A Conversation: Laura Sims and Joseph Massey

Joseph Massey: What does the apocalypse mean to you, and do you believe we're now in the midst of it? And how does it play into the manuscript you're currently working on?

Laura Sims: Apocalypse means everything to me. By that I mean: 'apocalypse' can mean and be so many things, great and small. There are: personal apocalypses, marital apocalypses, physical apocalypses, job apocalypses, nuclear apocalypses, weather-related apocalypses, and so on. These all share a cataclysmic end followed by a raw, often painful, beginning. In the larger scheme of things, there have already been a number of apocalypses (like Chernobyl, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hurricane Katrina, any of our great or small wars, or the recent spate of devastating earthquakes, to name a few), and yes, we're in the midst of a multitude of overlapping apocalypses, and also there are more to come, and maybe some of them, or at least one of them, or all of them combined, will eclipse all other apocalypses that have come before, and that will be The Apocalypse.

And then what? That's what my book is concerned with, for the most part. Even in the event of a gigantic earth event, there will probably be survivors. It may be the end of the human race as the dominant species, but we'll still be around. My interest in reading and writing about apocalypse stems, in part, from nostalgia for an earth I've never known, one that's fresh and clean, full of natural resources, and free of strip malls, highways, and chain stores. Wouldn't it be nice to have the slate wiped clean? Don't we kind of need it? And wouldn't it be hard and grueling and depressing? And wouldn't that be refreshing? To strip away all of the useless activities and anxieties in which we indulge in the 21st century and be forced to use our basic, forgotten human skills, the ones programmed into our mammalian brains (hunt, gather, make fire, reproduce, etc.). I admit that sounds appealing to me, as much as it sounds terrifying and awful. I'd probably die (or at least want to die) if I had to rely on those skills, mind you, but I'm still smitten by the idea of having to do it.

I started to think about these issues...well, because it does seem like we're living in the end times, even though that has not been an uncommon thought throughout human history. But also after I read David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, whose protagonist believes she's the last person on earth, and whether or not she is, she has to deal with the ramifications of living in a world emptied of everyone, and every living thing. Her situation (real or imagined) is both strangely enviable and deeply distressing. When the trappings of civilization fall away, and all other human or animal companions disappear, do we, should we, must we go on living? And what does that 'life' look like? There's a compelling purity to that life, as I was describing before, but there's also (of course) a great, unending emptiness. Kate (the protagonist) turns her brain into the last reliquary of civilization, but to what end? There will be no future human generations, so the book emanates a sense of loss that is both intimate and immense, all-encompassing.

I'm using a lot of source material for the poems that includes books (science nonfiction, science fiction, political nonfiction), films, tv shows, informative pamphlets, and online survival guides. Some of the richest ones have been: the revamped Battlestar Galactica, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, by Svetlana Alexievich, The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells, the animated film "9," Tropic of Chaos, by Christian Parenti, and the New York Department of Health's pamphlet on disaster response. I've tried to find sources whose words and images appeal to me--there's a plethora of apocalypse material out there, but a lot of it is pure crap. Or just boring.



JM: Do you feel any anxiety over the so-called "death of the book"?

LS: How can I be anxious about the death of the book when I'm so busy worrying about the end of the world??

But seriously: yes and no. Yes, because I think what's really dying is the book-object, not "the book," but I love book-objects and want to always have book-objects available to me, and in the world in general. Of course you could argue that a Kindle is a "book-object" but I mean the old-fashioned version, with paper and binding and glue and words inked or printed on pages.

No, because as I just said, I don't think "the book" is dying -- people are still reading, they're just reading differently; the format of "the book" is evolving, and ultimately its evolution will preserve it for the future. Hopefully. But I don't believe that people don't read anymore -- I think that's b.s.



JM: Do you have a writing ritual, or rituals? Any superstitions surrounding the act?

LS: Right now my ritual is: get it done, and get it done fast. I write during my infant son's naptimes, or after he's gone to sleep, before I crash for the night, so when I have some time I just try to clear my mind as quickly as possible, sit down, ignore everything else, and write. No time for rituals!

I don't really have superstitions about writing, either. I do have a lot of anxiety about losing my work, though--in fire, earthquakes, accident, theft, etc.--I do an awful lot of backing up. Now I use an external hard drive to do that, and also Time Machine on my Mac, and also Sugar Sync, which backs up data online.



JM: If Lorine Niedecker suddenly reanimated from the dead and made herself available to you so you could ask one question, and one only, what would that question be?

LS: What is it like to be dead?



Laura Sims is the author of My god is this a man, forthcoming from Fence Books in 2013. Her previous books are Stranger (Fence Books, 2009) and >Practice, Restraint, (winner of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize). She is a co-editor of Instance Press, and lives in Brooklyn.

Joseph Massey is the author of numerous chapbooks and two full-length collections: Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009) and At the Point (Shearsman Books, 2011). Work has also appeared in various journals and magazines, including The Nation, The Cultural Society, Verse, Western Humanities Review, Quarterly West, Asterisk, Tight, A Public Space, Mary, Carve, Northwest Review and American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, among many others; and in the anthologies For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals (Bootstrap Productions, 2007) and Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams (University of Iowa Press, 2011). He lives in Arcata, California.

Joseph Massey Interviews Rae Armantrout for Studio One's Reading on Friday May 7th

JOSEPH MASSEY: Tell us more about your forthcoming book Money Shot. There are several connotative layers there. Peel some of them back?

RAE ARMANTROUT: First, these poems were written during 2008-2009, the "Great Recession," so, of course, market manipulation, reckless greed, and the damage it does were on my mind. That's the literal "money" in money shot. In porn, the money shot is the one that shows the male orgasm. It's evidence—or it pretends to be evidence—of satisfaction. It's what they want you to see. The title prepares you, I hope, to examine the evidence critically.

There's a poem in the book called "Money Shot" which starts out by playing around with the name of one of the first banks that failed: IndyMac. Anyway, as soon as I gave the poem that title, I thought I'd like to use it for the book as well. I hesitated for awhile but I couldn't get the temptation out of my mind—so I did it.


JM: How has the landscape of southern California shaped your poetry? Do you ever long for other landscapes?

RA: It would be easy to come up with some reductive response such as that my poems are sparse because the landscape where I live is semi-arid or some such. But I don't really believe that. When Eileen Myles was here, though, she said she really "got" my poetry for the first time. She meant that there's a kind of isolation in southern California—which is such a car culture—that she also sensed in my work. You often see glimpses of things in passing. She thought my poems were composed of such glimpses. I don't know.

There are things I really like about the landscape here. One is that you can see great distances often. The sky is always a big part of the view. The terrain is rolling hills and canyons covered with brush. To the east there are mountains and on the other side a real desert. There's a lot of light.

Do I ever long for other landscapes? Well, yes. This summer we're going on a long car trip around the West, stopping at Zion and Grand Tetons. Lately I'm enamored by Seattle, the way it sits low on the water, the way it's surrounded by snow capped peaks. I'm a kind of landscape-whore actually.

JM: When I read one of your poems that ends without a period, which occurs frequently throughout your books, I imagine the poem is on a loop—a sculpted echo chamber—an Ouroboros of words. So, when you do end a poem with a period, what is its significance to you? How much does it weigh?

RA: That's interesting because I have more often been asked why I sometimes leave off the final period. Just flipping through Versed I see that such poems as "What We Mean," "Had," "Concentrate," "Hey" etc. have no final period. I'd say it's just about half and half. Sometimes I want a definite sounding statement at the end. In other cases, I want the statement to trail off rather uncertainly. Of course, even when the poem ends with what sounds like some pronouncement, that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm convinced of its truth. It's more like, "What happens if I declare such and such to be the case."

JM: Do you have an active dream life? Do you ever lucidly dream? Do you return to the same places/spaces in your dreams?

RA: I'm aware of dreaming every night. Some nights I remember a dream vividly, but more often I don't. I know that my dreams are full of chatter, full of voices. From what I read, I don't think that's necessarily true of everyone's dreams. Dreams fascinate me because in a sense they are little plays we make up for ourselves. We're the directors and the audience—and we're a good audience too because we almost always suspend disbelief.

In terms of lucid dreaming, I seem to have some control over my dreams. For instance, I don't really ever have nightmares. If a dream starts to get too disturbing, I generally wake up before anything too bad happens. Or sometimes the scary parts will be put at a distance somehow, happening to a character who doesn't appear to be me, for instance.

Before I was diagnosed with cancer, I had a number of sad or ominous dreams. I recorded some of them in Versed. Examples would be the 4th section of "Later" and the last part of "Worth While." If you read those sections now, I think you can see that I was giving myself a warning.

JM: Are you superstitious?

RA: Well, I'm not afraid of black cats or anything—but I do take note of coincidences. That is at the root of superstition, I think, and also at the root of poetry. I've had experiences that felt uncanny. For instance, as I told you, I had dreams shortly before my cancer diagnosis that seemed to foretell death. That's probably why you asked me this question. I think our senses pick up all kinds of things that, for whatever reason, don't enter our conscious minds. I'm interested in the things we know without knowing it. That kind of shadow knowledge is uncanny.



Joseph Massey was born in Chester, Pennsylvania and has spent the past nine years in Arcata, California. His latest books are Areas of Fog (Shearsman, 2009), The Lack Of (Nasturtium Press, 2009), Mock Orange (Longhouse, 2010) and Exit North (Book Thug, 2010). Work is forthcoming in the journal A Public Space and the anthology Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams (University of Iowa Press).

Wesleyan will publish Rae Armantrout’s next collection, Money Shot, in June of 2011. Armantrout’s most recent book, Versed (Wesleyan, 2009), was a finalist for the National Book Award, and was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Next Life (Wesleyan, 2007), was chosen as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2007 by The New York Times. Other recent books include Collected Prose (Singing Horse, 2007), Up to Speed (Wesleyan, 2004), The Pretext (Green Integer, 2001), and Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Her poems have been included in anthologies such as American Hybrid (Norton, 2009), Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (1993), American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Language Meets the Lyric Tradition, (Wesleyan, 2002), The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, 2006) and The Best American Poetry of 1988, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2007 and 2008. Armantrout received an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. She is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego. Writing in Poetry magazine, Ange Mlinko has said, “I would trade the bulk of contemporary anecdotal free verse for more incisive, chilling poetry like Armantrout’s.