Studio One Reading Series

Casey McAlduff talks with Ariana Reines

2012-01-14T18:09:00.001-08:00

Casey McAlduff: As with The Cow and Couer de Lion, whose structure and voice combine to present an ‘exact self’, it is a breathing verse, a living, volatile creature that "infects or contaminates" the reader from the pages of Mercury.

For example, in your poem "Baraka", you recant the phrase "I CAN'T WAIT", creating a litany of what proves to be a rare blend of desire and greed and excitement, as well as actual physical need, and a desperate urge to speak or act before the time runs out. It reminds me too of a comment you made during your Bookworm interview with Michael Silverblatt: that the situation of the "I" is also usually a situation of the oppressed; that "I" is always a breaking of a silence. Can you talk about the relationship between this two-sided urgency and the way that it figures in your verse?

Ariana Reines: I'm happy that the greed in Baraka didn't escape you, Casey. That you see its desperation isn't merely just, isn't simply just. The way you formulate your question as such an elegant reading makes it urgent that I not deface it. I think the two-sided urgency you speak of runs throughout the book, which is full of x's. And exes.

CM: As a self-declared fan of 'early manuscript culture', how do you approach the process of revision in your own work? Do you consider each revision to be a new version, and thus a new poem? How do you keep the verse's emotions hot and honest to the moment?

AR: I tend to write quickly and revise slowly, but the main thing I labor over is structure. The structure of a book. There are small moments in poems I've tinkered with maybe twenty or thirty times, but the poem or sequence itself keeps its immediacy because it has to come out fast and just. Once the structure of the book is complete I make small adjustments to the poems as constituent parts of a whole, so that every part of the book functions faithfully, like a good machine, but breathes, like a living thing. Certain flaws need to stay in there so it doesn't deaden or become merely literary.

CM: Mercury is filled with a unique magic that is particularly palpable in the book's title piece. The mix of alchemy here, combined with the snake-like slithering of chant words across the pages, ends up brewing a deft voice that seems to be creating for itself an elixir of life, a way "to make sure that I am living." Does the setting of Salem, filling up in October as hoards of schoolchildren board their yellow buses with crayons packed into their pencil cases for grave rubbings, have any place in this series? If so, can you share some of the influence that Salem's history has on you as a writer, and in particular, as a female writer?

AR: A movie about the witch trials starring Vanessa Redgrave, called Three Sovreigns for Sarah Cloyce, scared me so much in sixth grade I developed insomnia and spent almost all my nights of the ensuing two years with the light on and the radio blasting oldies 103 FM, opening strategic holes into my jeans with sandpaper. When I was four, a visit to the Salem Witch Museum, with its wax dioramas of witches being hanged and crushed under stones, and with its black floor's huge light-up pentagram, left me wide awake in tears for weeks.

One way of describing my family predicament is that my mother was misunderstood, condemned and excluded, went mad, and lost everything. My publisher is a descendant of Rebecca Nurse, killed for a witch. I used to walk around a pond called Redd's pond where Mamie Redd, also killed for a witch, was said to moan on certain nights. And this is barely the beginning. Yes, Casey, I am sure that Salem's history has influenced me in every way. I know that there still lurks in me the fear that if I speak the truth as I know it, I will be locked up in a mental institution and then killed in public while a mockery of me is made. That Massachusetts is a place where you get thrown into a mental hospital against your will if you are a woman, or a place where electroshock (now called electroconvulsive) therapy can be administered to you even if you don't really want it... I am sure these nightmares go back to the witch trials.

If you've seen Titticut Follies or read Cool for You by Eileen Myles, or spent any time reading or thinking about Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton you know that there is a very deep current of voluntary and involuntary confinement in nightmare mental hospitals in Massachusetts (and you are from Massachusetts, so I am sure you can add your own harmonics to this litany). There are happier Massachusetts emanations too of course, like the writing of Susan Howe, the transcendentalists, Emily Dickinson, George Whitman (RIP), Michelle Tea, Bobby Kennedy, a really weird fucking sexy accent.... But you asked about Salem and now I'm talking about Massachusetts...

Well I think I must act crazier than I am in order, deliberately, to preempt any accusations that might be lodged against my sanity. In fact I am sure that there is a dimension of insanity to my persona, such as it is, which I deploy in order to protect myself from suffering, as my mother did, defamation as a witch or insane woman. I am sure that it is this fear that prevents me from working, culturally, in a more direct or "useful" manner—as for example a scholar, or attorney, or journalist—or psychotherapist. Any profession in which my rationalism (or even just rationality)—my sanity and the performance of my sanity—would serve as legitimizing agents for the oppressed or misunderstood entities which I would champion would trigger my terror of suffering a witch's dishonor so regularly that I'm convinced I'd shatter.

As a poet I am permitted continually to subvert and dismantle my own charisma and authority, partly falsely, so I can trick myself into believing I somehow keep them safe by doing so, and partly truly, if only for the comfort of having taken myself apart with my own two hands, rather than let the state or the mob destroy me.

Casey McAlduff holds a B.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from the University of Southern California in 2009. Currently, she is an MFA Candidate in Poetry at St. Mary’s College, where she is also a Teaching Fellow. Since moving to California from Lexington, MA , Casey has developed an interest in the way that art is able to preserve the experiential sense of place, as well as the way that art allows individuals to converse with the world around them. Casey has pursued these interests by working for programs that promote poetry as an agent of social change and more specifically, as a means to increase literacy. In the past, she has worked for programs such as California Poet Laureate Carol Muske-Dukes’ non-profit organization, the Magic Poetry Blimp – a dramatic approach to the teaching of poetry in the classroom and in the community

Ariana Reines was born in Salem, Massachuestts. She studied French and English at Barnard College. She worked in restaurants, dungeons, bars, galleries, and street fairs, and was a doctoral candidate at Columbia University and at The European Graduate School, studying literature, performance, and philosophy with Sylvère Lotringer, Antoine Compagnon, Claire Denis, Giorgio Agamben, and others. (ABD)

Her books include The Cow (Alberta Prize: Fence 2006), Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar: 2007), Save the World (Mal-O-Mar: 2010; Fence (Audio): 2011), and the forthcoming Mercury (Fence: 2011). She has given readings across the United States and in France, poems have been anthologized in Against Expression (Dworkin + Goldsmith, eds) and Gurlesque (Glenum + Greenberg, eds), and her books have been reviewed, and other writings featured, on KCRW's Bookworm, the UK's The DotPod, and in The Fader, Flaunt, the Boston Review, RainTaxi, Soft Targets, LIT, BOMBlog, WebConjunctions, HTMLGIant, and in many other places.

phrases/fragments: a conversation on lyric modes, the sentence, politics and the social

2011-11-28T20:32:00.000-08:00

Barbara Claire Freeman, Jenny Drai, Gillian Hamel, Elizabeth Robinson and Brian Teare read on December 2nd at Studio One Art Center at 7:30 pm.

We consider how composing with the phrase as the basic measure differs from composing by sentence, how it is or offers a different compositional field, why one chooses it…

Barbara Claire Freeman: Taking the phrase, rather than the clause or sentence, as the measure for a poem is something I find both occasionally necessary and utterly mysterious. There's a certain kind of "landscape" (both internal and external, musical and syntactical) that demands the phrase, the white spaces between phrases, no punctuation or capitalization—a landscape for which the sentence, no matter how devious or disjunctive, isn't appropriate. (Of course the reverse is also true: certain "landscapes" demand sentences of various kinds.) Composing by phrase allows a certain kind of quietness and an accentuation of the pauses and silences that accrue around and within and between the linked phrasal units. I find that I compose-by-phrase especially when I want to write an exceptionally stripped, bare, slowed-down poem. And would love to know more about how/when/why others employ this form(?)

Elizabeth Robinson: I feel a great deal of affinity for the way Barbara articulates this. To me, the landscape of the sentence is more assertional. It says of itself, "I am complete. I state something incontrovertible." As Barbara says, there are poetic sites where one wants that. To me, the phrase is more lyric, less assertive. Maybe it's kind of a foreground/background thing: the sentence surges to the foreground. The phrase is attentive to its larger context. In that way, it measures sound and idea differently, more gesturally. In relation to the phrase, I think of Barbara Guest's idea that every poem carries within it, ghostlike, all the decisions that the poet didn't make but could have. That might be the the mysteriousness that Barbara cites: the phrase remains open to other possibilities/articulations that the poem accepts as present but doesn't necessarily need to fulfill.

Jenny Drai: I can relate to both Barbara and Elizabeth's responses and especially to the idea from Barbara Guest. Also, at some point I think the phrase/fragment allows for the espousal of an idea in lyric language even as it maintains a certain sort of hiding place, a site for the shifting and cloaking of ideas that float more freely than they ever could if they were tethered to the construct of the sentence. To add to that, I can say for myself that (I think) when I write in sentences, it is because I have something very definitive to say, whereas when I compose in a more fragmented form, I am exploring an idea of which I am still discovering the shape.

Gillian Hamel: I particularly like Elizabeth's idea: 'the phrase is attentive to its larger context.' To me, the sentence's completeness creates a kind of idiosyncrasy as well, a couching in personal terms and the perspectival logic of the subject-verb-object construction—there is always a centering, particular view woven into the syntax of a full sentence. Conversely, the phrase becomes more public, collective—the ownership of the language recedes and the language becomes its own subject and object. In this sense I also relate very much to Jenny's idea of the phrase as something more exploratory—the openness of the phrase invites the questions and the plurality of voices that are always present at the borders of the poem, absently suggested but never explicitly permitted by the singularity of the subject-driven sentence.

Brian Teare: So much of what has been said echoes my own experience of working in and with fragment. So rather than reiterate, I'd like to pick up something Jenny said—about working with fragment as an exploratory mode—and embellish it. Though for me as a thinker and believer the fragment is deeply epistemological (i.e. suggests that our mode of knowing is always already incomplete), for me as a working writer it is primarily prosodic. Its prosody has less allegiance to logos and more allegiance to melos, by which I mean the fragment supplies a more flexible, improvisatory compositional frame, one in which I follow ear/err from sound to sound, tracking suggestive and gestural noise associatively. It's a lyric logic, one with much room for stutter and gap.

Sara Mumolo: At a work related event today a woman on a panel said: “Everything we encounter is an argument.” Considering the resonance of this declaration, I feel grateful for the occurrence of this thread, awaiting me through the day’s arguments.

Poetry activates a space where we can depart from the inundation of arguments, if we choose to enter it. Barbara Guest says, in her talk at Buffalo from the early nineties, “Getting out of Poetry and into Prose”: "The poem is our act of special beneficence, and the Poet is rewarded the halo. The Poet is unaware of the halo, just as in the painting the persons are unaware of the halo, but it’s there as a reward for a particular unconscious state of imminence.” This quality of being ‘about to occur’ is where the phrase enters into the compositional field for my phrasal poems, some of which appear in the chapbook. It allows space, as Barbara Freeman mentioned, where the poems appear stripped down, and I find it essential that this mode not sculpt but rather, that the poems indicate a bareness.

For example, the sentence offers the argument and, as Gillian pointed out, the logic of a complete thought. Yet, the explicitness and possible arrogance of such completeness was not a consideration when engaging the subject of the nude—and all that she carries in the landscape of the painting. Rather, the phrase occurred instinctually, as a mode I only came to understand while it was occurring. That’s when that busted version of a halo, that “particular unconscious state of imminence” empowers the phrasal mode. The complete thought became more important to poem as a whole, the sequence as an entity, rather than the line or sentence.

Like Jenny, the sentence appears most attractive to employ when I have something definitive to say, or argue. Composing in the phrasal mode lifts me upward in some way, allowing me to write in altered states of being, states that more properly engage visceral realities (the sound in the body/bodies)—not that of social media, police and news reports, emails, bills… Each of those things works by creating space, multiple barricades, between the viewer and the painting, the user and the network. With the phrase, I can exhibit a space less ornamented, one like Brian mentions when he writes that our mode of knowing is always already incomplete. This incompleteness suggests absence, especially as confusion around our lack of being present in a space mutates. The occupation movement argues against these barricades between people and wealth, through what initially was a guttural-response-mode in its attempts to be present, to occupy. Phrasal composition could offer recognition for spiritual or empowering spaces we occupy.

Jenny Drai: "Poetry activates a space where we can depart from the inundation of arguments, if we choose to enter it. " I like this statement from Sara's response as well as the idea that there may be some arrogance attached to the sentence. I will add that the main problem I have
had in the past with the standard, straightforwardly correct sentence is that it takes its grammar for granted. Before the fragmentation I employed in the poem sequence from which the pieces in the anthology were chosen, I wrote in sentences, but disjunctive ones. So in their
own way, they were also full of 'stutter and gap' (Brian). I thought it was necessary to show a rupture within that otherwise apparently seamless entity, to show the work involved, to show that someone had been there, had constructed. Now, with the fragment mode, with this idea that the reader can engage with what might be 'about to occur,' (also Gillian's statement that "the phrase becomes more public, collective") I concede that now any reader can construct alongside the author. So maybe the fragment mode could in some ways be construed as an at least somewhat democratic mode of poetry—remaining authorial in the sense of setting theme, diction, etcetera, but always opening, opening, opening to the reader... I almost want to say that some of this sounds similar to the ideas behind L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, but my knowledge of poetic movements in this country is decidedly lacking. I would argue that maybe while I don't necessarily feel as if I compose what I write from some deep collective well of language (too stubborn for that!), I am really learning from this thread that writing in the fragment mode allows me to be read individually, idiosyncratically, and (therefore, in a weird way, and perhaps paradoxically) collectively. What do others think?

Gillian Hamel: This idea of reading collectively, of viewing social movement and conversation through the lens of the poetic mode (and vice versa) really resonates with me and seems particularly important to the construction and logic of the fragment. Careful of being swept up in the adrenaline of a political movement—of letting my poetics succumb to the argument, to use Sara's logic, the phrasal/fragmented composition becomes a way for me to mediate the plurality of perspectives, problems, narratives engaging my perception of the political moment. A way to really engage 'diversity of tactics' where news reports and editorials and general assembly proposals fall short—where the argument of the sentence fails and must be transcended. This also makes me think of the role of poetry in politics (not in the perversion of detached politicians wearing suits and waving proposals, but in the real sense of the polis, the endlessly transformative and exploratory sense of the people trying to coexist pragmatically) and vice versa. Poetry is often a negotiation of great spatial collectivity (drawing on the deep well of language, which I agree with Jenny is impersonal and unappealing) and aggressive intimacy. Exploring and engaging the pieces and particulars of speech is a part of this—writing toward, as opposed to from, a collectivity. In this sense, the fragment becomes a way to engage the rupture, the 'stutter and gap,' which frees it from personal argument while creating the awareness of speech as intimate as the individual; bodies standing together in the streets, rather than arguing on the internet.

Elizabeth Robinson: Thanks for this, Gillian. I'm having several feelings and thoughts that I'll try to state here, but they are not full thoughts yet (fragments, I guess). The piece I wrote for the anthology had to do with an epidemic of bat deaths across the country—the threat to that population. In the moment, I wasn't writing a poem to raise awareness of this phenomenon. I was responding with sadness. The fragment as a tonal signal or gesture. I'm not sure I can relate this to what I'm seeing in the news or online, but the violence against peaceful protesters is impacting me somewhat the same way. In 1980-1981, I was a student at UC Davis and during the Whole Earth Festival, on the same quad where a policeman sprayed pepper spray into the faces of students who were merely sitting, I served on the "Karma Patrol." I can't help remarking the contrast. We just wore green t-shirts and were supposed to wander around making sure that people were okay. There was a playfulness to the role even though the responsibilities were earnest. I had a corresponding feeling when I saw footage of the students who returned to Sproul Plaza after police brutality: sailing tents filled with helium balloons. I felt moved by it and happy. Obviously, as a political gesture it wasn't determinative, but, again, the sense of playfulness resurgent after something really ugly felt very hopeful to me. So again, fragment, gesture as tonal, and tone as something that is more important than commonly think it to be.

Brian Teare: I really like how we seem to have moved from a consideration of the fragment as a lyric mode to a consideration of the fragment as a way to engage the social differently. It seems that many of us view the fragment as a way to avoid falling into the trap of pure discursion while also subverting the bad politics of traditional grammar that many feminist and queer theorists and writers have objected to: subject-fucks-object. Am I hearing/reading this the right way? If so, it makes sense that the poetic fragment could make possible different kinds of social relation with the reader through language, ones less hierarchical and more relational. In Gillian's account, it is as though the speech-based poetic fragment were a phenomenological extension of bodies, a way to possibly encounter and experience significant otherness. I like this, and I like Elizabeth's tonal gesture, and they make me think about the fragment-based lyric as a somatic space of potential encounters—yes, a kind of collectivity, though perhaps different than the one Jenny writes about. What if the lyric fragment is a form that mimics the body-mind in relationship to its environment? Anyone or anything might enter through the doors of perception and begin to talk or to provoke sensation, which is why this mode strikes me as vulnerable to meaning: it is so open and multiple.

Friday December 2nd with Jenny Drai, Barbara Claire Freeman, Gillian Hamel, Sara Mumolo, Elizabeth Robinson and Brian Teare

2011-11-22T21:30:00.000-08:00

Studio One Reading Series is going on hiatus. Join us for the last reading! 7:30 pm.

A reading for the chapbook anthology phrases/fragments: an anthology with poems from Jenny Drai, Barbara Claire Freeman, Gillian Hamel, Sara Mumolo and Elizabeth Robinson. Introduction by Brian Teare.

Jenny Drai was raised near Chicago and has lived in Wisconsin,
Schleswig-Holstein, Munich, Oakland, the Los Angeles area, and
currently in Vancouver, Washington. Among other things, she has
worked as an Au Pair, a bartender, a bookseller, and as a researcher
for a historical consultancy. She received an MFA in poetry from
Saint Mary's College of California and was a finalist for the 2011
Sawtooth Prize from Ahsahta Press.

Barbara Claire Freeman is literary critic and professor of literature who has recently turned her full attention to writing poetry. She is the author of The Feminine Sublime
(University of California Press, 1998, pbk. 2000), among other works of criticism.
Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Harvard, she teaches creative writing in
the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Incivilities, her first collection of poems, was published by Counterpath Press in November, 2009; a chapbook, St. Ursula's Silence, was published by Instance Press in 2010. Selections from these collections won the Boston Review/Discovery Prize and the Language Exchange Prize. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, Agriculture Reader, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Forklift, Ohio, Jacket, Seattle Review, and Volt, among others.

Gillian Olivia Blythe Hamel lives in Oakland, California, and holds an MFA in Poetry from St. Mary’s College. Her work has appeared in the chapbook series Calaveras and will appear in the forthcoming anthology phrases/fragments. She has worked on various small print and online publications around the Bay Area, including Mary, A Journal of New Writing, and is a poetry editor and senior blog editor for Omnidawn Publishing.

Sara Mumolo is a poetry editor at Omnidawn and works for the MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Center for Environmental Literacy at Saint Mary’s College of California. She has curated the Studio One Reading Series since 2008 and, with Alisa Heinzman, she publishes the series CALAVERAS. Her chapbook March was published by Cannibal Books in 2011. Poems have also appeared in 1913: a journal of forms, Typo, Eleven Eleven, Shampoo, Lana Turner and West Wind Review, among others.

Elizabeth Robinson's most recent poetry collection is Three Novels, from Omnidawn. Other recent books are The Orphan & its Relations (Fence) and Also Known As (Apogee). Robinson will teach at the University of Montanain the spring of 2012. Otherwise, she lives reluctantly in Boulder, CO. With Colleen Lookingbill, she coedits EtherDome Chapbooks, and with Beth Anderson and Laura Sims she coedits Instance Press.

A former National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. He is the author of The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda-award winning Pleasure, and Companion Grasses, forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2013. An Assistant Professor at Temple University, he lives in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Friday, November 11th Moe's Books and Studio One folks bring you Stuart Krimko and Ariana Reines

2011-11-07T21:21:00.000-08:00

7:30 p.m.
Moe's Books

Ariana Reines was born in Salem, Massachuestts. She studied French and English at Barnard College, graduating Summa Cum Laude, with many scholarships and prizes, including awards for writing,translation, and the study of Chaucer. She worked in restaurants, dungeons, bars, galleries, and street fairs, and was a doctoral candidate at Columbia University and at The European Graduate School, studying literature, performance, and philosophy with Sylvère Lotringer, Antoine Compagnon, Claire Denis, Giorgio Agamben, and others. (ABD)

Her books include The Cow (Alberta Prize: Fence 2006), Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar: 2007), Save the World (Mal-O-Mar: 2010; Fence (Audio): 2011), and the forthcoming Mercury (Fence: 2011). She has given readings across the United States and in France, poems have been anthologized in Against Expression (Dworkin + Goldsmith, eds) and Gurlesque (Glenum + Greenberg, eds), and her books have been reviewed, and other writings featured, on KCRW's Bookworm, the UK's The DotPod, and in The Fader, Flaunt, the Boston Review, RainTaxi, Soft Targets, LIT, BOMBlog, WebConjunctions, HTMLGIant, and in many other places.

Stuart Krimko is the author of Not That Light (2005) and The Sweetness of Herbert (2009) both published by the Key West-based independent publisher Sand Paper Press. Krimko's poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in publications like Fence, Maggy, the Poetry Foundation website, Post Road, and Vanitas. In addition to his literary activities, Krimko has worked for many years in the art world. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where is an Associate Director at David Kordansky Gallery.

Zachary Schomburg talks with Heather Christle

2011-10-07T08:36:00.000-07:00

Zachary Schomburg talks with Heather Christle

Heather Christle reads tonight at Studio One Art Center with Brandon Downing and Daniel Tiffany.

Zach Schomburg: So, what do you think about me? What do you like about my poems?

Heather Christle: I believe you are part mountain. What I like about your poems is their sincerity. JK JK JK! I mean actually you are part graveyard.

ZS: I don't know if I can believe you. Your sincerity is underloading the systems. Where do I start believing you? Where do you stop believing? Where does belief start and I stop and you begin? What does belief have to do with anything?

HC: I believe in you when I think of you. When I think you are reading a poem I wrote I am making belief in you. When I am reading a poem I think you wrote you are making belief in me. When I die you can't make belief in me anymore, but my poems keep making belief in you. Then you die. Later the world ends.

ZS: Now that we're both dead, what is there left? What is there left to believe in? What do you hear and what would you rather be hearing? What are you writing and what would you rather be writing? Now that everyone is dead, what good are your poems? How good are they? What are they worth?

HC: I just heard the noise of my cat drinking water at the other end of the house. He does it loudly. There is not really anything else I'd rather hear. After we die there is still movement. We, the moving things, have gone away, but the movement we were making remains. (I don't mean movement as in "a movement," obviously.)

My poems are not as good as I would like them to be except for when I am in the midst of writing them. Everything is hard to believe in. Then suddenly it happens and it is difficult to imagine feeling otherwise. I am bad with time. Usually I am convinced that now is forever.

What are they worth? Once they got me a haircut. Who cuts your hair and why?

I wish I were writing a poem whose rhythm moved in such a way that it felt intellectually foreign but physically comprehensible. Instead I am writing this email, which is also okay.

Two men are walking by my window with one thin branch each. Therefore everyone is not dead, except maybe certain trees.

ZS: I usually get my hair cut at Bishops. For money. I think I'm going to stop cutting it for a while though. I think I'm going to embrace a more natural state now. I'm going to try to become the protagonist in a novel I just started to write.

Heather, now is forever. How could you be convinced otherwise? And what is a possible alternative? And what do you mean intellectually foreign and physically comprehensible?

Hegel said this, but probably not in French first: "L'homme est un animal, il sait qu'il est un animal, donc it ne'st pas un animal" What is he trying to say about you? And your poems?
HC: Can I take back everything? I never know what I'm talking about.

I heard you were writing a novel from my sister. Can you believe that she exists? (I mean, I feel like we've been acting like we are in these two separate times/spaces, so it seems remarkable that she traveled through both to be with each of us in person. And it happened over the time of these emails!)

I don't really know that I'm an animal. I try to know that, but in the way I try to know anything and fail. I mean, it's all rationalizing, no? The animal things I do I do and only later think I've thought about. Even if that delay is infinitesimal it still, I think, is real.

So the thing that knows I'm an animal cannot know I'm an animal. And the poems try not to worry about that too much. The gap is real, the distance between us is real, but so are a million other things. It's just part of the landscape. You know: tree, tree, tree, car, vast gulf between people, tree, house, tree, mystery, tree, house, car.

ZS: So with gaps and distance in mind, and animals, how about this for real?

you (me), tree (tree), tree (tree), tree (tree), animal (animal), car (car), animal (animal), vast gulf between people (vast gulf between people), tree (tree), animal (animal), house (house), animal (animal), tree (tree), mystery (mystery), tree (tree), car (car), me (you)

HC: Zach that is perfect. Is that what our tour is going to be like? I am hoping.

ZS: Our tour is going to be like this: you (me), nap (you), laugh (me), laugh (you), nap (you), laugh (you), laugh (me), nap (you), car (car), lamp (poem), nap (laugh), laugh (joke), tree (lamp), house (me), nap (you), tree (you), laugh (you), car (tree), poem (car), vast gulf between people (nap), me (you).

What I am heavy on and light on? What am I missing?

I recently thought about how all I'm ever doing is going inside from the outside, and vice versa, all day long. Like way more than 20 times a day sometimes. What do you think about that?

HC: You are maybe a little light on the vast gulf between people. But otherwise I think we are good.

"Inside" and "outside" are interesting categories. I would like to propose a non-prototypical situation and ask you which category you would put it in: sitting in a car. What if it's a convertible!? Also: lean-tos.

I like your idea though. It makes me wish I had a spreadsheet tracking my life based on my moves between the two spaces. Also, I think because we briefly talked about it (OUTSIDE of this interview) on the phone, while I was standing outside a Trader Joe's it made me think of another thing I've always wanted a record of--my paths through the significant grocery stores of my life. Alton's Star Market was, I think, the first. Then there was Rochester, which had arrows on the floor pointing customers in the direction the store wanted you to move. One way aisles. I remember my mother sometimes going against those arrows and me thinking we were really going to get into trouble.

Were you a well-behaved child? A child afraid of authority?

ZS: Convertibles: outside. Lean-tos: hmm...outside? How about cars with the windows rolled-down? A really big boxy costume? A regular box? A lion's cage?

What did you get that day at Trader Joe's? Would you mind listing all the grocery stores you've frequented in your life, kind of in order?

I was a well-behaved child. I was a child of self-imposed authority. I wanted bad to be good. Were you bad or good? Are you bad or good?

HC: At Trader Joe's I bought arugula, milk, bread, an onion, and some coconut water, I think. It was a quick trip, and I went back a day or two later for another quick trip, so I may be confusing the two a little. Oh, and an acorn squash!

Here are the supermarkets of my life:
Star Market (Alton, NH)
Star Market (Rochester, NH)
Sainsbury's (Pinner, UK)
Marks & Spencer (Watford, UK)
Hunter's IGA (Wolfeboro, NH)
DeVylder's Market (Wolfeboro, NH)
Shaw's (Ossippee, NH)
Star Market (Somerville, MA)
Whole Foods (Mill Valley, CA) ("A Supermarket in California," if you will) (or if you won't too)
Harvest Co-Op (Cambridge, MA)
Whole Foods (Cambridge, MA)
Berkeley Bowl (Berkeley, CA)
Whole Foods (Union Square, NYC)
Stop & Shop (Northampton, MA) (with the radio on)
Trader Joe's (Hadley, MA)
Whole Foods (Hadley, MA)
State Street Fruit Store (Northampton, MA)
Publix (Virginia Highland, Atlanta, GA)
Kroger (Atlanta, GA) (Also known as "Murder Kroger")
DeKalb Farmer's Market (Decatur, GA) (not a farmer's market)
Trader Joe's (Midtown, Atlanta, GA)

I think that is it. Some of the grocery stores recur later in my life, but I limited them to one appearance on the list, signifying my first visit. I spent an incredibly long time looking these places up on maps. I wanted to be really accurate. This leads me into my next answer, which is to say I was very good as a child. I can recall only a very few instances of getting in trouble at elementary school. In high school I was once caught with an empty box of cigarettes, and thus got off on a technicality. (Why was I carrying that box?) (I attended a private school where people smoked constantly when they went off campus, and the school could punish you if you were caught smoking ANYWHERE.) Of course as a teenager and in my early 20s I misbehaved in any number of ways. Slept in a park in Boston for a summer when I was 16. Stole things, drank a lot, did various drugs, broke into abandoned buildings, etc. I was always really careful though, not to get caught for anything. And still I am very afraid of getting in trouble. So mostly I behave. I am not submitting a whole lot of poems at the moment, but when I was I followed the guidelines religiously. And I often, in my daily life, have the sense that I am fucking up, not in such a way that I could be punished by any official authorities, but in the sense that I am probably letting down someone I love and respect.

ZS: It's so incredible how many groceries we've stuffed into our bodies, and how all those groceries haven't just killed us yet. How is possible that we're not dead yet? I mean, look at all those grocery stores, and they're all over the place. Thank you for such a thorough and accurate list. I want to see this on a map, with strings strung about. I want to see you on a map, bonking all around and vibrating in spot, eating everything in sight.

Are you acting up inside your poems? Do you misbehave there? Do responsiblity, or love and respect have anything to do with it?

I’ll meet you in California.

HC: Zach we are in California now and you are sitting next to me while I am typing this.

And I think that I am acting up a little in my poems, but not exactly misbehaving, because I have a different code I live by in my poems. I think I adhere to it pretty strictly. Responsibility and love and respect have everything to do with it. Even when I am getting kind of aggressive they are in the mix.

ZS: I see you. Why do you look like you're misbehaving?

HC: Because the teacher who asked us to leave this computer lab before (so she could teach in it) is still lightly teaching and I feel lightly guilty for being in here. It is showing in my posture and in my hair, probably.

ZS: Ok, let’s go.

HC: Ok.

Heather Christle is the author of The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011), The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books, 2009), and a chapbook, The Seaside! (Minutes Books, 2010). Wesleyan University Press will be publishing her third full-length poetry collection, What Is Amazing, in the spring of 2012. Her poems have appeared widely in publications including The Believer, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, and The New Yorker. She has taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and at Emory University, where she was the 2009-2011 Creative Writing Fellow. She is the Web Editor for jubilat and frequently a writer in residence at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. A native of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, she lives in Western Massachusetts.

Zachary Schomburg is the author of The Man Suit (Black Ocean 2007), Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009), and two forthcoming books. He co-edits Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine. He lives in Portland, Ore.

Brandon Shimoda talks with Brandon Downing

2011-09-30T12:21:00.000-07:00

Brandon Shimoda talks with Brandon Downing

Brandon reads at Studio One Art Center with Daniel Tiffany and Heather Christie on October 7th.

When I first encountered Brandon Downing’s art—in this instance, his poetry—I felt terrified. His second collection Dark Brandon (Faux Press, 2005) had just been released, and I had the ridiculous idea that it would teach me something about myself, about what it meant to be "Brandon," and not only that, but what it meant to be light, a possessor of and antithetical to the side of the self so named and so feeling, and somehow Dark Brandon. It proved even more ridiculous by doing exactly that, leading me into the crisis of immediate being through a series of terrifying—both exhilarating and embarrassing—flashbacks. I wrote a review of Dark Brandon for Octopus Magazine, through which I attempted to organize the feeling of having been opened, and got absolutely nowhere for neutralizing the opening. Thankfully, Brandon has a wide body of work of superlative joy and VELOCITY with which I have been able to continually reinvent the experience: Lazio, The Shirt Weapon, Lake Antiquity, Dark Brandon (the videos), Mellow Actions (in manuscript, forthcoming from Fence next year), photographs received in the mail, Brandon himself. And yet, I am still not wise enough NOT to attempt some understanding. What I am currently thinking is this: Brandon Downing’s art terrifies me for being a masterful manipulation of the overabundance of materials available to the shrewd however vulnerable possessed receiver as a manipulation of the crisis of an end being reached in the creation of artistic and poetic works—that revelation is in some sense new logic released, entered into by manipulation and control with each and with the challenge of entering into dark contract with the self in order to manipulate and control the overabundance of materials and one’s self lest lose each and all for the crisis with the necessarily resultant contract becoming the primary action of art creating as like an astral element factory a new logic shockingly total and as with any genuine manipulation-breaching of a cumulative body in crisis, completely outside the configurable realm of what came before yet configured completely of what came within what came before—and added to that solicitousness, a religious application of absorptive colors, and following cataclysm, love.

BRANDON SHIMODA: Brandon, have you ever been genuinely terrified by a work of art? Can you recall the first time that you were? Do you remember what the work was, what about it terrified you, and the nature of that feeling?

BRANDON DOWNING: Oh god yes! Freaked out of my mind. The first artwork to terrify my would have to have been when I was five or six...it was a rerun of NIGHT GALLERY...for some reason I remember being allowed at a very young age to stay up for the 9pm or 9:30 showtime of it. Something about Rod Serling walking through, well, a gallery of horrifying paintings to start each episode, and the aggressive cascading theme, always perked me right up. The episodes were hit and miss, but I will always remember one that absolutely shocked all good feeling out of me and tortured me for years. It was called THE DOLL, and involved a mysterious package sent to a former British colonial governor in India who had since returned to England. The young girl in his care, seeing the package had come from India, had assumed it was a gift for her.

The package, once unwrapped, was a doll. A seriously kohl-eyed, wild-haired apparition of a doll with full, needled dentition.

This doll:

And this doll was about revenge. About unavoidable fate. It was maybe only a ten minute episode, but this old man would hear the Doll speaking in harsh whispers to his grand-daughter/ward as he passed by her bedroom along the dark Edwardian hallways of his manse. A servant, brought from the colonies, recognized it immediately as a cursed, driven demon, sent to kill the old man for putting a Punjabi village to the sword during his governorship.

The old Colonel recognized the doll for what it was. He desperately tried to replace it with a new doll for the girl. But in the night THE DOLL shredded the new gift to pieces, and he found it sitting triumphantly on the girls bed, with a vindicated smile. It was unstoppable. He tried to bin it. It returned unharmed to his granddaughter's room. Tried to burn it in his fireplace with a hot poker. No go. It kept talking to her and stalking on him. Finally with his saber in his hand, he meets it above the landing, coming out of the shadows late at night...and BITES his CALF, shreds it, sending him toppling down the stairs. The servant knows he can't be saved. The doll's teeth were laced with INCURABLE POISON.

Alright. Enough of the story. But here I am, maybe six years old, and after staying up for what felt like three months of nights just dwelling on that doll, and of course not entirely able to process the feelings it planted, I became convinced that this doll was coming after me. The same way that it tracked and stalked the old man in the television. It wasn't the grin, the glaring eyeshadow, or the broke-porcelain skin that terrified me, it was its INEVITABILITY. It could not be burned, slowed, prevented, bribed, broken. I guess this was my first real brush with the cold sureness of death or whatever.

So the only way I could get to sleep at night, knowing this doll was on my trail, was to invent specifics about its location and pace that kept me out of danger for a period. Like: I knew the doll was coming for me. But it had started its journey from England...walking at doll speed. Which I'd determined was something like 1/4 mile an hour. I would make all these calculations in my head. It couldn't have reached even Canada yet! It was probably making its way across Iceland or Greenland. And I was all the way in Northern California. So basically, my introduction to geography and mathematics all came from deducting how long, and by what route, it would take for this evil doll to reach me and rip up my lower legs. I also reasoned that it would probably get caught in ice and snow from time to time.

So I'd do all this scenario math to convince myself I was safe; that she wouldn't reach me for years and years, so I could live on quite bit longer. And then, eventually, I would fall asleep.

Of course, now, thirty seven years later, my fucking doorbell rings and who would you guess is standing right there on the porch?

BS: Oh shit, did you lose track of the years?!? Did you calculate that it would take thirty-seven for the doll to find you? I am transfixed by this story of the Doll and the Colonialist, and especially how the "seriously kohl-eyed, wild-haired apparition of a doll" is in fact the Avenging Angel for a Punjabi village! That the Punjabi village would manifest vengeance in the form of a dwarf Tammy Faye Bakker with "broke-porcelain skin." Were you aware at that age that "The Doll" was an "artwork" -- that it was conceived and contrived and bricolaged by people, artists and technicians, etc.?

The flip side of the question is: When and how did you first discover that you could also "conceive and contrive" such a scene, such a plausibility, such a world (in whatever media), and one that could potentially carry out similar effects, provoke or inspire an individual's emotions -- fear or otherwise? (If you believe that you can, of course, I do, of you).

BD: Oh yeah, I lost track. About ten years ago I started trying to track down the episode on video, found it and rewatched it. Thankfully, my anxiety-cycle didn't start up again, but it sure re-scared the shit out of me! Of course, as you age, your anxieties become far more exquisite, though perhaps less far-fetched. This is a nice reminder of the primal scares we likely lived through every day when we were little.

But as far as awareness-of-artifice goes, well shit, I was a baby kid, so I had little idea of the trades and labor-divisions involved in its object-production. Collaborative art? TV was basically my scheduled reality. When I watch Night Gallery now though, the blunt force of its elements are almost beyond camp...a dark, shadowy mansion, a doll that, from a makeup and wardrobe standpoint, pretty much embodies boiling evil? The hazy musical cues? It's so ridiculous, so cheap, so all-out! And fucking effective, dang.

A lot of years have passed, but I guess I have remained drawn to that sort of maximalist expression; it may very well have started with these under-supervised childhood viewings. I mean, sure, I place a high value on restraint, but when I'm working in a recombinatory fashion—probably 70% of my across-the-board-practice—I love working with blocks of material like function like this. They are blunt-force, they are manipulative, but if you think of them as notes in a collaged-together score, they "ring across the plains like a battle trumpet", so to speak. I don't know that I could personally generate material of this nature, but I do like being able to rearrange their emotional content—with hopefully lots of other effective bells and whistles—into new filmic bits that shoot off their horror/etc. message like decaying isotopes within a larger, more emotionally-complex context. Does that make sense, I wonder?

BS: I wonder too, and then again I wonder if you ARE in fact generating "material of this nature" by way of working in a "recombinatory fashion," rearranging the emotional content of the "notes" into exactly that wide, refulgent and refugee wail of the "battle trumpet." Because though your work becomes a kind of vivarium for the material that makes it, it also creates a wholly new world -- both derelict and brilliantly unbounded -- in which the original material is not only being re-generated, but generated anew, and for the first time, in ways that might trouble and devour infinity.

Have you ever lost control of or within one of your poems or films? That the materials began to "recombine" themselves beyond the reach of your hand, and subsequently began to overpower you, master you? The terror induced by the Doll, for example, lies partially in the fact that though it has already satisfied its task (killing the colonialist), it is not anywhere near being "done."

BD: I think I have definitely lost control in a few videos before...while to me poetry is hopefully a (sometimes) systematic way of cataloguing individual moments that are consistently beyond my control or corralling ability, working on video pieces—recombining, essentially—always feels like a way for me to exert calm, directorial control. I'm glad you mentioned something of a newness that can come out of the pieces, as I work pretty deliberately to hammer out new quantums from the disparate bits and footage choices. New rhythms, new stories.

But there have been a few times when the end result has felt just so out of control. My perception of this loss of control vacillates between exhilaration and embarassment, because as a film editor I'm such a proud control queen! Two instances in particular both stem from my choices of backing soundtracks, and these from the same source: the chanting mono-drone recordings of the Church Of Universal Truth, camped out in hangars and bomb shelters in anti-nuke Montana, back in the 1980s. Led by cult founders Mark and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the church railed against Central America's popular revolutions, nuclear armaments and the like, but also rather embarrassingly ranting in tongues about the satanic messages in contemporary rock radio.

But their sermons were fabulous! Elizabeth Clare Prophet in particular had compellingly banal voice, and a way of synthesizing concepts of Buddhism and half-digested Gnostic Christianity with ample donation-seekery, spinning out her New Age wheels until the historical Christ comes off as some sort of protean Gandalf Sandinista. Excellent. The sermons would go on for hours and hours in these hot crowded tents, where they would get adherents to vocally synchronize themselves to semi-improvised, moaning drones, with occasional flashes of semi-recognizable language breaking up the cadences.

Still with me? Anyway, I've loved these recordings for going on 20 years. I started using them as soundtracks to several videos, to mixed success; the sound is so powerful it has frequently dragged the meaning of works far out beyond the range of my ability or influence. One piece was cut together around the time of a September 11th anniversary—mostly collaged footage from an early 1970s Robert Redford caper, The Hot Rock, that showed some criminals zooming around Lower Manhattan in a helicopter during the construction of the World Trade Center—and together with the C.U.T soundtrack, just became, to me, almost forcefully unwatchable, it's just so emotionally manipulative. I mean, I know you don't just evoke the WTC disaster with dancerly lightness, but this just ended up being ridiculous. That said, I loved the result, no matter that it feels distinctly "not mine".

I am Freedom 2010

Another video with an Elizabeth Clare Prophet soundtrack also suffers, but for slightly different reasons. The footage is less egregious than the previous example—it's mostly of 1978-era Burt Reynolds wordlessly ranting in front of a fish tank, then hiking down to the ocean, swimming out to sea, and drowning himself, taken from a forgotten, tone deaf comedy called The End. However, that damn soundtrack again...those devout, deluded voices just end up making the thing like 40x more viscerally powerful than I'd ever intended from the get-go. If I'm being honest, I originally meant for the Burt Reynolds thing to be a bit of a laugh (I mean, Burt Reynolds drowning himself? Fuck yes, bring it on, yay), but against that soundscape, I found it hard to not get completely freaked, even when watching it by myself. It's kind of exhaustingly poignant. You watch the damn thing and you're really rooting for Burt, really feeling him in his moment, and when he finally propels himself underwater, the video kind of pushes you into feeling, I don't know, completely relieved for him, kind of stoked. A result that just careened out of control from any of my original intentions.

untitled, 2009

BS: I love both of those videos, and for some of the same reasons you're saying they've run away from your intentions: for having "dragged the meaning far out beyond the range" of your "ability or influence." I feel like you often provide the genuine contexts for found materials in a way that COMPLETES them, brings them into full fruition within a world they might have originally imagined, but were somehow prevented from inhabiting. These videos might be "ridiculous" because their constituents have actually met their maker! What an exhilarating and embarrassing kind of rapture!—both videos featuring individuals impelled toward death, in different ways, by the voice of Ms. Prophet and her adherents! I saw the Burt Reynolds at Poetry Time in Queens and what I loved in the experience of watching it then was how attentive and celebratory the crowd was, how the experience became communal, so that every move (decision, synchronization) in the video met with immediate, collective response. What has been your experience of sharing your work with an audience? What have been some of the most surprising or generative experiences of sharing your work with that audience? Would you be exhilarated or embarrassed to know that a five or six year old child has read or watched, in the privacy of his living room at night, one of your poems or your videos?

BD: Oh wow, you were at the show where we played the Burt Reynolds movie? Well, then you know what that scene was all about. Having a platform to show these videos—workshopping them, really, as these were the first time any of the pieces were ever seen beyond my studio at home, or my own eyes—was amazing. I huffed and puffed for three years—roughly 30 readings—to push out fresh new content every month. And the attention being placed by the audience upon the wall-sized screen, it all felt very very heightened. And in terms of the 'immediate, collective response' you mention, you've nailed it.

They've also gotten a lot of love from museum audiences and at other screenings, which has also been madly gratifying (but as of yet no big money offers from the curators. Do you hear me, rich culture-y people?)

I don't know that YouTube—or a private viewing experience in general, really—has the same effect. In a crowd, in the right mood, if the work hits the notes...it sometimes feels afterwards like my world's red-shifting. But then I look at pieces on the YouTube channel that I just thought were the bomb, and some have had all of like 37 viewings in a year, and then I feel like a chump. But hey that's the online web I guess! And I do very little networking work with them other than putting them up and telling a small list about it.

Although I do learn of the tendrils that seem to grow out of them. I've had many back channel emails from high school teachers asking tenuous permission to show them to their 10th graders (and also, gingerly, inquiring as to whether what I do is or isn't legal), heard about DVDs being taken to a third grade show and tell (true story), queries from a media professor in Singapore, an economist in Mysore, elsewhere.

And I love the completely random internet comments I get from people who are just stunned; confused, pissed. Some are sweet, troubled notes. Many are in Chinese, Urdu, Hindi, which is flattering, because they assume I have some working fluency with the languages I'm wrapping into the works, but it's barely true except for a little Hindi and decent Spanish and Italian. Some are just unhappy faces and fields of question marks. Here are some I copied down:

What. The. Hell. Is. Going. On. Here. Oh--isn't it supposed to be "King KONG Escapes"?...and what do these two subjects have the hell to do with each other? Yes, I would agree that this is "totally psychotic".

(a comment on The Franklin Expedition)

.....

You both are silly stupid and need to check your ears with doctors.I don't think this is really sounds 'Garlic'. Remove those silly subtitles as it doesn't match with the song at all not even in funny way. Stupid..

(a comment on Hey Garlic / Global Rot)

.....

南洋明星张莱莱演唱的歌曲。
《一对好夫妻》是首很有意思的歌曲，通过一个孩子的眼光和童真看待父母亲的生活和希望他们永远和好。
歌曲旋律很轻快，具有西方童谣的特点，琅琅上口。
陈蝶衣先生巧妙地用了非常押韵的英语，突出了歌曲的意境。
一首很优秀的姚氏小品。

(a comment on 一對好夫妻)

.....

ahaha bien nazista y facista el video

wtf is this?
like...im not sure what im watching

crap, the tune is stuck in my head now...-_-`

i.....have no words to express my feelings....

What the fuck just happened?

(various comments on The Nazi Kids. Talk about great blurbs!)

Friday, October 7th with Heather Christle, Brandon Downing and Daniel Tiffany

2011-09-25T19:19:00.001-07:00

Brandon Downing is a writer and visual artist originally from California. His books of poetry include The Shirt Weapon (Germ Monographs, 2002) and Dark Brandon (Faux Press, 2005), while a monograph of his literary collages from1996-2008, Lake Antiquity, was released by Fence Books in late 2009. A long poem, AT ME, will be released by Octopus Books this Fall, while his next collection, Mellow Actions, will be published by Fence in 2012. In 2007 he released a feature-length collection of collaged digital shorts, Dark Brandon: Eternal Classics, with a 2nd volume forthcoming next year. You can see some at www.youtube.com/user/bdown68, along with his photographic and other work at www.brandondowning.org

Heather Christle is the author of The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011), The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books, 2009), and a chapbook, The Seaside! (Minutes Books, 2010). Wesleyan University Press will be publishing her third full-length poetry collection, What Is Amazing, in the spring of 2012. Her poems have appeared widely in publications including The Believer, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, and The New Yorker. She has taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and at Emory University, where she was the 2009-2011 Creative Writing Fellow. She is the Web Editor for jubilat and frequently a writer in residence at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. A native of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, she lives in Western Massachusetts.

Daniel Tiffany has published three books of poetry and three books of literary criticism. A fourth book of poetry will be published in 2013 by Omnidawn Books. His poems have appeared in Tin House, Paris Review, Fence, Boston Review, jubilat, and New American Writing. He is presently writing a book about kitsch and poetry, which allows him to spend time reading pet epitaphs, fake Scottish ballads, and gothic melodramas. He lives near the beach in Venice, California.

7:00 pm doors
7:30 pm poems
entry by donation
parking in rear

Samantha Giles talks with Cassandra Smith

2011-09-01T19:06:00.000-07:00

Cassandra Smith is my friend and a brilliant thinker. She helped me get thru graduate school by writing the kind of poems that made me feel like poetry was worth hanging out with. She once made my son a pirate sling when he broke his arm. She has also left a thermos full of hot tea on my porch when I was sick.

Which is only to say, that she is nothing less than the best kind of person.

She also wrote an astounding book, Being When Wendy, that, when you read it, you want only to read it again to make sure that it hasn't magically flown out of a London window at midnight.

We recently (like just moments ago) sent messages to each other while sitting in the same coffee shop. Here's the part that wasn't redacted:

Samantha Giles: OK, but let's talk about SERIOUS POETRY THINGS. So, Cassie Smith, serious writer of unicorns, tell me: what's up with the unicorns?

Cassandra Smith: They are very sad and lonely and they are really one person trying to be something greater than only one person. They are going a little crazy. They repeat the same things in different ways.

SG: Well, also unicorns are maybe only guesswork. or magic. I don't mean that in the like 4 year old fairy way, but like the place where you press and there's nothing there until there is. Like Neverland.
(this is super weird us talking with our fingers)

CS.: Which is still a very four year old fairy way of looking at things.
(Yes. Maybe I will stare at you. Let me turn my computer.)

SG: (Eeks. Thanks for being willing to take the creepiness up a notch.)
What are you reading on Friday?

CS.: I think am reading the sex poems and not the unicorn poems. Even I can't always take myself seriously with unicorns.

SG: But the sex poems are kind of like the unicorn poems, right? I mean detached and together at the same time? And kind of breathy inside voice?

CS.: Yes. They are all the same poem. The only difference is more porn or more horn.
But, aren't you supposed to ask me about my poetic influences and what time of day I write and what book am I currently reading and how do I feel about the future of the printed book?

SG: Well, I will say, that I have thought for some time that you should kind of be the boss of poetry. If you actually got the job, what kind of legislation would you enact?
(I am for shit as an interviewer.)

CS: I would reinstate fistfights. I think spirited physical altercations are mostly missing from poetry these days.
I am unfamiliar with the phrase "for shit". hmm. It could be a positive: "the shit" or a negative: "just shit." This is what I write about, all of the time. With the unicorn stuff it's about how someone can become indistinguishable from another, how this is such a desire sometimes, how this is such a sad nightmare at others.

…..

SG: So, why do you think people make such a notice of your font choice? As a designer, can you talk about your font choice?

CS: i like small things.

SG: I mean, really Cassie, WHY GARAMOND? Wikipedia says: Garamond’s letter forms convey a sense of fluidity and consistency. Some unique characteristics in his letters are the small bowl of the a and the small eye of the e. Is that what your poetry means?

CS: I like Garamond because it is simple. It is a little elegant but mostly invisible. I am actually in love with an Adobe typeface called Arno Pro. I don't have it, most people don't have it. Typefaces are maybe what poets have as accents. Garamond is probably most easily confused as being from another country, or planet, or Kansas. This is how I speak.

….

SG: If we were going to avoid talking about unicorns for a minute, could we talk about time travel? I mean, all of your work has this essence of "here and not" which is both here in the sense of time and not. And in the sense of place and not and in the sense of "I'm in the room with you while you're reading this" and not. Can you talk about this woo woo affect you have on your reader?

CS: The Gatsby Picnic is coming up soon. This is almost time travel, the costumery. When it is more time travel is right at sunset when everyone is tired and a little drunk, and packing up their picnics and 'real-time' starts to sneak back in, but it doesn't matter the year anymore because this has been the same creek for so long: This is what sunset at a creek looks like in September. There is only this moment, with different weather.

….

SG: (we are still across the table from each other, and yet we've stopped noticing each other altogether)
How are you feeling about this reading thing? Do you think poetry readings are good for poetry?

CS: I think they can be. I am really good at reading poetry. I am serious but you are laughing. I am not very good at knowing how to read my own poetry. I get nervous. My arms blush. I stumble, etc and etc. I am really good at reading other people's poetry once I have heard them read it wrong. Years ago I heard a recording of ee cummings and he leaves out all of the playful, all of the parts you wish you could hold.

SG: What does that mean to be very good at reading? This is that kind of stupid inevitable question about the performance of the page and the performance of the performance. But you know... what do you mean?

CS: I know what I hear, what I think, when I read someone else's work. I am sure it has a lot to do with my interpreting the poem with a personal slant, "ours like we adapt it to make it think we belong" kind of stuff. But I fall so crazy in love with words on a page, the moment of them, that I want to repeat this moment for someone else. I make the sound of someone else's words when I speak. I am never good at speaking me. I tell unicorns, I tell Wendy. I re-narrate stories. Maybe because I am an only child, grew up in the small town next to the small town where I went to school. I talk a lot to myself. I look at things. I never really had to invent things, I just renamed the things I knew after different things I knew.

SG: But maybe too, it's a little bit of palimsest-y time travel? Like the originality of the stories doesn't matter as much as the chaotic quiet inside them that gets repeated over and over?

CS: Yes. Everything imaginary has some basis in reality. For awhile I was trying to convince someone (anyone) else to get a Ph.d in imaginary beings. I wanted to know the root of cyclops; I wanted there to be an anthropological history of myth. I like thinking that a race of people with one eye might have existed. That, sadly, inevitably, some other race of people would have killed them off, made them myth to make up for it. Or maybe it was just one really big guy with an eyepatch and a lot of travel under his feet. Somehow every story is made from reality. I don't know which side of originality matters more. With Peter Pan, the story is this great adventure. The writing, its language, I think is more interesting than a lot of 'modern experimental poetry.' It collapses onto itself. It laughs. It is intelligent and precise, and it tells you when it is lying. And maybe more interesting than the story of Peter Pan is the story of JM Barrie telling it: the way he couldn't grow up for so many reasons, how he dealt with this, the things he created from it.

Wikipedia says this: "When he was 6 years old, Barrie's next-older brother David (his mother's favourite) died two days before his 14th birthday in an ice-skating accident. This left his mother devastated, and Barrie tried to fill David's place in his mother's attentions, even wearing David's clothes and whistling in the manner that he did. One time Barrie entered her room, and heard her say 'Is that you?' 'I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to,' wrote Barrie in his biographical account of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy (1896), 'and I said in a little lonely voice, "No, it's no' him, it's just me."' Barrie's mother found comfort in the fact that her dead son would remain a boy forever, never to grow up and leave her. Despite evidence to the contrary, it has been speculated that this trauma induced psychogenic dwarfism, and was responsible for his short stature and apparently asexual adulthood."

That this is an anthropological history of Peter Pan fascinates me.

Dara Wier Talks to Ben Mirov

2011-08-31T12:41:00.000-07:00

Dara Wier: Ben, are you still the recording angel Zachary Schomburg suggests you are?

Ben Mirov: I’m probably more of a recorder than an angel. My personality is kind of flat and suited for observation more than interaction. Sometimes, I feel like a huge eyeball.

I like the idea of being a recorder. I think I’m at my best, poetry-wise, when I’m acting like a recording machine that’s trying to articulate the unfolding of a poem in my brain. If I’m any kind of angel, it’s by accident. Or because I’m terrified of not being liked or breaking the rules or causing trouble.

I like being mentioned in the same sentence as Zachary. He is sincere and kind in a preternatural way. Although I may be a little biased towards Zach because Octopus Books, the press he runs with Mathias Svalina and Alisa Heinzman, is publishing my next book. Knowing he has anything to say about me or my writing feels rad.

DW: You do have that great longish poem “Eye, Ghost” in Ghost Machine, so I feel as if I know something about the kind of eyeball you might be.

Someone is going to let me look through her eyeball through its pupil to see inside her brain; she’s studying medicine. Your poems lots of times feel accurately and carefully enunciated, as if what’s in them has to be treated carefully, it’s that fragile out there, how do you do that?

BM: I think the enunciation of “fragility” comes about due to two aspects of the way I write. The first aspect is the content of the poems. I care to write about things that tend towards fragility, like emotions; memory; love; consciousness; relationships; etcetera (The content of my writing is unremarkable. I feel like I write about things people have written about since humans began to write).

The second aspect is the way I revise poems. I revise work over long periods of time. I write a lot, but only foster a small percentage of the poems I write into their mature forms. Once I finish the bulk of a poem, I dwell on it, or file it away and come back to it, sometimes over the period of years. Because I want to enhance the content of what I write, I try to help the form of each poem catalyze its content as I revise. I edit lines down for grammatical simplicity, so that they, hopefully, attain a structural integrity and or lyrical quality that bolsters their “fragile” content. I break lines and or tease out rhymes that enhance the poems object-like qualities. All this is in order to embody the ephemera of the content without undermining it. After a while, if a poem is successful, it takes an advantageous form, one that will hopefully enable it to deliver its messages and survive entropic dissipation.

DW: Wow, I just read your poems “#0.99999” and “#23.33” in the new notnostrums, with atoms and little dots and a very wonderful notice that goes along the lines of “…you only see once / and you don't get to share.” That directly speaks to surving entropic dissipation. Thanks for saying how your work develops, and finally, can you tell me something about the titles I mention. I love 9s for sure, so 3s are great too.

BM: I love nines and threes, too. Those poems in notnostrums are from a collection of poems called the Analects of Confusion, loosely based on the Analects of Confucius, of which I’ve only read a few pages. I thought it would be funny to write a bunch of poems that had a didactic tone, but sort of undermined there moral authority by spiraling into confusion and ambiguity. Using numbers as titles was my idea of cataloging the poems in a completely unorganized manner. Most of the time the number relates to the content of the poem. In the case of the ones in notnostrums, “#0.99999” was intended to have the little line over the last nine [#0.99999], which is a mathematical symbol denoting that the series of nines extends infinitely. Most of the moments in the poem are similar in that they meditate on mysteries that aren’t resolved. The poem moves from paradox to paradox without resolution sort of like the potentially endless string of 9s represented by the title. Also, “0.99999” is on the verge of being the number 1.0, much like the poem, which is on the verge of understanding without ever reaching it. I don’t remember why I went with the title “#23.33,” maybe I thought it was a funny number or it just appealed to me.

Ben Mirov reads this Friday at Studio One with Cassandra Smith, music by Peter Burghardt. Be there!

Friday September 2nd with music from Peter Burghardt. Poems from Cassandra Smith and Ben Mirov.

2011-08-24T13:20:00.000-07:00

Check it out:

First Fridays at Studio One

Food Trucks/bites off broadway 5:30-7:30
Readings 7:30-9:30
entry by donation

Cassandra Smith is a visual artist and poet. She makes things and writes things and often these seem like objects more than art. She is a poetry editor and book designer for Omnidawn Publishing. She has degrees. She has fire. She lives in Oakland.

Peter Burghardt and Stuart Pittman have been friends and frequent collaborators for the better part of a decade. Though geographic distance kept them from performing together during the past several years they continued to contribute words, ideas, and encouragement to each others music and art. Reunited again, Peter and Stu look forward to sharing the stage and making sounds wherever folks will have them.

Ben Mirov is the author of Hider Roser (Octopus Books, Summer 2012), Ghost Machine (Caketrain, 2010) and the chapbooks Vortexts (SUPERMACHINE, 2011) I is to Vorticism (New Michigan Press, 2010) and Collected Ghost (H_NGM_N, 2010). He is currently working on a trilogy of sci-fi novels about a man named Ben Mirov who is struggling to write his third book of poetry, while suffering from mild burnout and an addiction to the video game Starcraft 2.

Fall First Fridays at Studio One

2011-08-16T12:10:00.000-07:00

* September 2nd with music from Peter Burghardt. Poems from Cassandra Smith and Ben Mirov
* October 7th with Heather Christie, Brandon Downing and Daniel Tiffany
* November 4th with Sandra Doller and Ben Doller
* December 2nd with Gillian Hamel, Jenny Drai, Sara Mumolo, Barbara Claire Freeman, Elizabeth Robinson and Brian Teare for Phrases/Fragments: an anthology release reading published by Achiote Press

Image details:
Deer
2009 Finalist
River of Words
Jacob Scott, Age 12
Tell City, Indiana
Tell City Junior High
Teacher: Kyle Miles

Colby Gillette talks with Claudia Keelan

2011-08-10T12:41:00.000-07:00

Colby Gillette: As I was driving from Oakland to Vegas recently, and especially as I was making my way through the expanse from Barstow to Vegas, I was thinking about how the severity and beauty of such a landscape must shape people. Specifically, I thought about Alice Notley when I saw the sign for Needles and about something you said in one of your Ecstatic Emigre pieces, that the desert is your teacher. I'm wondering how you see the place you live in (and I'm thinking more of Blue Diamond and the undeveloped desert to the west than Vegas and its concrete cut outs, though, I imagine both make their presence felt) informing you and your poetry.

Claudia Keelan: Lately, the desert had been teaching me how to bear indignity. There it is, a desert forever, with no chance of being an ocean again. Developers have done their best to raze the land completely, but native plants still come back. Cezanne had his mountain, and I have somehow inherited this desert. The subtle cycles of change here teach patience, and demand a being-in-time that saves me from any form of nostalgia.

CG: I imagine some of these lessons were put to practice in writing Missing Her. The book is structured by/shot through with loss, which demands patience; you can't speed up mourning; you also can't rush its articulation, especially when loss is taking place on so many levels: personal, public, political, cultural, environmental. In some ways, the poem, “Body of Evidence,” through the story of Pocahontas and all its implications, is a locus for the whole range of loss that the rest of the book develops. I was wondering if there was any motivation for the poem besides the film, if her story holds an importance or resonance that you felt needed to be articulated.

CK: As I think of it now, "Body of Evidence" is an elegy to the American history that was lost by our failure to honor the aboriginal people here. Western civilization has largely discredited the experience of nativeness, even while it makes a cottage industry of the spirit available there. That native condition is also related to the land itself, and the ways in which our relation to the earth has been a documentary of theft and defilement. The American narrative pays lip service to the spirit of the land and the spirit of the people, even though the government has always been very busy creating bureaus that will categorize and still the very essence of that spirit. I've always loved Walt Whitman, but of late, I can't help but feel that his radical democracy is just a humanist version of manifest destiny, and that the equalizing he attempts in "Song of Myself" is just the same kind of categorizing I've just referred to, which by grouping together, ultimately fails to see the true originality, and necessity, of individual Being. Whitman asks "what is grass," and the figure in "Body of Evidence" comes "as grass," and is ultimately the physical activity of becoming, before the separation that must take place and things are delegated to their names. There is something infinitely old and wise, suffering and proud, in the earth, and esp, in places that have been misused. We are all born native (in our nativity), and are almost immediately stripped of origin, the sweetness of origin, as soon as our names go into the Bureau of Vital Statistics. I am not happy with our condition. We should be able to live with our originality intact.

CG: In connection with, or in contrast to, the fact that "western civilization has largely discredited the experience of nativeness," could you say more about the "ethics of negative capability," which you bring up in the Ecstatic Emigre series? Also, though this may be too large a question to bring up in this short of a space, I'm wondering how you stand towards Heidegger's philosophy?

CK: The further I take the ethics of negative capability, the more I see that it involves a course of action, a way of living in relation to the creation, or what we call the world. Keats, obviously, coined that term, and he was opposing it to what he called the egotistical sublime operating in the work of Wordsworth. He spoke of being annihilated by his perception of the others, by the Being of others, so that what he himself was involved in that being-the-others. I don’t know if he ever read religious philosophy, but his concept is found in the concept of the via negative, or the negative way, which proposed a diminishment of self in regard to the others. The work of Simone Weil operates this way, as does the figure of the Bodhisattva, a secular saint, who refuses to enter Nirvana, to attain paradise, but rather to stay in the imperfect here, so that others will see his refusal as a course of action which makes a possible paradise here. I’ve tried to write from that position, most esp. in Utopic, where I was tracking that stance through various texts, King Jr. for one. The capitalist adventurers who came to America wanted to eradicate, or assimilate, the native people who were here into a Christian-European model of civilization, and they wanted to dominate the land in the same way. We live in this continued aftermath, many of the supplanted natives absorbed by casinos across the West for recompense. Heidegger? Dasein? The Holocaust brought everything into question. I’m more drawn to Emmanual Levinas, who came after, and whose investigation of Being supplanted philosophy for ethics. I’m not as interested in what you can know, but what you can do.

Claudia Keelan is the author of six books of poetry including Refinery (Cleveland State University Poetry Prize), The Secularist (University of Georgia Press), Utopic(Alice James Books), and Missing Her from New Issues Press (2009.. In the preface to The Body Electric ,The American Poetry Review’s Best Poetry critic Harold Bloom wrote: “Claudia Keelan, new to me, is very welcome…she is endlessly enigmatic, again almost always what one hopes for in poems.” Of Utopic , the late poet Robert Creeley wrote: ”This profoundly moving book is fact of a consummate skill and the human possibilities it works to realize and to honor. In these poems Claudia Keelan keeps the faith for us all.” Born in California, Keelan has taught in universities in Iowa, Boston, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Colorado. Since 1996, she has been at the University of Nevada, where she is Professor of English and Creative at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and affiliate to the Black Mountain Institute, as well as editor of the literary journal Interim. Her honors include the Jerome Shestack prize from The American Poetry Review, the Beatrice Hawley award from Alice James Books, a Creative Achievement award from UNLV, a Silver Pen award from the Library Board of Nevada, and grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Under the auspices of Interim, she is partner to www.lyrikline.org, an online poetry archive founded in Berlin, whose mission is to serve poetry through translation.

A Conversation: Laura Sims and Joseph Massey

2011-08-08T17:39:00.000-07:00

Joseph Massey: What does the apocalypse mean to you, and do you believe we're now in the midst of it? And how does it play into the manuscript you're currently working on?

Laura Sims: Apocalypse means everything to me. By that I mean: 'apocalypse' can mean and be so many things, great and small. There are: personal apocalypses, marital apocalypses, physical apocalypses, job apocalypses, nuclear apocalypses, weather-related apocalypses, and so on. These all share a cataclysmic end followed by a raw, often painful, beginning. In the larger scheme of things, there have already been a number of apocalypses (like Chernobyl, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hurricane Katrina, any of our great or small wars, or the recent spate of devastating earthquakes, to name a few), and yes, we're in the midst of a multitude of overlapping apocalypses, and also there are more to come, and maybe some of them, or at least one of them, or all of them combined, will eclipse all other apocalypses that have come before, and that will be The Apocalypse.

And then what? That's what my book is concerned with, for the most part. Even in the event of a gigantic earth event, there will probably be survivors. It may be the end of the human race as the dominant species, but we'll still be around. My interest in reading and writing about apocalypse stems, in part, from nostalgia for an earth I've never known, one that's fresh and clean, full of natural resources, and free of strip malls, highways, and chain stores. Wouldn't it be nice to have the slate wiped clean? Don't we kind of need it? And wouldn't it be hard and grueling and depressing? And wouldn't that be refreshing? To strip away all of the useless activities and anxieties in which we indulge in the 21st century and be forced to use our basic, forgotten human skills, the ones programmed into our mammalian brains (hunt, gather, make fire, reproduce, etc.). I admit that sounds appealing to me, as much as it sounds terrifying and awful. I'd probably die (or at least want to die) if I had to rely on those skills, mind you, but I'm still smitten by the idea of having to do it.

I started to think about these issues...well, because it does seem like we're living in the end times, even though that has not been an uncommon thought throughout human history. But also after I read David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, whose protagonist believes she's the last person on earth, and whether or not she is, she has to deal with the ramifications of living in a world emptied of everyone, and every living thing. Her situation (real or imagined) is both strangely enviable and deeply distressing. When the trappings of civilization fall away, and all other human or animal companions disappear, do we, should we, must we go on living? And what does that 'life' look like? There's a compelling purity to that life, as I was describing before, but there's also (of course) a great, unending emptiness. Kate (the protagonist) turns her brain into the last reliquary of civilization, but to what end? There will be no future human generations, so the book emanates a sense of loss that is both intimate and immense, all-encompassing.

I'm using a lot of source material for the poems that includes books (science nonfiction, science fiction, political nonfiction), films, tv shows, informative pamphlets, and online survival guides. Some of the richest ones have been: the revamped Battlestar Galactica, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, by Svetlana Alexievich, The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells, the animated film "9," Tropic of Chaos, by Christian Parenti, and the New York Department of Health's pamphlet on disaster response. I've tried to find sources whose words and images appeal to me--there's a plethora of apocalypse material out there, but a lot of it is pure crap. Or just boring.

JM: Do you feel any anxiety over the so-called "death of the book"?

LS: How can I be anxious about the death of the book when I'm so busy worrying about the end of the world??

But seriously: yes and no. Yes, because I think what's really dying is the book-object, not "the book," but I love book-objects and want to always have book-objects available to me, and in the world in general. Of course you could argue that a Kindle is a "book-object" but I mean the old-fashioned version, with paper and binding and glue and words inked or printed on pages.

No, because as I just said, I don't think "the book" is dying -- people are still reading, they're just reading differently; the format of "the book" is evolving, and ultimately its evolution will preserve it for the future. Hopefully. But I don't believe that people don't read anymore -- I think that's b.s.

JM: Do you have a writing ritual, or rituals? Any superstitions surrounding the act?

LS: Right now my ritual is: get it done, and get it done fast. I write during my infant son's naptimes, or after he's gone to sleep, before I crash for the night, so when I have some time I just try to clear my mind as quickly as possible, sit down, ignore everything else, and write. No time for rituals!

I don't really have superstitions about writing, either. I do have a lot of anxiety about losing my work, though--in fire, earthquakes, accident, theft, etc.--I do an awful lot of backing up. Now I use an external hard drive to do that, and also Time Machine on my Mac, and also Sugar Sync, which backs up data online.

JM: If Lorine Niedecker suddenly reanimated from the dead and made herself available to you so you could ask one question, and one only, what would that question be?

LS: What is it like to be dead?

Laura Sims is the author of My god is this a man, forthcoming from Fence Books in 2013. Her previous books are Stranger (Fence Books, 2009) and >Practice, Restraint, (winner of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize). She is a co-editor of Instance Press, and lives in Brooklyn.

Joseph Massey is the author of numerous chapbooks and two full-length collections: Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009) and At the Point (Shearsman Books, 2011). Work has also appeared in various journals and magazines, including The Nation, The Cultural Society, Verse, Western Humanities Review, Quarterly West, Asterisk, Tight, A Public Space, Mary, Carve, Northwest Review and American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, among many others; and in the anthologies For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals (Bootstrap Productions, 2007) and Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams (University of Iowa Press, 2011). He lives in Arcata, California.

Friday August 5th with Laura Sims and Claudia Keelan

2011-07-28T08:45:00.000-07:00

Studio One Reading Series is back from summer break with a reading by Laura Sims and Claudia Keelan! Food trucks are now parked outside Studio One Art Center every friday from 5:30 to 8:00pm. This week truck's: Jon's Street Eats, Boffo Cart, Burmese Gourmet, El Tacobike and Breads of India

Laura Sims is the author of My god is this a man, forthcoming from Fence Books in 2013. Her previous books are Stranger (Fence Books, 2009) and >Practice, Restraint, (winner of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize). She is a co-editor of Instance Press, and lives in Brooklyn.

Claudia Keelan is the author of six books of poetry including Refinery (Cleveland State University Poetry Prize), The Secularist (University of Georgia Press), Utopic(Alice James Books), and Missing Her from New Issues Press (2009.. In the preface to The Body Electric ,The American Poetry Review’s Best Poetry critic Harold Bloom wrote: “Claudia Keelan, new to me, is very welcome…she is endlessly enigmatic, again almost always what one hopes for in poems.” Of Utopic , the late poet Robert Creeley wrote: ”This profoundly moving book is fact of a consummate skill and the human possibilities it works to realize and to honor. In these poems Claudia Keelan keeps the faith for us all.” Born in California, Keelan has taught in universities in Iowa, Boston, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Colorado. Since 1996, she has been at the University of Nevada, where she is Professor of English and Creative at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and affiliate to the Black Mountain Institute, as well as editor of the literary journal Interim. Her honors include the Jerome Shestack prize from The American Poetry Review, the Beatrice Hawley award from Alice James Books, a Creative Achievement award from UNLV, a Silver Pen award from the Library Board of Nevada, and grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Under the auspices of Interim, she is partner to www.lyrikline.org, an online poetry archive founded in Berlin, whose mission is to serve poetry through translation.

www.studiooneartcenter.net

Interviews coming soon!

doors, 7
readings 7:30pm

Sharon Zetter and Christine Hume on Insomnia, Motherhood, and Vocality

2011-06-03T09:51:00.000-07:00

Sharon Zetter, Music from First Novels and Christine Hume tonight, June 3rd, at Studio One Art Center 7:30pm

Sharon Zetter: In your most recent book of poetry, Shot, I was struck by your invocation of night and the landscape of dreams and dreaming that you meditate upon. What is/was it about the nocturnal landscape that you are so interested in exploring? (This question seems particularly apropos as I write to you in the midst of the witching hour.)

Christine Hume: I have been an insomniac for as long as I can remember, and feel physically connected to night's unfathomability. As much as its wrecked havoc in my life, I wanted to investigate insomnia as the most promising step toward self-knowledge. I also wanted to play with various nocturnal realities, including the ways in which we do become other people--chemically, psychologically etc--at night and in threshold states on either end of sleep. What happens when we are stuck in a threshold state? My great hope is staked in ontological fatigue: to reinstall slowness and self-doubt as a new aesthetic motor, to infect the reader with enriching fatigue. Flaubert does this in another way, says he wants to make the reader so catatonic that she will go mad but never fall asleep! My high school track coach's mantra was "fatigue is a mental condition," and though I think she meant this as a spur to keep running and run faster, my goal in Shot was to let this catchphrase take on as many lives as possible. In doing so, I'm hoping to dismantle a dependency on catharsis and the impulse to be productive, to structure my leisure and to feel guilt about "dead time." Luckily, in the middle of writing the book, I was pregnant and then had a child, which in effect entirely changed my relationship to sleep. Or maybe that process also had something to do with writing Shot. I used to become a werewolf, and now I can most nights (write it!) sleep. Or dream of werewolves.

SZ: I've also been an insomniac for just about all of my memory's length (mine recently abated as well--with the birth of falling in love!). I wonder if there is something inherently nocturnal in our writerly dispositions...Now that you have found sleep, how do you parse those two selves: the Christine of the night and threshold state in juxtaposition to the Christine of the day-awake? Or do you have a new view entirely? Also: how has becoming a mother/having a child altered your writing practices/interests?

CH: It's fortunate that I can answer these questions as one, albeit indirectly, as I think the before and after photos of me would be just as easily captioned BEFORE MOTHERHOOD and DURING MOTHERHOOD as DAY and NIGHT. I still have dark circles under my eyes. And I still prefer to write in the morning, but now I'll take what I can get, interruptions and all. Or as you say in one of your poems, "How the potential is / an arrival: every angle."

Of the umpteen different responses that come rushing to mind, then, I'll rewind to the time right after my daughter was born. Below are notes I took in those first months. (I'm still fascinated by the notion of "voice" and have come to realize that individuation happens first in the sonic field--vocality is really how we first come to know ourselves, not by the mirror (as in Lacan's mirror stage). That is our very first power of self-recognition is our own voice--that blurtish, spastic, stuttering, expressive, arrhythmic factory of vocal sounds.)

When I read my poem aloud in front of an audience, I am aware of my failure to voice it as I hear it in my head: I am lending to my writing a voice that always seems to fail the language.

When I am talking to my pre-verbal baby, I lend her a language that I can understand—I provide both sides of the conversation. This is not only a falsification of her voice but it’s a failure to recognize her language and her inclination toward imitation of nonspeech, onomatopoeia and nonEnglish sounds, sounds that have no representative function, but are not meaningless.

Think of Jakobson’s “apex of babble,” an infant’s vast capacity of sounds that must be partially lost to learn a single language. The loss of a limitless phonetic arsenal is the price my child must pay for the papers that grant her citizenship in the community of English-speakers.

When I teach her my language I fail to keep other languages alive and I fail at my ability to discover or reach beyond foregone conclusions.

My daughter’s stubborn sounds of attempt display the powers and deficiencies of language itself, an incompetence built into language, a verbal uncertainty that threatens my own fluency. After all emotional or intellectual intensity sometimes correlates with verbal insufficiency, which correlates with imaginative success. This paradox is best captured in music or tones of voice, that sounds and silence link us to our earliest states of being. Cadences lie less than words.

I may speak to my daughter in words, but to her they are not words.

Language is the child’s way of exploring and seeking pleasure. Language leads her back to bodies.

My failure is necessary for my daughter to learn language. My failure is also necessary for my own writing. I feel no assurance in what I write, I rewrite and erase, I am endlessly enmeshed in a work that cannot end, because I am always looking back at what I write. When I look back I see terrible things that petrify me and electric things that make me want to go other ways, or in multiple ways at one time.

What do I teach her? That all knowledge is a reduction of the unknown to the known. Blanchot paraphrased: A writer is her own first dupe, and at the very moment she fools other people she is also fooling herself.

I realize that failure—the thing that forces me toward editing, correcting, negating what I've already written—is also the very thing that insists I keep writing, adding more words, trying out new formulations and arrangements. Failure is necessary, but it is also impossible.

I attempt to work with and through my own failure, my guesses at who my daughter is and what will help her keep becoming. If I dedicate myself to motherhood, I dedicate myself to answering the call of this failure, the sense that the voice and language I lend to my daughter will help her take her own form (not mine), to help her understand her own choices, to help her attain a greater sense of her possibility and future, which includes the possibility of failure.

Please tell me more about The Dacha Project, your "off-grid educational homestead dedicated to creating sustainable living practices for working artists, located outside of Ithaca," in relation to your poetic practice. What new forms of public knowledge and empathy have you discovered in this collaborative process?

SZ: For me, The Dacha Project is about potentiality--specifically the potentiality of community and chosen family. The dacha is comprised of six individuals with simultaneously overlapping, parallel, and convergent ideas of both its current and projected mission. What that has meant for me and my poetic practice is the creation of an open field. An anchoring that allows for wider movement. And, beyond the material level, a possible home (which contains multitudes). The dacha is a space where cultivation of the creative force is constantly at work and at odds. This has led me to a deeper investigation into what it is I want my poetry to be and how I want it and I to enter into the world. Robert Creeley points to this when he posits that "form is never more than an extension of content." The collaborative force of the dacha is inextricably linked to the force that resides within each of us and all of us as one. Just as important as empathy--which is essential--has been a constant reevaluation and recommitment to myself and to our project.

CH: Your work seems inextricably relational and searching for locatability without seeking absolutes or stasis. I want to go back to "How the potential is / an arrival: every angle." I'm wondering how you negotiate this mining of potential with the possibility of personal failure. I mean, how do you manage "a constant reevaluation and recommitment to" yourself AND the collective project? This is a very American question!

SZ: This is quite a paralyzing question! I think, at first, failure is terrifying--even in this hypothetical notion-state. But what I would posit is that reevaluation and recommitment also point to, and hinge upon, rebirth. And rebirth can only occur when there has been a failure on some existential level--a death of sorts. Does this mean that failure is not only inevitable, but necessary? Are our poems, ourselves, merely caught in the eternal recurrence? This swings me toward Frank O'Hara's "Song":

I tell you
how I hate disease, it's like worrying
that comes true
and it simply must not be able to happen
in a world where you are possible
my love
nothing can go wrong for us, tell me

How can the self not want for nothing to go wrong? But also: how can nothing go wrong? In the simplest, most evasive terms: I manage by managing. Perhaps it is the Jewish New Yorker in me, but yes--I agree with Frank: "it's like worrying that comes true." It is possible that, in a future reevaluation, my self (and my poetics) could be in tension with the collective project. Which would then bring recommitment into question. For me, this is where stasis and absolutes come into play--both of which are essential. Stasis in the form of silence, meditation, reflection and family, relation, God for absolutes.

CH: And on a smaller square, how is the context in which the reader/listener comes to your work essential?

SZ: I would hope that a reader coming to my work would be interested and invested in relations--both with themselves and with others. Also in dialogue--again, with themselves (the myriad selves you point to in your investigation of the threshold moments) and with others. But also: any poem can and should transcend contextual limitations. Which is not to say that context is meaningless--a reader's familiarity with my artistic interests adds an important texture and grain to their reading. When I first came to "The Glass Essay," I was so taken by Anne Carson--her voice, the darkness, the stillness and strangeness that are braided into that particular piece. But I had yet to read Wuthering Heights! For me, "The Glass Essay" moves beyond a dependence on Bronte's text, but once that added contextual layer is brought into the fold, Carson's work takes on further importance and depth by being placed within a larger lineage. However, If I were to place a reader (in the act of reading) in context: I would plant them on the N train to Coney Island in the thick of August.

In line with this...Who are your beacons? That is: who are the poets that you find yourself returning to for sustenance? Although, of course, visual artists/filmmakers/"prose" writers/etc. are all welcome around these parts as well.

CH: I hesitate here for the usual reasons, but also I think coming to the Bay Area calls subtextuals of this question into relief for me. The Bay Area has such intense and long-standing poetry communities, that it's difficult not to think of how one's self-proclaimed beacons will map onto those various collective identities. For me the anxiety of inclusion runs as deep as the anxiety of exclusion. I like to think rather of Goethe's Elective Affinities and Tom Stoppard's remake, Arcadia, which updates the chemical affinities metaphor with chaos theory and thermodynamics, where characters are reactive entities. My affinities run toward Jeff Clark, Claudia Rankine, Christina Milletti, Caroline Bergvall, Gregory Whitehead, Yoko Ono, Anne Carson, Janet Cardiff, Alphoso Lingis, Bhanu Kapil, G.M. Hopkins, Aime Cesaire, Mina Loy, Muriel Rukeyser.... I'm also lucky to have Rob Halpern and Carla Harryman, both of whom I adore personally and admire artistically, for colleagues. Finally, a gathering of affinities I hope to see while I'm there is at SFMOMA, a show called "The Steins Collect."

Right back at you. Who/what gets your artistic engines running?

SZ: Now it is my turn to hesitate over the anxiety of in/exclusion! Other than those names I have already called out (Creeley, Carson, O'Hara), I would be not-myself without the affinities of Edmond Jabes, Emily Dickinson, Faulkner, Whitman, John Ashbery, Dan Flavin, Ann Lauterbach, Brenda Hillman, Don Revell, James Tate, Frank Stanford, Flannery O'Conner, Kiki Smith, Diane Arbus, Fanny Howe and Paul Celan. And yes: Stein.

Sharon Zetter lives in Oakland and works at Studio One Art Center. She is a co-founder of The Dacha Project, an off-grid educational homestead dedicated to creating sustainable living practices for working artists, located outside of Ithaca, New York. In 2009 she received an MFA from St. Mary's College of California, where she served as the poetry editor for Mary Magazine. Her poems have found home in Hanging Loose, Shampoo, The Greenbelt Review, Monday Night, Soft Skull and Blood Pudding Press, among others.

Christine Hume is the author of three books of poetry—most recently Shot (Counterpath, 2010)—and a chapbook with CD, Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008). She is Coordinator of the interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University.

June 3rd with Sharon Zetter and Christine Hume

2011-05-23T14:28:00.000-07:00

Join us for the first reading of the summer:

Sharon Zetter lives in Oakland and works at Studio One Art Center. She is a co-founder of The Dacha Project, an off-grid educational homestead dedicated to creating sustainable living practices for working artists, located outside of Ithaca, New York. In 2009 she received an MFA from St. Mary's College of California, where she served as the poetry editor for Mary Magazine. Her poems have found home in Hanging Loose, Shampoo, The Greenbelt Review, Monday Night, Soft Skull and Blood Pudding Press, among others.

Christine Hume is the author of three books of poetry—most recently Shot (Counterpath, 2010)—and a chapbook with CD, Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008). She is Coordinator of the interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University.

reading at 7:30pm
donation for entry

Anthony McCann and Matthew Rohrer in conversation.

2011-05-06T15:40:00.000-07:00

Anthony McCann: In Destroyer and Preserver I find the presence and absence of what might be called "the realm of the political" eerie and enigmatic. I mean that it is so present and yet so cleaved off and away in the book--so not touchable by the people of the book. When I am inside a lot of the poems in the book one of the feelings that being in the poem has for me seems like a denser, thicker version of what it feels like to move about in, or beneath whatever it is our democracy is. Does this make any sense? How did writing the poems make you feel and/or think about 'our democracy', etc.?

Matthew Rohrer: I think writing the poems in particular in this book felt like an engagement with a really wide swath of life — or at least I wanted it to. Of course that probably sounds kind of silly since it’s just my Brooklyn life. But what I mean is: I wanted to imagine the poems being written by someone walking through a dense curtain of input. Sometimes that input is things one reads, sometimes things one overhears, sometimes art one sees in a museum, sometimes the love one gets from one’s loved ones, and sometimes the terrifyingly distant and inhuman machinations of Capitalism and the government. I didn’t want anything to take precedence: I wanted what I was reading and what I was hearing on the radio and what I was seeing around town to all take the stage together equally. The political as you call it is always hanging there like an eerily gleaming guillotine blade just behind the clouds.

AM: Nice guillotine! Here's a stab at another question: another major presence--that is simultaneously tangibly present, yet also vague and ungraspable and kind of absent or haunting--is New York City itself. When you are in one of your poems do you feel at times like you're more in the city than you are "in real life?" I mean, I think I do when I'm reading some of them.

MR: Yes maybe. I think “the city” is a place for me at least and in my poems that doesn’t always have to mean “New York City” - though that is where I’ve lived for most of my life now. There is also a city I dream about that is “the city” in some of the poems. In some ways they are all the same city.

Anthony, so much of the language in your poems is elemental -- “face”, “bird”, “animal” etc. -- yet the poems themselves have an amazing sense of place and of physicality. How do you do that? And how aware are you of this elemental/simple linguistic situation in the poems? Is there a program behind it?

AM: Absolutely--there are certain 'elemental' terms that recur...they are all fairly loaded, for me, with affect. I mean--the face is the site of affect. I think hands and faces are where our social existences are embodied, in social life and in the poems. And animals and birds---perhaps--can be bodied ways out of the human. All the words you gave as examples, along with hands, are bodies or body parts. I think there are more--but I imagine they are all also bodies or body parts.

And, in Destroyer and Preserver your lines keep getting more deliciously delicate and slippery. At least it feels that way to me. Does that make sense to you? If so, maybe you would describe it differently. How consciously does this happen/has this happened?

MR: Yes, that’s a great description! I want them to be like that. Without punctuation, I want the enjambments to be sometimes so extreme that a line could either be fulfilling a previous thought, beginning a new thought, or doing both. Though that’s the kind of thing that seems great when you’re writing it but then when you read it aloud you realize you have to commit to some single way of reading it and that’s a little sad for me. I think definitely my allegiance is to the poem on the page.

MR: I know you’ve spoken many times about the process of writing the long poems in I HEART YOUR FATE (the section), with an especially good discussion of it up on the htmlgiant website.... But I wondered if you could talk about the inspiration for that form? And those lines? Like, who were you reading that prompted that exploration?

AM: I think of those poems as being short poems! Since they are all twenty lines long. I started playing with that form many years ago in response to that great Lewis Warsh book The Origin of the World. I wanted to write collaged poems of flat and stark un-enjambed lines like the poems in that book. But somehow my ear or my body or whatever demanded something tighter. There are 16 line poems in Moongarden that are the first results of playing with this form. The twenty line/five quatrain form took me over after moving to LA. I was reading that Warsh book again--I was teaching it. Also, I was deep into a re-visting of Kafka. I was reading all his letters. And there were some transformative events in my private life around then as well. I think the sequence moves toward a learning how to stand more presently in relation to one's others--maybe. I think there's a lot of that in Warsh's book as well. So I'll see you tomorrow!

See Matthew Rohrer, Anthony McCann, and Robyn Schiff tonight May 6 7pm

Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of I ♥ Your Fate (Wave Books, 2011), Moongarden (Wave Books, 2006) and Father of Noise (Fence Books, 2003). In addition to these two collections, he is one of the authors of Gentle Reader! (2007), a book of erasures of the English Romantics, along with Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer. He has taught English as a Second Language in the former Czechoslovakia, South Korea and Nicaragua, as well as in New York City. Currently he lives in Los Angeles, where he works with Machine Project and teaches in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts.

Matthew Rohrer is the author of Destroyer and Preserver (Wave Books, 2011), A Plate of Chicken (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007) and A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Satellite (Verse Press, 2001), and co-author, with Joshua Beckman, of Nice Hat. Thanks. (Verse Press, 2002), and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He has appeared on NPR's "All Things Considered" and "The Next Big Thing." His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at NYU.

Joshua Edwards talks with Robyn Schiff for her reading on May 6th

2011-05-03T01:27:00.001-07:00

Joshua Edwards: One of the many things I really love about your work is how it deals with information, and through information how it explores history and memory while also pointing to the future, sometimes with warning. It seems to me that in both your books, Worth and Revolver, the relatedness of things is explicitly expressed through the act of knowing. I'm just curious if you can trace these impulses to longstanding interests, a scholastic project, or things you really liked doing as a kid . . .

Robyn Schiff: No one ever asked me that before-- huh-- yes--the impulse absolutely has to do with the same kind of curiosity about the world that I had as a kid. I think it has to do with spending a lot of time looking at things-- not the natural world-- but man-made objects. My work is essentially ekphrastic, and the curiosity I hope to enact is the feeling of turning something over and over in my hands as much as in my mind.

JE: Related to that, how do you go about researching a poem? I mean, does the research usually follow the idea for a poem or are you constantly reading non-fiction and occasionally you'll come upon something that you think would be a good subject? Or do you get an initial idea for a large project and then follow a trail of ideas?

RS: I don't think of my poems as particularly researched, actually. There's certainly a sensation of information overload that I'm trying to express, as you say in your first question... and I love the word "information" because it contains the coming-into-being of things in formation, and the internal forms knowledge takes, and also menacing arrangements-- like fighter jets in formation. But I think that the syntax I'm attracted to makes the work seem to be concealing and revealing more stuff--more facts?-- more news items--more answers than are actually actually there. I love to read all sorts of material, and some of that material surfaces in poems, but I don't hunt for things to become poems, and I don't think of myself as a researcher or that research will help me overcome my own sense of tongue-tiedness before the astonishing world. Information can not power a poem. But enacting the vertigo of the chase-- maybe that's the poem? "Whoso list to hunt..."

JE: The poems in Revolver are especially astonishing for their portrayals of the lives of objects, and I wonder if there's an object you came across in doing research for the book that was for one reason or another too unwieldy to make its way into a poem but which has stuck with you?

RS: Yes! I really want to write about umbrellas! Amazing objects! Nothing interesting ever happens in my umbrella drafts though. Thanks for asking!

JE: Your work has very innovative formal and structural elements. Can you speak a little bit about how you employ form in your poetry, and what you see as the purpose of form? Do you see the form as giving "the impetus to the content," is it more a generative tool or a guide for the reader?

RS: I think of form as a generative tool and an obstacle at the same time. That's when I like it best.

JE: This is a rather broad and somewhat tedious question, but what do you think about the relationship, in your work in particular, between the poem on the page and the poem read aloud? I ask this because you have a fantastic reading style and I'm curious how it developed.

RS: That's a seriously important question, not a tedious one at all. Thanks for asking it. I'm interested-- both on the page and aloud-- in the dynamic between sentence and line. When we read silently to ourselves we can honor both line and sentence— we can confront the contradiction of moving forward and stopping—of talking and progressing while simultaneously also standing in the silence of the margin—but doesn't it seem that when we read aloud we have to choose one? True end-stopping is pretty rare, right? and we either propel the sentences forward as we read, or pause at the break. I vote with the sentence every time!

JE: Are there any writers that aren't poets with whom you feel a close creative kinship? Visual artists?

RS: I've got Guy Davenport and Alexander McQueen on my mind.

JE: Is there any subject matter you're currently obsessed with?

RS: Anthrax.

Joshua Edwards co-edits Canarium Books with Robyn Schiff, Lynn Xu, and Nick Twemlow. His first book of poems, Campeche (w/ photos by his father, Van Edwards), was recently published by Noemi Press and his translation of Mexican poet María Baranda's Ficticia was published last year by Shearsman Books. He lives in Berkeley.

Robyn Schiff is the author of Revolver (2008) and Worth (2002). She teaches at the University of Iowa and co-edits Canarium Books with Lyn Xu, Joshua Edwards and Nick Twemlow.

May 6th Anthony McCann, Robyn Schiff and Matthew Rohrer

2011-04-30T11:51:00.000-07:00

Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of I ♥ Your Fate (Wave Books, 2011), Moongarden (Wave Books, 2006) and Father of Noise (Fence Books, 2003). In addition to these two collections, he is one of the authors of Gentle Reader! (2007), a book of erasures of the English Romantics, along with Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer. He has taught English as a Second Language in the former Czechoslovakia, South Korea and Nicaragua, as well as in New York City. Currently he lives in Los Angeles, where he works with Machine Project and teaches in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts.

Robyn Schiff is the author of Revolver (2008) and Worth (2002). She teaches at the University of Iowa and co-edits Canarium Books with Lyn Xu, Joshua Edwards and Nick Twemlow.

Matthew Rohrer is the author of Destroyer and Preserver (Wave Books, 2011), A Plate of Chicken (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007) and A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Satellite (Verse Press, 2001), and co-author, with Joshua Beckman, of Nice Hat. Thanks. (Verse Press, 2002), and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He has appeared on NPR's "All Things Considered" and "The Next Big Thing." His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at NYU.

doors 7
reading 7:30
entry by donation

April 22nd with Alissa Nutting and Janet Mitchell

2011-04-14T20:50:00.000-07:00

Alissa Nutting is the author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, winner of the 6th Starcherone Books Prize for Innovative Fiction, chosen by Ben Marcus. She was born in rural Michigan and received a BA degree from the University of Florida and an MFA degree from the University of Alabama, where she served as Editor for the Black Warrior Review. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Fence, BOMB, the fairy tale anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, as well as many other journals. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she has received Cobain and Schaeffer Fellowships in Fiction. She is fiction editor of the literary journal Witness and managing editor of Fairy Tale Review.

Janet Mitchell is a writer and filmmaker. Her debut collection, The Creepy Girl and other stories, won the 5th Annual Starcherone Prize and was named 1 of the 12 best books of 2010 (staff of Small Press Distribution). Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Quarterly, The Pomona Valley Review, and is forthcoming in Gargoyle. Her work has also been optioned by Lifetime Television as well as by independent producers. She earned her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. She was born and raised in South Jersey, where her heart still resides.

Cassandra Smith Interviews Nik De Dominic for the Studio One Reading on April 1st.

2011-03-28T13:57:00.000-07:00

me: we chat?

Nik: YES

hello!

me: "Nik is busy. You may be interrupting."

worst

Nik: so, you've never done this before? gchat?

ok, well this is the part you imagine me in my underwear -- mostly because i am.

me: your underwear should be a lot more impressive.

Nik: YES

me: how's your new orleans?

Nik: i wouldn't mind owning a motel.

me: so uh, so nikdedominic. you’re my favorite writing poet. tell me about that.

Nik: baha, i don't think that's true. but thanks? i wish i wrote more. it's been difficult lately. i'm not sure what a poem is anymore. how to make one. i've been thinking a lot about professionalization lately. and how in some ways professionalization counters the process.

me: so off the record:

hi rusty,

i like the first one best. it looks simple but small and elegant bits. oh, so in love with his poetry. want it to be something i could court, sans person. "i bought your poems these flowers but they aren’t for you. could you find a way to give them to words please&thankyou?"

Nik: wow, that's lovely and thank you. that poem, i think you're talking about 'on translation'?, came from a really weird place. i was trying to translate czech poems, you know, with knowing czech.

without^^

me: every groucho, but the best mustache.

Nik: any club that would have you reference?

me: course

Nik: nice.

me: shucks

so. the offending adam.

tell me about that

Nik: HAH

Nik: TOA is a journal, online, that was started by several folk about a year ago -- andrew wessels, cody todd, ryan winet, laurel richardson came on a little after inception. We set out to do a couple things. First, we want to make an online journal that took advantage of the online medium, as opposed to mimicking a print format (i.e., something that would look like a journal, just on yr screen, and that would come out every couple of months, &c). So, we constantly update content, usually a couple poets a week. We believed there was enough work, interesting and innovating to support such a concept. I think we also believed in the idea of editor as a person too, that when something was chosen, there was a reason it was chosen; we believed that reason was important for our readers to know. I think the official language is something like serving as a bridge between poet and reader. I can't speak for the others on the team, but for me, the process of reading is deeply personal (is that too simple minded?). Reader as author. And that was something I wanted to be transparent to all. When I read something, I rewrite it, usually according to whatever's going on in my life at that moment. Many of my intros start with me in a particular coffee shop in the french quarter that I steal away to write them. Beyond that however, and rather than the whole thing being an exercise of ego for me, I want to showcase the work in a way that, again, is deeply personal. This is why I reacted to it, this is why I think it's important, this is why you should spend ten minutes reading, as opposed to updating yr facebook status, or scrolling through gawker, or whatever else myriad distractions there are on the internet. As far as how the things are formatted, we decided that they'd be short enough to not take away from the work. But other than that, we didn't put any other restrictions on them. And I think that's one of the nice things about the site. All of us are writing poets. But all of us have completely different personalities and aesthetics. There's not one person dictating the direction or vision of the journal...

Nik: Andrew Wessels may be perhaps the hardest working man in show business, and he and Cody Todd came up with the initial concept; they had a workshop together at USC where Andrew was finishing up his ugrad and CT was beginning his Phd (I may be a bit off here -- fact checker?). Andrew then recruited Ryan Winet and me. Andrew, Ryan and I all went to USC together and met in workshop but all ended up at different mfa progs (UAz for Ryan, Unlv for Andrew, Bama for me). Once we were on board, I think we spent about six months putting together the concept through emails and phone conversations, and then finally launched. And we're sort of still constantly reevaluating the mission/concept. We do a couple chapbooks a year and will be working with a press to produce a book.

there's a bunch of stuff? are you back outside, is it too cold, should we reschedule?

~~~~

from: cassandra smith

to: nik de dominic

re: interview

ok.

reread google chat.

cut and paste was mostly cut cut cut.

rewrote interview.

~~~~

i am reading your manuscript.

i am trying to remember nik de dominic the stack of paper, who is a different person from nik de dominic in the marigny.

I had a prof in grad who used to talk about page person and real person. That page person isn’t the same person who can’t park a car in a tight spot at the rite-aid, that’s real me. They are different. I don’t know if I buy that altogether. Page me is pretty close to real me. I think there’s more posturing in real me. I went on a date recently, got a bit drunk, and talked a little bit about XXXXXX. That wasn’t a good idea. Page me gets to talk about that stuff. But real me shouldn’t tell that stuff to people who just showed in my life. Real me always wants to do that, to be like, HEY BARISTA, I HURT, DON’T YOU SEE THAT – SOMETIMES WE ARE NOT GOOD AT LIFE. THAT’S OK. I don’t get to do that though; they’d lock me up? Or I’d be shunned? Although sometimes I already feel a bit shunned.

I don’t read friends’ work if they’re someone I don’t know professionally (or thru poet world). If they are friends who sell insurance, and they write poems, I won’t do it. It fucks up the relationship. I can’t help but to think bad things about them. How were page me and real me different? Was it a good or bad thing?

how is it coming?

have you realized yet that there is something so still that happens when the first two sections are entwined?

Do you mean that blending them in makes it still? Still in a bad way, like the thing lacks engine? I always thought the intermixing, the one essay throughout, drove the book. I want the book to not read like poems but like a novel. That sounds silly. I always thought of that as a narrative engine. Like I read these poems, these poems are informed by this weird thing throughout. I want someone to read those fifty pages like fast, in one sitting. It’s for story telling and not meditating.

that there is death, and there is poetry,

there are the days that move through them, and there is a classroom.

there is something, unspoken, that can only be written.

there is how do you touch things.

that that’s what it means when you called it “not here, not dead”

NHND I think is about memory construction and narrative in memory construction. Stuff that doesn’t exist but exists through utterance. Exists in the inbetween. But all of it. Yes.

you know we are only friends because you are a good poet.

I like you. I am happy that you are my friend. If my only redeeming quality is my poetry, so be it. I got you out of the deal. You say this. Some other people say it. Some one once told me that I was their favorite writing poet. That when my name shows up in a journal it makes him psyched that he gets to read me. This came from someone – and you too – that I greatly not only respect the work of but also everything that he does in the poetry realm. I don’t understand. I don’t think I’m always very good at it. I don’t even think I really understand it.

are your visions actual visions, seeing this, when you write, or are they mostly words?

i mean this:

Backyard, A Photo

A rusty wheelbarrow turned

on its side in brown knee-high weeds and dead

grass. It looks like it grows there

and the rotting carcass

of the raised redwood pool sits,

collects rain water, stagnates a fertile ground

for breeding. I have never seen a mosquito

just the welts grown fat from harvest.

They’re memories not visions, some imagined but all real, and all have actively been contrived. I see it all. Then I try to push on the language/construct of it.

52 Girls Sing, Texas

is not a good poem.

it rushes over itself.

it doesn’t know why it is there.

it is the poem part of how this is perfect.

You’re right. It should go. I don’t know why it’s in there. I think because I like the idea of sexual exploitation and ruining. Here are ruins. Everything in that book is about ruin.

are you the kind of person who falls in love and gets things done,

or falls in love and everything stops?

i am not sure if stops means better or broken.

Falls in love, everything stops. When the love stops, things get done. I’d be much happier fat in love with nothing ever getting done. The production comes in fits in the aftermath.

do you type the sounds or the words.

i think this is what i mean.

Sounds. Then words. Mostly associations. I think of the book as talk. All talk. Always my work as talk. I’d be happiest if I could just steal away in a dark room with reader and talk to them.

what is the difference between the stack of paper and the marigny

Stack of paper nik and marigny nik? Or stack of paper and marigny? For the first, see the first. For the second, the smell.

what is your holy

I was talking to someone tonight who was charged with writing something on the transformative ability of art. And I got stuck on that. This idea that art transforms. I couldn’t get around it. Like, I read something and I become a different person afterwards? Sometimes that happens, but it’s mostly aggregate. Of course, as an artist, everything has formed me, every piece I come across. But with that talk, we got to the sublime, a word I don’t know if I understand in every one of its senses, especially the philosophical. But my holy is whatever that is, the subliminity of beauty. XXXXXXXX. The thing that keeps me going is beauty in things, and that sounds fuck all stupid. But when I say beauty, I don’t mean a rose, but rather the power of an act, or a thing, to shock us out of our every day. I was telling this person I was talking to, the two most transformative music events I’ve had were once when I was 18, after a long week of acid and booze and walking on hot coals, I randomly stumbled across two guys playing ‘paint it black’ on their violins. It was the most beautiful thing I ever heard. The other time, again when I was in my early 20s, was walking into a Chinese rest for take out – one of those small dingy places that people only get take out from – and four women in their late 40s were singing karoke. This beautiful woman began singing house of the rising son and she had the most amazing voice I’d ever heard and it was the saddest thing ever to witness and it was the most beautiful thing. That’s holy.

there is a difference between the stack of paper nik and the drunken boat recording.

i swoon when you say lever.

I want to talk all my poems to you. I want to talk all poems to every one.

there are so many books in this one book.

interwoven seems too literary a word.

the abbot, the highway. the girl, boy,

when it is a word problem,

when it is another kind of word problem.

All those books in one book are the same book. They’re me playing dress up. Me running through trauma. Me taking on disguises.

Priapism

is a lot like 52 girls,

but now the language, the stumbling over,

is a turn. memory.

It’s supposed to be a hangman/abbot poem but a poem that explains how one would come before them. That book, it’s about sex, it’s about trauma, it’s about childhood. It’s about death and defying it. I like priapism because I like that in death, the hanged’s cock stands still hard in opposition to it.

it is raining, the branches.

i have a blanket that i call the ocean.

there are sirens and the curve in my neighborhood under a rain is the ocean.

i like how we are california, then alabama,

and met first as a mess in new orleans.

i am not sure which of us was first to cry.

i on the walk home.

i am not sure i will keep this question.

These words I thought could’ve been mine. That was transformative. I lost myself in you, the page, the other. Keep it or don’t. It happened.

this is why i like your [ ] poem best.

I want to make wendy into a book.

Apologia, Louisiana

Here is the sound. It is the sound of water. It is the sound of

rushing. It is the sound of being surrounded. It is the sound

of innumerable helicopters above, around us. The sky

blackens in blades. It is the repetitive whir of a ceiling fan off

balance, improperly hung, threatening to loosen itself through

its own motions, its own undoing and behead us both. Until

then, we will be cool and forget the wet in our skin, the way it

crawls. It laps around us, this sound, this water, our skin.

Here our bodies converge and separate. Here it will begin and

in beginning it will end again.

this is how you touch things.

Thank you.

it is like an ocean.

Yes.

Boy

doesn’t hurt as much at the end when it is right justified.

Ok. I will re make?

when you write,

it is a knowing or a forcing,

is it because you have to or should?

I force myself to write. But that’s not the good writing. The good writing comes from the knowing

where are you in a document

In the talk. If it’s a poem in voice. It’s all me. If not, if there’s blocking//description, wait until someone says something.

i wonder if i should mention, to readers,

that there is love and death and holy

in what and how you write.

It’s what I set out to do. I think. It’s what I want. It’s how I think of the world.

that i am sending you flowers.

My poems will never cum first and will never hit you.

April 1st with Nik De Dominic, Amanda Nadelberg, and Geoffrey G. O'Brien

2011-03-23T16:42:00.000-07:00

doors 7
reading 730

Nik De Dominic is a poet and an essayist. Recent work has appeared in Los Angeles Review, Fairy Tale Review, Harpur Palate, DIAGRAM and elsewhere. He is an associate poetry editor for the New Orleans Review and editor for The Offending Adam. He lives in New Orleans and teaches writing around town.

Amanda Nadelberg is the author of Bright Brave Phenomena (forthcoming from Coffee House Press) and Isa the Truck Named Isadore (Slope Editions, 2006) as well as a chapbook, Building Castles in Spain, Getting Married (The Song Cave, 2009). Her poems have appeared in Conduit, 6x6, Boston Review, No: a journal of the arts and Vanitas. In 2008, she received a grant from the Fund for Poetry. Originally from Newton, Massachusetts, she is a graduate of Carleton College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Geoffrey G. O’Brien is the author of Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007) and The Guns and Flags Project (2002), all from The University of California Press, and coauthor (in collaboration with the poet Jeff Clark) of 2A (Quemadura, 2006). He is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley and also teaches for the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison.

donations welcome!

Kate Schapira talks with Bronwen Tate

2011-03-04T16:53:00.001-08:00

Bronwen Tate and I have been friends since 2004. We’ve cooked together, written together, knit together and gotten our MFAs together. I love being friends with her and talking with her about teaching, writing and making.

Kate Schapira: Can you talk about the relationship that making physical objects has, for you, to making poems? I'm interested both in things like making chapbooks, with its more obvious and direct connection, and things like knitting which may seem unrelated but I suspect are not.

Bronwen Tate: I often see physical objects as a kind of ballast. They provide me with draft and stability. I love the fact that with making a soup or knitting a hat, time and patience are adequate. Struggling with words and language (both in writing poetry and in trying to write about poetry for my dissertation) can start to feel like a lot of abstraction and of uncertain value at times. There's something comforting in turning away from that and towards making an object that will be of clear use to someone. But now I also read criticism while knitting sweaters, and the physical object with a clear sense of progress (two more inches on the left sleeve!) gives me the patience to stay with whatever I'm reading and keeps my mind from wandering. And sometimes the objects send me back to language. Earlier today I felt compelled to look up "purl" in the Oxford English Dictionary and the eleven different definitions are so verbally thrilling to me that I want to write a poem using them. Making chapbooks (as we both do) brings that physical patience, the meditative repetition that slowly adds up to something [missing word here?] into the way the poems reach a person and I like that too.

KS: I've been delighted and honored to be around to watch your writing process over a number of projects, and one thing that always strikes me is your use of structure. How have different structures and constraints (formal, procedural, even collaborative) served you at different times? What do you think draws you to these?

BT: Structure and constraints vary from project to project, but are always there in some form or another for me. With my manuscript The Probable Garden, I read Proust in French, looked for words I couldn't make a confident guess about and then guessed at them anyway, later using the alignments and failures of alignment between my guesses and a dictionary to write the poems. The constraint here came down to starting from language rather than from the thing to be expressed. There was a lot of freedom for me still – I didn't stipulate how I had to use what I gathered, but usually a spark or provocation would occur and from that, the beginning of the poem. That problem or where or how to start is a lot of what draws me to this kind of thing.

My most recent group of poems, the ones in the chapbook the loss letters, use a very different kind of constraint or structure, but again one that helped me each time to make a beginning. This chapbook was a collaboration with Ming Holden, in which we decided to send one another ghazals, pantoums, villanelles, sestinas and sonnets, always in that order, with no more than 48 hours elapsing between poem received and response poem sent, and with no communication with one another other than the poems themselves. The constraint here was multiple: the time was short for each poem so we couldn't spend too much time obsessing. In each poem we had to grapple with the various fixed forms and the kind of thought that each form asked of us. And then the fact of having only the poem to convey whatever we wished to convey at a time when a lot was going on put a curious sort of pressure on the poem.

KS: This is connected to the problem of where/how to start: What makes you want to start at all—do you want to always be working on poetry, do you like to have something always going? If you don't work on poetry for a while, but you do work on these other things (making things, reading, doing scholarly work), what draws you back to it?

BT: Not to torture you, but I really wish this interview could include you eating a piece of this butterscotch pie I made yesterday.

KS: Believe me when I say that you don't wish that as much as I do.

BT: I would like to always have some kind of poetry going on, but sometimes gaps of time go by when I don't. The question of what draws me back is sort of the question of why I write poetry to begin with, right? The answer is multiple. For one thing, I really enjoy the feeling that can come from a total concentration on the material, a moment when I'm seeing and mouthing and hearing words and feeling for their resonances and rearranging them and shifting and moving them until they feel right. The feeling is a sort of dissolving of time awareness (I have far too much time awareness and time anxiety much of the time) and an intensity of being active, of being alive. Another part of it is that sometimes I look back on old poems and I don't hate them. When I can read an old poem and say "yes, that's what that was and it's still here in the poem," it feels worthwhile and I want to be doing it again, to have a crafted remnant of things. And then, of course, sometimes someone reads a poem of mine and responds to it and tells me, or sometimes I read someone else's poem and respond to it, and the desire to be part of this kind of conversation motivates me. Yesterday I stumbled across a scribble in a old notebook just after a list of camping supplies (head light, potato salad (make), apples, etc.), and it reads: "poetry: an exploration of language between mind and world, self and others, self and self. how/what do we tell/say about/around/between/inside?" It's a bit incoherent, but I think that's largely what draws me – the language between all these forms of relation is important, and it's infinitely fascinating to me. In poetry I try to map some of it.

Bronwen Tate talks with Matthew Henriksen

2011-03-03T20:08:00.000-08:00

Bronwen Tate and Matthew Henriksen read together on March 4th at Studio One Art Center.

BRONWEN TATE: I've been thinking, reading your book and just in general recently, about how words name things that exist in the world (bees, the moon, a table), but also are constantly in play with other uses of the same word in other writing. And poetry is sometimes trying to slough off those allusions and make the reader actually see a moon (not a symbol) and at other times relies on allusions to make meaning or create depth. Can you talk a bit about how this works in Ordinary Sun? Do you see your writing moving in one direction or another? Is a knife ever just a knife?

MATTHEW HENRIKSEN: A knife is never a knife as long as I cannot say for certain what a knife is. What does a knife do? I can say that it cuts, but I have not been cut by a knife. Therefore, I have no intimacy with knives. I know what a person is because I know what a person can do. A person loves, and I have been loved by a person. I am a person because I have inflicted my love intimately upon another. In poems, I am not comfortable with "knife" as symbol or as word. If I believe in the holiness of poems, I find holiness in the literal presence of the image, which is neither of the word "knife" itself or what "knife" suggests. The image is the event of a group of words flashing upon the brain and creating a "place" where shapes, colors, and sounds--conceivable sensations--occur. The act of impression, not merely the result, defines the image's presence. If a knife gets into my brain as an image I know what it is. The image is always intimate, inflicted by another and leaving a scar of memory. In "Copse," I do not talk about a knife but my friend's table, "where knife-gnaws never healed." I can't make the reader actually see that table, but I can try to impress the knife-inflicted damage on the brain of another. The image does not come from the actual table or the moment when I saw the table but from the scar of memory that coincided with writing that line. Images are more like ideas than facts, which is lucky for us, because we cannot posses a fact as intimately as we can an idea. The idea of my friend's table made me sad, and the image contains rather than symbolizes that sadness.

BT: I agree with you about the poem being a point of encounter where an experience takes place – both for writer and for reader. What I was concerned with, maybe, was the question of while you can say that "if a knife gets into my brain as an image I know what it is," how much do you care if/that your reader knows or receives the same thing? You say that you have no intimacy with knives, but I could say that I have a great and lasting intimacy with the knife I've used to chop hundreds of onions or that I've known the surgeon's knife, though I slept through it.

I think that some of the power of your poem in "Copse" comes from the recurrence of knives in the poem: "the floor dull as knives," as well as "where the knife-gnaws never healed." If a floor can be dull as knives, it's dull in the way that a knife can be scratched and worn and blunted. The scratched and blunted knife of the first couplet is still in my mind when I read of the knife-gnaws and adds violence to it. It takes more force to make a dent with a dull blade.

But talk to me about holiness or the holiness of poems. Ordinary Sun seems to me to make its way through the impossibilities of various offered kinds of holiness, of "dismantled catechism." I would venture that your idea of holiness might be linked to grace, be it a "disfigured grace" or the act of "hazarding grace" or the "grace [that] disturbs our sentiment for violence."

MH: We don’t share our minds: we share the world. Or, more exactly, we share the experience of experiencing the world. We cannot transfer that experience through language, imagery, art, or science. The experience belongs to the perceiver. When I write, the reader I consider belongs to my experience. Once a reader takes the poem, “Matthew Henriksen” gains an identity determined by the reader. I do not think it possible to share experience, though art allows for convincing imitations. Of course, I don’t know. Maybe someone sees “knife” just like I do, with all the same connotations. My poem “Parkway and Bennett” describes the lawn of the corner house where I grew up. My brother and sister can certainly recreate a similar image and set of connotations, but the three of us will never look at it the same way. I’m resigned to that loneliness and create poems out of that void. My poems are psychic space probes that will never return. Sometimes grace overcomes that distance. In spite of our definite isolation, we experience closeness. I think everyone, myself included, cheapens that closeness through short-cuts, by naming ourselves avant-garde artists or Libertarians or Christians. We assert that familial bonds are unbreakable when the grace of familial love resides in the difficult fact that our love for family, even our children, is ultimately conditional. I need not give examples. In my experience, grace always arrives through the dismantled, disfigured, and disturbed. I see the world as irrevocably flawed, and art is a failure that imitates that flaw. The physical world veils much of itself; I can barely sketch a picture of a tree in my mind, much less convey an image through words. But I try to make a new experience out of words, an echo of the original that ultimately has no connection with the tree but with the impression the tree left on me. I make poems so I can see the impressions myself, so I can see the experience apart from the world. And I send them back out into the world because I made them from what I gathered there. I get everything I need from poetry in making poems and letting them go. But sometimes they land with someone, and a reader comes back to me and says something about the poem that resembles what I thought I wrote. That proves to me that grace exists elsewhere, but I cannot say that it is the same grace. If I knew, I wouldn’t need grace.

BT: I've been thinking some about this question of trying to convey an experience vs. trying to convey a response to an experience (especially in regards to haiku which I've been reading and reading about recently). But your mention of sending poems out into the world brings me to another question I'd like to ask you: how has your work as a small press publisher effected your work as a writer? If you'd like, maybe talk a bit also about the difference between the online format of Typo and the endless folding-and-sewing of chapbooks.

MH: Editing hasn't influenced my poems, other than introducing me to many writers I would not have otherwise read. Of course, that was hugely important. I didn't start any of the poems that would go into Ordinary Sun until after Adam Clay and I started Typo. Through the Typo inbox I found out about Alex Lemon, G.C. Waldrep, Anne Boyer, and Graham Foust. Through the first few issues of Typo, Adam and I were still in the MFA program in Fayetteville, and our professors hadn't shown us much contemporary poetry. We'd found Ben Lerner and Joyelle McSweeney's poems, but that was far from the type of work we'd been encouraged to read. Suddenly through Typo I found people trying to do things I was trying to do, and also I saw some work that went beyond what I had imagined. As we put together the first five issues, I definitely learned in my own writing to trust the impulse I already had, particularly from reading Frank Stanford and Theodore Roethke, to trust the velocity of language.

The main difference between Typo and Cannibal results from the way people access the work. Cannibal tied in closely with The Burning Chair Readings. The joy came in handing people something gorgeous and rough-looking and cared for that was about to burst with poems that leaned on the wilder side but still had the same qualities as Typo poems. Cannibal brought more intimacy or closeness, because people could see how we made it and most of the copies we sold or gave away in person. If we published someone we didn't know in Cannibal we usually got to be friends with her at some point. People saw the amount of work that went into making Cannibal, though most probably did not realize how much. We'd fold, collate, and poke holes in two to three thousand pages for each issue. The insanity of that labor resulted though in an equally amazing response to the finished product. The other beautiful aspect of Cannibal's history is how collaborative the last few issues became, as far as the making. Katy and I have had lots of fantastic, long nights with friends making books. No one ever expects anything when they help you sew books. It's all about getting poetry out there in a gorgeous format. No one ever wanted to edit or to push poems on me. They'd eat pie and drink wine as payment. Now that we've given up Cannibal I am going to miss that amazement. More so I'll miss finding chapbooks from unknown poets who end up blowing minds. I'm pushing all of that energy back into Typo now. I think some people have sort of moved on from Typo, but that's a mistake. Typo is a serious monster. My attitude about Typo parallels my writing a bit. I want to do the best work I can and move on without thinking about who is reading it and reacting. Of course, Typo is only half mine, and I'm very protective of the other half, they way I'm protective of Cannibal Books poets, only more so since Adam is a brother to me. Even when I had both magazines going, I always put more care into Typo. The distance an online magazine presents between poet, editor, and reader promotes more serious reading.

BT: You mention that you didn't start any of the poems that would go into Ordinary Sun until after you and Adam started Typo, could you talk about how the book became a book? I can recall reading several of these poems in various manuscripts or in the chapbook horse less press did along the way. Tell me about your editing process. How did you decide which poems or sequences would end up in Ordinary Sun? Did you have any kind of editing relationship with Janaka or anyone at Black Ocean after they decided to print the book?

MH: About two-thirds of the material in Ordinary Sun comes from an extremely long poem called Row that I hacked up and fashioned into small poems and sequences and in some cases into longer poems. The revision process lasted several years. I cut mercilessly and tried to beat the language into a solid form. Revision has become a much more delicate, less painful process for me, so I must have learned something revising these poems. Little in Ordinary Sun resembles the initial plan, except that the book essentially comprises of a series of shorter books intended to revolve around each other.

When I would write new poems, I'd generally have either a longer piece of a series of poems that I would invariably jam into the book and displace other sections with. I don't write thematically or anything like that. I'll never write a poem to create some sort of arch or structure for the book. The sections come from the same central point, a point the book does not describe, because the book does not adhere to temporal movement. The difficulty resided in creating an arrangement that helped the reader get into the poems. Andrea Baker, Jane Gregory, and Kate Greenstreet looked at the manuscript in multiple forms and gave me a sense of how others would read it. That took years, and I'm infinitely grateful for that help. Beyond a few sympathetic readers who understand my perspective, I cannot ask for much more, and those three stand among my favorite poets today.

At Black Ocean, Carrie Olivia Adams and Janaka Stucky focused mainly on ordering the poems. I had long since settled on an order and left it. Also, I had so heavily revised the poems I could not see into them anymore. Their suggestions added to the book's velocity. Carrie's book Intervening Absence prompted me to send my manuscript to Black Ocean: her poems have a delicate face, but the formal elements, both of individual poems and the book's structure, assert strength. Janaka and I had collaborated as event organizers, so I knew where he was coming from. I trusted that if they took the book it would come out all right on the far side.

BT: Well, I think Black Ocean has done a beautiful job with the book. And I certainly know what you mean about revising poems so heavily that you can't see into them anymore. But I was interested by what you said that "the sections come from the same central point, a point the book does not describe, because the book does not adhere to temporal movement." This confirms my own sense of the book, which was of a dark event radiating through the poems without ever being exactly named. I see this refusal to name acted out formally in many of the poems in great memorable lines like "What I cannot find in the morning is most myself," or "I only asked for objects played against/ what held there" or "What she heard about their house dripped from the faucet." This makes me think of something like "the horror, the horror" in Heart of Darkness, how showing the shadow something casts can be much more evocative or chilling than trying to show or name the thing itself. But I also see a kind of narrative built over several of your sequences, through displaced details, permutations, or returns to words that accumulate a specific valence over time. This makes me think about that various elements that can constitute form in poetry. I identified numerous formal "activations" in Ordinary Sun. In "Corolla in the Midden," for example, I was fascinated by the way within a given poem the end of each page insists both on ending and on continuing onto the next page. It obliges the reader to do a sort of back-and-forth dance. So, can you talk a bit about what you see as constituting form in the book? Or just share any thoughts you may be having recently about form?

MH: Eliot describes the utter terror in a leaf scratching the street. That “dark event” pervades all experience and terrifies us precisely because we cannot name it or even fully recognize it. The narrative you see in Ordinary Sun, which I think follows the not-so-terrifying thread of the book, does seem to match with the formal construction. For me, poetry depends entirely on form. At least, form constitutes the aspect of the poem I have a say over. The mystery of the poem, the dark underside, as many have said, comes from dictation or translation and the poet has little say in how that arrives in a poem. The miracles in poems, the grace as we have discussed it, arises from the formal reconfiguring of our shadowy experiences into instruments of language, by which we release that pressure in song. The definitive substance of any poem resides in its sound. I only think about form when writing, if I am thinking. Of course, I’ll write unconsciously, but then I’ll look back and see that four-fifths of the lines scan as blank verse or that I’ve written a fourteen line lyric poem with a volta between eighth and ninth lines. I think about meter. The construction of the line matters more than anything else, at least anything I do consciously. Andrea Baker and I had a running discussion about form all through the making of Ordinary Sun. Those conversations revolved mainly around the line as a sort of delivery mechanism for the lyric. Each line follows another directly, with accumulating momentum, but you can also back up into the lines, because the lines are not temporal, even when narrative. Andrea asked difficult questions, and once I told her I thought of myself as a failed narrative poet. The story falls apart because so much happens and so much of that comes to us through the past in flashes of sound and light. I like failure, especially in art, and form allows me to expose that in myself. I think about iambs and trochees, but I won’t let a formal pattern rule me. In “Corolla in the Midden,” I wanted to break the fourteen line pattern by writing the poem haphazardly, but the turns kept falling into place and I could not revise them out. I put as much pressure as I can on each line and on the poem as a sequence of lines to expose the crack that inevitably turns up in every piece of art. I think that indestructible brokenness gives art the vitality that heals us.

BT: You speak of yourself as "a failed narrative poet," but I think one could also say that your poems are sometimes about the ways narrative fails us or is inadequate for understanding what we experience. Narrative implies a beginning and an end, but in fact these are always somewhat arbitrary – there are always things before and after. Poetry, like the novel or anything else, involves selection, but it allows for a wide range of methods or means of selection. This reminds me that I wanted to ask you about Surrealism. I have an ongoing fascination with Lautréamont's "Les Chants de Maldoror" which the Surrealists latched onto for his strange similes especially. I can see similar metaphorical work at times in Ordinary Sun, metaphors where it's more a question of juxtaposition than of comparison. Care to talk a bit about your interest in Surrealism or how it came to title a section of the book?

MH: The title for “The New Surrealism” came from a line in the poem that has nothing to do with surrealism but rather attempts to rename the circumstances of our contemporary experience. I suppose Lautréamont, Breton and Artaud more or less intended that. I have resisted surrealism as an intentional method in my work. Stevens’ The Necessary Angel shaped much of my foundational understanding of metaphor’s vitality, the necessity of a basis in the real allowing the metaphor then to stretch our perceptions. The marriage of surrealism to the narrative construct in my poems probably has more to do with cinema, where my heroes (Federico Fellini, Bela Tarr, and David Lynch) treat narrative structure as a malleable element. Fellini’s meandering storyline in La Dulce Vita, with those characters who step to the forefront and vanish as Marcello meanders from party to party, more closely resembles my experience, exactly because its beginning and end are arbitrary, unless of course you look at the film as an artist’s expression, each scene presenting a complex sensation amid a sequence of sensations that speak musically, as abstract paintings speak musically. In Werckmeister Harmonies, when Tarr puts plot development on hold for about six minutes to let his camera dance along with a man dressing for bed, the experience of that as art seems as odd as watching Jean Amrais walk through a mirror in Cocteau’s Orpheus, because both scenes allow emotions and reflections to accumulate around the image. Nothing I have ever read has struck me as more accurately real than Novalis’ Hymns to the Night. Soaring through darkness, his speaker eyes a barely perceptible mound of dark earth and lands to rest from his flight. In a work of art, a man chopping wood in the winter to heat his cabin in the Rockies is just as surreal. The impossibility of our existence, or call it the miracle of our existence, exceeds determined law. All literature begins with the surreal because language is the most odd and inscrutable component of our reality. In Hunger when Knut Hamsun describes God sticking a finger into the narrator’s brain and the exposed nerves left by the hole there, I immediately relate. We think in the surreal, especially when we think in metaphor. I certainly hope people read my metaphors as juxtapositions rather than comparisons, because comparison implies rhetoric. Can I assert that the poem may offer statement rather than rhetoric, the images and metaphors provoking an emotional experience in the reader that speaks its own language, as music and paint have their languages? I love Larry Levis, William Matthews, and William Heyen, who came in the wake of the Deep Imagists but turned the image into something more clearly made of words spoken from a particular voice. They brought the Modernist “I” back to the subjective, but a more Eastern subjective, where the “I” notices with a degree of detachment the mingling of sensory and intellectual experiences rather than superimposing one on the other. My favorite poets writing today consciously bring the image entirely into the mind, where after all images literally reside, and fuse the image with the emotional and intuitive experience of the perceiver. I mean something like negative capability in reverse, where the poet absorbs the image into the subjective. Isn’t that closer to reality than divorcing the self from experience, no matter how far subjectivity spins experience into the surreal?

March 4th with Bronwen Tate and Matthew Henriksen

2011-02-24T09:19:00.000-08:00

Bronwen Tate is the author of the chapbooks Souvenirs (Dusie 2007), Like the Native Tongue the Vanquished (Cannibal Books 2008), Scaffolding (Dusie 2009), and if a thermometer (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2011). Her most recent chapbook is the loss letters (Dusie 2011), a collaboration with Ming Holden. Bronwen makes her friends hungry on her blog at http://breadnjamforfrances.blogspot.com/. She plans to knit 17 sweaters whi...le completing her dissertation in Comparative Literature at Stanford University where she also edits Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism and Translation.

Matthew Henriksen is the author of Ordinary Sun (Black Ocean, 2011) and the chapbooks Another Word (DoubleCross Press, 2009) and Is Holy (horse less press, 2006). Some recent poems appear in Fence, Realpoetik, Raleigh Quarterly, Alice Blue Review, Sink Review, The Cultural Society, Handsome Journal and Two Weeks. He co-edits Typo, an online poetry journal, and publishes Cannibal Books, a book arts poetry press. From 2005 to 2008 he organized The Burning Chair Readings in Brooklyn and now hosts irregular readings throughout the country. A special feature of Frank Stanford’s unpublished poems and fiction, selected by Henriksen, will appear in Fulcrum #7. He lives and teaches in the Ozark Mountains.

7:30pm to 9:30pm
donations for entry, drinks, pizza or byob

SPRING

2011-02-23T08:38:00.000-08:00

MARCH 4TH: BRONWEN TATE AND MATTHEW HENRIKSEN

APRIL 1ST: NIK DE DOMINIC, AMANDA NADELBERG AND GEOFFREY G. O'BRIEN

MAY 6TH: ANOTHY MCCANN, ROBYN SCHIFF AND MATTHEW ROHRER

JUNE 3RD: SHARON ZETTER AND CHRISTINE HUME

ALISA HEINZMAN TALKS WITH MATTHEW ZAPRUDER

2010-12-01T12:11:00.000-08:00

ALISA HEINZMAN: What words or sentences are most important to you lately? I'm thinking of maybe a poem, some text you've read, or something you've heard. Is there anything that has been taking over your mind?

MATTHEW ZAPRUDER: I don't know if anything has been taking over my mind exactly, that sounds a little scary but also exciting. As far as words, I like to go in search of strange ones. This weekend I was at the bookstore in Fort Mason in SF, and they have a cafe with bookshelves which they have stocked with all sorts of fabulous old books, most of them not exactly literary masterpieces. It's great to pick up some obscure novel from the 1920's and see what crazy words they used. Someone is always standing on a cliff about to jump, or looking at a lake where there is an obscure figure wandering, or sitting on a divan and having a hilariously unintentionally erotic conversation. Saying words like "irrefragable" and "oculist." Also, those books are very beautifully bound, and often they have lovely drawings inside them. I have to stop myself from buying them. They are too dusty.

I always like to read a wide variety of writing, not just because I find a lot of different things interesting, but also because I feel I really need to get inside as many different textures of language as possible. in order to keep moving forward in my poems. The rhythm of that sort of prose, not to mention the unexpected weird vocabulary in a book about some kind of esoteric subject, can be inspiring to me. For instance when I was writing my first book I was really into John McPhee, books like The Survival of the Bark Canoe and The Pine Barrens, and those books resulted in a few poems at least. Lately I have been reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis, don't know if that's going to result in any poems but it's fun to read. Baseball has been on my mind a lot lately (Giants!). Also, I have a little blue Oxford World's Classics edition of Keats's letters in my office, and I have been reading it, and writing down every time he mentions a Shakespeare play (which is a LOT).

A: I love your poem Schwinn, and its final lines are a part of my asking this question:

I will / never know a single thing anyone feels, / just how they say it, which is why I am standing / here exactly, covered in shame and lightening, / doing what I'm supposed to do.

Other people feel things, and you feel things, and they do or do not, or may or may not, correspond. Really, there's no knowing. This strangeness or separation comes up in your poems. Can you say something about why this is important to you? Also--if this is a different question--how this situation affects you?

Z: I really mean the end of that poem very literally. I don't think we really know much, if anything, about how people are feeling, beyond what they say and the way they say it (all sorts of non-verbal cues we get when someone is speaking), which is why I say "how they say it" and not "just what they say." I guess that could be sort of depressing if you look at it in certain ways. But for me personally this is the reason I write poems. Yes I am "interested" in language and excited by messing around with it in all sorts of ways. That's why I'm a poet and not some other sort of artist, because I am interested in and good with language, and not paint or cameras or something else.

Language by its nature contains great reservoirs of crucial knowledge, and when I write poems I am entering into our collective human knowledge by activating language in certain ways that can only happen in poetry. I feel this is good. When I say it is "what I'm supposed to do," that is an assertion of a feeling of purpose for my life which I feel more and less at different times, usually in direct relation to how much I am actually writing instead of wasting time.

A: In Come On All You Ghosts, the reader--or listener--is addressed often. The title poem feels to me like, among other things, a love poem to the reader. Through your poems, what do you want your relationship with the reader to be like?

Z: I feel like what I (hopefully) have in common with the reader is a faith and trust that what the poem is doing is, contrary to everything we are told and therefore everything we fear, really important. We are together in a place of meaning, the sort of meaning you can only have in poetry. I believe that is true, that there is something poems can do that nothing else can, and that this is an absolutely vital aspect of the human experience. I agree with Williams when he famously writes "it is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ but men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there." Die in that case surely is meant literally, but it also can mean I think to be dead inside to what is around us, which is also a great danger. I am trying to keep myself and people who read my poems from dying in that way.

A: The words love, death, and loneliness are in your poems. Not just the words, but they're often subjects. Are you ever afraid to use these words?

Z: Afraid in what way? In a literary sense? If so, no. Or a superstitious one? If so, a little!

A: I guess I'm thinking of fearing these words, in part, because of the number of connotations each has. Now that I write that, though, I'm not sure they have more connotations than other words. They just seem like really big words and big subjects, and I'm wondering if you ever hesitate to address them in such a direct way? Do you pause longer before including the word death in a poem than, say, before including the word Tuesday? Do you ever fear that the poem can't support these subjects?

Z: I am inclined to say Tuesday is as complicated as death and frankly a lot more difficult on a weekly basis, but I think that would not really be answering your question. You are of course right, those are big words and big subjects, and there's obviously a way they can be just stuck into a poem as sort of a placeholder. That would, I suppose, be the sort of not very good writing we have all seen. I think the reason why I at least would call that not very good writing is because there's a lack of energy or urgency or commitment or necessity there. But I can also feel that lack in poems that carefully stay away from anything big as well.

I think the proof is in the effect on the reader. If the reader feels when she gets to that part in the poem when a big word like that, loneliness or death or love, appears, and she feels like that is authentic, then it's the right thing. Sometimes those big words, in their very overwhelming hugeness that threatens to escape particularity but also does not, are just right. Feeling like "loneliness" is the right word even though it's a big word that you almost don't understand, that's a feeling too, isn't it?

If I am genuinely encountering some big concept like that, I think it can work to let it come into the poem naturally. It doesn't feel honest to me if it's not really what I'm thinking about, but maybe a stand in for something else I'm not quite ready to face, or heaven help me a way of manipulating the reader into sympathy for me. I really don't want sympathy from the reader. I want connection. After my father died in 2006, it took me a while to be able to honestly allow that fact into my poems. It was just too painful or big or something for the first couple of years. And when I was able to start really thinking about it, it seemed absurd not to call his death what it was, especially when it was something I was actually remembering. Then again, I was very aware when he was sick and then after he died of how common my experience was. It's also very common to feel lonely, and also common to feel in love. Of course these emotions are all subject to infinite gradations, and that's really if anything the true purpose of my poems, to honestly examine those gradations, in all their forms.

A: What is it about looking out a window that makes the poem-writing-impulse happen?

Z: That is a great question. To look out a window is to experience the world in a frame, in which we see certain things surrounded by at least a subtle darkness. There is a certain element of arbitrariness to what is in view of a window. And also an element of choice: you have chosen to look out this window, and not another, or to look at all.

This is what a poem does too. It selects from among the universe of things that could be brought into the poem, and brings these things in, leaving others out. We feel both what is and is not present. Some of what is present feels like a choice made by the writer, and some of it feels fated. Whatever is in the window, or poem, by its very nature -- as an object destined, or chosen -- glows with significance.

I get excited and moved by the combination of chance and intention in poetry, maybe because in some kind of way that can never quite be articulated, that combination reminds me of what it feels like to be alive on a daily basis, choosing and also responding to what is given.

There is also usually a lot of regular life happening in what you see out a window: you could look out your window for a long time and not see anything really dramatic. And therefore everything becomes kind of dramatic. I like this too in poetry. There is a wonderful painter Jane Frielicher, who was friends with many of the New York School poets, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler among them, who to this day apparently only paints scenes that she sees out of her window in her house in Long Island and her apartment in New York City. I have always felt very happy imagining that she never gets tired of looking out her window. I think Schuyler was the same way, though I think he might have gotten very tired sometimes come to think of it. But he still kept writing great poems right up to the end.

A: What do you wish would change?

Z: Well, this makes me think immediately of politics, and of the growing inequity in our society between the small number of people who have so much, and the great number of people who don't have enough. And how angry everyone feels they have a right to be. But I will leave that aside. One thing I wish I could change is how distant so many people feel from poetry. It seems sad to me that people are so willing to accept strangeness in film, music, television, and so on, but have so little tolerance for it in poetry. It's ironic really, because humans are so good with picking up on the subtleties of language, it seems as if people would actually have an easier time with poetry than some other things.

A: Do you like living in San Francisco? Of the places you've lived, which have you loved the most?

Z: I do like San Francisco. It's the second time I lived here, and it's changed enormously, but that's a different subject (if you are interested about this you can read the fabulous and harrowing work of Rebecca Solnit). I don't know if I can answer the second part of your question. I miss New York and many other places I have lived, like Massachusetts which is so beautiful and sad at this time of year, and Maryland where my mom, and my sister and her family, still live. A lot of the time in poems I start thinking about a place, but really what I am thinking about is a feeling I had in the place, which probably had much more to do with the people I cared about there than anything else. So for me poems are a private way of going back to those lost times and being once again part of the mundane and marvelous because of their ephemeral nature situations that, for better or worse, once were home.

Alisa Heinzman lives in Chicago. She received her MFA from Saint Mary's College of California, co-edits CALAVERAS along with Sara Mumolo, and is the Managing Editor for Octopus Books. While living in Oakland she would sit at the book table during Studio One Readings, and now she misses it an awful lot.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon), recently selected as one of the top 5 poetry books of 2010 by Publishers Weekly. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Open City, Bomb, Slate, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Tin House, Harvard Review, Paris Review, The New Republic, The Boston Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney's, The Believer, Real Simple, and The Los Angeles Times. He has received a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Currently the Holloway Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as an editor for Wave Books and a member of the permanent faculty in the low residency MFA program at UC Riverside-Palm Desert, he lives in San Francisco.

Thursday December 2nd at Studio One with Matthew Zapruder and Robert Hass. Music from Sean McArdle

2010-11-26T20:11:00.000-08:00

thank you for the poster Jeff Boozer. check out Jeff's posters here

Thursday December 2nd with Matthew Zapruder and Robert Hass. Music from Sean McArdle.

2010-11-22T10:59:00.000-08:00

check it out:
December 2nd
doors 7
reading 730, sharp
entry by donation

Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon), recently selected as one of the top 5 poetry books of 2010 by Publishers Weekly. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Open City, Bomb, Slate, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Tin House, Harvard Review, Paris Review, The New Republic, The Boston Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney's, The Believer, Real Simple, and The Los Angeles Times. He has received a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Currently the Holloway Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as an editor for Wave Books and a member of the permanent faculty in the low residency MFA program at UC Riverside-Palm Desert, he lives in San Francisco.

Sean McArdle cut his teeth in the San Francisco Bay Area scene in the '90's with his own lo-fi recording project, Driving by Braille (Troniks Records) and most notably with The Cost (Lookout! Records).

Sean went through a career change with his music when moving to Washington, DC in 2005. Turning down the volume on a new set of songs, and joining forces to record and perform with resident Dischord Records drummer Ben Azzara (Delta 72, Joe Lally) and Lida Husik (Alias Records). Enlisting players for organ, vibes and guitar, Northern Charms was finally mixed at the legendary Inner Ear Studios, in Arlington, VA. Completing a national USA tour in the summer of 2009, and a month in Europe in the winter, Sean is back in San Francisco working on a new record, a short film and more tours.

Robert Hass has published many books of poetry including Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, and Sun Under Wood, as well as a book of essays on poetry, Twentieth Century Pleasures. Hass translated many of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and he edited Selected Poems: 1954-1986 by Tomas Tranströmer, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, and Poet’s Choice: Poems for Everyday Life. He was the guest editor of the 2001 edition of Best American Poetry. His essay collection Now & Then, which includes his Washington Post articles, was published in April 2007. As US Poet Laureate (1995-1997), his deep commitment to environmental issues led him to found River of Words (ROW), an organization that promotes environmental and arts education in affiliation with the Library of Congress Center for the Book. Hass is chairman of ROW’s board of directors, and judges their annual international environmental poetry and art contest for youth; he also wrote the introduction to the poetry collection River of Words: Young Poets and Artists on the Nature of Things. He is also a board member of International Rivers Network. Robert Hass was chosen as Educator of the Year by the North American Association on Environmental Education and, in 2005, elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His collection of poems entitled Time and Materials (fall 2007) won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He wrote the introduction to a new edition of selected Walt Whitman poems in Song of Myself: And Other Poems. His most recent volume entitled The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems was published by Ecco in spring 2010. Hass is currently at work on a collection of selected essays.

see you there!

We will be taking Jan and Feb off, but we will back on March 4th for a reading with David Antin.

THURSDAY DECEMBER 2 @ 7:30PM

2010-11-16T13:50:00.000-08:00

MATTHEW ZAPRUDER

& ROBERT HASS

Scott Davis talks with Elizabeth Hatmaker for Nov 5th's reading

2010-11-04T17:59:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Hatmaker’s poem cycle, Girl in Two Pieces (BlazeVOX, 2010), explores the life and mythology of Elizabeth Short, the “Black Dahlia,” who was brutally murdered in January 1947 in Los Angeles. This interview was conducted by email exchanges between 10/27/10 and 11/1/10.

Scott Davis: First off, let me say how much I enjoyed reading your work. You’ve taken this figure that’s simultaneously famous and anonymous and interrogated the conditions of her status as icon and managed to restore to her some resemblance of humanity at the same time. It was deeply moving. What drew you, initially, to the story or the character of Elizabeth Short? Stories like this are told all the time, when did you get the fever, “the girl rancor,” when did you decide that this was the story that needed to be told?

Elizabeth Hatmaker: Thank you for your kind words. I was in Washington Dulles airport on a long layover with nothing to read, so I picked up Max Allan Collin’s Angel in Black. He wrote a series of detective stories in which his protagonist is embroiled in all of the great mysteries of the early to mid 20th century, including the Black Dahlia murder. As a lifelong true-crime junkie, I was intrigued by both the variety of true-crime “solutions” and Collin’s willingness to string them together into this larger unruly narrative—one that is, at turns, appealing and overheated. I tried to imagine how one could write Short in a way that was clean and dignified or smooth. I couldn’t. Trust me, there’s no way to write about her that doesn’t get banal or narcissistic or naive really fast (probably I shouldn’t admit this at the start of the interview). I suppose I started off interested in her narrative and representational awkwardness within true crime writing, a genre that beckons you to think about dead women like Short but then can never offer a dignified language for you to do it in.

My “girl rancor” came as I confronted all the creepiness that the project made me embody, all those positions of fantasy—liking her, identifying with her, killing her, fucking her, saving her, experimenting on her, avenging her, solving her—that make it impossible for me to simply and reasonably observe that we shouldn’t commit violent crimes against women. How am I supposed to look other women—other people—in the eye and say that I couldn’t quite play that line straight? That sense of writerly discomfort seems like the story that I needed to tell.

SD: Your work frequently invokes women who are peripheral to the story (as well as society): Harriet Manley, “all those women in Juarez,” the long list in “Norton, Jan. ’47 (Author’s Note),” “this daughter” in “Theory 3” (and elsewhere), Geneva Ellroy, and in part VI, simply “the Girl” (with its final allusive nod To Elsie). The cycle seems as much for all of them as for Elizabeth (and you acknowledge you write “for women like her”). In what ways do you imagine Elizabeth Short as a point of comparison for so many women? In what ways as simply human? How do you negotiate between this sense of “representability” and her own singularity?

EH: As I continued to obsessively research all things Black Dahlia, I was struck by the impossible epideictic logic of her dead name: “The Black Dahlia.” All these occasions which commemorate her memory—the books, films, TV documentaries, the crime scene photography that appears in art books. I can’t quite decide what to do with her. The bisected “Dahlia” riffs on the “beautiful dead girls” in those 19th century penny dreadfuls; her impossible name links an overwrought romanticism to a more forensic modernism. “Dahlia” the name is the idealized “angel of the house” term perversely reborn to perfection as pure mystery after a wild adventure in the 20th century public sphere. Elizabeth Short, on the other hand, was, several researchers tell us, “going to seed” at the tender age of 22 and probably not slated for a long or happy life even had she not been murdered in January 1947 and become “The Black Dahlia.”

As scholars like Chris Breu, Greg Forter, Erin Smith and Sean McCann observe, for many men noir and hard-boiled literature served as a site for “working through” the various complicated ideal constructions of masculinity and the increasing impossibility of embodying these roles within a Fordist economy. In this same way, true crime accounts of Elizabeth Short and many of the other women I explicitly name—famous names like Sharon Tate and the less-known but specific names of women killed in Juarez and in Vancouver’s Eastside—and the anonymous signifiers — “the Girl” or even “Elsie”— represent a similar “working through” space for women who make up a significant readership for both true crime and police procedurals.

Similar to pulp masculinities, true crime femininities serves as a sign under which the material violence of everyday life is elided with nostalgic imaginary relationships. It seems counter-intuitive as noir offers culturally celebrated “tough guys” while true crime offers us abject dead bodies for possible identification, but I wonder if, for many women, the name shift from Elizabeth Short to “The Black Dahlia” is an understandable thread between safety and death enacted in the “angel in the house/beautiful dead girl” dialectic. Certainly this thread can produce conservative responses—blaming the victim, identifying with violence, endless melancholia. But I think it also challenges us to construct better stories of supposedly “seedy” women like Short, probably like all of us, who, not safe but not yet dead, are perpetually in danger of death.

SD: Karen Joy Fowler once wrote a story about multiple Elizabeths –Tudor, Borden, Cady Stanton, Taylor – as different avatars for a singular intelligence (ed: “The Elizabeth Complex,” 1996). And as I read about “Beth for Short,” I kept thinking about additional Elizabeths: Bennett, Minnelli, Hatmaker. How much of a hatmaker is your short?

EH: I initially liked the idea of Elizabeth Short for obvious reasons: I liked the way she looked; she grew up not far from where I once lived in Massachusetts; some of her sad attempts to impress men reminded me of my similar attempts; we both have last names people make stupid jokes about. Two rather solitary matter-of-fact Elizabeths just trying to hobble together some sense of mystery and style in their lives, or at least that’s how I romanticize our shared intelligence. It seems wrong to claim we share the intelligence of male violence given her murder, but I suppose we do. I sometimes look at her picture and wonder if she would have liked me. Since writing the book, I’ve come late to three brilliant texts I wish I would have read a long time ago—Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder and The Red Parts (both about the murder of an aunt she never knew) and Kate Millet’s The Basement (about the murder of Sheila Likens). Both women I think struggle with this problem of connecting one’s intelligence—which I take to include one’s ethics, one’s stupidity, one’s disappointments—to that of someone we can never really know even as we obsess about.

SD: You riff so well with received language and images and there’s a moment mid-way where I felt almost assaulted by the language of film, especially the language of noir. And your invocation of this language suggests a deep ambivalence toward it: you lean on it in so many ways and yet you seem resistant to it and bemused by it and even resentful of it. Do you imagine film as something akin to some social apparatus within which we learn to work all right all by ourselves without ever really knowing it? Something we consume without knowledge and without thought and yet it animates us, creating what we mistake for knowledge, channeling what we think is thought?

EH: I join several others in “killing the father” in the name of the Black Dahlia. I suppose my relationship to the idea of film in this piece revolves around the lack of a film starring Short. In theory, she went to Hollywood to be an actress, but there’s no evidence she actually followed through, not even a screen test or girly movie. It’s amazing to me how many narratives about her want to redeem her in film. Even as De Palma’s film Black Dahlia was largely dismissed by critics, it was the fictional Elizabeth Short “screen test” scenes that people thought had promise. It’s as if, more than any actual father, we count on film to save her and make her whole in our eyes.

SD: “Poetry can be about public outcry, same as the next form.” There is no art after Auschwitz or Hiroshima, we’re assured, and yet one reads, say, James Ellroy, and one feels that in the crepuscular light of January 47 the pain is only just beginning. Ellroy invokes what he calls a ruthless verisimilitude to find a narrative form that can encompass that pain without sentimentality or venality; how do you imagine the public outcry that is poetry as a form to encompass this pain?

EH: I love Ellroy’s work, don’t get me wrong, but I have to say that his claims for ruthless verisimilitude feels limited, more limited I think than his writing, which always psychopathically lyric, like the illustrations on old pulp covers—precise broody lines with color vomiting itself out. You know, before the events of January ’47, Short was apparently a fairly prolific letter writer, especially to men she dated. She kept a journal. She tended to exaggerate the events of her life—often constructing romantic and sentimental narratives to cover over what seemed to be a life filled with numerous rejections. She herself was probably guilty of the kind of banal excesses that somehow we are to avoid so as to respect some larger ethos about pain. But it seems awful to assume that the modes of engagement she used to seek comfort and to contemplate pain wouldn’t be meaningful or pure enough to engage our esoteric pain about her death.

What would it hurt to be sentimental about Elizabeth Short? I think we give up too easily on the modes of narrative engagement historically imagined to be feminine or excessive, forms that “talk too much.” Certainly the appeals of parataxis and tight indexical images are many, but I’m not convinced that they somehow get at pain in some better or more ethical way than overwrought sentimentality. Whose sentiments are venal here? The “no art after Auschwitz” line always struck me as insincere even as I offer up a similar sentiment; “poetry’s not free anymore,” after the Dahlia that is. There’s art, and we love it, but it seems like we don’t trust art to do much after Auschwitz. I’m kind of up in the air about whether poetry, like other forms, can express Short or women like her right. But I find great beauty in the web of attempts to do some justice for all of us.

SD: What are you working on now? I hear you and Chris are working on a project on Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, can you say more about that now?

EH: I’m working on a number of projects now. I’m lucky to be married to your friend and mine, Chris Breu, author of Hard-Boiled Masculinities. All my psychoanalytic gyrations above—all stuff I worked through with him and for which I owe him huge props. As I write in my dedication, he truly walks with me in the dark in many ways. We recently collaborated on a project on what we are terming “imposter noir.” Through this narrative structure—most famously employed by Patricia Highsmith in The Talented Mr. Ripley—we try to navigate how noir explores the larger shift from U.S. Fordism to the current neo-liberal global economy. In conjunction with this, I ‘m trying to work out some connections between the work of Cornell Woolrich, who inspired many of my most over-the-top moments of excessive bathos in Girl in Two Pieces, with Japanese writer Natsuo Kirino, whose brilliant novel Grotesque seems equally willing to dig at the guts of self-pity, morbidity, and resentment—those emotions that I suspect everyone fears will infect the pure pain I talk about above. I’m also working on some new lighter poetry about exploitation films.

SD: A great moment in John Sayles’ Lone Star has our detective protagonist conversing with an old family friend who shakes a rattlesnake skin at him and says, “Don’t go digging around in the past; you never know what you’ll find!” In all the research and archival work you did for the project, was there anything that just blew your mind that didn’t make it to the text?

EH: First off, I’d never claim to be any sort of Black Dahlia expert or archivist. Plenty of folks– many cited in my acknowledgements—researched Short’s life far more carefully than I did. Even then, it’s my impression that there really isn’t much of a Black Dahlia archive. Apparently all of her “stuff,” all the evidence in her LAPD files, has gone missing over the years. Even so, plenty of Dahlia enthusiasts will note things they are obsessed with that I left out, or guessed at, or even got wrong.

But what rattled my chi as I got lost in all the various true crime accounts I read was what Mark Seltzer, in his recent book True Crime, would articulately describe for me as a kind of pathological substitution of my own commiserative reading forensics (Poetics? Are these the same in my work?) for more materialist modes of inquiry into her life. Perhaps this is what you are getting at? It’s not the stuff you dig up; it’s what the action of digging produces.

Still, and I couldn’t have written this book without it, there was a sort of drunkenness of objects and observations about Short’s life; with this came great joy. There was endless narrative and lyric possibility, for which I am eternally grateful to all of those Dahlia researchers. I’m equally grateful to my comrades in creative writing—Kevin Killian and his obsessive music to the dream of living pop in Action Kylie; Cecil Giscombe and his insistence on the importance of Martha Reeves’ voice, and then of physical place and its documentation in Giscombe Road; Joe Amato and his obsession with the un-erasable working-class figure on the blue-print of academia in Industrial Poetics; Dodie Bellamy and her continued commitment to documenting that female body in all states we ain’t supposed to talk about. These people, among others, showed me the way to work my “archive fever” in new ways. If poetics may suggest problems, it has always been a good place for me to find fellow travelers.

Scott Davis is Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Stanislaus. Elizabeth Hatmaker is the author of Girl in Two Pieces (BlazeVOX 2010), a collection of poetry and essays about the 1947 “Black Dahlia” murder. Her work also appears in Life As We Show It: Writing on Film (City Lights 2009), ACM, Bird Dog, Epoch, Mississippi Review, MiPOesias, Mandorla, and Mirage/ Periodical. Hatmaker teaches creative writing, film, cultural studies, and urban education at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois.

Elizabeth Hatmaker reads from her work at Studio One Art Center on Nov 5th at 730pm

Elizabeth Hatmaker will also read at California State University, Stanislaus (Turlock, CA), on Monday 11/8/10, 1 pm in the Vasche Library West Reading Room. Click http://www.csustan.edu/English/ for more information.

DOROTHEA LASKY TALKS WITH LEWIS FREEDMAN for her reading November 5

2010-11-01T06:19:00.000-07:00

Lewis Freedman: Since this is an interview for a reading, I thought I might start by asking you about your performance of your poetry.

I've heard you read quite a few times now, and it has been an insistent and powerful experience each time. To my ear, your voice builds in its insistence, but builds by refusing to resolve, by leaving the end of a line or statement splayed. Since your poems very often have to do with confronting the problems of perception (and the role that plays in being a self and relating to others), the insistence and unresolvedness of your voice gives me a simultaneous sense of the vulnerability in strongly asserting these perceptions (the forces threatening them) and of the strength in having produced this vulnerability.

What I'm getting to, is I wonder if you'd be interested in talking about your bodily sensations before, during, and after public readings. Perhaps even your sense of time. How does the listening group of people occur in your body while you read (if they do)? I'd be interested to hear generally about your physical sense of performing, but also specifically if you consistently have bodily associations in relation to particular poems (perhaps even some of your poems that specifically locate your body?)

Dorothea Lasky: Thank you for asking this question. Reading to an audience is very important to me and to my practice of poetry and I often think about why or what I am doing when I am reading. I remember once reading a short essay Eileen Myles wrote for the Poetry Foundation website, in which she talked about the places readers go to when they read. I can’t remember her exact words, but in the essay she described the otherworldly place (maybe not otherworldly, but alter) that poets go to in a reading and how important it was to be gentle to a poet afterwards, as she had just been transported through time and space. I remember that she said that a poetry audience should “help her down” afterwards. I think this is right. Reading poems makes you go somewhere else, where your body does not exist and it can be hard to reconnect the timeless part of you with your body once it is over.

As far as my own bodily sensations before, during, and after a reading, they change every time and are completely determined by the reading space. They are especially influenced by the people at the reading. If it is a friendly reading, if a lot hinges on being social and warm, then I actually have a tendency to be less vulnerable and I feel less during my reading. The more I don’t know an audience and the more work I feel I need to do to either win them over or hurt them or make them see something, the more I feel a duty to get to a vulnerable place where I am nonexistent within the situation. These times are both my best and worst readings.

Reading wears me out. If a reading is simply a social interaction, then I get worn out by talking to people before and afterwards. If a reading is a reading, then I am worn out by transporting my timeless part away from my body, as it is genuinely cleaved. But I think, ideally, reading should wear you out. I think of my Track and Field days back in high school. I used to never exert myself to the point of passing out during practice or a race. This was part due to the fact I had amazing endurance at a young age and the fact that I didn’t really see the point. I remember being scolded by a particularly ditzy coach of mine. Between snapping her gum, she told me that I should look like I am dying each time I run. I thought she was full of shit then, but now I think maybe she is right, if I translate it to reading poems. A reading should really be something. I think readers should always give it their all.

In terms of certain poems and reading perceptions, I guess I’d say that I started off reading with an insistent volume about 5 years ago, because I had a lot of poems (some of these are in my book, AWE) that are based on religious tracts, ephemera from religious zealots, and so forth. I wanted to make my readings into religious ceremonies. This translated into other poems. I feel a spiritual void often, despite having a very real spirit within my body, and so I sometimes want my readings to take away this void.

Lewis, I really like the way you read your poems. It’s scary. You scare me when you are reading. I mean that as a compliment.

LF: Dottie, thanks for your real answer. I certainly have an experience of what you name as the transportation of the timeless part away from the body in the performance of a reading. It's genuinely scary sometimes for me in the extent of its amplification. It's as though my body has expanded and vacated to make space inside it for all the people in the room. My body feels very light and unfelt, and my voice jumps with the struggle to stay with the presence of words as they are making.

When you mention that your experience of a reading space is essentially being influenced by the people in the room, I'm drawn to thinking about how significantly and variously your poems are populated by people. Not only the names and presences of people in your life as subjects in the poem, but also by a way in which people and culture are already present in language and writing and how they feel active to me in the uncanny leaps your poems regularly make.

I'd be really interested to hear about how you experience the arrival of other people in your writing process, those you know and those you don't? Do you look for or follow language that brings them in? Do you receive strength towards honesty and confrontation in your poems from the companionship of other peoples' presence from within language?

DL: I like what you say about the body being unfelt. That is nice, because I think about felt experience in the world. But to be unfelt during a reading would mean to be in transcendence after something presumably felt in the poem. Yes, that seems right.

Thanks for saying that about people and my poems. People are very important to me in terms of poetry. I cannot divorce the two. I cannot divorce myself from the idea that language is always grounded in the social, and that it is a finite form to human experience. And so that what is uncanny in the poem (I love the word uncanny, by the way, thank you for using it) is the idea that people are there finite in the forms of the words.

I think a lot of my writing process involves listening to people. I've been getting this education/social science degree for the past five years and a lot of it involves observing people, interviewing them, listening to the way they structure their discourse as a seemingly silent indicator to what they really think, if they could somehow be cleaved from the social pressure of what they feel they must say (although they never could be and that is great, too). I have been training my voyeuristic perspective for a while now, but I think what actually attracted me to the work, or what made the actual work of the degree seem ok (why I am getting the degree is another story) was that I am fascinated, obsessed, enthralled (never can think of the correct word) with how people talk. I guess both private and public talk, although public talk is more intricate to me because it is part of a spectacle.

You mention the idea that I might receive strength towards honesty and confrontation in my poems from the companionship of other peoples' presence from within language. I don't know about honesty or confrontation. I know that is there. What I am interested in mostly is real conversation. I want to establish in my poems a direct conversation between the speaker and the reader. The other people in the poems are oftentimes beautiful or ugly decorations. Or they were the necessary mediaries to get me to the desired direct address.

How do you feel direct address functions in your poems?

LF: Yes, you put your words right on it there, the direct address of your poems is definitely what I see as their confrontation. What confronts is the genuine clearing you create as a path between speaker and listener. I don't really have a clear sense of that path in my own writing (though I might like to). In the clearing (to continue this not great analogy) (is it something like Duncan's meadow?) I can't usually differentiate where I stand or where others do, who or where is the speaking and the listening,

I wanted to ask you some more about your fascination with talk. Could you talk a little more about what you see as the distinctions between private and public talking? Would thought be included as private talk? Do you hear your poem-making as public talk or private talk? Or perhaps, do you see some of the promise and potentiality of writing poems as occurring within the transference of public talk to private and private talk to public?

DL: You ask a lot of really interesting questions about talking. Talking itself is so complex. Language itself, intent (as convoluted as it can be), and then the private versus public. It is hard to address it all clearly, especially through language as I am doing now. I guess that the most simple way to say it is that I think all talk is inherently public. In poetry, I think the instinct of poets to both communicate feeling/sensation and to entertain the reader, makes even private talk public. And in anything spoken or written, there is the sense that it must have been meant to be public. In my poems, I am trying to play with the lines between public and private talk, but I am very much aware at how public this talk is once it is spoken or written.

I'd love to think more about how thought relates to public and private talk. Obviously something social happens when thought becomes language becomes language that is meant to be and then is expressed. However, we often (in my mind, unfairly) relegate talk that is most like raw thought (i.e. seems to be seemingly unaware of how it might be taken in a social context) to the insane, to children, and to those who have for whatever reason "lost their rational minds" and thus, must not know better. I guess in a way I am most invested in thought that is language, but has not burdened itself to be blended and gutted out by the social world. Thought talk is not exotically beautiful (I hate the term Outsider art, by the way), but is humanly beautiful. I like poetry that is thought talk before it turns into private or public talk. It is the moment of greatest (and most wide-reaching) potentiality of human communication. I think this is what Stein got at in her work and I'd love to continue to explore how to play with the boundaries.

November 5th with Elizabeth Hatmaker and Dorothea Lasky

2010-10-24T22:01:00.001-07:00

check it out:

Elizabeth Hatmaker is the author of Girl in Two Pieces (BlazeVOX 2010), a collection about the 1947 “Black Dahlia” murder. Her work is also featured in Life As We Show It: Writing on Film. (City Lights 2009), ACM, Bird Dog, Epoch, Mississippi Review, MiPOesias, Mandorla, L’Bourgeoizine, and Mirage/Periodical. She teaches creative writing, cultural studies, film, and urban education at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois.

Chelsea Walton is an animator and editor located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her animation experience includes creating motion graphics for Independent Television Service, visual effects for True Margrit music videos,animating logos, and creating and animating the trailer for the Green Screen Film Festival (2005). In 2010, she completed animation for Laura Lukitsch's The Beard Club: A Documentary.border="0" />

Dorothea Lasky was born in St. Louis, MO in 1978. She is the author of Black Life and AWE, both out from Wave Books. She is also the author of several chapbooks, including Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). A graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, she also has been educated at Washington University, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania. She currently lives in New York City.

doors: 7:00
reading :7:30

entry by donation

November 5th

2010-10-20T10:31:00.000-07:00

ELIZABETH HATMAKER AND DOTTIE LASKY

Check back for a list of spring 2011 readings/readers. We will take Jan and Feb off and meet back up again in March. See you Friday.

Steffi Drewes talks with Brian Teare for Friday 9/24's reading

2010-09-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

Steffi Drewes: Let me start by saying that your two most recent books, Sight Map (University of California Press, 2009) and Pleasure (Ahsahta Press, September 2010), are testament to your expertise at creating vivid poetic terrains—both books contain a beautiful fusion of geographical, sexual, theological, and linguistic landscapes. Before addressing the Biblical garden paradise that is so central to Pleasure, I am wondering if there are any gardens or green spaces that figure prominently into your memory, specific landscapes that have either directly informed your writing or served as personal sanctuaries? You write with such a fierce attention to natural detail—and by fierce, I mean stunning.

Brian Teare: Thanks so much for your kind words about this recent work, Steffi—and for your own very fierce attention to it.

The first garden I knew must have been my mother’s: she had an L-shaped planter in the backyard that was all hers. But she was a mother of six, and anyway indifferent to plants, and so it never contained much more than a few straggly rose bushes, some low-maintenance perennials and bulbs bought from a catalog—crocuses, daffodils and the likes—a gesture toward the idea of a “garden,” and very little else.

But this was in rural Alabama. We lived on the edge of a small town; our house was largely bounded by pine forest, and I was not a boy given to boundaries. My affinity for the natural world started just past my mother’s half-hearted garden, where the forest, by closing in upon itself, opened onto another kind of horizon.

Mine was the kind of childhood that allowed for many unsupervised hours outdoors, and that was the greatest freedom I knew: the trails and trees and seasons of that place, unmediated by reason. I mean that I know that I loved the forest because I experienced it as entirely outside of “law”: it was a place where familial and religious orthodoxies didn’t follow.

Of course I have lived in and loved other places since, and Sight Map travels through many of them—the Susquehanna river of central Pennsylvania, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and Lake Merritt in Oakland—but as an adult I have been all too aware of the various kinds of law and/or order at work in structuring my experience of the natural world.

You might say that Sight Map records the collision of those two gestures at work in my relationship to the natural world: Romantic idealization (faith) and self-conscious critique (doubt). Transcendentalism meets post-structuralism.

SD: In your newest book, Pleasure, there is a three-part poem titled “Eden Tiresias” in which alternating lines of the first and second sections seem to be remarkably spliced together to create the third section. As soon as I finished this third part, I went back to read the first two again and could have read myself in circles, guessing which came first and intrigued by how seamlessly the first two sections functioned on their own and as a whole. Could you talk a bit about the structure of this poem, how it originated and evolved?

BT: Though Pleasure is foremost an elegy, it’s also an encounter with Gnostic thought—which I was in thrall to for the better part of a decade. I was and remain especially taken with the Gnostic tractate “The Thunder: Perfect Mind,” which both reifies the binary system upon which Gnosticism depends and destroys it through an insistence on paradox as basic to the structure of being. Given that many scholars believe the poem to be spoken by the feminine principle of wisdom—Sophia herself!—paradox would seem to reflect a gendered relationship to knowledge and to reality.

Paradox is a wholeness that acts like a fragment when we try to think about it. That’s what makes it so interesting. Even when we think we’re close to understanding something like “I am the honored one and the scorned one,” we encounter something like, “I am the barren one/and many are her sons.” Just as it seems possible to grasp, paradox always turns some part of itself away—sort of like the moon in its phases. A full moon doesn’t last long, but the light of comprehension is bright while it shines.

So that’s one significant half of the poem’s background. The other is the figure of Tiresias, whose condition seemed to me to be a lot like that of Sophia, but queer: he embodies knowledge gleaned from both sides of the binary. And if in some Gnostic myths Sophia visits the garden of Eden in the guise of the snake offering much-needed wisdom to Adam and Eve, snakes play a crucial role in Tiresias’ transformations—as Ovid tells us, snakes attended each transformation that allowed him to become her to become him.

To reveal how I wrote the poem might risk dispelling its magic, wouldn’t it? Basically, I wanted to write a poem whose form was paradox: binary but dialectical, discreet and chiasmatic. I set out to do so in a fairly methodical way—by which I mean I created a working solution to the technical problem of writing a poem whose two halves work on their own and together—but I’ll say that what I actually wrote, the content of the poem, surprised me: especially the prevalence of rage and refusal in the closure.

SD: This book, Pleasure, is so deeply personal and urgent and yet so intertwined with philosophical and religious narratives that have such cultural magnitude. In one of my favorite poems, “Dreamt Dead Eden,” you write “I walk the graveyard garden schemata.” I think that is such a telling expression of the speaker’s precarious position throughout the book, the straddling of two worlds related through paradox. And in the collection, there are so many other boundaries (binaries) that are explored: self/other, creation/destruction, life/death, knowledge/intuition, pleasure/pain, mind/body, entrapment/escape. Do you find yourself taking a similar philosophical approach in your recent or upcoming projects, or does the new work feel like a departure from that structure?

BT: I once had a teacher who told me that all of my poems were arguments—at the time I took this to mean quarrelsome or aggressive. I was, after all, writing explicitly queer poems set in and against traditional patriarchal family structure, which in my case was also highly religious and regionally inflected by Southern culture. But now I think I didn’t hear all the meanings she intended to set at play in the diagnostic word “arguments”: I think she meant it literally, as in the poems are structured by a rhetoric which is aimed against other rhetoric.

Which is a long way of saying I’ve long been aware both of the rhetorical and ideological contexts within which I was raised and those which have framed and informed much of my adult experience and writing. But rhetoric has its own music, evokes its own prosodic structures—as does counter-rhetoric. Hence the “graveyard garden schemata” by which the speaker is constrained but within which the speaker is also mobile. This structure seems generally true of all of my work. For instance, during the time I was writing Pleasure, I was certainly testing the general formlessness of my own experience of mourning against the received structures of Gnosticism—perhaps that’s my particular music, the counterpoint of mobility (or the illusion of mobility) against constraint.

If my new work differs philosophically from that of Pleasure—and it does—it’s first because Gnosticism no longer has the central importance it once held for me, and second because I’m testing my own experience against other systems of thought. It’s also because, though my own experience remains relevant to the poems, their structures are far less likely to be narrative—a combination of collage, prosodic and syntactical compression, and allegiance to aural improvisation rules my process of writing at this point. Probably my friends could paint a much better picture of the continuities and changes in my work than I can, but it seems fair to me to say that I remain that student writer who is always arguing with something.

SD: At one point, you speak of “the roar before order,” which struck me as a very dynamic line, one that could easily refer to the process of writing, to the process of grief, and of course, to the process of creation. Am I making a fair assessment?

BT: That line—from “Of Paradise and the Structure of Gardens”—was gesturing toward what it must have sounded like to be a priori : before names, before an understanding of the strictures imposed upon us by having a history. Biblical accounts of the garden posit naming as a good thing—evidence of man’s stewardship over beasts—but I love the idea of the garden before man as a kind of cultural pre-linguistic stage. It’s like trying to imagine Western Civ as an infant! But I take full advantage of the generally potent metaphoricity of the Biblical myth of Eden, assigning all sorts of tenors to its vehicle. For example: Pleasure posits the world before Jared’s death as a kind of Eden and his death as a kind of Fall. The snake here is not AIDS—the garden is not a conventional moral space—but rather the Gnostic spirit of Sophia. If we fall from union into wisdom, it is our only consolation, and it protects us from nostalgia, a harrowing affliction because our idea of origin is often so compelling. In the Biblical narrative “the roar before order” is the welter of the world in its purest Being; it’s a kind of chaos whose power is harnessed and briefly controlled by naming and divine sanction; the fall essentially returns us to a state in which the world is uncontrollable and does not answer to a name. Grief is like this, yes. And so, sometimes, is writing.

SD: Writing an elegy, especially a book-length elegy, would appear to be such an inherently daunting, yet therapeutic (and in some cases, necessary), task. What were your biggest fears about writing these poems, if you care to tell? Was there anything that you were most afraid of uncovering or discovering in this uncertain lands of Eden, ecstasy and intellect?

BT: I can’t say I had many worries when I first began writing these poems: I started the book in 2000, a year after Jared’s death, and I can’t say I thought much about what I was doing at first, a fact I attribute to grief. Even the recurrence of “Eden” in the poems at the beginning was incidental; once I had four or five it dawned on me that I was working on a sequence or group or poems. When the energy for those poems slackened off, I was worried about what to do with them; they seemed so unlike anything I’d written, yet they didn’t add up to anything on their own. Then in 2002 the “Californian” series began and the second half of the book began to open up in front of me. It took me until 2004 to write “To Other Light,” after which the book snapped shut behind me. It was only then that I began worrying about the book itself: that it’s too concerned with God and theology for most contemporary readers, that its two sections are too different aesthetically, that it’s too depressing.

But these were shallow and/or unfounded worries; the real ones suggested themselves soon enough. For ethical reasons, Jared’s story was largely not mine to tell—the narrative aspects of it, I mean. So I was worried that the poems would seem too involved in their own experience, not mournful enough of him in all of his specifics. On the one hand, this is not an unusual quality for an elegy, and is, in fact, almost a trope of the historical genre: both “Lycidas,” In Memoriam and Sonnets to Orpheus (among many other poems) eclipse the lives of those they mourn for. On the other, there’s the contemporary genre of AIDS elegy that the book participates in and honors—I’m thinking specifically of Paul Monette’s Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog and Mark Doty’s My Alexandria as well as Tory Dent’s harrowing series of auto-elegies Black Milk—and when measured against these books, Pleasure is largely less domestic and more mythic in its scale.

Though I was certainly inspired by books like Monette’s and Doty’s, my experience of Jared’s death was probably theological and spiritual first—the politics of it came in a close second. This blend of experience, theology and politics moved me to write into a register of language I found in elegy throughout its generic history, thus putting me into a very different conversation with the history of ideas than many of the contemporary books that had been most important to me—though I was constantly reinforced in my ambitions by Brenda Hillman’s Death Tractates and John Taggart’s When the Saints. My basic desire was to forge a language in which I could fuse the mythic and the personal, rather than have to choose one over the other—.

The recipient of Stegner, National Endowment for the Arts, and MacDowell Colony poetry fellowships, Brian Teare is the author of The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, and Pleasure, as well as the chapbooks Pilgrim and Transcendental Grammar Crown. On the graduate faculties of Mills College and University of San Francisco, he lives in San Francisco, where he also makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Steffi Drewes was born in Iowa. Her poems have recently appeared in New American Writing, Parthenon West Review, Bombay Gin, Shampoo and Monday Night, and her manuscript, Her Wingspan In Inches, was a finalist for the 2010 Cleveland State University Poetry Center FirstBook Award. She lives in the East Bay and is a contributing editor for MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine.

Studio One Reading Series is on September 24th with Brian Teare and Martha Ronk. Music from Campos-Quinn.

2010-09-13T23:30:00.000-07:00

The recipient of Stegner, National Endowment for the Arts, and MacDowell Colony poetry fellowships, Brian Teare is the author of The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, and Pleasure, as well as the chapbooks Pilgrim and Transcendental Grammar Crown. On the graduate faculties of Mills College and University of San Francisco, he lives in San Francisco, where he also makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Single Slit Diffraction Pattern is a tape loop and flicker film based project that pokes a third-eye stalk through the veils of bodily perception. Cresting waves of drone, vocals ripped apart, drifting sands of hum and buzz. Flickering sphincters, full body epileptic fits. From Michael Campos-Quinn and Curtis Tamm.

Martha Ronk is the author of eight books, most recently Why/Why Not from UC Press, In a landscape of having to repeat, Omnidawn (a PEN USA best poetry book) and Vertigo, a National Poetry Series selection, Coffee House Press. She is also the author of Glass Grapes and other stories from BOA Editions, 2008 and teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

reading 730
entry by donation

2010-09-10T11:56:00.000-07:00

Friday, September 24 @ 7:30PM

MARTHA RONK

BRIAN TEARE

2010-09-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

STEFFI DREWES

ARIEL GOLDBERG

RUSTY MORRISON

Lara Durback talks with Ariel Goldberg for her Studio One performance on 9/3

2010-09-02T08:37:00.000-07:00

I am about to interview Ariel Goldberg, one of the most serious and hard-working artists I have ever met. We are emailing each other in this interview. We are good friends. We write letters to one another. We are making a book together. (More later.) I would do anything to have the consistency of practice that she is able to keep up with her writing. This person works on art every day.

LD: You have been working in an epistolary mode in the past, writing letters to dead soldiers. I remember your performance by the Claremont post office mailbox. I felt like I had to be reverent to watch you. You were holding and caressing the letters underneath the mailbox with a faraway look in your eye.

Your photographer character, however, in more recent performances, has almost a clowning feel, as some people commented, or even aggressive! Yet I know you didn't want the character to be a clown at all. You said to me in an email or letter that you envisioned the Photographer Without a Camera to be, but rather an "expert on a subject as broad as all of photography." What goes into the sort of mood your performance moves into? Is performance always on your mind while you are writing?

AG: I am drawn to things that are impossible, confusing or absurd to me. Right now, the act of photographing and the pace of photography feels very urgent, or always has. I throw myself at big topics to obsess over and the writing is daily. My focus on it is anti-canon. Ultra mundane. It takes at least a year of marinating to then know how I will perform it. I tend to collect a lot of junk, usually thrift store stuff, I build mini-installations or sets to write the performance scripts in and then a character will sort of emerge, in a very sloppy way, from the writing. And somehow I'll do a little performance somewhere and it's a way for me to figure out how to reconcile the writing and the performance.

My work can be seen as an anti-podium poetry reading, meaning I hung out a lot around downtown New York experimental theater, so I am always thinking about how to captivate an audience like I was captivated the first time I saw Taylor Mac or Jibz Cameron. I just saw the band Moira Scar play, and they don’t break character. If the mic is fucked up they tell the tech guy fix this now while wearing a cat mask. It’s real.

The Photographer Without a Camera started doing press conferences because I built a teleprompter, sort of by accident, one day in my studio. And then this character was an aggressive yelling mess because they wanted to convey some urgency. This performance scared people, children, at the Headlands open house. I had a crisis of me not wanting to scare people but the character just going for it. They stared past people’s foreheads and asked “Do you want me to take your picture?” The kitchen staff at Headlands, who I talked about my work with everyday there, told me this piece was, “a bummer.” I didn't like this. So I'm tweaking this aspect of the character. I think I'm done amping up the wackadoodle of this character. I had multiple microphones whipping around to satire press conferences in the news. Now I'm more interested in developing the Photographer without a Camera to be more of an eccentric philosopher. I'm working on David Antin style slide lecture talk poems, in the voice of this sort of technological expert, time travelled journalist. I'm thinking now after a year of these impassioned street creature performances that The Photographer without a Camera is just going to write and respond to letters about photography instead of yell in the wind at the Golden Gate Bridge about photography. The characters in the performances become addressees of the writing in other words.

LD: So you are writing TO the characters. I get that. So, since you had a bunch of different characters embodied under this umbrella-person of Photographer Without a Camera, the phrases that you came up with were addressing all of them. (Hey reader, Ariel and I are printing these phrases into a book by setting type, and then printing onto pages of old photo magazine pages.) You have so many phrases, Ariel. You have notebooks full of all the interactions with photography. Why did they get narrowed down to such short bursts of language, like "I thought you were taking a picture of me" ? I know these choices are very specific for you. What goes into the choosing?

AG: I stick with a form, for example one-sentence captions about photographic events, then I have to figure out how to present this writing without it being a total snore. Because the truth is I write all day long so I have a lot of garbage. I’m like a pack rat of my own brain. Notebooks filled with handwriting I can’t even read. Yes, I’m invested in the handwritten. I need objects. I feel terribly overwhelmed when I have to edit. So I get help from friends if I ask nicely or. I did have a girlfriend who was an excellent editor. I feel a little screwed now. But I reread what I write over and over again. Then only the strong survive.

LD: What do you read a lot of? How, when? I know you read the newspaper, the one that is a paper object. Do you read the computer newspaper more often these days? This is a pertinent question to me when I think about writing, writers, and who writers are writing for. I, for instance, have a bookmark in every book in my house, almost. Many of the books I would call my favorites are unfinished. I write more than I read most days. Certain kinds of writing assume that the person reading has a lot of time, or can concentrate in a particular way. A lot of writing depends on undivided attention. How is this relevant to your writing/performance?

AG: I never feel like I read enough. I think of it like a hunt or surprises but it always feels magnetized to whatever I'm trying to articulate in my writing/performance. When I read current experimental poetry I think that's when the world make sense to me. I feel like the news is poetry and poetry is the news. The actual paper is a luxury I only come across in libraries or as a gift of public transit. And I sort of hate the SF Chronicle. I have a complicated relationship with the New York Times, on the other hand, which mostly involves lust and disdain. I skim online; I don't know if it's reading, it's terribly impatient. I listen to the news on the radio more. I read all sorts of commercial and art photography blogs. I write in the voices of photographers. It's sort of research for the writing which is often photographers explaining, narrating the pictures they take, the ones mostly in the news. I inundate myself with news photos. I guess this is reading. It's actually very disturbing. I don't read much fiction at all and if I do I don't finish it; I try to turn it into poetry, crack the narrative in my impulsiveness or laziness.

Right now I'm gravitating towards interpretations of art essays. Because Charity Coleman and I we are sort of writing scripts and creating this talk show Write This Down TV. I went through a pretty heavy phase of reading any documents/essays of the culture wars too, and anything I could about late 80s/90s art scenes in New York, you know when I was just a kid. I really like Printed Matter's Artist and Activist series. It's free, ask for it if you are ever buying anything there. I read old photo magazines, the ones we are printing our book on, Shutterbug, Modern Photography, I read the classified ads in the back where people are actually selling slides of girls in lingerie so you can "learn lighting." I'm imagining that I'm writing an essay called "The problem in Queer Arts Today" or it doesn't have a title yet. So I just read a book on Drag Kings. I'm also hunting for fucked up versions of the epistolary because I'm fascinated with and constantly using the forms of letter/email/text message. So I got Chris Kraus' I Love Dick in the mail. I read My Walk With Bob by Bruce Boone this summer. It was fantastic. I'm into anything interview related. The A.R.T. series and Re/Search publications. But I agree. Bookmarks all over.

LD: Ooh, that Kraus book looks so good. I just looked it up. Anyway, I was thinking about the attention span of reading in general. Your choice of performance (over "podium") makes me think that you are looking for a sharpened attentiveness to your writing while presenting in public. No room for people spacing out. They have to LOOK at your writing. I can relate to that. But then, you lean so much more toward print material, objects, the tactile. I'll have to show you this book of a bunch of letters and emails called The Septa Letters by Liz Rywelski. It's so manipulative. She writes admiring notes with her email to strangers on Septa (Philly's public transportation), and then they email her and she never writes back. There's like this giving happening from the opposite end...the person who didn't think they were being published. But who were they giving to? Anyway...I'm just interested in attention, and how it happens. Is this a question? WAIT! I know where I'm going. You wrote in a letter to me when you were lamenting how wacky the Photographer got, "what about the performance that doesn't want any attention?"

AG: I think art is very serious, or it’s why I’m here. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t fun also, or funny. I’m having fun! That’s where people get mistaken. Somehow this reminds me of when men tell you to smile. Like when I got fired from a gourmet pizzeria nine years ago because I wasn’t smiling enough. No, I’m performing--back off. Because how else will you hold people’s attention?

Studio One is on September 3rd with Steffi Drewes, Ariel Goldberg and Rusty Morrison

2010-09-01T19:33:00.000-07:00

Join us Frist Friday for:

Steffi Drewes was born in Iowa. Her poems have recently appeared in New American Writing, Parthenon West Review, Bombay Gin, Shampoo and Monday Night, and her manuscript, Her Wingspan In Inches, was a finalist for the 2010 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First
Book Award. She lives in the East Bay and is a contributing editor for MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine.

Ariel Goldberg writes poetic scripts and performs them, often as, The Photographer without Camera. This writing is in the form of captions, open letters and slide lectures addressing unknown and multiplying photographers and images that may not respond. Currently, you can find her work online. Ariel Goldberg is also the co-host, with Charity Coleman, of the public access talk show WriteThisDownTV.com.

Rusty Morrison's third book, After Urgency, just won the Tupelo Dorset Prize and will be published next year by Tupelo. Her second book, the true keeps calm biding its story, won Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, the Northern California Book Award, & Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize. Whethering, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She’s received the Bogin, Hemley, DiCastagnola, and Winner Memorial Awards from The Poetry Society of America. She is Omnidawn’s co-publisher.

readings 730, sharp
doors 7
entry by donation
365 45th st
parking in rear or on street

Della Watson talks with Steffi Drewes for her Sept 3rd Studio One Reading

2010-08-30T20:12:00.000-07:00

Della Watson: Let’s start at the beginning: What did you eat for breakfast?

Steffi Drewes: This morning I made a mango coconut raspberry smoothie and immediately decided I should have one of these every day.

DW: Good god, that sounds delightful—much like your poetry, which seems to have a jazz-like quality, as root sounds repeat and mutate. How does sound develop in your poems?

SD: It usually starts with a single phrase or line, or a couple of words that sound like they belong together even though they signify totally different things or emotional contexts. I try to pay a lot of attention to word connotations, because I want there to be multiple interpretations available to the reader. But I basically start riffing off that one word combination or image and see where it leads me. I do like the comparison to jazz because there is definitely a sense of play and improvisation, of tuning into the words and trying to establish a balance (or rather a tension) between logic and mystery, pleasure and peculiarity, beauty and discomfort—in sound and context. The story unfolds itself. I try not to let a preconceived narrative interrupt the language.

DW: You and I both received our MFAs from art schools. Do other art forms have a role in your poetry?

SD: Absolutely. I have always sought out museums and galleries as sanctuaries and sources of inspiration. In grad school, getting to my classes involved walking past installations of student work or in-progress critiques of all kinds—architecture, sculpture, fashion, painting, photography—so I was constantly surrounded by creative energy. Taking book arts and photography classes also informed my writing, in terms of visual presentation, collage and splicing techniques. I like thinking about the overlap between the visual and literary art worlds—the shared vocabularies, the possibilities for collaboration. I had a great experience collaborating with a photography student and would love to do something like that again. Right now, I’m working on a series of poems with the working title “Installation” that is very much in conversation with the practices of visual art-making, gallery installations, and everyday scenes that strike me.

DW: Tell me about the “Horizon Line Drawings” series.

SD: It was part of a writing exercise I started a few years ago. Each poem was originally named for a day of the week, but I renamed the series because each poem seemed like a simplified account of the day’s events, like an outline or line drawing. For me, “horizon line” was about the fact that I wrote them at the end of each day, looking back long after sunset and tracing where I had been. I assigned them arbitrary numbers because titling them with days of the week felt just as arbitrary, yet numbers seemed to indicate that there were many more entries, either existing or yet unwritten.

DW: There’s a phrase in your poem “Days Before the Tunnel Failed Us” that struck me as interesting: “how these nets are nothing more / than loops and loops of vowel sounds.” I’m gonna go out on a limb and identify this as a statement of poetics. If you care to join me on my limb, answer this: Are you the fish or the fisherwoman?

SD: As far as writing goes, sometimes I’m the one swinging the net and sometimes I’m the one getting caught—but I can usually escape! To be perfectly honest, I didn’t have a poetics statement in mind when I wrote that. In fact, I’ve revised that section of the poem multiple times but always kept that phrase the same. Ars poetica? Maybe so. For now, I will happily join you on the limb.

DW: So while we’re out on that limb, tell me, do you consider yourself avant-garde or experimental? And for that matter, do you ally yourself with any of the poetry “camps”?

SD: Only those poets who like to go camping, because it is important to have allies and I enjoy being outdoors. But I don’t find the labels all that helpful when it comes to my own work—maybe because I’m so deep in it. Every poem I write feels like an experiment—that’s what keeps it exciting for me. I try to challenge myself and my readers with different forms and rhythms, phrasing and narrative structures, but maybe that impulse to try new things is a reflection of both my attention span and writerly intention. I wouldn’t keep writing if it felt predictable and safe.

DW: So while we’re out on that limb, tell me, do you consider yourself avant-garde or experimental? And for that matter, do you ally yourself with any of the poetry “camps”?

DW: So while we’re out on that limb, tell me, do you consider yourself avant-garde or experimental? And for that matter, do you ally yourself with any of the poetry “camps”?

SD: Are you in need of a hard yes or no or “I am X” for this one? I seem to have received this question several times. . .

DW: It must be an email glitch. Just ignore any repeat questions.

DW: So while we’re out on that limb, tell me, do you consider yourself avant-garde or experimental? And for that matter, do you ally yourself with any of the poetry “camps”?

SD: OK, now it’s just getting funny. That’s probably the fourth or fifth time I’ve received this question via email. It’s almost as though the computer refuses to accept my vague question-dodging answer. As if it is imperative that I answer this question. Nothing like a little ghostly technological persistence to make a girl batty and doubt her words!

DW: So while we’re out on that limb, tell me, do you consider yourself avant-garde or experimental? And for that matter, do you ally yourself with any of the poetry “camps”?

Interviewer’s note: At press time, Steffi Drewes’s email account was still being bombarded with the persistent poetry-camps question. We fear that Steffi may be haunted by this question for the rest of her life.

Days Before the Tunnel Failed Us by Steffi Drewes

2010-08-30T09:10:00.000-07:00

In Case You Missed the Devota, Shimoda, Baus Reading

2010-08-08T20:39:00.001-07:00

Steven Fama's take on the night here

And some photos:

]

photos c/o Trevor Calvert. Thanks Trevor!

Don Mee Choi talks with Dot Devota for Friday August 6th's reading

2010-08-03T22:01:00.001-07:00

DON MEE CHOI: As I was reading your poem “Insurgency,” published in Action, Yes, I thought of Ch’oe Sung-ja’s poetry, a contemporary Korean women poet I translated in Anxiety of Words. I found the relentlessly abrasive, rebellious images and thoughts in the poem breathtaking. Then I started to think that a brilliant line such as this “An idiot asking a valid question in a world that didn’t have to be a world because it was already validated as one, its own, Hall of Fame” could only be written by an insurgent translator of some sorts, living in a time already realized—“children’s books will be best. Small cabins will not be kind. Neither will the cockpits of planes.”
How did you come to write “Insurgency”?

DOT DEVOTA: The “Insurgency” poems came after writing a series titled “Defenestrations”. There was very little planning—titles came to me and I began writing to them. I was a dog with its nose to the ground following a scent, turning corners every once in awhile but all the time not looking ahead or even up.

Of course the title “Insurgency” comes from news coverage on US wars. I grabbed the title like a toddler who picks up the word “fuck” from their parents—having very little idea as to what the word actually means but by spilling it over and over again they become a part of the condition of that word. Because it is obscene, gets attention, and for the toddler it has consequences. As soon as the “Insurgency” poems started “Counterinsurgency” poems began appearing on the same page. So I had these mutinies trying to distinguish themselves but with similar characteristics or “tactics” they were completely indistinguishable. The titles become bogus. The poems might as well not be titled at all, or maybe they should just be called “Fuck”.

DMC: Any thoughts about being or posing as an insurgent translator?

DD: I think of the insurgent translator as engaging in armed resistance by taking a foreign language and making it ones own. Although I feel pretty weaponless. Poetry not being much of a weapon in the US. Being a poet here feels like being a soldier without any arms or legs to wield weapons. Maybe that makes the poet a war vet, having lost recognizable human form during battle, possibly becoming hyper-human simultaneously, because they were totaled by the experience—thus lineation in poetry.

DMC: And what about the “Fat Ghost” of the “Insurgency Day”? I’m curious about this fatty ghost. Fat with curtains or something else?

DD: Fat with its ghostness, I suppose. As an invisible entity getting larger, becoming monstrously invisible, taking up all the space but invisible nonetheless. It’s infuriating!

DMC: Your manuscript, The Division of Labor, was one of the five finalists for Omnidawn’s full book poetry contest. Are you distributing it elsewhere? If you were to say to a publisher of your choice why they should publish this manuscript, what would you say? Any insurgent thoughts will be most appreciated!

DD: I imagine the insurgent wouldn’t abide by rules of poetry publishing. I’d ask myself, “How do insurgents get their concerns across, their demands met?” Do some literary beheading. I imagine I’d have to break in through the air vents of Bookthug’s office, or into the Waldrop’s basement, or as literary anthrax sent to New Directions. It would be easier than finding my capitalist spirit and trying to sell anyone anything. I know people say “but lots of writers peddled their manuscripts door to door.” But this is largely a folktale passed down to us by people who mean well. I’m not a man doing business on a golf course. My poetry is my sex. It’s how I plan on sleeping my way into a book. A lot of insurgents have great PR—videos from undisclosed desert locations, and car bombs always get attention. But really, more than anything, I would want a friend to publish it, and I would say to them, “You are my friend and I want to die. Take these poems they belong to you now.”

DMC: Last you traveled to Lebanon and Syria. Why Lebanon and Syria? Who translated your poems that appeared in As-Safir? Did you get to read with the translator? Would you be able to show one translated poem here?

DD: After writing The Division of Labor, which eventually turns its gaze towards the Middle East, I needed to go. As Americans, we’re constantly being inundated with all this information about the Middle East, but we have very little understanding as to what it’s actually like there. I needed to see what was going on street-level. My boyfriend Brandon Shimoda and I contacted a bunch of Arab poets there, such as Sabah Zwein (who translated our poems) and Etel Adnan (who also lives in California and Paris) and asked if they wanted to meet. Originally, I had full funding from the University of Montana’s Arab Studies—a program specifically designed to promote conversation and cultural exchange—but then the US issued a travel warning and suddenly the school pulled my funding and refused to answer my calls. It was the same week that Obama gave his hyped-up Cairo speech to the Arab world, talking about the need for dialogue and understanding but simultaneously issuing warnings and bans making it impossible for me to go as an academic. I went anyway.

Brandon and I were asked to give a reading in Damascus in a basement for about 200 Syrians. They were the best audience you could imagine, because they are actually alive at poetry readings—yelling out, trying to read along, drunk, asking to have the poems afterwards like it’s the set-list from a concert, demanding to be won over by the writing, i.e. engaged.

DMC: You have recently embarked on a much longer trip, a journey back to the land where your grandmother, Dot Devota, had once lived. How does your grandmother’s identity as a rodeo star overlap with yours?

DD: The land—280 acres in mid-Missouri—is still in my family, bought by my grandparents in 1940, although it’s not a working ranch anymore. But it’s beautiful country, very Tarkovsky-esque. It has hidden pastures and quicksand. My grandmother wasn’t a rodeo star herself, just gave birth to them. Rodeos weren’t really popular in the US yet when she was growing up. Still just a bunch of cowboys then. But as for our identities, I’m not sure they do overlap. More than any identity, it’s about connection to the land. Having the exterior landscape mirror my interior landscape. I feel like I was sort of kidnapped from the country before I was even born, exiled from a time and place I had never experienced, so it’s not nostalgia and it’s not idealizing the past, because it’s alive and still in my bones. More like abduction from a way of life—having been taken to a city and given possibilities only to scheme my way back, except now I’m horseless and without farm skills.

DOT DEVOTA fled Oklahoma during the dust bowl. Her poems can be found in Boonville, MO.

Don Mee Choi's first book of poems, The Morning News Is Exciting, is now
available from Action Books. She has
translated When The Plug Gets Unplugged (Tinfish, 2005), Anxiety Of Words
(Zephyr, 2006), and Mommy Must Be A Fountain Of Feathers (Action Books,
2008).

Trevor Calvert talks with Eric Baus for his August 6th Reading at Studio One Art Center

2010-07-20T22:21:00.001-07:00

Trevor Calvert: Hey Eric,

I read Tuned Droves again and this time made notes! So you'll be reading at the Studio One Reading Series in August, so I think it would be good to chat a little bit about your writing in context of Tuned Droves, your current projects, antecedents, sensation in your poems, multiplicity, audio recordings, and maybe helix owls...

To start, would you mind speaking a little as to what writing has helped form your poetics? I recall from when we met you were really into French Surrealism and poets like Nate Mackey and George Kalamaras—how have these writers influenced you?

Eric Baus: Hi Trevor!

Sure, no problem. When I went to college in the mid 90's in Indiana I met George Kalamaras, who was one of my first poetry teachers. He was incredibly generous and encouraging and gave me some reading leads to follow up on. George actually brought Mackey to my school for the visiting writers series and he taught Eroding Witness and School of Udhra a few months before he came to read. When Mackey read I bought Bedouin Hornbook (the first book of epistolary fiction) and that opened up a lot for me.

TC: Wow, so Kalamaras introduced Mackey to you initially. That's great! Would you mind, talking a little bit about how these two influenced your writing and do you see threads still existent that you can trace back to them today?

As I recall, didn't you work collaboratively with Kalamaras later on after you graduated? And since then you've worked with others as well—how important (if at all) do you think it is to work in this way with other writers?

EB: Well, in a very direct way the phrase "Dear Birds" which starts a lot of the poems in my first book, The To Sound, is from Mackey's novel Bedouin Hornbook. I only noticed the phrase after I'd had the book for a while and I ordered an SFSU Poetry Center recording of Mackey reading from it. The phrase "Dear Birds" appears briefly as a description of how a musical instrument (a flute?) sounded, what it seemed to "say" during a performance. I loved that recording and would listen to the tape on repeat. One time I was walking into the room and that phrase stood out, literally stopped me in my tracks. Hearing it helped me to start thinking about how to merge intimacy with distance/dispersal.

That recording is now available on Pennsound:

http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Mackey/Mackey-Nathaniel_San-Francisco-State_1987.mp3

George and I are still close friends (actually I plan on spending a few days hanging out with him in Colorado in the next week or two). After I graduated we've kept in touch, including the collab you mentioned. George's influence is so persistent in terms of his own writing and work he showed me. His writing feels like it's always talking to me every time I write.

I think it's been helpful to work collaboratively. I haven't done it as much lately. It helps me to shake off some of my tendencies and talk through another person's logic, especially their syntax.

This might seem a little off topic, but I remember coming across Juliana Spahr's first book in Cal State Chico's library right around the time you and I met and became friends. I didn't know her work but I'd just read Lyn Hejinian and saw that she picked for the NPS. It was so exciting to track down new writers and magazines at that time. I think we were together when I bought a copy of Chain magazine and Hambone at Cody's too. Thanks, by the way!

TC: Yeah, I recall when you bought those too. I was very excited to discover writers who were writing poetry that, for me, was so vastly different from the poets I had been exposed to up until around then. I remember you showing me some of your poems which had been published in Key Satch(el) and being really thrilled with a lot of the poems; really your writing has always been the same for me--I always am surprised with what I discover in your work!

Actually, I'd like to ask you a few questions about your own writing. I recall Burroughs once stating something like words are microorganisms whose meaning only exists because of gradations of order. When reading your poems I kind of get a similar feeling--that over the course of pages a sort of syndetic structure begins to emerge. That is, your poems seems to have emergent qualities thanks to its structure over the course of a series. I am curious if you'll speak a little to the way your poems come together structurally and become the "haunted house of Eric Baus" that Andrew Joron mentions on Tuned Droves' blurb.

EB: Yeah, I want the poems to have some level of illusion of being autonomous but I'm also really interested in dispersing and distributing little echoes of sound and image. I've always liked reading work that takes into consideration the ways poems blend and bleed into one another. That sense of being haunted by a feeling of recognition but not necessarily being able to place it is something I am always trying to work with.

When I go to write a new poem it's often taking some small part of an earlier poem I've written and trying to tease out new threads, new vocabularies, new sound variations. There's a lot of clipping and grafting that happens. Often I end up with the beginnings of 2 or 3 new poems with a similar tone, vocabulary, length, etc. to them, then I go back to them individually at different points and finish them by trying to push them away from each another a bit. There are usually a few major features that get repeated across the space of a manuscript, particular figures that I'll try to work in from time to time in order to give a feeling of continuity within the different textures.

TC: So as you are working on a collection of poems, do you feel a tension between them? the frission between creating a echo and trying to pull away from the generative original?

EB: Definitely. The longer I write and the more I know my own tendencies and instinctive gestures the more I try to work kind of myopically or microscopically at first. Now when I begin writing a new manuscript from scratch I try to let in as much dissonance as possible, then I stand back from it and try to find the elements that could be carried across several poems. I want the poems to keep their strangeness so I try not to force them into a superstructure right away.

EB: But I'm always thinking about echoes. A long time ago (late 90's) on the Suny Buffalo EPC site, I listened to a linebreak interview of Jena Osman by Charles Bernstein. Osman and some other performers read her piece The Detective which literally echoes the same or similar pieces of text while it's being performed to create these variable waves of language. She used the phrase "echo system" to describe that and it's always stuck in my head as one model for the book.

http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/linebreak/programs/mp3/osman-jena_linebreak_buffalo_1997.mp3

TC: Terrific. Thank you for the link!

I like that--echo system. That's great. It seems to take Stein's idea of insistence, and then derange it a little and make it more complex.

EB: Yeah, Stein is always in the background too.

TC: Eric, what starts a poem for you? I mean are there key ideas, methods, etc that you use when beginning a poem? Tell us your secrets!

EB: There are a few ways it happens. I can give one super specific example. So, I recently wrote this poem called Negative Moon. I'm not sure that it's done, but I wrote it because of a mishearing by Michael S. Hennessey (Pennsound's Managing editor) of the title of my earlier poem Negative Noon. He did a Pennsound Daily post about my recordings recently http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/daily/201005.php#26_19:20

where he heard "moon" instead of "noon" in the recording. "Negative Noon" is this weird palimpsestic poem that I wrote on top of the language of the poem "The Continuous Corner" which appears in Tuned Droves. I thought it would be fun to write this poem "Negative Moon" that Michael had accidentally imagined. So, there's something about mutation and palimpsest that's usually at the start of my writing. Here's Negative Moon, by the way:

Negative Moon

Minus magnetized his story’s satellites to form a negative moon. His echoes unearthed a hidden gong stored inside the core. The cloaked tone spread. Impacted kites released. The boom’s dust circled above the sky until its sails were cinders.

EB: http://www.ixnaypress.com/uploads/ixnay_reader_four.pdf

Negative Noon appears in this issue of the Ixnay Reader

EB: I like the idea of bigger poems having a kind of gravity and that there can be these little blips, these little satellite poems made out of detritus.

TC: [referring to a technical glitch with google] okay sorry about that--i had to log out and sign back in...

EB: now we are as one!

TC: Heh. Yes we are a synced wave.. actually, that kind of leads me to my next question--how do you see technology impacting poetry? Not just in terms of cutting and pasting, but rather in how electronic media (online journals, clients like wave, blogs, etc) may be affecting poetry. Has it affected your's in defined ways?

EB: First, I want to let you know that there is a pretty intense squirrel fight outside my window now.

Um, you know it's subtle but huge. I actually feel like electronic journals have taken off in a way that seems exciting. A few years ago I think there was more of a sense of an implicit hierarchy between print and online journals and now that's broken down.

I also think that my assemblage-oriented way of writing is mirrored in the way I read content online. Reading and writing feel a little closer somehow.

TC: That was probably causing the de-linkage in the interwebs...

EB: My computer has rabies.

TC: awesome!

TC: Yeah! I mean how many bookstores even have print journals of poetry anymore?

EB: I know. I'm not dissing the print journal or anything, lots of amazing ones, but the ones I tend to pay attention to now are more handmade, homemade, small scale journals by friends or acquaintances or friendly strangers. I think the hugeness of the internet has changed the print world of poetry into something that was unpredictable. It doesn't feel like the internet is annihilating print so much as it forces print to rethink itself in ways that can be exciting.

TC: Moving from the digital to physical--how has Denver been treating you? Has it had any affect on your creative process (besides ruining your baking)?

EB: Let me begin by complaining that it takes water like a month to boil here. Now that that's out of the way...

I like Denver. It's a very easy place to live and write. I sometimes miss Philadelphia because as a place it was so insistent and present. There's a great community (or series of overlapping communities) in Denver and Boulder that keeps things going.

TC: Eric, do we have time for a few more questions? I keep forgetting a bout the time difference...

EB: Totally, I'm not in any rush. I'm actually not meeting my friend for lunch today so I'm free free free to write.

TC: Excellent! One of the ideas I wanted to chat about with you is what role sense, as in the five senses, plays in your poetry. When I think back on your poetry it feels very cinematic--lots of images, lots of light, that sort of thing--a very visual recollection, but when I started going through Tuned Droves with this idea in mind, I noticed a lot of poems that included taste, touch, sound. How important do you think the senses are to your poetry?

EB: I think more and more I'm interested in mixing senses or collaging different types of sensory experiences. My poems tend to tune into the sensory world first and then bounce around until ideas get generated. Tuned Droves consciously stepped back a little bit from the exclusively visual and worked more with sound. I mean, it's a slight difference I'm sure but I think I had a different kind of ear when I wrote that book.

TC: literally?

EB: indeed.

TC: How do you see your writing changing in the future? If writing at least in part is connected to the physical body, then it's changing all the time in small ways. Can you speculate on how you perceive your writing changing?

EB: The manuscript I'm finishing now, Bee-Stung Aviary, is even more sound driven than Tuned Droves. There's a lot more dissonance, sonic play, homophonic and homonymic stuff going on, even though there's plenty in The To Sound and Tuned Droves. Actually living in Philly for a while maybe did that, made me want to get noisier and slightly more agressive with the language. I think of these new poems as similar to my old poems but "prepared" like a prepared piano or like I'm putting all sorts of stupid effects pedals on the language. I'm trying to kick the language around a bit more. Does this seem weirdly macho or something? I hope not.

TC: It does make me concerned for language's well being. Actually, it makes me think of one of your poems in Tuned Droves that ends with "I hear her hands are calling. They say ding. Or what it gloves" which is really plastic, in the sense that it takes meaning and sound and denatures them to a neat effect. When you are kicking language around, how conscious are you of language "gloving" meaning?

EB: "Plastic" and plasticity are great words for me to think about what I want to do with language. I tend not to experience language as gloving meaning but as meaning emerging from language's ability to stretch, snap, extend, and permeate. I like the way language can be clipped and shortcircuited. I like building meaning out of elements that seem like non-meaning. That's maybe what's happening more and more, I try to generate threads but I also try to generate little shavings of things that don't have obvious "meaning" at first and then I try to work with them until they resonate.

TC: Like you are using syntax and word choice as a tuning fork of sorts...

EB: Yeah, or maybe I'm setting up a bunch of different tuning forks in the same space and hitting them at different times with different materials. I think my metaphor just got unwieldy, but you know what I mean, it's less about a stable center for me and more about creating a reading environment that is kinetic, more constellated or like a magnetic field you can throw different chunks of metal into.

TC: I like that! Your clarification here is really perfect and prophetic as it is a perfect lead-in to a question I had prepared before this interview got started. Would you mind talking a little about the concept of multiplicity? swarms, droves, waves, rain; perhaps it's just me but it seems like there are a lot of collective entities/objects in your writing...

EB: I think you're right about collective entities, they're everywhere in the writing and there are probably tons of different ways I could answer that question. One way to answer would be that it hopefully bounces between individual somewhat identifiable subjectivity and something beyond that. So even though I use "I" a lot in the poems there's an emphasis on taking in the relationships between figures, objects, landscapes, etc. rather than focusing on the wisdom of the speaker or author. I guarantee that I have almost zero wisdom to impart. BUT hopefully the poems can enact a kind of experience the reader can participate in.

Also, I just love the experience of proliferation of seeing things explode and multiply. That seems like a pretty fundamental thing humans like. I love watching one branch of my tomato plant turn into seven. It's about pleasure in some ways, the pleasures of experiencing unexpected shifts, the pleasures of feeling overwhelmed.

TC: There is a pleasure there for sure! I hadn't thought of the pleasure of multiplicity in this way before--thank you. And thank you for this interview! Do you think we should talk about convex vultures and helix owls, or shall we save that for a later conversation?

EB: Thanks so much Trevor! Convex Vultures have delicious tentacles and I make a mean Helix Owl soup. I will prepare this stuff for you when I'm staying at your new apartment.

TC: Sweet! We can wash it down with a Chinese herbal tea.

EB: Yeah, the tea my acupuncturist gave me yesterday looked like it had a blond Fraggle wig in it.

TC: So you'll be at the Studio One Reading Series in Oakland on Friday, August 6. Will you be reading from the new manuscript?

EB: Yeah, mostly I would imagine.

TC: Eric, thanks again for chatting, and I look forward to seeing / hearing you on the 6th!

EB: Thanks, I'm really looking forward to it. Wooooo!

Eric Baus is the author of Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009) and The To Sound (Verse Press/Wave Books, 2004) and several chapbooks, including Bee-Stung Aviary (Further Adventures, 2010). He lives in Denver and thinks about audio recordings of poetry here: To The Sound http://baustralia.wordpress.com/

Trevor Calvert is a poet and librarian living in the East Bay. He is the author of Rarer and More Wonderful (Scrambler Books, 2008), and has appeared in Bay Poetics (Faux Press 2006), Mrs. Maybe, Weird Deer, and others.

Dot Devota, Eric Baus and Brandon Shimoda Read on Friday August 6th at Studio One

2010-07-20T16:16:00.000-07:00

DOT DEVOTA fled Oklahoma during the dust bowl. Her poems can be found in Boonville, MO.

Eric Baus is the author of Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009) and The To Sound (Verse Press/Wave Books, 2004) and several chapbooks, including Bee-Stung Aviary (Further Adventures, 2010). He lives in Denver and thinks about audio recordings of poetry here: To The Sound http://baustralia.wordpress.com/

Brandon Shimoda was born in California. His collaborations, drawings and writings have since appeared in print, online, on vinyl and on walls … and most recently in The Bowling, with Sommer Browning (Greying Ghost) and Lake M (Corollary Press). The Girl Without Arms and O Bon are forthcoming in 2011 (from Black Ocean and Litmus Press). He is currently on the road, and lives nowhere.

doors 7
reading 730
entry by donation
parking on street or in rear

Andrew Wessels talks with Craig Santos Perez for his July 2nd reading at Studio One Art Center

2010-06-29T19:36:00.001-07:00

Andrew Wessels: unincorporated territory is a project that now spans two books. Do you see this larger project being at some point in the future being assembled into a single, 'completed' form? Or is the fracturing of both the entire project as well as the poem-threads something integral to the project itself? Any idea or knowledge of how far you are planning on taking the project?

Craig Santos Perez: I will continue this project as long as Guahan, my homeland, continues to be a colony of the United States--as long as I continue to be "from unincorporated territory." Sadly, I may continue this project as long as I live. Yes, I can foresee the books being collected into a single book--but never a 'completed form' as the excerpting and poem-threads are indeed integral to both the making of the project and the project itself.

AW: You have mentioned Paterson as a touchstone for your writing, but when I initially posited a connection, your response made me think that you did not actively and overtly look to Paterson during the writing of this book. The book, though, uses found language as well as epigraphs, so intertextuality is overtly at work here. I'm curious to know more about your various approaches to using texts and what you see as, perhaps, active and passive 'uses' of text?

CSP: You're right, I did not actively look to Paterson during the writing of my books; yet having studied Paterson as an undergraduate left an impression on me. Like Williams, I also interweave lyric poems, historical & political documents, individual speech, and discursive information as a statement not only about a place, but also about how the roots and routes of a place can highlight the experience of colonialism. Research is an important part of our projects--as well as the problematics (and rewards) of finding ways to incorporate that research into the flow of the poetic text. In the same way that the Passaic falls and its river flow through the books of Paterson, water (hanom) also flows through my own books. In terms of how I use text: as you mention, I use many kinds of documents in my work--such as sources from history, politics, anthropology, journalism, popular culture, cultural studies, etc. Almost always I will purposefully manipulate a text's syntax, punctuation, and typography to defamiliarize it--a kind of ritual cleansing of a text before it enters the poetic tide. Often, I will place these shifted texts in new contexts, giving the text new meanings and resonances. Sometimes, texts will be disbursed across an entire thematic trajectory, putting the text in conversation with personal, familial, or cultural memory. So I think my use of documents--of the inter-, pre-, and post-textual--as active in a variety of ways.

AW: I was able to hear you read some poems in Denver at AWP. However, this is before I had read the book. I wish that I could switch that order or be in attendance for this upcoming reading. Now, having read your book, it is apparent that the page as a space or field of composition is vitally important to the existence of the poems. Additionally, you utilize typographical conventions such as bolded words, crossed out words, and italicized words. As this interview is in preparation for another reading, I'm curious to know: How do you translate these physical representations of the word on the page into your live reading?

CSP: I wish you could be in attendance too! In terms of space, I try to embody the space by pausing during my reading, by creating waves of silence that wash over the aural text. Larger spaces require longer silences--in the same way that a larger period in Robert Duncan's work requires a longer pause (tho I am not as mathematical in my pauses as Duncan was). In terms of other typographical conventions, I haven't yet found a way to embody bold or crossed out words in a live reading--so I just read them and hope that it provides a nice surprise to the reader who takes the book home with them.

AW: I'm interested in particular about the conversation in your work between land and the sea. I see the sea as a space where history vanishes nearly instantaneously. Ruins and archaeological remains exist on land. The sea swallows this past, is a continuously blank surface. Like an Etch-a-Sketch in a way, maybe. Your work attempts to navigate this space, I guess these islands, in which this constant-present of the sea is juxtaposed by the history of land and, particularly, of documents. Or, maybe, the difference is a difference between tradition and history?

CSP: I see the ocean (or tasi, in Chamoru) as overflowing with signification, history, politics, transit, story, life and death. Ruins exist in the ocean as well--especially around Guam. For example, there is a "dive site" where you can actually dive into two ships from World War I and World War II (the SMS Cormoran & the Tokai Maru) in the same place. And as we know, the ocean does not swallow the past completely. It hovers or plumes and washes ashore. We can think of the oil spill in the Gulf or the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," the floating island of toxic plastic waste growing exponentially in the Pacific. If only we could Etch-a-Sketch these things ways. If only we could Etch-a-Sketch the fact that in 2009 George W. Bush signed three declarations—under authority of the u.s. 1906 antiquities act—placing the Marianas Trench and the waters around three islands of the CNMI (Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands) and 21 undersea volcanoes, as the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument in the Central Pacific Ocean and the Rose Atoll Marine National Monument in American Samoa, under the jurisdiction of the u.s. government. These new Pacific Monuments measure about 200,000 square miles, and are managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce, Department of the Interior in consultation with the Department of Defense. Among other things, the declaration quotes (and yes, this is going in my next book): "to protect the training readiness and global mobility of u.s. armed forces and ensure protection of navigation rights and high seas freedoms under the law of the sea which are essential to the peace and prosperity of civilized nation." Just as the land is never truly terra nulls, the ocean--the Pacific--is never truly a blank surface. It is mapped--sometimes visibly, sometimes invisibly--by imperialism, colonialism, geopolitics, tourism, and militarism. So to me, my work hopes to navigate (and de-navigate) the constant-present-past-future of both ocean and land (as land, too, is an ever-changing tidal surface that bears the scars of colonialism. Both land and ocean have history. Both are part of my tradition. The land (tano) and sea (tasi) are interwoven. Tano' tasi: land of the sea. Tasi tano': sea of the land.

AW: The part of your life we are talking about right now is your poetry life. But you have another life as a graduate student in ethnic studies at Berkeley. I'm curious to know more about the push and pull between these two pursuits. How does one inform, encourage, or at times possibly get in the way of the other?

CSP: Don't remind me about the darker, seedier part of my life! Actually, being a graduate student in ethnic studies has been a real blessing for me. I received funding for my first two years through the university, which gave me plenty of time to continue writing poetry while doing my academic coursework. When that funding ran out, I received a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Diversity Fellowship, which gave me plenty of time to finish writing my second book while working on the written portion of my oral examinations. Basically, when I get bored with my poetry I switch to the academic work; when I get bored with the academic work I turn to poetry. That's the push and pull. Because my current academic work is focusing on Native American and Native Pacific Islander Literature and Literary Theory, I am always thinking about how my own poetry fits into these indigenous literary traditions and how certain scholars might interpret / critique my own work. So it keeps me on my toes.

Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan Guam), is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of two poetry books: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008) and from unincorporated territory [saina](Omnidawn Publishing, 2010). He received an MFA from the University of San Francisco and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Andrew Wessels has lived in Houston, Los Angeles, and Cambridge. He now splits his time between Istanbul and Las Vegas, where he is pursuing an MFA in poetry at UNLV. He is editor in chief of the literary journal The Offending Adam and co-edited with Mark Irwin the anthology 13 Younger Contemporary American Poets (Proem Press). Currently, he is a Cobain Fellow at Black Mountain Institute.

Amanda Nadelberg talks with Rob Schlegel for his July 2nd Reading at Studio One

2010-06-25T11:04:00.000-07:00

AMANDA NADELBERG: Your first book, The Lesser Fields, is an entire universe unto itself, and it's filled with some of the most beautiful descriptions of the natural world I've seen—creeks, ponds, fish, trees, honey, horses, hay and duckweed, for instance; it's also full of family units and story (but with story comfortably forgetting a few of its details to make for Better Stories) and directions (read: maps, possibly related to Story) and this amazing and particular myth-making that emerges believable while still strange. Could you talk about these poems and address any of these elements, if they seem familiar to you?

ROB SCHLEGEL: I spent most of my childhood living near the edge of Mr. Maller's twenty acre woods on the eastern slopes of the Oregon coast range. I whacked beehives with sticks and was stung. I wrapped vines around the trunks of trees, not realizing the vines were poison ivy. So its possible that the creeks, ponds, fish and trees in The Lesser Fields are the after-images of those landscapes and animals which helped inform my relationship to language and perception. That said, it took me a few months away from the book to actually see its relatively haunted undercurrents. Seeing them for the first time actually startled me a bit. It was as if I had come across an animal I once knew that was now decomposing.

The final section in the book contains poems that were written after my friend (poet Brandon Shimoda) came to live in my backyard for a spell. So often, Brandon's very presence creates an atmosphere of creative and artistic stimulation. At the time, my wife was away in Mexico for a month, so I basically spent that time (once Brandon left) writing these poems in complete solitude. A lot of the poems were born during that hypnogogic state just before we fall asleep, when the cerebral filters that are generally in place when we're awake, begin to soften and our minds seem more flexible, open, perhaps even, less our own.

AN: In some of your newer poems, there is more city alongside the nature: casinos, towers, theaters (of mollusks!) manmade clouds and commuting and it's striking how it all snuck in so easily, like a cousin to the world in The Lesser Fields, but not that world exactly. How have these new poems evolved? Were there changes in your process, and how do you feel about sonnets?

RS: At the risk of sounding a bit reductive and oversimplistic, I feel that this distinction might stem from reading more and more of the first generation New York School poets (not that Schuyler/Ashbery necessarily avoid the natural world). Once I read O'Hara's THE DAY LADY DIED through Geoffrey G O'Brien's lens in his seminar THE END OF THE POEM, the city suddenly became a place that contained as many (if not more) tensions between my psyche and language as the natural world contained for me in The Lesser Fields. It's likely also the result of actually spending more time in cities, the man-made clouds revealed themselves as I drove from Midwestern city to Midwestern city last fall.

The conversations in Geoffrey's class also got me thinking more and more about form. Many of the sonnets actually began as variations on Hopkin's eleven line curtal sonnets. Since then, I've "sewn" (as a smart friend said) a few of the eleven line sonnets together and then began carving away the excess. Many of the sonnets have been informed by Robert Pogue Harrison's mind-blowingly beautiful book The Dominion of the Dead, as well as some writings of Alberto Giacometti and the two-headed philosopher Deleuze and Guattari.

AN: Do you have socks with lightning bolts on them?

RS: One red pair with white boltz; one green pair with yellow boltz.

AN: One time I saw you read a poem to Lake Erie via skype to some people in a library in a small midwestern city. How did that awesome come about? Do you collaborate often? How do you feel towards the interwebs?

RS: Just after moving to Iowa City, I began to feel some relatively heavy anxiety about living so far from the Oregon that I love. When I lived in Missoula, it was easy to imagine myself still very close to my home state (the state that I used to say, as a highschool kid, I would "fight" for, should it ever need to protection--from what, I had no idea, and still don't). Anyway, I asked a few friends to write poems addressed to Lake Erie that I would read to the lake, and then wait for the lake's response. At its core, this project considered the consequences of departure, arrival, integration and reintegration, as well as explorations of the limited and limiting definitions of “audience” and “reader” in the context of the traditional structures that persist in most reading venues today. Additionally, as a new resident of the Midwest (from the Pacific Northwest, a region that helped sustain me physically, emotionally and artistically) I wanted to explore how voluntary departures and subsequent arrivals felt like minor segmentations of awareness Thus, the delivery of these five texts through my own body and throat was an attempt to move beyond the need to feel as though I was "comfortable" in this new place and toward an appreciation for the fact that these texts (as they were delivered) inhabit/deliver me. To this end I hoped to create some semblance of symmetry around the edges of unease; here and not here, having arrived and arrived nowhere.

AN: At times, there seems to be a more public face in the newer work, but then other times I'm reading, I take it all back, thinking there's a more private logic in the sonnets than in The Lesser Fields, with the act of myth-making in your first book being a generous inclusion for the reader. How do you think about the public vs. private in poetry and/or how do you think of audience if/when you do?

RS: Indeed, I can see what you're saying about the sonnets maybe having a more private logic and I can't help but think that working within the form only allows for a more intense immersion into the psyche--you know--the whole idea that the more structure you have in your life, the more willing you might be to actually wander into those parts of your mind you might not otherwise have the guts to visit. I wonder if those are the private parts of mind? Ultimately, I think many of the sonnets seem to be sitting someplace between the public and private. Perhaps somewhere in the "middle" as Deleuze might say in his Dialogues.

AN: You and your wife, Kisha, started The Catenary Press? Pray tell!

RS: Kisha and I started The Catenary Press when we realized that there weren't very many places for poets to publish serial-work. We wanted to create a venue for that. And so far, the first two publications have nearly sold out. This fall we plan to publish one or two more chapbooks (though we're still trying to figure out which).

AN: What did you have for breakfast?

RS: I am currently living in my sister's basement in Portland. So this morning I ate: Granpola (a homemade granola mix my grandfather invented); yogurt; a few Hood strawberries my sister bought at the Sellwood farmer's market; green-tea in a white cup.

AN: A year ago you moved from Missoula to Iowa City. How you have experienced the changes in terms of landscape, staircases, neighborhood, rainfall, culinary delights and transportation?

RS: Iowa City and the midwest in general, seems like a remarkably comfortable place to live. A friend of mine said that the midwest makes you "own up" to being an American. Which feels about right. That said, the writing community in Iowa City has been tremendously welcoming, and I think this is due, in large part, to the ANTHOLOGY READING SERIES.

AN: Some people really like the summer. What will you do this summer?

RS: I'm reading books for a seminar I'm teaching next year tentatively titled The Post-Modern Post-Trauma: Readings in Contemporary Fiction. So far: L.Davis, Murakami, Dellilo, Millet, McCarthy. I'm also wallowing in the loss of a few good friends who won't be returning to Iowa City next year. The coasts are calling them; they may very well be calling me as well.

Rob Schlegel's The Lesser Fields was selected for the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, he has lived in California, Montana and Iowa. He currently teaches at Cornell College and is publisher of The Catenary Press.

Amanda Nadelberg is the author of Bright Brave Phenomena (forthcoming from Coffee House Press) and Isa the Truck Named Isadore (Slope Editions, 2006) as well as a chapbook, Building Castles in Spain, Getting Married (The Song Cave, 2009).

Studio One is on July 2nd with Rob Schlegel, Cassandra Smith & Craig Santos Perez

2010-06-22T07:08:00.000-07:00

Check it out:

Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan
(Guam), is the co-founder of Achiote Press (www.achiotepress.com) and
author of two poetry books: from unincorporated territory
(Tinfish Press, 2008) and from unincorporated territory [saina]
(Omnidawn Publishing, 2010). He received an MFA from the University of
San Francisco and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Ethnic
Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Cassandra Smith works with a combination of fixing and making things.

Rob Schlegel's The Lesser Fields was selected for the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, he has lived in California, Montana and Iowa. He currently teaches at Cornell College and is publisher of The Catenary Press.

Where?
Studio One Art Center
365 45 St
Oakland
Cross: Broadway

When?
doors 7
reading 730

How much?
Entry by donation

2010-06-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

Emily Kendal Frey talks with Alisa Heinzman for June 4th's reading

2010-06-04T11:17:00.000-07:00

EMILY KENDAL FREY: If I described your poetry as "hesitatingly brave" would that resonate for you?

ALISA HEINZMAN: I feel like I don't know what brave means. Actually, I feel like I don't know what a lot of words mean lately. Calling the poems brave feels really funny to me. They address events that I found and find painful, so if that means they're brave I would think it's in a way that a lot of peoples' poems are.

EKF: Your poems, especially those from the "Brother in the Field" series handle biography with such quiet command, and I appreciate so much the way your images offer themselves to the space they occupy. For example,

Our grandparents,
kind in their distance.
The hard-starched collars, the flag-heavy video.
Am I late? It seems I am.

These lines are bald, unflinching, and evenly applied-- the softest opaque. People (grandparents) and things (collars, flags, video) do exist. Your world is an actual world. But the speaker seems to float within this real world, neither judging or participating in it fully. ("Am I late. It seems I am.") There's a resigned bravery there.

AH: I think that's a nice way to put it, sometimes floating within the real world. That seems like a common yet totally weird experience, especially during intense and difficult times, right? Like telling jokes in hospital waiting rooms, or feeling like you have to have a decidedly sad face at funerals. It's just impossible to feel fully and properly at the times you're supposed to. So then when do you freak out? In the bathroom, on the bus, at the grocery store. It's been years since I've read it, but isn't that a part of Camus' The Stranger? The guy's mom dies and he can't seem to act properly like "a grieving son". Most of these poems are written about memories of my brother going to Iraq as a medic, and as I wrote them I realized that in pretty much every situation I felt inappropriate and inadequate. Too aware of myself as a part of this public event with so many other families going through the same thing, but also, of course, feelings of terrible privateness.

EKF: What's it like to write poems like these? How do you approach biography in poetry?

AH: Honestly, I'm really looking forward to not writing poems like these at some point. Or at least not poems that overtly address events I was involved with with my family. It feels really complicated. The poems are about me, about my feelings and responses to events because in many ways that's all I can write about here. I'm not in the military and all I can know about my brother's experiences is what he tells me. So there's some of that, things he talked and wrote about, but I tried to deal mostly with myself because that's all I can really know.

EKF: What do you do with the personal when it intersects the political?

AH: The issue of the political, and the political where it insects biography is an ongoing source of anxiety. I've had so many terrible feelings about it. Like using the words war and soldier and deployment and uniform...these words are just huge. They are so difficult. But the public-ness and the political aspect of these experiences are integral to the experiences, so writing poems that completely ignored this--poems that just addressed an absence or something like that, or abstracted the events--felt all wrong. I had so many fights with myself like, "really, are you really going to use the word war again?" and "why can't I use the word war? It's a war isn't it?" But the big words feel distancing, so I was/am always conflicted.

I think it's hard, too, because political poems (and really, I'm not sure what exactly constitutes a political poem) get a bad rap for a lot of good reasons. There's the risk of being a sort of "speaker outside the event" that looks in and judges without being culpable or present. I don't know. Lately I've really liked looking at Wave Book's State of the Union. There's this great range of poems there that deal with the political, the public, whatever, in really thoughtful ways.

EKF: How do you include someone else in a poem without being exploitative?

AH: I really have no idea. This has also been such a concern for me in these recent poems. If to exploit is just to put to use then I'm trying to think of it as, In these particular poems, I put my memories to use and my memories involve other people. Really, over and over, I keep thinking that the best solution I have right now is to focus on myself, be certain the speaker is always a version of me, which sounds, maybe, selfish. But really, if what's there is what comes in through my own eyeballs and ears and hands, then I can be responsible for that, or at least I can answer for that in some way.

EKF: What's your relationship to reading? I know that my relationship to reading (poetry, and all texts) shifts constantly, and I'm always in conversation with myself as a reader, not just a writer. Any current favorite poets or writers?

AH: Reading is definitely a big part of writing for me. I think this is especially true when I'm trying to work through difficult parts of a poem, or think about how to approach the sometimes vague poem-blob in my head in some way...to think of how someone else did it in a way that felt successful to me. The books of poetry that have affected me most strongly in the last several months would definitely be WS Merwin's The Lice, and more recently, Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract. I memorized a couple of short Merwin poems last month and have been thinking about how reading impacts my writing most when it really inhabits my brain, my day to day thoughts when I'm waiting in line or something, thinking about how a poem looks or feels or wondering at a really weird, magic moment in it, and then trying to bring something of that love to my own writing. Of course, it doesn't always transfer.

Emily Kendal Frey lives in Portland, Oregon and teaches at Portland Community College. She is the author of Airport (Blue Hour 2009), Frances (Poor Claudia 2010), and The New Planet (Mindmade Books 2010).

Alisa Heinzman lives in Oakland. She co-edits the journal CALAVERAS with Sara Mumolo, and is the poetry editor for MARY Magazine. She will graduate from Saint Mary's College of California's MFA program this month and has several poems forthcoming in the SF Public Press.

Vincent Standley talks with Sandy Florian for Studio One's reading on Friday, June 4th

2010-05-23T15:54:00.000-07:00

Vincent Standley: Repetition is central to all of your work. In Prelude to Air from Water, it operates not only on the level of the line but of the structure of the work as a whole. It would be easy to say each piece is a variation on a theme, but that usually excludes the idea of repetition by assuming each variation extends from some kind of master iteration of the theme. In Prelude, rather than extending from something, the pieces are set side-by-side in a sort of static refusal of their origin, making repetition the thing by which we understand or don't understand their similarities and differences. I'm curious if there's an implicit questioning of the idea that knowledge, like progress, develops over time toward a better or more complete condition?

Sandy Florian: Well, if you are asking ask whether I think knowledge might be tied to an origin, tied to some knowledge event from which it rises like an optimistic stock price, or whether I think knowledge in its static repetition is more like the skyline of a city of identical buildings, then I would answer that the book is a sort of stupid skyline, or that doesn’t believe in knowledge at all. None of the "moments" that are encountered in the book lead to epiphany, cumulative or not. And those episodes where The Moment doesn't appear, when small epiphanic moments can be said to occur, well, those episodes are actually dream episodes, or episodes that are submerged in the unconscious that has no real sense of time, even though that's not necessarily meant to be clear to the reader. So, in that sense, the book refuses awareness of its characters, though it is hyper aware of itself, and with this hyper awareness, it permits the reader a knowledge that is separate from any literal knowledge discovered in the book.

But it’s funny, this question of repetition in my work. Because I never intend to use repetition. Prelude started as one little episode with The Moment in it. After I wrote it, I realized it was done, but not done - finished, but incomplete. So I wrote another only to find the pair was finished but not complete. So I kept writing them over and over in a sort of meditation until it taught me something about itself, about the vanity of knowledge, its ludicrousness or its hubris. But I had to learn it, I suppose, and therein lies the tension of knowledge.

VS: The space of not knowing while writing is very powerful and necessary. It's as if you must first learn from the work before enforcing a set of objectives, even though in practice that order is often reversed. How do you negotiate between what the work teaches about itself and what you want it to do?

SF: I know this is probably weird, but there is usually no "me" in my books. Okay, I take that back. I am in the work, but only to kink out the phonetics, to smooth out the sentences, to hear it out loud, and make it sound. But in terms of content, I don't ever start out with any objectives. I learn entirely from the writing what the writing wants. My books inform themselves, and I completely trust them. Even The Tree of No, with its "knowledge event" and seemingly strategized narrative. I did some research, yes, and toyed a lot with dictionaries and the bible, of course, but I toyed only because the book informed the process. So, in that sense, all I carry to the page when I write is faith.

VS: This reminds me of something Maurice Blanchot writes in "The Essential Solitude": "To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence. I make perceptible, by my silent mediation, the uninterrupted affirmation, the giant murmuring upon which language opens and thus becomes image, becomes imaginary, becomes a speaking depth, an indistinct plenitude which is empty. This silence has its source in the effacement toward which the writer is drawn."

I noticed that Francisco Aragon interviewed you a while back for the Institute of Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. In response to the question "Are you comfortable with the label Latino Writer?," you say the work would be dishonored without the identity of your Latino heritage, while personally the identity is less important. Can you expand on this distinction between work and author?

SF: Well, yes, I can try to expand. I think my work is hugely informed by my heritage, but my heritage is distinctly not homogeneous. Yes, my heritage is Latino, but it’s a hybrid between Colombia and Puerto Rico, two lands that have distinctly different cultures. To complicate matters, I was raised not in Colombia or Puerto Rico but in Venezuela and Mexico and Panama. And because my father worked for a French company when I was young, I spent my summers in France. I went to college in London. It sounds fancier than it is because it wasn’t necessarily fancy. Still, who I am is informed by where I’ve been.

Yes, my work tends to draw, I think, from the magical realism of writers like Garcia Marquez, the Kafkaesque attitudes of writers like Borges, the problematic proesy of Galeano, but this isn’t because I’m a big follower of their styles, per se. It’s more, I think, because the Latino culture is markedly fanatical. Distinctly involved with the impossible, the invisible, the peripheral, the intensely problematical, and these are borders I enjoy crossing. So yes, I think my work is distinctly Latino.

As far as my own identity, though, I’m not sure. This is possibly because it’s more difficult for me to look at myself than it is to look at my work, and even in my work, every time I have characters who can look at themselves, they tend to incriminate themselves, or to dismember themselves, as many of my characters in On Wonderland and Waste. Perhaps I prefer to reside in the interstices of culture, navigating my way to myself. But perhaps this interstitial preference too is Latino. That I wouldn’t argue against for a moment.

VS: What are you working on now?

SF: It’s called Boxing the Compass, and it’s a winner! It’s a pro-feminine, Virigina Woolfish, character driven, event disclosing, creative nonfictionesque novel/novella with progressive narrative and sequential chapters galore. It focuses on science, on the ecological devastation of the oceans and how it affects the psychology of my everywoman character. I'm in the middle of it and hope to finish it by September. Stay tuned.

The other book I am working on is a collaboration with Robert Savino Oventile called Sophia Lethe Talks Doxobox Down. And it's turning out to be a fantastically morbid collection of dialog, each using specific rhetorical devices. It's a gas, and I love both of these books.

Sandy Florian is the author of 5 books of prose poetry: Telescope, 32 Pedals & 47 Stops, The Tree of No, Prelude to Air From Water, and On Wonderland & Waste. She lives in San Francisco where she is an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts and one of the "other" editors for Tarpaulin Sky Journal.

Formerly the editor of 3rd bed, Vincent Standley's fiction has appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Encyclopedia, Esquire, Parakeet, Post Road, Quarterly West, and Salt Hill Journal. Essays have appeared in Rules of Thumb: 71 Authors Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations and Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature.