Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Dara Wier Talks to Ben Mirov
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!
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Friday September 2nd with music from Peter Burghardt. Poems from Cassandra Smith and Ben Mirov.
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.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Fall First Fridays at Studio One
* 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
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, August 8, 2011
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.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
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.
www.studiooneartcenter.net
Interviews coming soon!
doors, 7
readings 7:30pm
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
Friday, June 3, 2011
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.
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.
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