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.

Farrah Field Interviews Zachary Schomburg

Farrah Field: You write, paint, and have a knack for photography. (And film making). How do you balance and nurture all of your varied interests?

Zachary Schomburg: Thanks for noticing, and for assuming these interests are balanced. To me, they feel awfully messy, overlapping one another, getting in each other’s way. Poetry is the only thing I’ve formally studied, so the painting, photography and film-making are made out to be indulgences. I try my hardest to get book-making, editing Octopus, and translating in there somehow too. There are certainly waves of interests for only one thing—every few days I have a new aspiration. Every few days I’ve figured out I want to dedicate my life to film-making (for example)—so a lot of these other projects get back-burnered for a few months until I re-aspire.

For whatever reason, we’re under a lot of pressure to be and do one thing and do it well. I’d rather do a bunch of different things passionately. Though, really, these projects you mentioned are really born from the same impulse—they’re manifestations of the same need to make art. My paintings, photos and films are all saying the same things. Regardless, these projects are what keep me moving forward. Ye old carrots on a stick trick. I’m a donkey.


FF: Scary, No Scary begins with a prologue poem. Was this your publisher’s idea or did you intend for the book to be prefaced this way?

ZS: “Scary, No Scary” was the first poem I wrote for this manuscript. It is that world’s big bang, so it seemed natural to make it the book’s prologue (it was my idea—all mine!) It establishes something: the walk through the woods, the attempt to find Home, the night, the loneliness, the ambiguity, the choices.


FF: In Scary, No Scary, you work and re-work the idea of smallness (spiders, hummingbirds, eyelashes) and feeling small juxtaposed by gigantic things. I thought it was pretty funny to see this indexed at the back of the book, “Tiny, the idea of being (see also Gigantic.” Will you tell me more about the indexing process? Who’s idea was it and was there a different approach for both of your books?

ZS: Yeah, being gigantic and being very tiny is essentially the same thing. Both indexes were quite a blast to make. I stayed up late for this last one, after the page numbers had been set, and I went through poem by poem to catalogue all the repeating images, all the repeating concepts. Both times, I was surprised by some of the things I found had repeated. In the Suit, for example, I remember thinking, “I have a gorilla wearing people clothes twice?!” It is a great exercise for anyone completing a manuscript. You’re able to see your invisible crutches and then kick them out from under you. “Why are all my characters crying?” you’ll say. “What is wrong with me?” Or “why are all my characters miniature or gigantic?” you’ll say. “Why can’t things just be normal-sized?”

With the Suit, the approach felt much more accidental. I had indexed it for fun when I had a bad case of the Block one night. Janaka and I joked about including it. This second time around, I wrote more with a potential index in mind. I knew the hummingbirds were there. So whenever I needed a bird for a poem, I made it a hummingbird. In this world, all the birds are hummingbirds. It’s much simpler that way.


FF: The Pond and Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene are longer poems/sections from both of your books as well as separate chapbooks. Did you write these two particular pieces before the rest of the manuscripts? How did you determine that they would make great separate pieces (both of them are beautiful chapbooks) and how do you feel about them now that they are folded into the whole of it all?

ZS: These are two poems I am really proud of. They were both written like any other poem in the manuscripts, right in the middle of the process. They are both firmly a part of the worlds of their respective books. In the chapbooks, they seemed a little lonely, a little out of place.

FF: Tell me more about your poem-films. How did you come by way of the footage? Which arrangement do you prefer for the poems to be read by a speaker in the film or by the viewer alone? When did you begin making these and what was your goal for adding images and music to the poems? How did you pick the poems you made poem-films for?

ZS: I traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, during the summer of 2008 and started taking a bunch of footage on my new little pocket camera. I didn’t have any idea how I would use that footage, but it felt important that I record something. I had this vague notion that I would make some sort of documentary. After Russia, I continued to collect footage of patterns, things moving, during my walks around Portland. Once, I was on the internet-less train between Portland and Seattle. I was a bit bored so I clicked on that iMovie app at the bottom of my laptop and I freaked out a little. I clicked on all the buttons to see what they would do. I made that one about the airplane first, in about 45 minutes (can you tell?). I didn’t write a new poem for about two months after that, but I made about 12 poem-films on iMovie.

The footage is all mine. This steers which previously written poems will be used—they need to somehow marry the footage. I don’t take footage to accommodate a poem.

Also, I just got a new camera. I’m going to get pretty serious this year.


FF: On your blog you often write about the film classes you teach. What is your approach to teaching these classes? Does the school tell you they need a such-and-such class to be taught and you come up with a syllabus or do you come up with a class based on some films you’d like to teach? Furthermore, what is it like to experience the text together with your students, watching a film together, versus discussing assigned reading with which students have engaged prior to class?

ZS: I love teaching film. The department at Portland State gives me the freedom to design my own classes how I see fit. I’ve taught 1950’s Cold War Hysteria films, Feminist Film Theory, some Introduction courses, and now, The Outsider in Independent Cinema. For the most part, I build a class around a group of films I’d like to teach—a group of films that somehow speak to one another.

These classes really don’t operate any differently than a lit course. We watch great films each week and then discuss the socio-cultural implications (in Intro, we discuss the film’s cinematic devices). In some ways, I suppose, film in the later half of 20th century is like the novel of the 19th century. It is quite easy, through film, to set the appropriate groundwork for a historical conversation about who were then, and who we are now. Regardless, whatever we encounter in my classes, we ask “how does that make you feel/think?” and then “so what?”

Most of my students have no idea that I write poetry. Though, when watching some experimental films last term, we watched the surrealist films of Buñuel, and Maya Deren, and then some Brakhage and Lynch. I said that we’d been watching novels all term long, and now it was time to watch some poetry. I had them all write poems instead of taking notes. I think there is a pretty natural bridge between the two art forms. In a poetry class, I’d like to show some films.


FF: The last time we spoke we both reminisced about our elementary schools in Omaha. Last summer I revisited mine and thought it was really weird to not see it during winter, as most of my memories are of walking to school in snow and playing on the ice outside in the school parking lot. Have you been back to your elementary school? Furthermore, how has Omaha changed or how is it different now that you’ve left it?

ZS: You did? Which school was it again? I went back in December while visiting my family. Lewis Central. My dad is the swim coach, and he let me in to the pool with his keys to do some swimming. I think I was afraid I was going to put on some blubber while back in Omaha, eating chicken wings all day long. I took a few pictures of the locker room.


Everything is so small. The urinals are so low. I was pretty much just peeing on the ground. I remember getting in my first and only fight in that locker room. Nathan Okerbloom was saying some mean things about a friend of mine and I had just about had it, so I pushed him and he fell over one of those benches. He hit his head on the other bench and it looked like it hurt pretty bad. I was shocked at the violence I had caused. It scared me. So I ran out of the locker room and tried to reason with Nathan once he caught up with me.

Omaha is still the same, but I have changed. I have so much nostalgia for that place. I love it. My relationship to Omaha feels like Alexander Payne’s relationship to it. I’m drawn to it endlessly. My heart is from there. It is a place that is so simultaneously strange and comforting, lost and familiar. My heart, then, is born from that dichotomy.

It reminds me who I am and who I am not. It is the place I can go to see myself in a mirror. We’re starting to get at the heart of SNS.

What is your Omaha like?

FF: Thanks for asking--I went to Golden Hills. My family lived less than a block away from school, so we always ended up spending most of our time there with all the neighborhood kids. The playground equipment was made from large tractor tires and my sister taught me how to ride a bike in the schoolyard. When I went back last summer, there was a kid sitting on the playground, bored and lonely looking. He climbed to the top of a fence in front of a kickball field surrounded by a great expanse of land. He slouched. I wanted to ask him where all the other kids were and how come the hill leading up to the school looked so small, why the neighborhood looked so run down. When I drove away, he was lying on top of a table where teacher-smokers used to sit during recess.

So, you and I are in our thirties. What’s something that you’d like to do that you’ve never tried in/with/on your poems and what’s something that you hope would never happen?

ZS: I’m almost 33. Are you around there too? I’m writing a very very long poem, and I would like to finish it while I am still in my 30s. It is called Asteroid. I’m writing it alongside two other manuscripts, but I’m in no hurry to finish it. It is currently about 50 pages long, but it is in its infancy. I’ve never tried anything like this before. It sprawls and seeks out new pockets of light. I’m trying to let go of my need for tight narrative, trying let go of my need to get out of a poem in some strange way. I’m trying to teach myself to stay in the poem, to look around and hold my breath.

I hope I keep writing things that surprise me, instead of falling into the trap of recreating old surprises.


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.

Farrah Field's poems have appeared in many publications including the Mississippi Review, Typo, Harp & Altar, La Petite Zine, Eklesographia, Effing Magazine, and Ploughshares and are forthcoming in Mantis and Cannibal. Rising, her first book of poems, won Four Way Books' 2007 Levis Prize. She lives in Brooklyn and blogs at adultish.blogspot.com.

Reader Report

Brandon let me know of Suzanne Stein's thoughtful reader report at LWC/LWK

We are a hard spot to find and I liked how Stein mentions the long walk up to the front door, which always seems to build an impression. Rolling lawns.

Sometimes I think finding Studio One is like finding the ever elusive party but then when you finally do all the nervousness about getting lost was totally worth it because the place is raging fun.

Also, there is a parking lot in the back of the building allowing you to park super close to the Hall where we hold the readings. You just have to find that little driveway that winds you back around the place. :)

First Friday at Studio One is May 1st

First Friday @ Studio One!



Brandon Brown is a poet from Kansas City, Missouri. His friends published the chapbooks Memoirs Of My Nervous Illness (Cy Press, 2006), 908-1078 (Transmission Press, 2006), Camels! (TAXT, 2008) and the forthcoming Wondrous Things I Have Seen (Mitzvah, 2009). He co-curates the (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand and wears pink socks.


n a t h a n a e l f . t r i m b o l i is a multi-talented artist, musician and videographer. Trimboli, a former Chief Designer with PBS, has made his mark by examining life through the lens of his community. As a professional editor, the South Bend Regional Museum of Art hired him to teach classes on expanding abstract thought through video. His art installations have been incorporated as set-design for fashion shows as well as traditionally viewed multi-media graphic documentary, and are always backed by community causes. Recently Nate has landed in Oakland, a new community with new artistic challenges and a multitude of exciting possibilities. Nate is currently filming a documentary for the Community Coalition for Haiti.



Farrah Field's poems have appeared in many publications including the Mississippi Review, Pool, Typo, Harp & Altar, 42Opus, La Petite Zine, Pebble Lake Review, and Fulcrum, among others. Rising won Four Way Books' 2007 Levis Prize and is her first book of poetry. She lives in Brooklyn and blogs at adultish.blogspot.com.

Doors open @ 7
readings start by 730

your donations are appreciated for entry and wines! Many thank yous to all the people who donate dollars every month to keep the series free for others.