Colby Gillette talks with Claudia Keelan

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

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

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.


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Interviews coming soon!

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readings 7:30pm

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

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

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.

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

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.