EMILY KENDAL FREY: If I described your poetry as "hesitatingly brave" would that resonate for you?
ALISA HEINZMAN: I feel like I don't know what brave means. Actually, I feel like I don't know what a lot of words mean lately. Calling the poems brave feels really funny to me. They address events that I found and find painful, so if that means they're brave I would think it's in a way that a lot of peoples' poems are.
EKF: Your poems, especially those from the "Brother in the Field" series handle biography with such quiet command, and I appreciate so much the way your images offer themselves to the space they occupy. For example,
Our grandparents,
kind in their distance.
The hard-starched collars, the flag-heavy video.
Am I late? It seems I am.
These lines are bald, unflinching, and evenly applied-- the softest opaque. People (grandparents) and things (collars, flags, video) do exist. Your world is an actual world. But the speaker seems to float within this real world, neither judging or participating in it fully. ("Am I late. It seems I am.") There's a resigned bravery there.
AH: I think that's a nice way to put it, sometimes floating within the real world. That seems like a common yet totally weird experience, especially during intense and difficult times, right? Like telling jokes in hospital waiting rooms, or feeling like you have to have a decidedly sad face at funerals. It's just impossible to feel fully and properly at the times you're supposed to. So then when do you freak out? In the bathroom, on the bus, at the grocery store. It's been years since I've read it, but isn't that a part of Camus' The Stranger? The guy's mom dies and he can't seem to act properly like "a grieving son". Most of these poems are written about memories of my brother going to Iraq as a medic, and as I wrote them I realized that in pretty much every situation I felt inappropriate and inadequate. Too aware of myself as a part of this public event with so many other families going through the same thing, but also, of course, feelings of terrible privateness.
EKF: What's it like to write poems like these? How do you approach biography in poetry?
AH: Honestly, I'm really looking forward to not writing poems like these at some point. Or at least not poems that overtly address events I was involved with with my family. It feels really complicated. The poems are about me, about my feelings and responses to events because in many ways that's all I can write about here. I'm not in the military and all I can know about my brother's experiences is what he tells me. So there's some of that, things he talked and wrote about, but I tried to deal mostly with myself because that's all I can really know.
EKF: What do you do with the personal when it intersects the political?
AH: The issue of the political, and the political where it insects biography is an ongoing source of anxiety. I've had so many terrible feelings about it. Like using the words war and soldier and deployment and uniform...these words are just huge. They are so difficult. But the public-ness and the political aspect of these experiences are integral to the experiences, so writing poems that completely ignored this--poems that just addressed an absence or something like that, or abstracted the events--felt all wrong. I had so many fights with myself like, "really, are you really going to use the word war again?" and "why can't I use the word war? It's a war isn't it?" But the big words feel distancing, so I was/am always conflicted.
I think it's hard, too, because political poems (and really, I'm not sure what exactly constitutes a political poem) get a bad rap for a lot of good reasons. There's the risk of being a sort of "speaker outside the event" that looks in and judges without being culpable or present. I don't know. Lately I've really liked looking at Wave Book's State of the Union. There's this great range of poems there that deal with the political, the public, whatever, in really thoughtful ways.
EKF: How do you include someone else in a poem without being exploitative?
AH: I really have no idea. This has also been such a concern for me in these recent poems. If to exploit is just to put to use then I'm trying to think of it as, In these particular poems, I put my memories to use and my memories involve other people. Really, over and over, I keep thinking that the best solution I have right now is to focus on myself, be certain the speaker is always a version of me, which sounds, maybe, selfish. But really, if what's there is what comes in through my own eyeballs and ears and hands, then I can be responsible for that, or at least I can answer for that in some way.
EKF: What's your relationship to reading? I know that my relationship to reading (poetry, and all texts) shifts constantly, and I'm always in conversation with myself as a reader, not just a writer. Any current favorite poets or writers?
AH: Reading is definitely a big part of writing for me. I think this is especially true when I'm trying to work through difficult parts of a poem, or think about how to approach the sometimes vague poem-blob in my head in some way...to think of how someone else did it in a way that felt successful to me. The books of poetry that have affected me most strongly in the last several months would definitely be WS Merwin's The Lice, and more recently, Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract. I memorized a couple of short Merwin poems last month and have been thinking about how reading impacts my writing most when it really inhabits my brain, my day to day thoughts when I'm waiting in line or something, thinking about how a poem looks or feels or wondering at a really weird, magic moment in it, and then trying to bring something of that love to my own writing. Of course, it doesn't always transfer.
Emily Kendal Frey lives in Portland, Oregon and teaches at Portland Community College. She is the author of Airport (Blue Hour 2009), Frances (Poor Claudia 2010), and The New Planet (Mindmade Books 2010).
Alisa Heinzman lives in Oakland. She co-edits the journal CALAVERAS with Sara Mumolo, and is the poetry editor for MARY Magazine. She will graduate from Saint Mary's College of California's MFA program this month and has several poems forthcoming in the SF Public Press.
Showing posts with label emily kendal frey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label emily kendal frey. Show all posts
Friday, June 4, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Studio One and Calaveras Reading with Jenny Drai, Emily Kendal Frey, Zachary Schomburg and Barbara Claire Freeman
Friday Feb. 18th
Emily Kendal Frey is the author of AIRPORT (Blue Hour 2009). She teaches at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon.
Jenny Drai is from Chicago, Munich, and Oakland. She has work
recently appearing or forthcoming in Calaveras Journal, Court Green, H_NGM_N, Monday Night, and RealPoetik. She currently lives in Orange County, which is interesting.
Zachary Schomburg is the author of The Man Suit (Black Ocean 2007), Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009), and several chapbooks including three forthcoming collaborative chapbooks with Emily Kendal Frey: Team Sad (Cinematheque Press 2010), Feelings Using Wolves (Small Fires Press 2010) and Ok Goodnight (Futuretense 2010). He co-edits Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine. He lives in Portland, OR.
Barbara Claire Freeman is a literary critic and professor of literature who has recently turned her full attention to writing poetry. She is the author of The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction (University of California Press, 1998, pbk. 2000), among many other works of criticism and theory. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Harvard, she teaches creative writing for the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her poems have appeared in A Public Space, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Modern Review, New American Writing, Sycamore Review and Parthenon West Review. She is a recipient of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Award, the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize (Sarah Lawrence College, 2007) and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Incivilities, her first book of poems has just been published Counterpath Press (November, 2009). A chapbook, St. Ursula's Silence, is forthcoming from Instance Press.
Doors at 7
Readings at 730
365 45th St
parking on street or lot behind the building.
Donation for entry
Calaveras is edited by Alisa Heinzman and Sara Mumolo.
Read interviews with each of the readers, scroll down.
Emily Kendal Frey is the author of AIRPORT (Blue Hour 2009). She teaches at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon.
Jenny Drai is from Chicago, Munich, and Oakland. She has work
recently appearing or forthcoming in Calaveras Journal, Court Green, H_NGM_N, Monday Night, and RealPoetik. She currently lives in Orange County, which is interesting.
Zachary Schomburg is the author of The Man Suit (Black Ocean 2007), Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009), and several chapbooks including three forthcoming collaborative chapbooks with Emily Kendal Frey: Team Sad (Cinematheque Press 2010), Feelings Using Wolves (Small Fires Press 2010) and Ok Goodnight (Futuretense 2010). He co-edits Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine. He lives in Portland, OR.
Barbara Claire Freeman is a literary critic and professor of literature who has recently turned her full attention to writing poetry. She is the author of The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction (University of California Press, 1998, pbk. 2000), among many other works of criticism and theory. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Harvard, she teaches creative writing for the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her poems have appeared in A Public Space, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Modern Review, New American Writing, Sycamore Review and Parthenon West Review. She is a recipient of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Award, the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize (Sarah Lawrence College, 2007) and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Incivilities, her first book of poems has just been published Counterpath Press (November, 2009). A chapbook, St. Ursula's Silence, is forthcoming from Instance Press.
Doors at 7
Readings at 730
365 45th St
parking on street or lot behind the building.
Donation for entry
Calaveras is edited by Alisa Heinzman and Sara Mumolo.
Read interviews with each of the readers, scroll down.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
February 19th
Studio One Readings Series did a print Series: Calaveras.
Come to the release reading with
Emily Kendal Frey is the author of AIRPORT (Blue Hour 2009). She teaches at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon.
Jenny Drai is from Chicago, Munich, and Oakland. She has work
recently appearing or forthcoming in Calaveras Journal, Court Green, H_NGM_N, Monday Night, and RealPoetik. She currently lives in Orange County, which is interesting.
Zachary Schomburg is the author of The Man Suit (Black Ocean 2007), Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009), and several chapbooks including three forthcoming collaborative chapbooks with Emily Kendal Frey: Team Sad (Cinematheque Press 2010), Feelings Using Wolves (Small Fires Press 2010) and Ok Goodnight (Futuretense 2010). He co-edits Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine. He lives in Portland, OR.
Barbara Claire Freeman is a literary critic and professor of literature who has recently turned her full attention to writing poetry. She is the author of The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction (University of California Press, 1998, pbk. 2000), among many other works of criticism and theory. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Harvard, she teaches creative writing for the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her poems have appeared in A Public Space, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Modern Review, New American Writing, Sycamore Review and Parthenon West Review. She is a recipient of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Award, the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize (Sarah Lawrence College, 2007) and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Incivilities, her first book of poems has just been published Counterpath Press (November, 2009). A chapbook, St. Ursula's Silence, is forthcoming from Instance Press.
Doors at 7
Readings at 730
365 45th St
parking on street or lot behind the building.
Donation for entry
Calaveras is edited by Alisa Heinzman and Sara Mumolo.
Come to the release reading with
Emily Kendal Frey is the author of AIRPORT (Blue Hour 2009). She teaches at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon.Jenny Drai is from Chicago, Munich, and Oakland. She has work
recently appearing or forthcoming in Calaveras Journal, Court Green, H_NGM_N, Monday Night, and RealPoetik. She currently lives in Orange County, which is interesting.
Zachary Schomburg is the author of The Man Suit (Black Ocean 2007), Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009), and several chapbooks including three forthcoming collaborative chapbooks with Emily Kendal Frey: Team Sad (Cinematheque Press 2010), Feelings Using Wolves (Small Fires Press 2010) and Ok Goodnight (Futuretense 2010). He co-edits Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine. He lives in Portland, OR.
Barbara Claire Freeman is a literary critic and professor of literature who has recently turned her full attention to writing poetry. She is the author of The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction (University of California Press, 1998, pbk. 2000), among many other works of criticism and theory. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Harvard, she teaches creative writing for the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her poems have appeared in A Public Space, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Modern Review, New American Writing, Sycamore Review and Parthenon West Review. She is a recipient of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Award, the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize (Sarah Lawrence College, 2007) and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Incivilities, her first book of poems has just been published Counterpath Press (November, 2009). A chapbook, St. Ursula's Silence, is forthcoming from Instance Press.
Doors at 7
Readings at 730
365 45th St
parking on street or lot behind the building.
Donation for entry
Calaveras is edited by Alisa Heinzman and Sara Mumolo.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Jared White interviews Emily Kendal Frey
Jared White: Often times your poems seem to employ a kind of dream logic, either literally inhabiting a dream or making imaginative leaps between striking images. Right now your facebook status even describes a dream you had last night. Do you think of your poetry as primarily surreal, or dream-based? Do details in your poems come from the “no place” of the imagination more than lived experience, readings, overheard language, etc.?
Emily Kendal Frey: Lived experience tends to fill in where dreams leave off. Am I asking for too much if I say I'd like to inhabit both? For me they are the same thing. I wouldn't describe my poetry as "surreal," though, because that would imply an interchange or armwrestle with the "real" -- a jig or a dance to one side. A towel snap at the ass of time, moving in one distinct direction. My interior landscape is much more sloth-like; it's filled with base archetypes -- rivers, mountains, an occasional clown. Last night I dreamt there was a revolution and we all had to hide in those puffy, aerated, overmanicured hedges. Not on the ground, but actually insert ourselves within the foamy prickle of the shrubs. Most of the dream was me thinking, breathing, from within my hiding place. That's what poetry feels like.
JW: In poems of yours like “The History of Knives” there’s a quality of continual destabilization, like a game of one-upmanship or leapfrog from shock to shock. I am thinking of poems like your "The History of Knives" a prose piece in which the first five sentences of this poem veer quickly from a surrealistic kitchen rendering bodies as salt shakers to the bottom of the ocean and back. In between, firecracker sentences go off, saying things like “I married my dad and threw him in the ocean” and I opened my legs and a grasshopper was there.” When you were writing this poem were you aiming to excavate a specific landscape? Were you discovering and improvising as you went along? Does collage play an important role in your process?
EKF: That poem started as a 6 or 7 page spew. I'd been reading Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist and was feeling jazzed by how blocky and inhabited her words left me -- I wanted to find one of my own narratives and kind of choke on it for a while. Unfortunately, the only thing that came to mind was a butter dish. I wrote towards love, and butter -- the essentials -- for a good long time. Then I went back and filled in the rest.
JW: Halfway through this same poem, after a series of descriptive sentences that start to feel like a cracked narrative, a different kind of sentence breaks in: "Let’s talk about the Fibonacci sequence." I wonder whether as you were writing whether you suddenly associated to Fibonacci sequence specifically. Or maybe you always wanted to find a place to mention this in a poem… Or perhaps the Fibonacci sequence is not important in and of itself but rather operates like mad libs word substitution, where it is more a kind of syntax or discourse that you are evoking generally, where it could just as easily be the Third Law of Thermodynamics, or the Battle of Hastings, or matryoshka dolls, or phylloxera… How do you see moments like these in your poems?
EKF: The act of writing is one of great hope. I'm skeptical of the hope that drives me to write, even as I recognize it as viable. Poetry (a.k.a life) so easily strays into aphorism. If or when that happens, I don't want to convince myself that there's a moment there, a life being lived. I think I can work harder than that. The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers that make a spiral when expressed physically. Apologies to all mathematicians -- I'm sure I bludgeoned that. But as I write I'm treading carefully, listening for the moments when I stray towards my own ego-shrouded hope and sometimes, a spiral emerges. Those are the necessary images. Moments like the Fibonacci sequence are very scary, in that they come just as I'm starting to feel safe. Within the familiarity of using language is that hard nugget of skepticism. Cracked, it has the potential to be (or at least feel like) bravery. I'm not randomly collaging what I find in the "world," but rather, allowing for the world that has already attached itself to me.
JW: I’m lately very intrigued by the newly proliferating mode of the online chapbook. How did you come to publish AIRPORT in this way, with Blue Hour Press in Tuscaloosa?
EKF: Justin Runge, the editor, wrote and asked if I had anything he could publish. I did! Isn't AIRPORT beautiful? I love the inside pages and the tiny planes and the titles set in Frutiger, the airport sign font.
JW: AIRPORT wonderfully mixes a mode of dispatches in motion (like when one poem arises in the instant of spinning in the revolving door entrance to the airport) with poems that feel more like the airport is a metaphor, an “analogy” as you write. They are tiny pieces, organized in little couplets, which lends a feeling of tossed-offness, as if they plausibly could be written on receipts from an airport newsstand or on the back of a ticket while waiting at the gate. How did these poems come about? Were they written on the move? Did they all originally come into existence as a series, or did the title allow you to draw in poems that were initially unrelated?
EKF: Dispatches in motion... I like that. I'm trying to recall if any of the poems in AIRPORT were in fact written while inside an airport and I can't honestly say. There's a good chance. They were written during a period of 4 or 5 months when I was traveling between Portland, Oregon and Lincoln, Nebraska a LOT. I was spending a majority of my time in airports, on public transportation to get to or from an airport, waiting on tarmacs, in a Hudson News, curled up in a ball and writhing on the carpet, spitting into my own hand... no, I'm kidding, I was only doing a few of those things in airports. But I did start to want to inhabit the extreme possibility that an airport is. All that devastation and desire in one place -- it's freaky. One time I was sitting waiting for some gut-destroying ninety-seven dollar burrito in Minneapolis I think it was and I looked over and saw my friend Mathias sitting at the table next to me. I remember what book he was reading. Airports are weird! Anything can happen.
JW: Another series of your poems uses a sort of faux-letter device where different nouns are addressed as if creating a litany of ridiculous pet names, particularly “Dear Jalapeno.” When you first wrote "Dear Jalapeno" into a poem, were you conceiving of this line as a refrain, a way of finding energy to draw on for a whole group of poems? Now it is even the title of a whole manuscript of your poems. Was there a discipline to writing many poems in this same format? I imagine you waking up and writing “Dear Jalapeno” at the top of a blank page, day after day. Was the ñ ever tempting?
EKF: You know, I had a very long back and forth with one of the editors who published a bunch of the DEAR JALAPENO poems about the tilde. I could show it to you, or...? I loved it. I am so grateful when an editor takes the time to engage in conversation about a poem of mine, and we were really at an impasse about it for a bit (he wanted me to include it and I said I wouldn't). We had this fabulous dialogue about "proper" vs. "personal" uses of words and what it does to language to personalize words. But the gist of it is that the "jalapeno" I'm using in my poems is (very intentionally) the one with no tilde. It's the jalapeno of green tortilla chips and soft 7-11 taquitos. It's the bright waxy green dancing cartoon image of a pepper screaming at you. It's neither proper nor zesty enough to balance the delicate considerations or conversations of language that the tilde would imply. It's the jalapeno icon and not a real jalapeno. This is really what calls each poem in the series into being -- an invitation to the "things of the world" to ossify for a minute, stop, and be what they are, for better or worse.
JW: Some of these “Dear Jalapeno" poems are titled in a similar way, Imaginary ____,” with a different noun in that blank space, such as “hate,” or “thought,” or “distance.” Other poems have titles that refer to flowers (“Morning Glory,” “Garden Rose”) and some are tiny declarations like “You Broke My Heart.” Did you have a method behind these various titles?
EKF: Yes! A good portion of the titles are borrowed from song names by the group Lavender Diamond. Do you know them? It's what I was listening to at the time. It seemed to fit, in part because there's a summery explosiveness to many of them and I first started writing the poems in spring and summer. I made up the rest to sound like song titles. And yes, I did write those poems for about a year, maybe more. It was the most fun I've ever had in my whole life.
JW: I was amused and horrified by a meanish blog post by Gary Sullivan a few months ago where he poked fun at a bunch of poetry don’ts, including poems whose title is a dedication to a dead poet. (He particularly called out “To Jack Spicer,” at which I blanched, looking at my own “To Jack Spicer” poem.) Another of his pet peeves is the “dear x.” He writes,
I know poetry is "artifice," but come on. This never fails to make the hair on my neck crawl, largely because the person's voice who reads this sort of poem always, like, "lilts" in that "special" way when they say "Dear,". Bleah.
Does reading “Dear Jalapeno” make your voice lilt?
EKF: Oh I totally have a poem voice, so I probably do lilt when reading, but that would apply to any poem. My voice gets even more nasal and husky than usual. To the issue of the "Dear ____" trope, I think it's intriguing to note the patterns in poetry -- to see where everyone falls in line in terms of what we're doing or trying or practicing or espousing in our work. Our tiny toolboxes. It seems to me, though, that there's a bitterness in lists of do's and don't, an attempt to ingratiate us with the fact we're not original and never will be. Poets reminding other poets that their attempts are recognizable (and therefore... frivolous?) is not that interesting to me. I'm glad that people read "Dear Jalapeno" and either recognize patterns or don't. But there's so much more to be said, I hope, about those poems.
Emily Kendal Frey is the author of AIRPORT (Blue Hour 2009). She teaches at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon.
Jared White grew up near Boston and is currently living in Brooklyn, New York. His poems have appeared in such journals as Barrow Street, Fugue, Harp and Altar, The Modern Review and Sawbuck; they are forthcoming in Fulcrum, LVNG and elsewhere. A chapbook of his poems, Yellowcake, will appear in the forthcoming debut issue of Narwhal from Cannibal Books. He blogs from time to time about poems and culture at jaredswhite.blogspot.com
Emily Kendal Frey: Lived experience tends to fill in where dreams leave off. Am I asking for too much if I say I'd like to inhabit both? For me they are the same thing. I wouldn't describe my poetry as "surreal," though, because that would imply an interchange or armwrestle with the "real" -- a jig or a dance to one side. A towel snap at the ass of time, moving in one distinct direction. My interior landscape is much more sloth-like; it's filled with base archetypes -- rivers, mountains, an occasional clown. Last night I dreamt there was a revolution and we all had to hide in those puffy, aerated, overmanicured hedges. Not on the ground, but actually insert ourselves within the foamy prickle of the shrubs. Most of the dream was me thinking, breathing, from within my hiding place. That's what poetry feels like.
JW: In poems of yours like “The History of Knives” there’s a quality of continual destabilization, like a game of one-upmanship or leapfrog from shock to shock. I am thinking of poems like your "The History of Knives" a prose piece in which the first five sentences of this poem veer quickly from a surrealistic kitchen rendering bodies as salt shakers to the bottom of the ocean and back. In between, firecracker sentences go off, saying things like “I married my dad and threw him in the ocean” and I opened my legs and a grasshopper was there.” When you were writing this poem were you aiming to excavate a specific landscape? Were you discovering and improvising as you went along? Does collage play an important role in your process?
EKF: That poem started as a 6 or 7 page spew. I'd been reading Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist and was feeling jazzed by how blocky and inhabited her words left me -- I wanted to find one of my own narratives and kind of choke on it for a while. Unfortunately, the only thing that came to mind was a butter dish. I wrote towards love, and butter -- the essentials -- for a good long time. Then I went back and filled in the rest.
JW: Halfway through this same poem, after a series of descriptive sentences that start to feel like a cracked narrative, a different kind of sentence breaks in: "Let’s talk about the Fibonacci sequence." I wonder whether as you were writing whether you suddenly associated to Fibonacci sequence specifically. Or maybe you always wanted to find a place to mention this in a poem… Or perhaps the Fibonacci sequence is not important in and of itself but rather operates like mad libs word substitution, where it is more a kind of syntax or discourse that you are evoking generally, where it could just as easily be the Third Law of Thermodynamics, or the Battle of Hastings, or matryoshka dolls, or phylloxera… How do you see moments like these in your poems?
EKF: The act of writing is one of great hope. I'm skeptical of the hope that drives me to write, even as I recognize it as viable. Poetry (a.k.a life) so easily strays into aphorism. If or when that happens, I don't want to convince myself that there's a moment there, a life being lived. I think I can work harder than that. The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers that make a spiral when expressed physically. Apologies to all mathematicians -- I'm sure I bludgeoned that. But as I write I'm treading carefully, listening for the moments when I stray towards my own ego-shrouded hope and sometimes, a spiral emerges. Those are the necessary images. Moments like the Fibonacci sequence are very scary, in that they come just as I'm starting to feel safe. Within the familiarity of using language is that hard nugget of skepticism. Cracked, it has the potential to be (or at least feel like) bravery. I'm not randomly collaging what I find in the "world," but rather, allowing for the world that has already attached itself to me.
JW: I’m lately very intrigued by the newly proliferating mode of the online chapbook. How did you come to publish AIRPORT in this way, with Blue Hour Press in Tuscaloosa?
EKF: Justin Runge, the editor, wrote and asked if I had anything he could publish. I did! Isn't AIRPORT beautiful? I love the inside pages and the tiny planes and the titles set in Frutiger, the airport sign font.
JW: AIRPORT wonderfully mixes a mode of dispatches in motion (like when one poem arises in the instant of spinning in the revolving door entrance to the airport) with poems that feel more like the airport is a metaphor, an “analogy” as you write. They are tiny pieces, organized in little couplets, which lends a feeling of tossed-offness, as if they plausibly could be written on receipts from an airport newsstand or on the back of a ticket while waiting at the gate. How did these poems come about? Were they written on the move? Did they all originally come into existence as a series, or did the title allow you to draw in poems that were initially unrelated?
EKF: Dispatches in motion... I like that. I'm trying to recall if any of the poems in AIRPORT were in fact written while inside an airport and I can't honestly say. There's a good chance. They were written during a period of 4 or 5 months when I was traveling between Portland, Oregon and Lincoln, Nebraska a LOT. I was spending a majority of my time in airports, on public transportation to get to or from an airport, waiting on tarmacs, in a Hudson News, curled up in a ball and writhing on the carpet, spitting into my own hand... no, I'm kidding, I was only doing a few of those things in airports. But I did start to want to inhabit the extreme possibility that an airport is. All that devastation and desire in one place -- it's freaky. One time I was sitting waiting for some gut-destroying ninety-seven dollar burrito in Minneapolis I think it was and I looked over and saw my friend Mathias sitting at the table next to me. I remember what book he was reading. Airports are weird! Anything can happen.
JW: Another series of your poems uses a sort of faux-letter device where different nouns are addressed as if creating a litany of ridiculous pet names, particularly “Dear Jalapeno.” When you first wrote "Dear Jalapeno" into a poem, were you conceiving of this line as a refrain, a way of finding energy to draw on for a whole group of poems? Now it is even the title of a whole manuscript of your poems. Was there a discipline to writing many poems in this same format? I imagine you waking up and writing “Dear Jalapeno” at the top of a blank page, day after day. Was the ñ ever tempting?
EKF: You know, I had a very long back and forth with one of the editors who published a bunch of the DEAR JALAPENO poems about the tilde. I could show it to you, or...? I loved it. I am so grateful when an editor takes the time to engage in conversation about a poem of mine, and we were really at an impasse about it for a bit (he wanted me to include it and I said I wouldn't). We had this fabulous dialogue about "proper" vs. "personal" uses of words and what it does to language to personalize words. But the gist of it is that the "jalapeno" I'm using in my poems is (very intentionally) the one with no tilde. It's the jalapeno of green tortilla chips and soft 7-11 taquitos. It's the bright waxy green dancing cartoon image of a pepper screaming at you. It's neither proper nor zesty enough to balance the delicate considerations or conversations of language that the tilde would imply. It's the jalapeno icon and not a real jalapeno. This is really what calls each poem in the series into being -- an invitation to the "things of the world" to ossify for a minute, stop, and be what they are, for better or worse.
JW: Some of these “Dear Jalapeno" poems are titled in a similar way, Imaginary ____,” with a different noun in that blank space, such as “hate,” or “thought,” or “distance.” Other poems have titles that refer to flowers (“Morning Glory,” “Garden Rose”) and some are tiny declarations like “You Broke My Heart.” Did you have a method behind these various titles?
EKF: Yes! A good portion of the titles are borrowed from song names by the group Lavender Diamond. Do you know them? It's what I was listening to at the time. It seemed to fit, in part because there's a summery explosiveness to many of them and I first started writing the poems in spring and summer. I made up the rest to sound like song titles. And yes, I did write those poems for about a year, maybe more. It was the most fun I've ever had in my whole life.
JW: I was amused and horrified by a meanish blog post by Gary Sullivan a few months ago where he poked fun at a bunch of poetry don’ts, including poems whose title is a dedication to a dead poet. (He particularly called out “To Jack Spicer,” at which I blanched, looking at my own “To Jack Spicer” poem.) Another of his pet peeves is the “dear x.” He writes,
I know poetry is "artifice," but come on. This never fails to make the hair on my neck crawl, largely because the person's voice who reads this sort of poem always, like, "lilts" in that "special" way when they say "Dear,". Bleah.
Does reading “Dear Jalapeno” make your voice lilt?
EKF: Oh I totally have a poem voice, so I probably do lilt when reading, but that would apply to any poem. My voice gets even more nasal and husky than usual. To the issue of the "Dear ____" trope, I think it's intriguing to note the patterns in poetry -- to see where everyone falls in line in terms of what we're doing or trying or practicing or espousing in our work. Our tiny toolboxes. It seems to me, though, that there's a bitterness in lists of do's and don't, an attempt to ingratiate us with the fact we're not original and never will be. Poets reminding other poets that their attempts are recognizable (and therefore... frivolous?) is not that interesting to me. I'm glad that people read "Dear Jalapeno" and either recognize patterns or don't. But there's so much more to be said, I hope, about those poems.
Emily Kendal Frey is the author of AIRPORT (Blue Hour 2009). She teaches at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon.
Jared White grew up near Boston and is currently living in Brooklyn, New York. His poems have appeared in such journals as Barrow Street, Fugue, Harp and Altar, The Modern Review and Sawbuck; they are forthcoming in Fulcrum, LVNG and elsewhere. A chapbook of his poems, Yellowcake, will appear in the forthcoming debut issue of Narwhal from Cannibal Books. He blogs from time to time about poems and culture at jaredswhite.blogspot.com
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