nurture community.

You know, for the first year or so of the pandemic, I found itimpossible to write. I came to understand that this inability to write at thattime was because I had no real reason to write, because I write in order tomake community. The whole point is to write something that you can bring to astage, go into a classroom with, huddle up in a bar around, to share it outloud with others. As my body was despairing during the pandemic that it had solittle human contact, I started to question if I would ever get to inhabit suchspaces again. For a spell, my creative spirit just gave up on the idea ofwriting, because writing is only the bridge to community. Fortunately we areback in the world, together, and I have gradually gone back to my old writingprocess, because the meaning for it all has returned. I tell you, I cannot livewithout experiencing oral poetry and stage theater and live music. Or at leastI wouldn’t want to.

On a quick craft point: Live readings are also part of my editingprocess. Hearing my poems out loud and gauging them with audiences helps me tohear what is working, what needs tweaking, and provides me with a more completevision for a piece and what it is meant to be doing. 

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

I’m not sure if you are asking about theoretical concerns in craft orin vision, but I think posing, engaging, and exploring questions is the primaryengine of the work. I regularly share with my students this interview withJulia Alvarez where she paraphrases Checkhov, who insisted that the purpose ofan artist’s work is not to provide answers, but rather to articulate a questionclearly. That says a lot about my approach. With each art poem/play/book, I amattempting to articulate a particular question for myself and for thereader/listener/audience. The questions I am trying to articulate are expansiveand varying from poem to play, but with my three poetry books, each had anoverarching, guiding question that unified the collection.

STEREO.ISLAND.MOSAIC. examines the very personal question of “whatdoes it mean to be Puerto Rican/Caribbean/Latinx?”

TERTULIA explores the question of “how do BIPOC groups in the U.S. andthe people of the Global South resist the coloniality of power?”

HIVESTRUCK asks “in the age of the technopoly (Neil Postman identifiesthe technopoly as the current era where humans have chosen to worshiptechnology like a religion.), what is a person?

I think all of those questions are still quite relevant. At least,they are relevant to me, as I am still engaging with them, and will probablycontinue to try to unpack them in future work. Of course each of them havehundreds of disparate but related questions springing from their branches.

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

Well let me start with how I sense others currently see that role.Here in the U.S., a culture still locked in the thrall of Global MilitaristicCapitalism, there are those people who want to deify the writer, to give thewriter a privileged place in the hierarchy, and to prove that writers deserveto receive some of the spoils available to the privileged. Then there are thosewho think the writer is a useless annoyance (unless their books can generatemassive revenue) who is better left ignored, and is entirely undeserving ofsaid spoils. I’ve come to see the writer outside of the Capitalist frameworkthat renders us as either “special people” or “non-people.” In fact, it is myconviction that the idea of there being “special people” is a violent notion bolsteredto help maintain systems of inequality.

I think writers and what we do are absolutely vital to the world, butin the same way that nurses and electricians and mathematicians and farmers areabsolutely vital. We contribute to the larger whole by providing a specificessential service. Our particular contribution is in making and codifyingculture, in synthesizing the different fields of knowledge, in transmitting andtranslating those fields of knowledge, in articulating and critiquing themachinations of power, and in evolving how collectivities of human beings thinkand operate. It’s the synthesizing part of that statement that is mostimportant. Octavio Paz, in making an argument for the important of thehumanities, claimed that those of us that work in the humanities (which, ofcourse, includes writers) are the ones who weave together and makes sense ofthis world of cordoned off “specialists” that the post-industrial world hasproduced. He said without someone to unify these otherwise isolated fields ofknowledge and to make them accessible to everyone, social entropy will takehold. We need the writers (and others in the humanities) to perform thisfunction. And there will never be a time when human societies are not in needof someone to do that work. So though what writing looks like and how writerswrite will inevitably morph over time, I can’t foresee a human world where thewriter will not have a place. I think the writer’s strike this past year did agood job of revealing this to be true.

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

Is it an either/or proposition? Can’t it be both? I mean, perhaps itis my theater training, but I don’t really think any artist can function in avoid. We need collaborators and co-conspirators, someone who can look at whatwe are doing from the outside and can tell us what they see, ask us questions,provoke us to think about our work differently. But this is a relationship, andall relationships require labor, patience, flexibility, a mutual effort tounderstand each other. As a former collaborator from my theater days in SanAntonio once said to me, “pero es un lindo trabajo.” It’s beautiful work! Or atleast it can be. Like all relationships, a good deal hinges on who it is youare involving yourself with. The right collaborators/co-conspirators can makeutter magic together. Conversely, it can be toxic if the people involved cannotcome to understand each other.

I have been quite lucky in my life to have worked with some reallywonderful editors. Janet Holmes, who ran Ahsahta Press where my first book waspublished, handled my work as a new author with such care and patience. Shedidn’t try to impose her own aesthetics and ideology on me, and as a whitewoman editing a book rooted in Latinx and Caribbean poetic legacies, she wasnot dismissive of what she didn’t understand (which I have experiencedelsewhere). Similarly, Paul Slovak and Allie Merola at Penguin, and their team,trust that I know what I am doing and commit to my vision for a book, whilealso guiding me to making the work as strong as it can be by asking criticalquestions, encouraging me to dig deeper in places where they see I can gofurther, and keep me focused while providing space for me to experiment andtake risks, which is in my nature as an artist.

They are and have been my official editors, but writers also havethose editors who are not listed in the rolling credits of the film, right? Iam very fortunate, and honored to be married to a first rate writer andscholar, Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta. She is my first reader and has done countlesshours of unpaid editorial work, offering feedback, advice, and encouragement,labor I hope I have reciprocated.

So it again goes back to this idea that art/writing is all aboutmaking and nurturing community, no? 

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

This relates to what I have been saying about the importance ofrelationships and art as community building. I received this wisdom from myfirst mentors in the theater world, from playwrights Carmen Rivera and Candido Tirado. It is not anything that can easily be summarized or wrapped up in acatchy sentence. They showed me the very difficult truth that some folks aregenuinely there to build with you and want to help you and your work flourish,and there are those who will take on the appearance and use the language of acollaborator and co-conspirator, but they will try to sabotage your work byweaponizing feedback and critique. They taught me it was important to learn howto distinguish between the two, in order to protect myself and my vision, butalso to protect the artistic communities that I find myself a part of. As theirmentee, I watched them interact with other writers, directors, actors, andproducers, and saw how they carried themselves, how they made themselves alwaysavailable to help, but how they protected their space, their plays, withdignity and without toxicity. Learning this from them has carried me throughthese last 30 years of my career.

10 - How easy hasit been for you to move between genres? What do you see as the appeal?

Depends on the genre. I have always been a sponge for art and acreative polyglot who loves what people consider highbrow and lowbrow art. Hivestruckwas inspired in part by science fiction films and novels, and my first twobooks are heavily influenced by pop artists in music and visual art, from Björkto Pedro Almodóvar to Basquiat to Octavia Butler and comedian Freddie Prinze.Actually, central to my art is the act of blurring - or even eliminating - theaesthetic and ideological walls of genre and style. It’s all Édouard Glissant’sPoetics of Relation to me. The appeal, the joy, is in bridging all thesedisparate worlds together in a way that also abolishes hierarchies. I alsoblend forms and techniques, and I love to juxtapose vernaculars and jargon fromdifferent subcultures. Genres can be fun, but they are also constructs designedto sell and market products. It’s the artist’s duty to flip the script on allthat.

11 - What kind ofwriting routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does atypical day (for you) begin?

I think I covered this a bit with one of the prior questions, but I amrather anti-routine, which can feel liberating, but I know it is also apersonal obstacle. I grew up in a rather chaotic household, there were norituals we adhered to. We were taught to be responsible about meetingobligations for work, but outside of that, life is a free for all. This bred meto be averse to routines and stubborn about doing only what I want when I want.Perhaps that was why I didn’t make a great athlete when I was playing sportsback in my school days. The idea of doing the same workout everyday at the sametime repulses me. I am well aware that this is to my own detriment.

Theater did offer me another way, however. Stage productions operateon a schedule, but for a finite timeline where you can see the finish line. Youwork intensely for three months and then the run is over and you can go back toan unstructured life. I suppose it is fitting I ended up a professor, where Iwork intensely in four month intervals, and then go back to waking up and doingthings at different times every day. And I have adopted this for my creativeand writing life as well. I work intensely for marked intervals, and then I cango back to living randomly for a spell, before I have to get back to living bymy alarm. When I am in professor mode, I am up early, my schedule packedtightly, and steadily juggling the classroom with administrative work with mywork as an artist. In between semesters, my days are a random sancocho ofreading, drinking coffee, music playing, errands, film watching, city walks,writing and other art making. A few months ahead of a deadline - either thesemester is about to begin or I have a piece I have to write or a productioncoming up -  I’ll tighten the reins andpush myself to keep more structured and saner hours. 

12 - When yourwriting gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a betterword) inspiration?

Art. I return to some art or artist I know will ignite my intellect ormy senses. The impetus for me to write comes from two places: I set to workwhen some injustice or corrosive power draws my ire, or when I have taken inanother work of art that moves me so deeply it fires up the impulse to createagain. The first impetus can’t be artificially provoked, and it would be awfulif one could spawn injustice to happen just to make art. With the former I amusually taken by surprise and it's kind of a “drop everything you're doing towork this out on the page” situation. But when I haven’t created new work for aspell and I am feeling like I need to make something happen, I’ll go and watcha Pasolini film, or hit up a museum, spend a few hours mixing up records on mysound system, or - when I really need to return to the source - I read someDerek Walcott. Walcott always makes me want to write, and to be a better writer(and to question why I even try because he is just so damn good).

13 - Whatfragrance reminds you of home?

Whatever fragrance my wife is wearing that evening, because she is myhome.

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

Yeah, lo siento, pero I have to respectfully disagree with McFadden. Itake the position of Kurt Vonnegut here, who said, “I think it can betremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mindother than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear upits own asshole, so to speak.” Books coming from books makes for insular workthat exists in an echo chamber and risks being irrelevant to the world atlarge.

I already mentioned how I tend to turn to film, visual art, theater,and (primarily) music to replenish the creative well and gather material for myart. But I also strongly advocate taking the time to learn from and engage withthings outside the realm of art. You referred to nature and science, forexample. I am puro city kid, not the outdoorsy type, but I find that going forlong walks (through any kind of environment) replenishes the well. Though Istruggle with a steady exercise routine, I do find that physical activity canalso kick things into gear. Playing some basketball used to do it for me,before I tore up my ankle one too many times. And dancing, which I still do,though now it’s just for 30 minutes in my living room; my clubbing days arefar, far in the past. I have writer friends who like tinkering withelectronics, some who knit, others who fish, who take up running. Whatever hasyou engaging with the world beyond literature, so you have something to bringback to the page with you when you return. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edouard-Glissant

15 - What otherwriters or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside ofyour work?

During the release of my last book, Tertulia, Jose B. Gonzalez askedme in an interview about my poetry being steeped in history. That’s because Ihave such a small obsession with history, not for nostalgic reasons, butbecause I am a descendent of colonized people whose history and culturehegemonic powers have continually tried to erase. Reclaiming my history hasbecome crucial to my writing and my teaching. It has aided me in understandingmyself and mi gente, and it has also helped me understand our oppressor better.So I read a good deal of Latin American history, politics, and cultural texts…a lot of decolonial theory. Eduardo Galeano is essential reading. AníbalQuijano’s Coloniality of Power is cornerstone, and I think I already mentionedAntonio Benítez-Rojo and Édouard Glissant. Their theories heavily informed myfirst two books. There’s also Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Edward Said, Arundhati Roy, Judith Butler, Juan Flores and Miriam Jiménez Román. José Esteban Muñoz’stexts are absolutely necessary. And right now I am trying to read everything byMarie Arana, one of the foremost writers on Latinx and Latin American peoplecurrently working. Being an educator, I also read my share of pedagogical textssuch as bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Neil Postman, and Dr. Bettina Love. And Iread an unreasonable amount of books about music, too many to name here. Musicbooks are my go to when I just want to read for pleasure. 

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

I am extremely fortunate to be able to say that most of what I havewanted to do with my life I have already done. But I would love to visit asmuch of the planet as I can while I am alive. It would be great to get to seemore of Latin America, and to finally travel to East Asia and somewhere inAfrica. I also would like to one day be fully fluent in Spanish well enough toread One Hundred Years of Solitude in its originallanguage. 

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

I think I am already doing the only other work I am cut out for:teaching. If I can use this question to fantasize for a minute here, though, adream job would be hosting a travel show, one that focuses on culture andhistory instead of food. Stanley Tucci recently did his “Searching for Italy”show. I’d love to create a show “Searching for Latin America” and host it. 

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

Well, I began writing because I was bullied and silenced as a youngchild. There was a real danger in opening my mouth back then, there would bephysical repercussions, so I took to laying down what I was experiencing in anotebook. Then when I started reading out of those notebooks at open mics onthe slam circuit I felt a kind of liberation. Writing and performing poetry wasthe option that made itself available to me for inexplicable reasons. I supposepart of that has to do with class. My one true artistic love is music, butthere was no money in my family for expensive instruments and private lessons.A pen and notebook is the cheapest set of materials for any artisticdiscipline. Anyone can take it up. That is why it is such a powerful agent forpersonal and social change. Believe me, if I had had access to the resourcesthat could have made me a singer or a guitarist, I would have jumped on that.It’s always been about sound and language for me. 

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

Ooh! I just finished reading Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other . That is an utterly heart warming and mind-blowing book. The novel isa kind of tapestry of the lives of Black women in contemporary England. With nosingle character on a “hero’s journey,” the book serves as an antidote to thesingle story problem (as articulated by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). The storiesin it are so eclectic and rich and complicated and surprising, with a wonderfulbalance of humor and serious discourse. And there are hardly any men in thestories. We are in secondary roles and not central to any of the narratives inthe book - which I find refreshing, and quite beautiful. And of course thatshould be the norm. Anyway, I am adamant that everyone should read this book.

And I recently watched AboutDry Grasses by my favorite Turkishfilmmaker, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. In my book, Tertulia, I wrote an ekphrastic for his film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. His films are also an antidote: an antidotefor the “roller coaster” model of Hollywood films (to quote Martin Scorsese).His films are sprawling, meditative, pieces driven more by character than byplot. They are also visually stunning, every shot is a painting. Ceylan’s filmshave the nuance and complexity of great novels, they don’t deal in thesimplistic good vs. evil binaries of Hollywood films. This makes it a bitdifficult to say what his films are “about.” They are about many things, butmore importantly they are an experience. What I can say is that About DryGrasses confronts the blurriness of whatwe consider to be “truth,” and how disillusionment can lead to bitterness andisolation. The film’s neo-realistic character study of teachers in rural Turkeyis blended with a few surprising, artful flourishes and lush cinematographycapturing the wintery landscape of central Turkey. I really do wish more filmslike this were being made right now, films that illuminate the human experienceand do not shy away from subtlety and vulnerability, that use image as metaphor- film as poetry.   

20 - What are youcurrently working on?

Right now, I am back to making clay. There isn’t anything concreteyet. What I can say is that the handful of poems that I do have so far are akind of sequel to my first book, reaching back but expanding the themes ofLatinidad and Puerto Rican and Caribbean history that I was exploring there.The working title for this series is Hurricanticle, but it is at avery early stage, and my work can sometimes become something very differentfrom what I started with during the arc of my process.

It’s been almost seven years since I worked on a play, so I am hopingto get back to that part of my creative life at some point as well. I have askeleton idea for a play, but there’s not enough there yet to even consider atitle or provide a tagline for it. We’ll have to see. Right now I am justtrying to be in the present and celebrate the fact that Hivestruck isfinally out in the world. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

AJ Dolman, Crazy/Mad

 

Bitch

Anger, dwelling, a sorrowof stones,
no weathers but the rains
that misery us past thebroken point

Rage house and drag lawnand
all the time spent,
every moment wasted
each my/our, your fault,mine,
what differences there
could still be between us,
these spaces

Anger fibres from thecarpets,
fills the voids, eachempty room
brimming with furniture,clocks
and

Thefull-length poetry debut by Ottawa poet, editor and fiction writer AJ Dolman is Crazy/Mad (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2024), a book of anxieties,flailing, resistance, vulnerability and mental health struggles. “Ruptured spokesand axel / whine as moulded steel settles / into new shapes,” Dolman writes, aspart of the poem “Trauma response,” “plastic, / deflated lung, a brokentradition; / cougar and hare motif homaging / histories of crosshairs /triangulated on hills of fog, / the many outcomes / that came before, / thatwill [.]” Set with opening poem “Overthinking” and three sections of poems—“HYSTERIA,”“NEUROSIS” and “MELANCHOLIA”—Dolman’s first-person lyrics move through an arrayof subjects, examining and highlighting rage, trauma, self-harm, vertigo, supernaturalbeliefs, atheism, personality disorders and memory loss. “There’s a story,” thepoem “Memory loss” ends, “the night that happened, / but a man can’t tell astory like that. / He has to wait until everyone named within / is dead; canonly hope to outlive them, / so that someday he can explain his certainty / tono one [.]” How does one write, or even find balance, through such struggle? There’ssomething interesting, also, how Dolman refuses closure, whether easy orotherwise, ending poems abruptly (although perhaps not as abruptly as theycould be), often sans punctuation. It suggests both a sudden stop and a kind ofongoingness, how one poem, one crisis or concern, actually bleeds into the next.“All our forths and backs could be broken / into letters,” the poem “Difficultyconcentrating” ends, “twenty-seven shapes, / a few scratches, but we whisper /our meanings in the kerning [.]”

Thisis a book of anxieties, but of agency, also. In an interview conducted earlierthis year by Amanda Earl for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics,they speak to the book’s overall theme:

AE: You deal withmental health issues in this book in a way I rarely read in contemporarypoetry. Can you talk about how the collection came together and how you decidedto center it around this theme?

AJD: I write whatI am passionate about, and this is a thread that has run through my life,through generations of my family, among friends and colleagues. And now,especially since the start of the COVID pandemic and general acknowledgement ofthe climate crisis, anxiety and depression, in particular, seem to be runningrampant. Of course they are. Look at what is happening. I am honestly amazed wearen't all just breaking down in the streets daily. Yet, Madness was one of mymost fundamental fears for as long as I can remember. Not the being Mad itself,but to be considered crazy, to be sent away, institutionalized, diagnosed.Voicelessness, again.

Joyelle McSweeney, Death Styles

My review of South Bend, Indiana poet Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2024) is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics . See my 2009 "12 or 20 questions" interview with her here.