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

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

Zack Tuck interviews Jenny Drai + a poem feature

Zachary Tuck: It seems that poets still reach most frequently for Classical antiquity yet your work, especially [WULF AND EADWACER], has a deep and complex relationship with Anglo-Saxon literature. Can you tell me about the development of your sense of lineage?

Jenny Drai: More than anything else, I think my sense of wanting to engage with the Anglo-Saxon comes from the dreamlike familiarity of the language itself. As a native speaker of English, with deep life-long roots in the German language, it just seems like a logical progression to engage w/ that literature. But the desire to engage doesn't come from linguistic concerns alone. I really thought the big Angelina Jolie Beowulf flick did a very good job of diminishing any chance for female characters to be portrayed in a non-stereotypical way, whereas other smaller Beowulf films (of which there are several) do not make the same mistake. So I started digging in, reading scholars on the subject. It helps, of course, that I am a big history geek. I like to go far into the past to understand something about the present conundrum. But I mean, I'm also just a geek. I want to know what the past smells like.

ZT: Part of the present conundrum, especially in EADWACER centers on the concept of consent: "Consent is venerable..." and "Consent is delirious,". In section 8, "A number of writers would like to assign you a task. To study the evolution of human emotions, or if / they have evolved at all. The interim project of behavior. Consent is required or you're just flying off the / handle". Do you feel that you, like the speaker of this poem, have been in some way assigned to grapple with this issue? In terms of non-stereotypical portrayal of female desire and agency, can you talk about about why you have chosen consent in particular as a focal point?

JD: I suppose I am the sort of person who grapples with everything I come across. This can be a good thing and a bad thing. But the issue of 'consent' is maybe just a mirror way for me to talk about intent, to understand the beating limits of one particular body, in this case my own. I think when I was a bit younger and more green, I thought if I wasn't moving very quickly in multitudinous directions, I wasn't really alive, as a writer or as a person doing the living. The Eadwacer poem comes from a place of needing to stop and slow down but thus also having to look at what's occurred. It's important to me to involve syntax in this process. It seems to me that a particular grammar could assuage in such a way that could allow for evolution after all. Like, you could actually see the drama unfold. I think I'm sort of answering your question and sort of not. Suffice it to say I have a lot of personal experience in pressured wanting and thus more recently, as this pressure has come to be mostly diffused, I can appreciate anew the clarity of actual, bona fide agency.

ZT: I don't need a straight answer. What is your grammar?

JD: Seriously! What a question. This is how I got to where I'm at. During graduate school, when my poems were being workshopped, I could throw little arrows to catch the word 'disjunctive' in the air (a word I now hate and would never use to describe someone's poetry, because it absolutely begs the question, disjunctive to what). Is there a base camp? But I was mucking about in grammar because I wanted a fractured sentence. It seems to me the poetic fragment does notalways take account of schism, it can be an artifice of it, but for some reason, while sitting on my bedroom floor reading an article on fractal poetry, the fragment felt like a sickness, like an outright lie. Something completely manufactured to lose itself around its edges. And the sentence, as I had heretofore understood it, didn't show its work. Put these words in that order. Like this or like that. And there was a personal story taking place in the grammar as well, an autobiography in syntax, maybe a disorganization reimagined to construct a new whole. But I'm much more relaxed now. I'm trying to let phrases turn across themselves against the line break. A swimming metaphor: like swimming freestyle into the turn, then pushing off on one's back so there's a different line of sight on the way back. Maybe even swimming diagonal into a different lane. To answer
your question: my grammar is texture.

ZT: I lob you an easy one while I meditate on grammar, texture and the backstroke. I know that you're also writing series of novellas. Could you tell us about them? Is there other new writing in the works? And what happened to that blog, hm?

JD: That blog went away because I determined there was very little else humorous to say about the relationship of my cat to Gerard Butler or about the ways Beowulf is adapted in our contemporary mind. I thought, quit while ahead. As for the novellas, the idea of a series is very much in flux right now. I can't help feeling that the writing styles clash, so I'm trying to sort this out. They are actually very much written. Beowulf in Love addresses the perplexing issue of why he doesn't have a queen and is meant to be a soap opera in lyric form.
Dark Age is the adult version of Nim's Island [aah! Gerard Butler reference] & the Haircut focuses on a single act of violence within adomestic relationship that is not otherwise violent. Each of the texts centers around source material from the fifth century and are in turn a bit obsessed with the history of human emotions. And are supposed to be documents of learning. [Wulf and Eadwecer] is actually supposed to be the fourth and final chapter in this project (although it's from the eighth century). I am going for a blend of seams and fusions and the novellas too allow for presence of other genre. Line breaks & such. As for the future, I am in the reading phase for a project that I hope will examine the almost inexhaustible tension between evolution and the religious belief of intelligent design from an atheist's perspective. But as one who is seeking to engage, not merely to proselytize.

Zack Tuck is a poet from Texas, now living in Oakland.

Jenny Drai is from Chicago, Munich, and Oakland. She has work
recently appearing or forthcoming in Calaveras, Court Green, H_NGM_N, Monday Night, and RealPoetik. She currently lives in Orange County, which is interesting.

See Jenny read at the calaveras reading release party at Studio One Arts Center on Feb. 19th. @7:30pm.


from [ Wulf and Eadwacer ]

by Jenny Drai

Adoring the intricate
hiddenness of textual

appeals to my but I’ll speak
her lay and to her hall

just to mead or hearing the scop
and an 8th century pin drop.

I can tell you my story, this story
belongs to mine and just

a woman’s lips and verbs, or.
I tell this shredding to my

people under my own
skin to roughen a twinge.

The speaker shall not shallow
out longing b/c words are gouges.

Eadwacer could seize her and utter her.
His tongue-silt is honey and honey

comes from his stomach
where he smells the orchard

in her hair,
smitten of peaches.