Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 87

T. Liem, SLOWS : TWICE

 

Thesecond collection from Montreal-based poet T. Liem, following OBITS. (TorontoON: Coach House Books, 2018), is SLOWS : TWICE (Coach House Books, 2023),a collection of mirror-texts, with each poem corresponding to a counterpoint poemat the other end of the collection, until each end of the collection finallymeets, or even collides, in the middle. Through each pairing there’s an abstractof questions and how answers reveal themselves. Liem works through erasure,revision, reclamation, translation and transmogrification, exploring howstories are solved, resolved, morphed and recovered. “We need concepts more /than they need us so try again without me,” Liem writes, as part of “1985 –,” “andthe grandmother. It’s been done.” And, as the corresponding poem, “– YYYY,” offers,simultaneously:

Myliver my take So
donebeen it’s. grandmother the and
mewithoutagain try so us need they than:
more concepts need

Liemwrites amid and between categories of self and identity, offering each poemfacing its mirror, composing both staring at and through the other, whether as apair of straight, clean images or as two that blend and shimmer into the other.“language is change / changed by prosody,” Liem writes, as part of “THE SECONDHALF / FOLDS IN ON ITSELF,” “later an offer / a translation [.]” Liem writes ofexisting in that in-between of being, as the back cover offers, “divided inhalf, a charged division for someone who is often identified as such ethnicallyand racially. As each half unfolds, divisions of category blur – work andpleasure, night and day, home and stranger are reinvented.” “Maybe / one oftwo.” the poem “THE PAST” offers; further on, writing “Maybe / both.” A bitdeeper into the same piece, a futher fragment reads: “lexicon of what I hadbeen called / coincides with / lexicon of what I calls self [.]”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Amy Berkowitz

Amy Berkowitz is the author of Gravitas , recently published by Total Joy and Éditions du Noroît, and Tender Points , published by Nightboat Books. Her writing and conversations have appeared in publications including Bitch, The Believer, BOMB, and Jewish Currents. She lives in San Francisco, where she’s working on a novel and a nonfiction project. More at amyberko.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?
Tender Points changed my life by introducing me to other disabled people. I wrote an afterword to the 2019 Nightboat edition about that (the book was originally published by Timeless, Infinite Light in 2015). When I started writing it, I didn’t know anyone else with fibromyalgia. Now disability community is an important part of my life.

My new book, Gravitas, which is coming out this month from Éditions du Noroît in Canada and Total Joy in the US, is funny and angry at the same time, like Tender Points. But while I made a big deal in Tender Points about trying to write in “straightforward, masculine prose” so that I’d be taken seriously, Gravitas is a poetry collection.

2 - How did you come to prose first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I actually started with poetry. I wrote poetry as a kid and all through college, and I got an MFA in poetry. But the professors at my MFA program taught me that poetry wasn’t an effective way to express myself — the only feedback they gave me was, “Amy, where’s the gravitas”? It was only 10 years after we graduated that a friend pointed out the sexism behind that criticism, and that’s what made me start writing Gravitas.

Anyway, I mostly stopped writing poetry after grad school. I wrote Tender Points and some shorter essays and one and half novels. I started writing Gravitas as an essay, but it was a very weird, dense essay. I put it away for a few months and then looked at it again and realized it needed to be poems. Which is ironic because it’s about how grad school made me stop writing poetry.

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?
Every project is different. With the novel I’m working on now, the idea came to me quickly and I wrote a few pages of notes. And then other projects came up and I kind of put it away, and then more than a year later I started writing it.

There are always some recognizable words or lines in finished work, and also some new and improved language as well. I’ve been in various writing groups IRL and online since 2017, and gathering and incorporating feedback from friends is a big part of my process. Even though I’m technically the author, it all feels collaborative to some extent.

4 - Where does a 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?
It depends: Tender Points and the fragmented essay I’m working on now are aggregations of short pieces. The novels I’ve worked on were more planned out, but I’ve been trying to think of ways to bring the ease and serendipity of fragmented writing into my fiction writing practice.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Yes, I like doing readings, and I think poems like being read out loud. I hosted a reading series at my apartment for seven years and now I host an outdoor reading series with Erick Sáenz called Light Jacket Reading Series.

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 don’t think about the world in terms of theory. Generally my writing projects come from the question: why did this happen?

Why did I develop fibromyalgia after recalling my sexual assault (Tender Points)? Why did my grad school professors spend two years telling me my work lacked gravitas (Gravitas)? Why do so many well-meaning feminist people, including me, wind up reacting in unhelpful and even harmful ways after a friend is sexually assaulted (unpublished novel)? Why was figuring out my sexuality so confusing (novel in progress)?  

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?
As AI is becoming more popular and so many people think it’s the hottest shit, the role of the writer is clearer than ever: our role is to have and express new ideas through language. The thing with all the AI writing programs is that they can do some pretty interesting things in terms of combining ideas, but they’re not able to come up with original ideas. The idea that they’re intelligent is an illusion. If we relied on AI for our writing, writing would be limited to remakes and remixes of ideas that already exist, including some pretty bad ideas. We won’t be able to move forward as a society if we limit ourselves to ruminating on a finite amount of ideas.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
As I mentioned, feedback from friends is an essential part of my practice. I rarely publish something without showing it to someone first, because my friends always have great ideas. In a more formal capacity, I’ve worked with some great editors, like Niela Orr. I’ve only had one difficult experience working with an editor, and even then, most of her edits were useful! Her google doc comments were just phrased in a very harsh way, and I feel like there’s never a reason to give feedback like that — just be nice and people will have an easier time listening to and applying your suggestions.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I don’t remember where I heard this, because it’s pretty common advice, but just the idea of using the Notes app as a place to write. I have a memory of Sarah Manguso mentioning it at a Green Apple event for her book Ongoingness , but that might not be true. I associate it with parents especially, because it can be harder to find the time to sit down with your computer when you have kids. I just had a baby in October, so I’m very interested in how my writing routine will shift and evolve.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don’t have a regular writing routine. I’ve always felt okay about this, maybe because I started as a poet.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I go for a walk, which is what I do to solve a wide range of problems. Sometimes I’ll wind up writing on my Notes app while I walk, but that’s not the point of it. The point is to get out of my head.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Wet asphalt after rain in the summer (New York City).

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
All kinds of media and experiences influence my writing. I recently saw Desperately Seeking Susan for the first time and it kind of helped me unlock something about the relationship between the characters in the novel I’m writing.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I could make a long list but instead I’ll just name two big ones, Diane di Prima and Miriam Toews. Diane di Prima because she showed teenage me how to make a life as an artist and Miriam Toews because her novels are just as sad and funny as real life is.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to visit Japan. My husband and I had planned a trip there for May 2020 hahahaha.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I became really interested in linguistics in college and took some classes on philosophy of language and child development of language, but my school didn’t have a linguistics major. I thought about transferring to a school with a linguistics major, but didn’t want to upend my life and start over in a new place. I think I’d really like being a linguist, but I’m happy doing what I’m doing now.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Through my teens I was equally interested in writing and photography. The thing that made me ultimately choose writing was that it doesn’t require special equipment. When I finished college, I didn’t have darkroom access anymore, but I still had ... a pen.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was Zoe Tuck’s poetry collection, Bedroom Vowel. As for films, I really enjoyed the recent documentary about the Elephant 6 music collective. It’s a really beautiful depiction of collaborations that grow out of friendships and friendships that grow out of collaborations and the resulting art. I also really like the show Atlanta. I don’t watch a lot of TV, but if more shows were like Atlanta I would.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a nonfiction project that’s too new to talk about and a novel about bisexuality, imposter syndrome, making art, not making art, and the humiliating process of becoming yourself.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Spotlight series #86 : Maw Shein Win

The eighty-sixth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win.

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

Alicia Mountain, Four in Hand

  

Forefather, I swear I’mfalling turbulent from
the DC sky. I am sweatpalmingpages the
rational blood you put inme cannot subsume.
Loosen tie. Tighten seatbelt.On the tray table
I smooth convention centernotes I took in the
back row of a reading—Poetryin the Age of
the Drone. I apologizefor my body, for its
puny hovering fear. The rattleas gravel on a
road in the dark of myclosed eyes. Imagine
there is four-wheeldrive. Me small in a car seat
and you up front saying, cattleguard. Saying,
baby girl. Saying, don’tlet this rumble scare you.
Unshaken, the pitch ofthe cockpit voices,
the sinister lever-pullthat will not right us. (“Initial Descent”)

I’mfascinated by the extended sonnet-structures and deep meditations across New York City-based poet and editor Alicia Mountain’s second full-lengthcollection, Four in Hand (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2023). Structured asa quartet of sections—“Train Town Howl,” “Sparingly,” “Initial Descent” and “MyMerrill”—eachof these contain suites of fifteen linked sonnets, each poem folding lines fromthe prior: each opening line is also the final line from the prior, until eachsequence ends with the opening line repeated, looping all the way back to the beginning.In certain ways, Four in Hand is a lyric of constraint and geography,wandering the landscape and hills in fourteen lines, fifteen poems, across acycle of four. “Your map doesn’t stray like I do,” the opening poem offers, “butwe were both drawn to scale, / traced by your fingers for a path, / we both foldsmall for safekeeping.” Throughout, there is almost a kind of American Gothic articulatedthrough Mountain’s examination of ecological landscape and paced lyric,reveling in swagger and intrigue, and the erotics of storms and of hills. As theopening poem of the second section reads: “lips / licked / wet / enough / to /whisper / we / saw / a / bald / eagle / here / once / remember [.]” Her lyricsare textured, tensile; writing of memory, and landscapes internal and external.“Who mouthed it / last?” she writes in the first sequence, “What solemnity andgrace did / they avow? To what am I entitled?”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Carrie Oeding

Carrie Oeding's collection of poems If I Could Give You a Line won the AkronPoetry Prize and was published by University of Akron Press (2023). She is alsothe author of Our List of Solutions (42 Miles Press), and her work hasappeared in such places as Bennington Review, Sixth Finch, PBSNewsHour ArtBeat, DIAGRAM, and Denver Quarterly. She was therecipient of the 2020 Rhode Island Council on the Arts' Fellowship in Poetry.She received her PhD in creative writing from Ohio University. She is aninstructional designer and educator at Johnson and Wales University. She liveswith her husband and daughter in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

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

In my first book, OurList of Solutions, I tapped into a voice, through readingother voices that surprised me. I figured out my associative inclinations.The book ultimately came from grad school, and I had learned what tolisten to and not listen to when making the book. When published, it felt likean achieved milestone, and I was/am very happy that I made the book I wanted tomake.

My second book, IfI Could Give You a Line, is wild to me because it feels like an impossiblework I made, that I am still surprised I wrote, that nobody cared if I wrote,and it was completely felt out in the dark in an exciting, difficult way. Ittaught me I can leap into uncertainty and write a future book that I also don'tthink I can write. My voice is still present in book two from book one, but inmy first book, the voice felt more pessimistic. This new book is notoptimistic, just more interested in art-making than anything, and thatart-making makes me think a lot about my relation to others in dailiness.

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

I wanted to mine voice inthe dark and tunnel out spaces with that voice that felt like I could, in someways, do whatever I wanted to do as long as I let that voice keep unfolding ina certain way. I do not know how to describe what that "certainway" is, other than knowing when it feels flat or limiting and that Ineed to keep kicking over rocks or But I needed to figure out what kind ofcontainer or room was allowing that freedom in others' and then my own work.At the time I didn't know writers actually lead with voice in fiction andnonfiction, too. That edgelessness. But fiction writers like Claire Louise-Bennett set my brain on fire with their lyricalunderstanding/being. 

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?

My writing isembarrassingly slow. The more I try to embrace that, I hope, the lesspainfully slow it comes. I don't finish a draft of anything until the poem isactually done. Meaning, I can't write a draft then revise it. I revise whilewriting and it never is a finished draft until it is finished. I like thismessy feeling, because I jump around the poem in progress and work on different partsat different times. Although my partner would say I sound completely frustratedand lost while working through this mess, and that is also true.

4 - Where does a poemusually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combininginto a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the verybeginning?

My poems usually beginwith the title or the first line. It feels like a frame or just one piece ofmaterial handed to me, and I can sense there's a lot there to explore with thattitle or first line. There is a lot of tone and concept at once in theline that I don't try to control but try to keep surprising myself with. I willhave to figure it out, but to be successful I also have to let go andknow I am not "capturing" but doing something else by developing thepoem from that first line or title. For instance, in If I Could GiveYou a Line, one of the poems is titled "At No Time in Your LifeCan You Just Be Near Something," which I started writing the poem with. Iliked the tension I felt between distance, closeness, longing, and annoyance. Atension between object, others, and self. Time in experience and time outsideof experience. Anyway, when I start with a title or line, I like the feeling ofpossibility in the line, yet the necessity to let go and swim through it.

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

Readings don't seem to bepart or counter to my creative process. My poems' speakers are verypresent and gesture to an audience that feels close and far away at once.I like that feeling while working on a book, but reading in public doesn'tfactor into that feeling. I like feeling alone when working atthe peak of a book, but I also feel lonely. Sometimes an audience laughsduring a reading and is surprised by some of the dry humor, which is fun.At this point in my life and with this recent book, I like reading in publicbut don't do it a lot.

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? 

I think so, but I wouldn'tbe great at explaining this. This comment would probably disqualify me fromanswering any further, for some people. I have to crack something open.

Some direct questions in IfI Could Give You a Line are “What materials are used to make distance?/ What else could you live without, me?”  which are from the poem I Would Give You aDrawn Line. I question the freedom and limitation of the desire to makesomething you want others to encounter, while pushing back on the restrictionsI feel that others can have on artmaking. I think the book overall is alwayswondering what is poetic “space.”

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?

I don't know if I can saythey have a role other than a culture has a role to allow writers to succeed,thrive, and be plentiful and diverse. 

These days I wonder aboutpointlessness. Pointlessnesses? The delight I get from something I read or seethat is pointless in a way that feels very alive and engaging with the world atthe same time. 

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

At this point, so many poetswho publish a book of poems today must make a book that is so publishable andbeyond ready, in order to be accepted for publication, that for a lot of us notmuch is changed after acceptance. Nothing was changed in my latest book besidessmall copy edits. But a series editor or judge has an important role inselecting who to publish. When writing an article or essay on somethingpoetry-related, working with an editor has been wonderful and humbling and I amgrateful for it.

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

I am not sure at thispoint. Advice always reads flawed and partially true, except for read a lot.When I find myself giving advice, I am talking to myself, or I am in a momentwhere I should be listening instead.

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

There was such a hardinsistence for a number of decades to be the writer who writes every day at5AM. I block out 1-2 hours here and there during the week, that land maybeon 3-4 days and then I also get time to write on Sunday afternoons. I have aseven-year-old daughter and my husband is a poet and professor, and ourlives are in hour-blocks, routine trade-offs to make everyone happy, but itworks. I think becoming a parent helped me get my act together. I would blocklike 5 hours at a time to write before which is silly in terms of how I write.I would waste most of that time in those large blocks. 

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

I am trying to figure outwhat stalled means for me. It's hard when feeling stalled leads to avoidance orbeing too forgiving to myself, but I have to relax and get in a certainmindsight. While reading helps me write, I can too often pick up a book andthink okay maybe something like this, when all of my movement forward on astuck poem ends up coming from me. Yet it didn't, really. 

12 - What fragrancereminds you of home?

Very dry rectangles ofbaled alfalfa remind me of where I grew up. 

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

One of the opening poems in IfI Could Give You a Line begins with my obsession with artist Richard Long’sA Line Made by Walking.  Visualart is a major influence in If I Could Give You a Line, and thisparticular work excited me for how much it said and proposed about the physicalline. The brilliant simplicity of thinking about mark making and the line inthis way. It prompts me to think about the line and art making in the eight-sectionedpoem.  

In If I Could Give You a Line, I play around withthe traditional triangular relationship between artwork, poet, and reader. Idon’t think my relationship with the reader is as traditional as a lot ofekphrastic poems. The book started with my envy of contemporary visual art and theimmediacy I feel when I walk into a gallery or museum and experience thatengagement with something made. I like that it’s a little impossible to be thatimmediate to my reader, but still be gesturing to them. I am exploring what itmeans that a moment of looking, as in a museum or as speaker in a poem, canfeel both public and private at once. That tug and pull also connects to someof the speakers as mothers who want to be heard as artists but feel limited.What is the value of making something when they often feel ignored. Making artas a parent changed in something for me, and I am trying to figure that out,even though I am not always directly writing about motherhood. I am alwayswriting about artmaking. I guess I can’t shake that every poem is an arspoetic, for me.

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

For If I CouldGive You a Line, so many contemporary books of poems were important tothe creation of the book. It took 7-10 years to write it, based on how I lookat it, and reading books that kept me exploring and excited by new forms andvoices like Bridgette Bates’s Whatis Not Missing is Light, Mary-Kim Arnold’s Litany for theLong Moment, Stacy Szymaszek’s Journal of Ugly Sites, DianaKhoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, Sherod Santos’s Square InchHours, Sarah Vap’s Winter, Cole Swenson’s OnWalking On, Yanyi’s My Year of Blue Water, Darcie Dennigan’sPalace of Subatomic Bliss, ReneeGladman’s Calamities. I know I am just listing and I go keep listing. Iam so happy to be reading and writing in 2023.

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

If I'm just thinking aboutmaking things, I'd like to finish my third book of poems. I'd like to writenonfiction about art exhibits. I'd like to collaborate with a visual or soundartist on something I can't imagine right now. I'd like to spend time inBerlin.

16 - 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?

If it was in a realisticway, maybe something with translation or secondary languages, which I have nobackground in. If I could fantasize, I would study studio art with a focus onvideo and sculpture/installation.

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

It seemed like the mostaccessible art form, given where I grew up, in rural Minnesota, and books andthe library were always an option.

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

I recentlyloved Niina Pollari's Path of Totality, , andCynthia Arrieu-King's The Betweens. I am starting and lovingEndi Bogue Hartigan's oh orchid o'clock. 

19 - What are youcurrently working on?

A third book of poems. Sofar, I feel good about the collection's title.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

the above/ground press 30th anniversary fundraiser!

Acrossthe thirty years-to-date of my poetry chapbook publisher above/ground press (b.July 9, 1993) I’ve worked hard to engage with numerous threads of literaryactivity, from multiple elements of poetic form (prose poems, long poems,visual poems, lyric forms, etcetera) to different geographies and communities,and a whole slew of individual writers across North American and beyond intheir ongoing works. Centred in the Ottawa literary community, above/groundpress publishes single-author poetry chapbooks as well as a handful of ongoingjournals (Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], GUEST [a journalof guest editors] and The Peter F. Yacht Club), and has publishedchapbook debuts alongside works by award-winning authors and produced works intranslation and collaborative efforts, running the gamut between wildlyexperimental works and more traditional forms. Last year, above/ground press startedproducing a series of festschrifts, celebrating the works of individual poetsfrom across North America, attempting to find a spark of positive throughoutthe weight of the Covid-era.

Thevery nature of chapbook publishing is both ephemeral and immediate, and able totake a particular kind of risk that almost refuses anything commercial.Unfortunately, of course, publishing is an expensive enterprise, andsubscriptions alone provide far less than half of publishing costs. I’ve longresisted increasing my subscription rates, precisely due to not wishing tooutprice anyone who wishes to engage with the work.

Whilethe pandemic years managed with roughly the same amount of annual above/groundpress subscribers overall, the press saw severely reduced individual sales, aswell as wiping out in-person readings and small press fair possibilities (fromthe ottawa small press book fair to Toronto’s Meet the Presses), so therehasn’t been the same ability to replenish the financial coffers to feed backinto production. My personal Public Lending Rights and Access Copyright monies havealso fed directly into the press, but it still hasn’t been enough to not worryabout how one might keep the lights on. Given the enormous backlist the pressholds, much of which is still in print (although half of the titles I’m listinginclude some of the final copies), I thought this might be an opportunity tooffer a series of curated packages of titles, many of which highlight a varietyof threads the press has deliberately attended.

Fullyaware that chapbook publishing, especially poetry chapbook publishing, isinherently a not-for-profit enterprise, I’d like to keep moving forward,otherwise I might have to seriously reassess how best to keep publishing, if atall.

A whole slew of available chapbook bundles of experimental writing have been posted or shall be soon, including Ottawa Poets, Brooklyn Poets, Bay Area Poets, Canadian Surrealists, Canadian Minimalists, Canadian Long Poems,  language poets, collaborative projects, visual poetries, translation bundles, Toronto Poets, Vancouver Poets, prose poems, Montreal Poets, chapbook debuts, Philadelphia Poets, Kingston Poets, prose chapbooks and Chicago Poets, as well as various bundles featuring the works of Jessica Smith, Jason Christie, Derek Beaulieu, Phil Hall, Ken Norris, Julia Drescher, Sarah Mangold, Stephanie Bolster, Amanda Earl, Hugh Thomas, Amish Trivedi, rob mclennan, etcetera. There will probably be others.

Thegoals for this fundraiser are to keep going. Check out the campaign at the link here.

Carrie Oeding, If I Could Give You a Line

It is so easy. A manwalks through a field and makes a line. What else could be made with no hands? Song.I’m becoming all hands, reaching so hard. I’m grabbing every instrument I canfind to keep them occupied. What sound am I making? It’s hard to think throughmy own orchestra. Would you please hold this note? One of these instruments? Whatdo you hear? Is this your hand? It takes a little letting go, I guess. And noweverything seems difficult and loud.

A man walks through afield and makes a line. I am blowing a horn to make a path that still. I amjust sitting next to your table at my table. I’m talking too loudly about howgood the food is. (“THE MAKING OF THINGS”)

I’mstruck by the poems in If I Could Give You a Line (Akron OH: TheUniversity of Akron Press, 2023), the first I’ve seen but the second collectionby Rhode Island poet Carrie Oeding, following Our List of Solutions (42Miles Press, 2011). If I Could Give You a Line is a collection of poemsborne out of a landscape, set as a book of cartography that seeks meaningthrough placement and mapmaking, examined through sentences. “A man walksthrough a field and makes a line.” the sequence “THE MAKING OF THINGS” begins, ‘’Itis made of nothing but breath, // legs, the willingness of soft grasses. The failureof pencils. // The success of pencils. The phrases that failed you, // but youstill have a body. // It is a field of wheat and blindfolded children.” I’mamazed at how Oeding composes moments through which her poems transcendthemselves, such as the “blue, blue, blue” offering of the short poem “I KEPT AVOICE IN MY PEACOCK,” the first half of which reads: “It said it wasn’t apeacock. It was a map. / It said it was meant to be read. I read my peacock /and got lost. Peacocks don’t roam. I got lost on very little. / I wanted more,so I left my voice. I didn’t have any / plumage, so I shouted blue, blue, blue,and hoped someone would notice / I was doing all of this without a voice. I hopedsomeone would notice.” Her poems are composed as extended sentences, stretched-outthoughts that accumulate into lyric prose via deceptively-straightforwardnarratives. “I forget the line is simple,” she writes, further along the extendedsequence “THE MAKING OF THINGS,” “but then remember the line is simple.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Evan Kennedy

Evan Kennedy is a poet and bicyclist. He is the author of I Am, Am I, to Trust the Joy That Joy Is No More or Less There Now Than Before (Roof Books), Jerusalem Notebook (O’clock Press), The Sissies (Futurepoem), Terra Firmament (Krupskaya), Shoo-Ins to Ruin (Gold Wake Press), and Us Them Poems (Book*hug). He runs the occasional press, Dirty Swan Projects, and was born in Beacon, New York, in 1983. He lives in San Francisco, California.

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?
Until my first chapbook, Us Them Poems (Book*hug, 2006), I hadn't brought any project to completion. For years I thought I had moved past the stuff in that book, but now I understand that the same concerns play out in all I've written since, just differently.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
A poetry anthology in my grandfather's attic. I was wowed by the urgency of Chidiock Tichborne's poem written on the eve of his execution. I grew committed to scratching in notebooks.
 
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?
Six months to a year to determine the ground rules or armature. I try to approach each project differently, to make one or two drastic changes to throw myself off balance, or step into the waters until they're lapping at my nose. On the other hand, I worry I'm fooling myself into thinking I'm innovating when I'm only repeating the past. I edit my drafts till they're slick.

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?
My books are formed around a topic: Francis of Assisi, Ovid, my biography, a sex robot with body dysmorphia. Usually enough material or ideas accumulate and require they be cohered into a single poem that serves the manuscript's subject.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Readings provide an unequaled opportunity to shepherd the work into the world. I can best test and plead my case for the work by reading it. But I try not to let my voice get in the way. Early in a project, I like to debut a new project at a Bay Area reading for my friends. Preparing the writing to be tested is as important as gauging the room and hearing their thoughts.
 
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?
Uniting it all in the tree of life. Making an appeal to its creator. Reconciling myself with it.

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?
Perhaps like monks, poets work separate from society to offset its sins. I don't see poetry playing a significant role among the general public I find myself among. It's not like Zbigniew Herbert reading at labor gatherings. Yet it's essential to life, or mine at the very least. I never want to join the poets who claim its uselessness. They have careers in poetry to protect, so they gotta say it's useless.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
My editors have been supportive but mostly hands-off. I like to submit a tidy manuscript.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
If you see an item of clothing that appeals to you, buy two. My distant relation Jackie Kennedy recommended that.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Because I work a job separate from literature, I have to find pockets of time. On days off, I read or write in pajamas until two or three, then hit up Amoeba Music in Haight-Ashbury. I check out what Doc recommends in the metal section.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I continually ask my friends for book recommendations and to read whatever they're working on.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
A mown lawn.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
INRI, the debut album by Brazilian black metal legends Sarcofago, is a masterpiece. I'd love to shape a manuscript consistent with that tracklist. I mention that because there's no way I could approximate Myra Hess's arrangement of Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." Or Mozart's String Quartets dedicated to Haydn. My creative process is closer to David Bowie's than any poet's. I'm interested in pastiching styles and imagery. I wish I were a scientist, but that would require too much recalibrating of my fundamental being. I wish I could identify more plants and animals than I do now.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
My book Metamorphoses springs from Ovid, who becomes increasingly dear to me. I fantasize about writers the way people imagine themselves befriending Alyosha Karamazov or Elizabeth Bennett. Among them is Herve Guibert, Ovid, Kafka, Ronald Johnson, Simone Weil. Real friendships with Noah Ross, Jacob Kahn, Jackqueline Frost, and Jason Morris are crucial.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I wish I could sing but I'm incapable.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
If I were capable, I'd prefer a career like tenor Ian Bostridge's. It's probably too late for me to become a priest, a projectionist, a mopper at The Cock. It's probably not too late to scalp tickets.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I didn't have perseverance for anything else. Abilities in other things like music plateaued.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Emanuele Coccia's Metamorphoses. David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future.

19 - What are you currently working on?
A book-length poem with the same concerns as my Metamorphoses (transformation, talking animals) involving the two birds from the Scottish ballad "Twa Corbies," a poem I first read as a child in Texas public school.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Kate Cayley, Lent

 

Glasses

When I think of AnneSexton’s glasses, I imagine then not on her face but in the collection of theAmerican billionaire who purchase them after she gassed herself in her garage. Hekeeps them in a temperature-controlled case like an artifact, a page from theKing James Bible, a torn strip of papyrus, bitten with hieroglyphs. I saw aphotograph of this man once: innocuous, sweating like over-risen dough. Full ofunambiguous goodwill, but something else there, something hidden, the way the desertin Texas where he lives might hide things. Does he gloat over the glasses,think about the woman in her car? Does he sometimes, alone, convince himself hesees her eyes in the frames? I imagine he sleeps in a temperature-controlledroom, his white bed square and hostile as a glass case.

Toronto-based poet and fiction writer Kate Cayley’s third full-length poetry title, following When This World Comes to an End (London ON: Brick Books, 2013) and Other Houses (Brick Books, 2017) [see my review of such here], is Lent (Book*hug, 2023), a collection constructed as a quartet of suite-sections,furthering her ongoing exploration of slow, unfolding lyric attentions. Cayley’spoems are almost structured as acts of unwrapping, or as working a particularkind of puzzle, each line inching closer towards a particular solution, discoveryor revelation. “And if repetition could itself be / a form of attention,” shewrites, as part of the opening poem, “Attention,” “folding along the crease /until the crease finds itself / hollowing out the groove, as in marriage, /studying the same face, the same / permeable body […].” As overused as thedescriptor “unfurls” is for discussing poems, this single-sentence lyric poem doesexactly that, moving resolutely across the page and through myriad line-breaksto question, open and reveal. It is curious that Cayley mentions repetitionwithout specifically utilizing repetition through the collection, instead allowingeach poem an echo of tone, rhythm and, yes, attention, as a way of garneringalternate perspectives. “I sit from time to time in empty churches,” shewrites, to close the fourth and final poem in the short sequence-cluster “DutchMasters,” titled “Gerrit Adriaenszoon Berckheyde, Church of Saint Cecilia,Cologne, / about 1670,” “not knowing how to pray. Hoping for belief/ the way a tree might for the axe: show me / the pith of my own heart.”

Lent exists in four sections—“Interior,” “Art Monsters,”“Sixty Harvest” and the title sequence, “Lent”—the second of which includes ahandful of poems and sequences, including the eight-poem sequence “Assia WevillConsiders Herself,” writing, as Cayley offers in her “Endnotes,” of the Germanpoet who was “[…] the partner of Ted Hughes towards the end of Sylvia Plath’slife and after her death. Wevill committed suicide by the same method alongwith her young daughter in 1969.” There is such heartbreak in the straightforwardnessof Cayley’s lines for Wevill, offering a clarity for a figure who became but afootnote in the larger narrative surrounding Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. “Shecloses / her eyes.” the sequence ends, “The animals gather / around the lake. Thelake is on fire.” The section also includes the four-poem “Dutch Masters,” aswell as shorter poems such as “Mary Shelley at the End of Her Life, Recallingthe Monster” and “The Light in Vermeer.” Her attentions are fascinating throughtheir precision, collecting details with the eye of an archivist and the heart ofa poet, and one might wonder if this collection, on the surface, seeks toreference the Christian period of fasting and remembrance, or as somethingoffered in loan to another. Perhaps neither, or perhaps both, although theopening of the second poem in this particular prose sequence offers: “Therewere people in the church today and I went in. I like the melancholy ofchurches. There is a spaciousness in failure. The minister, breaking the bread,wears a small smile that suggests he knows the futility of what he does anddoes it anyway, out of love, out of habit, the way the two are, over time,indistinguishable.” There is little that Cayley sees that is not allowed to completelyremain on its own terms, collected within her lyric through through a deft hand,attentive eye and open ear. Or, as the poem “The Light in Vermeer” offers, to begin:

It pours the way milkpours. The sky hard as porcelain. The woman
reading her letter,instructing her maid. The maid, pouring.

The blue of the sky and thebowl means forgiveness, a hint of Madonna
crouched at the manger. Whereis my mother?

Ranjit Hoskote, Icelight

 

STILL LIFE WITH ORANGES

As boats shear pastthrough the pearl-grey haze
our eyes widen to grasp abowl of oranges.

The prism of this momentsacrifices more
than flesh, pips and rindat the hour’s altar.

Each fruit bursts invariants of bright:
shine, glow, gleam and atinge

of hope. To this bonfirewe feed
our strained cages ofskin and need

as we launch ourselvesinto the tide,
creatures crafted fromcloud and night

given safe passage andbrief voice
by the caprice of thisshifting pearl-grey light.

Bombay-basedpoet, cultural theorist and curator Ranjit Hoskote’s eighth poetry collectionis Icelight (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023). The firstof his collections to be published in the United States, I’m intrigued at thesubtleties of the lyric dialogues and thesis contained within this particularcollection, my introduction to both him and his work. “The rain never lies.” hewrites, to open the poem “RUNNER,” “It just shifts / the names of our seasons.”His poems offer meditations on attention, beauty and memory; on seeking andbeing lost, almost to the point of allowing for the space to become lost, sothat one might allow for renewed discovery. “What if I had / no skin / Of what/ am I the barometer?” he writes, to close the opening poem, “TACET.”There is a way his poems attend to the simple beauty of the everyday, and afresh perspective on the simplest of known knowns and known unknowns. “Am I theboy / who climbed this spur / and laid claim / to the scrubland swearing / inits shade?” his narrator asks, to open the poem “SPUR.” His poems offer anelement of calm and clarity across poems fully aware of their mortality. Set insix clusters of lyric narratives, these are poems run through a foundation oflonging, and how words are formed, offering both as a lineage of lyric discovery:he is learning what the words are saying at the same moment you are. “I’vefound the seed bed, Earth,” he writes, to close the poem “WITNESS,” “I wait foryou // to say: It’s time. Let me tell you / why you’re here.”