Friday, December 7th featuring poetry by Rusty Morrison, giovanni singleton, and Sarah Valentine plus music by Alberto Madueño

Come join us on Friday, December 7th at 7:30 PM 
for a night of poetry and music with poets Rusty Morrison, giovanni singleton, and Sarah Valentine, plus music by singer/songwriter Alberto Madueño!

Snacks and beverages will also be served at the event. 

Thanks for reading and we hope to see you there!

 Photo by William Bagnell

Rusty Morrison's -After Urgency- won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize, -Book of the Given– is available from Noemi Press, -the true keeps calm biding its story- won the Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, the Northern California Book Award, Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, the DiCastagnola Award from Poetry Society of America. –Whethering- won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She has received the Bogin, Hemley, Winner, and DiCastagnola Awards from The Poetry Society of America. Her poems and/or essays have appeared in, or are forthcoming from A Pubic Space, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Lana Turner, Pleiades, VOLT. She is co-publisher of Omnidawn Publishing (www.omnidawn.com).

  Photo by Sarah Collins

giovanni singleton is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a critically acclaimed journal dedicated to experimental work by artists and writers of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. Ascension (Counterpath Press), her debut collection, received the 81st California Book Award Gold Medal for poetry. She has been selected for inclusion in the Poetry Society of America’s biennial New American Poets series. Her work was featured in San Francisco’s 1st Visual Poetry and Performance Festival, on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), and in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Writing for Children, What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, and I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. She has taught poetry at the de Young Museum, Saint Mary's College, and Naropa University.

Sarah Valentine’s first book of translations, Into the Snow: Poems by Gennady Aygi, is a collection of poems translated from the Russian-language poetry of Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi (1934-2006).  Individual translations have been featured in the Two Lines anthology Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, as well as in journals such as diode, Circumference, and Redaction: Poetry and Poetics.  Sarah has a BA in Russian Studies and Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in Russian Literature from Princeton University.  She has received a Templeton Foundation grant for her research at Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion and a prestigious Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at UCLA.  Sarah lives and Los Angeles and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside, in the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages where she teaches Russian literature, comparative literature, film, and critical theory.  

 

Photo by Vicente Peñuela

Alberto Madueño has been playing and recording music for over a decade. Not concerned with advertising or satisfying any genre, his methods, instruments and techniques remain in a state of constant motion and redirection. Most recently, he has been active as a sound scrapper and creative adviser for the El Gato Film Collective, a teleological experiment group focused on blurring painting past what is still. He wants to be better than he is, always, he says. And that, the only way to do that is to keep working, long beyond the point of reason or explicit intent. He is affected by light. He wants more, and he often still wonders. Is there life on mars?  

Friday, November 2nd with poets Andrew Joron, Dora Malech, and Michael Leong. Plus the theremin/percussion duo Cosmists!

Join us on Friday, November 2^nd at 7:00 PM for an All Souls Show of poetry and music with Andrew Joron, Dora Malech and Michael Leong!  

The night will also feature theremin and drums duo Andrew Joron and Mark Pino, otherwise known as Cosmists.  

Please note, this event begins at 7:00 PM. Beverages and snacks will be served.

Special thanks also to our emcee for the evening, Robert Andrew Perez!

 

Andrew Joron is the author of Trance Archive: Newand Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010). Joron’s previous poetry collections include The Removes (Hard Press, 1999), Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003), and The Sound Mirror (Flood Editions, 2008). The Cry at Zero, a selection of his prose poems and critical essays, was published by Counterpath Press in 2007. From the German, he has translated the Literary Essays of Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch (Stanford University Press, 1998) and The Perpetual Motion Machine by the proto-Dada fantasist Paul Scheerbart (Wakefield Press, 2011). Joron plays theremin in the dark ambient group Cloud Shepherd as well as in the instrumental rock trio Crow Crash Radio.

Dora Malech was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1981 and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. She earned a BA in Fine Arts from Yale College in 2003 and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2005. She has been the recipient of a Frederick M. Clapp Poetry Writing Fellowship from Yale, a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship from the Writers’ Workshop, a Glenn Schaeffer Poetry Award, a Writer’s Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy, and a 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. The Waywiser Press published her first full-length collection of poems, Shore Ordered Ocean, in 2009 and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center published her second collection, Say So, in 2011. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, Best New Poets, American Letters & Commentary, Poetry London, and The Yale Review. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa; Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, New Zealand; Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois; and Saint Mary’s College of California in Moraga, California. Her paintings and drawings are available at the Chait Galleries in Iowa City, Iowa. She lives in Iowa City, where she writes, draws, teaches, and coordinates the Iowa Youth Writing Project, an arts outreach program for children and teens.

Michael Leong is the author of two books of poetry: e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009) and Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions, 2012), which won a "Face Out" grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.  He has also published a translation of the Chilean poet Estela Lamat, I, the Worst of All (BlazeVOX [books], 2009).  He is the recipient of a 2012 &NOW Award for his chapbook The Philosophy of Decomposition/Re-Composition as Explanation (Delete Press, 2011), and his newest chapbook, Words on Edge, was chosen by Rob Fitterman as the winner of Plan B Press' 2012 Poetry Contest.  He is a lecturer at Rutgers University where he completed a dissertation on the contemporary long poem and the archive.

Mark Pino began playing the drums at age eleven. Previous to that he had loved listening to music, and his parents’ catholic tastes in music opened up his ears to many different styles. Pino began playing publicly in the SF Bay Area in the early 1990’s, and since then has played regionally and nationally in many different bands. Mark considers himself a band player; the interaction with other musicians remains important to him, as does the act of manipulating physical instruments for sound and music making. Over the course of his career, Pino has played with all sorts of people in all sorts of settings, and is grateful to all of them, as well as to his teachers who shared their knowledge with him.  

Robert Andrew Perez lives in Berkeley, California with two biologists. Unlike most poets, he is literally rolling in the dough, working for a deep dish pizza company not in Chicago. He holds various other odd jobs, including but not limited to mobile DJing for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs and miscellaneous aca-drone for the English departments of UC Berkeley and Saint Mary’s College (where he earned his BA and MFA, respectively). He is also the blog manager for the Underpass Reading Series and an associate editor for speCt!, a book arts letterpress poetry imprint, both based on Oakland. He is the recipient of the Lannan Prize for Saint Mary’s College and a Lambda Literary fellow. His recent work can be found in publications such as The Cortland Review, Writing Without Walls, and The Offending Adam.

A Conversation: Farrah Field and Dan Magers

chaos + lyric = accessible experimentation

Farrah Field: During grad school, we were asked to go around the room and say something that we wanted to happen to our poetry, a way that we would want it to change over the course of the semester. I said I wanted more controversy. Everyone else had more complicated answers, treatises on form or language or grammar. At the time I wanted controversy on a surface level; I wanted controversy—discomfort, loudness, irreverence, something that you would want to talk or know more about. I like poetry so much that I need to do something to it to make it normal, like poetry is something I need to mud wrestle or something within one’s body.

Dan Magers: I think we are similar in that I was also looking for a chaos in my work and was less interested in consciously connecting it to a poetic movement or intellectual underpinning. While I’m interested in poetics, and the discussions and debates that surround them, it also seems strangely unmoored to why I write poetry. In my book Partyknife, I think I was finally able to replicate on the one hand the wild jumps that the mind makes between different thoughts and emotions that is almost destabilizing, and on the other hand, something close to a lyric “I” that is reasonably recognizable as such. I’m pleased when I hear people saying it is somehow both experimental and accessible and a quick read. Seems to me like the best of both worlds.

FF: This is an interesting equation: chaos + lyric = accessible experimentation. As a bookseller, I watch people physically react to your book, you know, the very act of opening it and saying “wow.” While selling books I encounter many people who don’t often read poetry and their most common response to Partyknife is that they didn’t know these things could be done in poetry.

DM: Do you still aim for controversy in your work? You said you wanted it on a surface level—does it now occupy a more subterranean level of your work? When you say you have an inclination to make your work more “normal,” is it because you think the chaotic or controversial drive in your work would make an unpalatable, or even unsuccessful, work? Do you think that people wouldn’t get it? Do you think your second book Wolf and Pilot is more—or less—“normal” than your first book Rising?

FF: I don’t think I aim for controversy as much as I did when I was younger, but I’m really interested in power! I want the power to constantly change and create and take risks; I want to write and be something powerful. Rising is so different from Wolf and Pilot because with Rising I had a gut-wrenching anger about being the surviving sibling of my murdered sister. It’s so uncomfortable to talk about, and the only way I could was to go after it in poetry. I know it’s probably cheesy to say, but poetry was how I could begin to sort out the feelings surrounding my sister’s death. Poetry is the only art form that listens while doing all the other things it does. Wolf and Pilot is so different in that I approached a genre, seeing what I could do with a sort of fairy tale, like Snow White meets Twin Peaks. I wanted to make something up, experiment and invent in a way I never had before. Sexuality, both childish and adultish, and the themes of sisterhood and loss are still unavoidably present, but they surface in a world I created, as opposed to being led by the very real and very tragic event central to Rising.

Getting back to chaos, which I really like and is more or less what I wanted to evoke with controversy, I couldn’t help but think of your lines: “I’m the Jesus of making out with girls drunk” and “Sometimes I think that I’m doing all this cross training / so I can do more cocaine.” We could obviously say so much about these lines, but what is most striking to me is their chaos and irreverence. Perhaps in these two lines, is the chaos self-effacing? Is chaos the attempt at making art that is normal-seeming (accessible), spiced with feelings of failure, a general lack of health/stability, yet ritualistic, and yet poetic?

DM: I don’t think chaos needs to be self-effacing per se. And maybe chaos is the result instead of the attempt? I think I worried that people who knew me who read my book would think I secretly hated them, because I think a there is a lot of anger in the book that is directed from the speaker to the other characters (and at life generally). I was talking to my therapist about this, and he made the point that I often turn my anger inwards, against myself. That happens in my life, but it’s definitely present in the book too. And I think the sort of love/hate thing that goes on with the other characters in the book, as well as in the speaker himself, is what gives the book its animating force.

I had started therapy while I was working on editing my book for Birds, LLC. It was kind of perfect timing, because I felt like I was able to more directly channel my ideas and emotions. I think while I was learning about how and what I wanted to write throughout my twenties, I had to go through many, many iterations of “obscuring” what was driving me to write. And when I say obscuring, I don’t mean deliberately. More like what was driving me was a self-secret that I’m in the process of unlocking. One of the things I needed to do when revising the book was to improve the ending, which turned into a really intense experience. During the second-to-last dive into it before the ending was finished, I felt like I was under a dark spell, and it was like I was physically surrounded by a despair that was touching my body. It felt almost dangerous. But it turned out great.

Do you think writing Wolf and Pilot was emotionally and psychologically easier than writing Rising? Were there times when the writing of it felt particularly intense?

FF: Hell yeah! At first Wolf and Pilot seemed so easy. I wrote many of the poems with the collective voices of four little girls in mind, while watching really young cattle curiously and timidly approach my car on a ranch in California. All the while I was thinking about the collective “the girls” in The Virgin Suicides and how that concept is unified as one in Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls. I guess there is the collective consciousness thing, but also the collective way in which “the girls” are handled and treated. I was also reading about Iraq and about torture, particularly Naomi Klein’s investigation of it and Glenn Greenwald’s reporting of it, and what terrified me the most was how torture (at least US government-sanctioned) targeted consciousness, disrupting it so much so that victims, sleep exhausted or deprived, don’t even know if it’s night or day. That place of being lost, on which someone actually wrote a handbook, that someone actually does this to other people, began to creep into the girls’ reasonably safe space in Wolf and Pilot. They’re safe in their collective consciousness—they run away together, they choose their teacher to take care of them, but one of them allows herself to be taken and dies.

So in the Rising sense, this territory of disrupted sisterhood and loss is of course dark and very familiar to me. It occurs to me now that Wolf and Pilot and Partyknife both address youth in very different ways. My work approaches childhood and the adultish nature of childishness and yours confronts being twenty-something young. Do you think your work will continue to investigate youth and youthful approaches? Our books are set in incredibly different places—yours seems so cityish and mine so woodsy. (Shall we compare book trailers here?? ha ha). Is city life still influencing your work in the same way?

DM: It’s hard for me to talk in print about what I want to do next, since I’m mindful of the fact that what I’m working on may not, and will probably not, be successful. One of the hundred reasons I’m happy I’m no longer in my 20s is that I spent so much time working on poetry ideas and projects that didn’t go anywhere, which made me feel like “what’s the point?” It’s easier for me to just write now, knowing that what I’m working on won’t necessarily turn out how I first imagine it. I’m doing a lot of writing right now, and experimenting with new ways in which to generate and manipulate text, and I’m enjoying the freedom of not writing towards any particular goal, whether it’s writing a second book, or making more publishable poems to place in lit mags. Pretty soon, urgency will kick in, and I’ll focus on something, but for now, I’m just writing.

FF: Last but not least, I want to ask you about your relationship to poetry as an editor. We have both worked together, workshopping together, and you have been my graciously ruthless editor for my chapbook Parents. I have seen very early drafts of Partyknife and in fact still sometimes reminisce on the former title, Sweet Christ How I Love Partyknife. Do you like to read more as an editor or as a poet? Do you feel your work as an editor influences your creative work? You said that the revisions you made with the Birds, LLC edits made the book turn out great; what was it like being on the other side of the editing process?

DM: I really felt like the extensive editorial process that Birds, LLC does was a luxury. Because of the nature of how poetry is generally published, the poet is often left to his or her own resources when writing, and then trying to publish, a poem or book. And often when they publish a book, it’s often published without edits, or maybe with some minor tweaks. I also think sometimes poets (especially poets) get fretful when they do get edits, like they are being faced with a deficiency in their work (and being). I think that maybe my book was more conducive to being edited because of the use of narrative elements as well as the collage-like composition of the book. But since also my day job is at a big publishing company, I think I tend to trust the editorial process more, and understand that writers have blind spots. That said, I definitely read more like a poet than an editor. Everything I read is filtered through what I’m thinking about in my poetry.

What are you writing right now? Do you have a 3rd (or 4th?) book in mind? Does being a poetry book seller affect how and what you want to write, and who you want to write for?

FF: For the past few years I have been working on a series of poems, all of which have the name Amy in the title. I love what the project is doing and how it’s growing, so I just keep it going. The Amy poems have sort of taken a life of their own; they surprise me and it’s really fun working with that. Originally, I started the poems as revenge against an artist who did not allow me to use her art for my first book. I’m grateful she said no because Rising turned out to be such a beautiful book. So over time the poems have delved into investigations of female characters from books and films, the language of female relationships and what they might sounds like in a culture that valued them, and the voices of women revolutionaries such as Ulrika Meinhof.

Lately I have begun a rather in-depth project regarding research on television addiction. I have been going to libraries (any excuse to visit Butler Library!) to research and take notes. I haven’t done any research in so long that it’s daunting, but I’m really getting into it. I actually thought about going back to school and getting some kind of degree in sociology or political science, but my friend Keith told me to write about it, which is a great suggestion because I don’t want to go back to school. I should just write it. I’m not thinking about whether or not any of this will be a book, but I’m really learning so much by being with them, having a focus but being sloppy, letting myself put poems in piles, and making notes in a handmade notebook.

Friday, October 5th with Farrah Field, Jared White, and Dan Magers

Studio One First Fridays presents Farrah Field, Jared White, and Dan Magers— Friday, October 5th @ 7:30 PM

Come early to catch Bites off Broadway @ 5:30! Snacks and beverages will also be provided at the event.
 

Farrah Field is the author of Rising (Four Way Books), Parents (Immaculate Disciples Press), and the forthcoming Wolf and Pilot (Four Way Books). She is co-owner Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop and lives in Brooklyn.

  

Jared White lives in Brooklyn where he is the co-owner of Berl's Brooklyn PoetryShop, a small press poetry bookstore, and the co-curator of Yardmeter Editions, an event series. He is the author of the chapbook YELLOWCAKE, published as part of the Narwhal anthology from Cannibal Books in 2009. His recent poems have appeared in journals such as Sink Review, Esque, Coconut, Harp & Altar, No Dear, We Are So Happy To Know Something, and on the Flying Object web site. His blog is jaredswhite.blogspot.com.  

Dan Magers’s first book of poems, Partyknife, is published by Birds, LLC. He is co-founder and co-editor of Sink Review, an online poetry journal, founder and editor of Immaculate Disciples Press, a handmade chapbook press focused on poetry and visual arts collaborations. He lives in Brooklyn.

A Conversation: Jared Stanley & Laura Wetherington

Jared Stanley: Hi Laura, did you see the weird sun this morning? Did we talk about poetry when we carpooled yesterday? Did Blake come up as we got into the Tahoe Basin? How's that?

Laura Wetherington: I did not see the weird sun the sun the sun. I did see weird clouds—weird in that they were clouds and this is Nevada and not Ann Arbor or Seattle. And then the sunset that went along with it. It was cherub-worthy. Blakeian.

Been reading some Blake. Trying to figure out his deal. I was reading parts of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell yesterday, which made me think about difficulty in poetry. How much deciphering tone is like deciphering anything in an opaque text. Context is everything. Like Eric Zboya has an algorhithmic translation of Mallarme's Un Coup de Des, and without his postscript talking about the 3D nature of his ink blots, how they match the texture in the original poem, I would have missed all that depth.

Anyway, speaking of cherub-worthy sunsets and Blake, didn't we see a cross in the sky on our commute? Or what did we see? And you talked some about the cover of your new book? Can you say more about that picture on the cover?

JS: I guess "What did we see" is basically an animating principle for art - one ventures a guess, and gets into a kind of humility by acknowledging that an answer to such a question is always a bit tentative, murky, 'endarkend'.

That's what the cover of "The Weeds" is about too–- it's a photograph by a great friend, the artist Gabie Strong. The photo's called "Untitled (Mystic Truth)". A photograph of two contrails crossing to form an X in a desert sky. In one sense, it's crossing god out of the sky, or providing a location to look for something to believe in— 'x marks the spot' and all that. But because this huge X in the sky is the result of technology, it presents a kind of awesome paradox. Strong and I are both pretty in love with the mystic, occult aspects of the military industrial complex—the way technology is put to irrational ends despite all the kind of rational thought required to make them happen, and the way that so many of us don't stop to read these 'signs and wonders' for what they truly are - atavistic rituals of purification, or the worship of raw power. And things like contrails are just so powerful—they connote our absolute dominion over the earth. One feels both horror and pride, because, as a popular Berkeley bumper sticker of the 80's used to say, "Nature Bats Last." 

I also like that it's photography, and subject to chance, and luck, and human pattern making—you write "We cannot get away from the way our minds solidify", yet by the end of a poem "and then a sea change"— poems and patterns and everyone - say more... 

LW: You're talking about the title poem of the book. When I think about minds solidifying, of course it's a metaphorical thing--getting in a rut, whatnot—but it's also an anatomical idea—that our brain accumulates deposits, or buildup of other outside materials that slows down and deteriorates our processes. It's a relationship between content and form. We're living it.

There's also a partner-line to the one you mentioned: "We choose into what we cannot get out of:/the way we hold our bodies." I studied bodywork and massage for a number of years, so I think about the body a lot. We develop soft tissue defenses in response to injury (scar tissue). It impedes movement and changes the way we hold ourselves upright. Our bodies become maps of our lives in that way. That's why every person's gait is so fascinating—we're each a walking atlas of our pasts. I think about patterns in terms of the body (patterns of movement, the body as a complex system) and that seems inextricable from some kind of one-to-one correspondence with patterns of mind. Like we have those same deposits of scar tissue in our thinking.

Scar tissue (in a real sense or in a metaphorical sense) seems to be an aberration from the natural patterning of our bodies—it's chaos compared to the smooth lines of muscle fibers. This, oddly, brings me to poetry, because I'm interested in what it means for a work to exist arrhythmically, or atonally. It seems to me that chance operations show us that we're always working within a set of natural forms or rules. One can't get outside of rhythm—one can only introduce unfamiliar patterns (sea changes, perhaps).

How 'bout you, friend? How do you think about the music of a poem, the rhythm of your writing? What patterns are you following or working against? (I think of a moment like "All along the orange Chesapeake water/hypoxic color the color of the morning's first/slow-handed cup of coffee..." with all its visual and aural alliteration...)

JS: Yes, to bodywork, and to the idea of reading a person's history in a gait - that is the most amazing melding of time, damage and physicality I've heard in awhile. Wow! I'm a little afraid of what my gait communicated the first time we met!

I'm especially interested in your description of the scars of a lifetime as aberrant – automatically this brings me to the parallel scars that both Ahab and the whale carry— that their motives are physical, almost allegories – maybe scars are notches of time?

And, just as scars mark time on a person's body, I have this great desire to keep the act of reading physical— to mark time on the body in rhythm. Poems are a good medium for physicality in writing, because they foreground all those material parts of language. I like to imagine my poems as workouts regimens for the vocal cords, the tongue, and the mouth—to yoke phonemes together, to make a line 'chunky' - I want it to feel as though a reader is chewing on something when reading one of my poems aloud—I write them to be read aloud, and I revise strictly by ear. Keeping things physical.  

So, that line you quoted: 'hypoxic color the color of the morning's first" - the line is an agglomeration of iambs, trochees and anapests, and is actually trying to resist falling into a repetition of any of these feet—the line is hard to pronounce, and that difficulty of saying, I hope, reminds the reader of some unused muscles in the neck, some unfamiliar shape the tongue might take. So that a strangeness of poetry is not just conceptual. It's physical. Sometimes I like to touch my face and neck when revising a poem—asking with my hand, 'does my body have to work hard to say this?'—It is an attempt to create a unity between the poem's construction and the reader's muscles. 

 

Jared Stanley is the author of The Weeds, Book Made of Forest and four chapbooks, including How the Desert Did Me In. He co-edits Mrs. Maybe, and is a member of the art collective Unmanned Minerals. He is a 2012-2014 Research Fellow at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, and teaches at Sierra Nevada College. Stanley lives in Reno, Nevada.

Laura Wetherington (http://laurawetherington.com/)‘s first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance (Fence Books 2011), was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. A chapbook, Dick Erasures, is available as an ebook from Red Ceilings Press (http://issuu.com/theredceilings/docs/dick_erasures) and a number of articles and interviews about collaboration are available at One Pause Poetry (http://onepausepoetry.org/follow). 

She co-founded and co-edits textsound.org (www.textsound.org) with Anna Vitale. Wetherington lives in Nevada, where she teaches creative writing at Sierra Nevada College and is at work on a series of fake translations.

Friday, September 7th with Jared Stanley, Laura Wetherington, and Lindsey Boldt

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Studio One First Fridays presents Jared Stanley, Laura Wetherington, and Lindsey Boldt—Friday, September 7^th @ 7:30 PM

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Come early to catch Bites off Broadway @ 5:30! Snacks and beverages will also be provided at the event.

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Jared Stanley is the author of The Weeds, Book Made of Forest and four chapbooks, including How the Desert Did Me In. He co-edits Mrs. Maybe, and is a member of the art collective Unmanned Minerals. He is a 2012-2014 Research Fellow at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, and teaches at Sierra Nevada College. Stanley lives in Reno, Nevada.

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Laura Wetherington (http://laurawetherington.com/)‘s first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance (Fence Books 2011), was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. A chapbook, Dick Erasures, is available as an ebook from Red Ceilings Press (http://issuu.com/theredceilings/docs/dick_erasures) and a number of articles and interviews about collaboration are available at One Pause Poetry (http://onepausepoetry.org/follow). She co-founded and co-edits textsound.org (www.textsound.org) with Anna Vitale. Wetherington lives in Nevada, where she teaches creative writing at Sierra Nevada College and is at work on a series of fake translations.

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Lindsey Boldt considers herself an itinerant culture-worker in training.  So far, this means she writes poems, plays and prose, edits books and chapbooks, teaches poetry in public schools and has just begun a new project building a mobile library, which she will take on tour with her partner and collaborator, Steve Orth in September.  She is the author of "Oh My, Hell Yes" and "Overboard". 

Angela Hume talks with Rebecca Farivar

Angela Hume: Rebecca, dear poet and woman friend, I am so delighted to talk with you about your poetry in this format! Over the years we’ve known each other—since 2006, when we met in graduate school—we’ve discussed poetics and practice at length. It’s been exciting to watch your project evolve. Here I want to ask you some questions that I think gesture toward some of the key formal and thematic concerns of your work. 

So. To begin. Your book is called Correct Animal, and in it I spot geese, whales, a beetle, a mammoth... Even human figures become animal, “noising and flapping.” Can you talk about animals and “animality” in 
your work?


Rebecca Farivar: That is a tricky question to answer, but one I thought about a lot as I was bringing the collection together. The animals and the humans in the poems share many qualities. As you pointed out, the humans take on animal qualities at times, but the animals are attributed with human motivation and emotion, too. So they blur together for me. Whether human or animal, they all operate under the control of instinct and pattern, as well as exerting thought and reason. In that way, the humans and the animals register as the same force in the poem for me.

AH: You say “whether human or animal,” but it seems to me that the poems are actually working to deconstruct this limit. Also, it’s interesting to me that you name the human/animal in the poems “force.” Can you say more about “force”?

RF: Force as in energy. The animals and humans in my poems have energy that is distinct from the plants or objects. They can exert themselves. They act. Regardless of when or why they act, or even if they have control of their actions, the fact that they move on their own makes them feel like a force to harness, rather than a material to manipulate. I’m not saying that they act on their own in the sense that they are just coming out of me onto the page. There are no Martians or Muses taking over my brain and speaking through me. But rather that’s just a true thing about how animals and humans exist in the world—we have the ability to control our motion. And because of that we can attribute reason to those actions. This fundamental connection between humans and animals is what leads to that deconstruction of the line between us.

I’ve tried to play with objects in my poems by imbuing them with same motivation and thought as humans. I even published a poem several years ago called “The Humanification of Things.” But there ultimately is something that doesn’t resonate when an object is thinking. (You’ll notice that poem is not in the book.) It just doesn’t matter if a blender’s scared or a table wonders about its place in the world. Their lack of movement so clearly marks them as not alive that anything that seems human-like just won’t stick.

AH: In other words, perhaps: the table is worldless. That’s Heidegger. And that’s a conversation for another day! But just briefly: I appreciate that, for you, the poem is a vehicle for philosophical speculation. For you, writing poetry is doing ontology.

Let’s talk about your poetry as it relates to place. I want to ask a couple of questions. First of all, you’re a Bay Area native. Not surprisingly, the materials of your
 poems are often distinctly Northern Californian. There’s morning Bay fog; the smoke and ash of the region’s fires; coastal debris; the big, empty sky. How does your poetry relate to space, place, and local
 (material) cultures? Secondly, you’ve spent several years living and working abroad, in France and in Germany, since writing (much of) Correct Animal. How has this experience affected your poetics? Do you ever find yourself doing a
 kind of “travel poetics”?

RF: I’m going to answer these two questions together because in my head they are related. I have thought a lot about the impact of place and how it influences my writing, and perhaps because I’ve been thinking about place in particular for the last few years as I’ve been writing abroad, I can see it other poets’ work as well. Recently I was flipping through some poetry books on my shelf and it just happened that I picked up two books in a row that were written by poets in California, and both those books referenced Eucalyptus. And then I happened to pick up two books that were written by poets in the Northeast and they both referenced bears. So it seems only natural that the local place around you while you're writing, whether you’re from there or not, would start to seep into the work. If every day you walk down a street lined by Eucalyptus, Eucalyptus becomes part of the materials you work with to build your poems. It’s in your space, so it’s in your head, whether you realize it or not.



That’s something I’ve come to really realize from living abroad. Bonn is on the Rhein and I would see the river almost every day, just on my daily commute. Many of the poems I wrote while living in Germany have imagery from the river in some way or the other, so much so that I’ve assembled a chapbook with these poems and titled it Am Rhein.

Perhaps it seems obvious that the local place would enter the work, but it’s something that I didn’t appreciate or notice before because, as you pointed out, I’m from Northern California and most of the poems in Correct Animal were written in Northern California as well. So it seemed like those poems were more influenced by my past experiences than the actual landscape as I was experiencing it at the moment, when in fact looking back, I think it was the other way around. It’s not the original place but the current one that has the most impact for me. 


Maybe this seems obvious, but I really expected that the German language would have had more of an effect on my writing than the place—maybe I just wanted it to have more of an effect on my writing because I wanted to feel like I knew German better than I do! But really the language has had little impact. Sure, I do have some poems that use a German word here or there, but German grammar, structure, or sensibility are nowhere in the new poems. What is there are rivers, castles, trains—pieces of the Rheinland. I don't think of this as a travel poetics, but just a fact of place.

AH: Ah, the Rheinland. As you know, it’s been my home for the past year, too. I look forward to reading your new manuscript. 

I’d like to ask you about your form as it relates to your content. Your poems are incredibly compressed, and in this way the bodies, objects, and materials that constitute them—so daily in nature—are rendered strange. On my reading, there’s more than a touch of Williams here. “No ideas but in things”?


RF: Yes, I do subscribe to the Williams line of thought on images! I don’t think I ever consciously thought that I wanted to write like an Imagist poet, but ultimately I aim to create an impression of an emotion or sensation, and usually it’s tied to an image. I do remember being drawn to the Imagist poets when I first started studying poetry in college. I love it when I immediately feel something from a poem and don’t really understanding why I felt it, but still not doubting the feeling. I try to recreate that same experience with my own writing.

AH: The type of poetics you’re describing actually sounds very Romantic. And I do mean Romantic-with-a-capital-R—as in that lyric that draws from local, “natural” settings to achieve or name an insight (to name one capital-R Romanticism). To what extent do you see yourself as drawing from the Romantics? 

RF: I have a complicated relationship with the Romantics. I don’t normally gravitate to those poets, but when I’m forced to read and really think about the work in a detailed way, like when I had to teach “Ode to a Nightingale” in Germany, I do appreciate their complexity. But when you present the Romantics in comparison to my own poetic intent, I can see the connection you’re making. Though when I’m using the pieces from my local environment, it’s not to exalt the natural world, but rather just another material making the poems. I also feel like the Romantics have a much clearer sense that what they’re expressing is a truth about the world and I think my poems are much more ambiguous—I hope a feeling or emotion comes through and feels authentic, but I also know that it’s not “true” for everyone (or even every speaker in my poems). It’s an experience or feeling that happens in the world, not a truth about all existence. But maybe I’m being a little too hard on Romantics there.

AH: It’s good to be hard on them, since most of us are Romantics ourselves—at least to a certain degree. And again, the Romanticism we’re talking about is just one form of it. There are many.

I want to ask you about the women in your poems. From an unnamed “she” at the center of so many of the poems to the female protagonists in American literature who crop up in the middle section, women's bodies populate your book. In the poems there’s also talk of conception, wombs, birthing, and milk. Is this is a feminine and/or feminist poetics?

RF: Once last year, after I gave a reading, an older man asked me if I was a mother, and I said no, to which he said, “Oh, well you write like you’ve had children.” And that is definitely true, and something I’ve sort of wondered about in my writing, why I use so much birth/pregnancy imagery when I have not experienced it myself. I think it does come down to the fact that I am distinctly interested in expressing a feminine poetics. My speakers are female and I assert that they are.

That being said, one thing I’ve been concerned about is whether I use the female body as a crutch to explain or access the female experience—the body becomes shorthand for woman. I think I start to get away from that shorthand in the middle section of Correct Animal in trying to speak to these female characters from American literature about their experiences in a way that isn’t precious or instructive to the reader, but a little snarky and unexpected. But of course there are still lots of babies and mothers in that section, as well.

These days I’m trying to move away from using the female body so much in my work. I’m still concerned with having a distinctly female voice at the center of the poems, but doing that without drawing only on the body.

AH: I don’t think you use the female body as a crutch. I think yours is a poetics that thinks the world in and through experiences of embodiment. It’s a way of asserting the actuality of female embodied experience as it relates to all of the other materials. It’s a form of insistence. Recall Rich: “No one has imagined us.”

RF: Oh, well, thank you—I’m glad that it doesn’t come across as a crutch! Actually your reference to Rich is so crucial here because she is a poet who has had a great influence on me. The first poetry book I read and owned outside of a classroom was Diving Into the Wreck. Her commitment to the female experience instantly drew me to her work early on and, thematically speaking, still influences me today.

AH: I know that you follow comedy culture—writing, standup, podcasts,
 etc. And while I wouldn’t describe Correct Animal as “funny,” the tones of the book are wonderfully slippery. We have lyric sincerity, and then we have irony; we have the intensity of witness, and then we have the breezy tongue-in-cheek. How do you think about humor and tone in poetry? In your poetry?

RF: One thing I am constantly amazed by when I listen to standups talk about their craft (this is via podcasts) is how similar the process of writing comedy is to the process of writing poetry. A lot of the same buzz words come up in conversations around comedy and poetry—there’s lots of talk about trying to get to the truth of an experience, trying to be surprising, trying to be authentic. Poetry and standup—at least good poetry and standup—are both trying to express some reality about what it’s like to exist in the world. So it seems natural that poetry would veer into comedic territories sometimes (the same way standup can veer away from jokes).

I love it when I read a book that has a variety of tones, either within individual poems or across the collection. It feels authentic somehow and keeps me attentive while I’m reading. Both Zachary Schomburg and Mathias Svalina who run Octopus Books have this tonal variety in their books (and I would imagine that shared slipperiness is part of what drew them to my book when I submitted it). I remember reading Mathias’ most recent book I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur (which is technically a novella though I read it like poems) in a park in Berlin and it made me both laugh out loud and cry, two things that are usually embarrassing to do in public when you’re sitting by yourself, but fortunately it was Berlin so no one paid attention to me. I had a very similar experience reading Zach’s most recent book Fjords Vol. 1 in an airport. In that case, people did seem to notice. I’m currently reading Bright Brave Phenomena by Amanda Nadelberg (who read at Studio One in June) and she has this same tonal variety, too, where I’m delighted one moment by a funny or unexpected turn of phrase and then struck by the sheer sincerity or beauty of the next line—sometimes within the same line!

AH: I love the connection you draw between writing comedy and writing poetry. Tone is so difficult to control. I admire how skillful you are at it in your own writing.

It’s been a pleasure, Becks. Thanks so much for this exchange!

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Rebecca Farivar is the author of Correct Animal (Octopus Books, 2011) and chapbook American Lit (Dancing Girl Press, 2011). She holds an MFA in poetry from St. Mary's College of California. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, 6x6, RealPoetik, The Volta, Word for/Word, The American Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Oakland, California

Angela Hume lives in Oakland. She is the author of Second Story of Your Body (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2011). Poetics/poetry have appeared in such journals as Evening Will Come, eccolinguistics, Zoland Poetry, Word for/ Word, and Spinning Jenny. Critical work is forthcoming or has appeared in The Volta, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, ecopoetics, and Evental Aesthetics.