Joshua Edward's new book, Imperial Nostalgias, is out from Ugly Duckling Presse this month
He will be reading at Studio One on March 21st @ 7:30 with Farnoosh Fathi
"At times, a poem arrives when language pushes back against the self."
-Joshua Edwards
Sheila Davies Sumner: Your new book of poems has an arresting title –– Imperial Nostalgias. Both words have an
ineffable quality and taken together that quality is increased tenfold. It seems that any of our senses can be
metabolized into homesickness, remembrance, melancholia –– or into the absence
of “the bright feeling of belonging.” The word imperial has a second meaning, it’s a synonym for non-metric, for
standard weights and measure. Thus, I found myself wondering about the mass and action of nostalgia in your book, particularly in the title poem.
What were your reasons for choosing this title? Also, in your acknowledgements
you write that the title is
based on a series of poems by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. Can you say what in your work resonates with or is
inspired by Vallejo’s?
Joshua Edwards: First off, since I’ve had the chance to read some of
your questions in advance, I just want to say I really appreciate your
insightful, considerate reading of the book. I’m so glad you find the title
arresting, and I’m pretty sure I chose it as a title for the book before I
wrote the eponymous poem. I stole Vallejo’s phrase for a few reasons. First of
all, I like its sound and tension (especially since “imperial” translates so
unfortunately well into contemporary American English)—it’s ineffable and
heavy, imposing and deflated. Secondly, I love Vallejo’s writing and I wanted
to reference his itinerancy, poetry, and legend. Although I wouldn’t single him
out as a particular influence for this collection—which was written over the
course of many years and came together as poems gradually found each other—his
agitated lyricism, dark imagery, and use of form and archaic language have
definitely shaped my work. Finally, I wanted to create a context for the book
in which my position in the world is implicated or exposed. I’m of course
against imperialism, robbing people of their land and livelihoods, drone
warfare, and any sort of institutionalized violence, but imperialism is in the
cereal I eat and the culture I consume, and the ghost of Manifest Destiny looms
large in the histories of the states I’ve spent most of my life in Texas,
Oregon, Washington, and California. I hadn’t thought about the imperial
measurement system until you mentioned it, and I like thinking of the force and
mass of nostalgia. The nostalgia I want to come through in the collection
itself is quite different than the one evoked by the title, and could perhaps
be described as the measure between volition and the present moment. I could
describe it as nostalgia for the now—a sense that what’s going on is lost in
the happening.
SDS: There is something about your
eponymous poem that brings much excitement and much grief. It reverses time and
entangles space in a concise, almost scientific way. I wonder if the poet is in
conversation with an earlier speaker who asks whether “travel is an enemy to
ends.”
JE: I think all the poems emanate from the same speaker,
but one who is in different (non-hierarchical) stages or states of being. This
is probably the poem that is the most political in that section in some ways,
and the "Departures" poems were written while reading a bit of
cultural criticism, so there's definitely a link there.
SDS: The
arrangement of poems in Imperial
Nostalgias is thoughtful and elegant. There are five parts, which I’ve
identified in this way: Parable, Lacunae (silence),
a Reverie in sestets, a Chorus of forms (sound),
and 31 Micrograms. How did you come to organize the book as you have? Assuming
there is a story you tell yourself when you write, how does this storytelling
help or complicate the way you structured this book?
JE: The sections were each written during very different times in my life,
in different places, and the story I told myself came in the selection of the
work instead of its writing. Although I often use aphoristic and declarative
language, I’m more interested in uneasiness than resolve, so I wanted to convey
a sense of a consciousness coming apart while being reformed, opening up as it
becomes more focused. The poems
aren’t arranged chronologically, but I did want to create the texture of time’s
passage.
SDS: I’m impressed by images in your
poems that are both visceral and figurative. For instance, the smell of an
“approaching language frontier”; a ceiling fan that “helps heighten the hotel’s
diction”; time being “something that leaks from lungs”; a speaker needing to
“dislodge the extra voice caught in my throat”; and an outsider who “stuck the
real up into the imaginary.” It seems that you allow tandem realities ––
sensational and imaginal –– to compatibly occupy a phrase, which in turn
offered the chance for me to practice playing around in two worlds at
once.
JE: I hadn't really thought of that, but thanks for
pointing it out! I'm guessing it has something to do with my interest in
photography and poetry, how they interact in matters of truth and imagination.
SDS: In
the section called Two Parables, the
man in “The Traveler” and the man in “The Outsider” possess essential but
opposite attitudes: sacred & secular, wise man & trickster, pedagogue
& performer. Each man draws a crowd to his specialty; each awakens the
crowd differently. In what ways do these parables act, throughout your book, as
a reader’s travel guides?
JE: I
guess the figures in those poems are meant as guides through the book, but I’m
not sure I know how they work. Even if I did, it might be better for me to
allow them to exist in their ambiguity.
SDS: “Valley
of Unrest” is a series of photographs that follows the parables. I think it’s
interesting that we traverse these images, allowing for sudden, silent time to
look around before arriving at the first poems in “Departures”. What was behind
your decision to place this valley, just so? What are the challenges or what kind of time do you imagine
the reader experiences? Are they meant as preparation for or as a kind of
mnemonic for poems encountered later? In one poem, you write: “images are more
demanding than ideas.” Since you worked extensively with photographs in your
earlier book, Campeche, I’m hoping
you can describe some of these demands or challenges.
JE: I take photographs to apprehend lyrical moments. I photograph things
that move me, or I take a photograph when I want to remember a moment in time
or record an image for further meditation and inspection. I wanted “Valley of
Unrest” near the beginning of the book to put the reader in the role of a
watcher. When I wrote “Departures,” I was sitting in trains, looking out
windows, so having the photographs immediately before that section may help
recreate that way of seeing. Some things resonate between the images in the
collection but there’s no narrative to search for (except for the implication
of an ending with the last image), and I wanted to establish this paradigm.
Besides all this, my dad (with whom I collaborated on my first book) and
several of my good friends are photographers. I’ve learned a lot from them
about vision and accumulated meaning.
SDS: Ideas, images, and tightly wound
theories are held to place by the reliability of the sestet form in
“Departures”. There’s a noise of regularity –– train wheels on tracks –– that
is comforting and, because of that, develops awareness of your language of
motion, as if your words travel in their own poetic textures.
JE: I really love traveling by train, and at that point
in my life I found journeys to be comforting partly because the confusion I
found in the world –– which became more apparent in new surroundings
while having a traveler's mindset –– seemed to dwarf my own.
SDS: I’m
curious what you would answer to the question you ask in one of Departure’s sestets: “What are poets to
do with the silence they put their poems into?”
JE: I don’t know, but maybe once the silence is gone it’ll be time to stop
writing.
SDS: An emotional fatigue travels
through some of these poems. Their tones or atonality are charged with a kind
of unction and spiritual significance, like “a journey between exhaustion and
joy”. Often, emotions “arise between a verb and its object,” as if sadness,
bitterness, and attacks of love exist in a transitional space between the
environment and the individual; as if emotions are indigenous to specific
sites, and thus discoverable and borrowable. One example might be this stanza:
“I have formulated a new type of / resistance, against my
own ignorance: / I transplant my mind a few times a day, / replacing it with
unreliable / algorithms aimed at solving problems, / known as poems. I call
them departures.”
JE: I wish I had time to look up some psychoanalytic
stuff about the totem to address this idea of emotions as indigenous to
specific sites, but as you know I'm on the road again tomorrow. I pick up
pretty strong vibes from places, or else I project my own anxieties and such
onto places, and that transitional space of which you write does often feel
very real. To me, it seems even more present between language and the self, than
between the environment and the self. At times, a poem arrives when language
pushes back against the self, and this happens a lot for me in environments.
SDS: Throughout
Imperial Nostalgias the poet
chronicles or is accompanied by crowds –– obedient crowds that listen,
rebellious crowds that don’t hear, “crowds trapped in margins of stale air,”
crowds made up of Beat poets, ancient and modern philosophers, a bunch of
sightseers, ghosts and workers, notable photographers and visual artists. These
crowds seem to have a vital, psychological function in relationship to the
individual. You seem to be saying that the individual requires the crowd to
make sense of himself?
JE: Community is something I think about a lot, and I’m glad you pointed
out the crowds in the book because I hadn’t realized they were so prevalent. I
recall the first time I was in a mosh pit, as a sophomore in high school…I was
a really small kid, and I got slammed around really, but I enjoyed it a lot and
it changed my thoughts about music, which until then had been a rather private
joy in my life. It’s baffling to think of the powers at work in a violent mob
or a bhikkhu-sangha joined in meditation.
SDS: On a more personal note I’m wondering what you’re doing these days? I
know you’ve been involved with translating and teaching, that you’re the
director and co-editor of Canarium books, and you’ve been living in Germany.
Please talk about any of these things that seem relevant or of note.
JE: Since
October, Lynn and I have lived near Stuttgart at the Akademie Schloss Solitude,
an
amazing interdisciplinary residency where I’m on a yearlong fellowship. Our
apartment is in an 18th Century palace that’s surrounded by forest,
up on a hill, and we don’t go to the city much. Most of our time is spent at a
shared desk, or else walking in the woods or hanging out with friends. I feel
extremely fortunate to take part in the academy’s international community of
artists and thinkers. Besides learning a lot, I’ve had the opportunity to
collaborate with several friends I’ve met here: composer Peter Jakober,
architect/artist Alan Worn, and artist Charlotte Moth. The past few months,
I’ve also been working on the upcoming Canarium Books collections, freelance
jobs, and my next book, Agonistes.
After we leave Europe in December or January, Lynn and I will settle (at least
half-time) in Marfa, Texas. We’re working on the design of our home with a
friend and my dad, and we’ll build it from the ground up with the help of
family and friends.
Sheila Davies Sumner has an M.F.A. in Poetry
from St. Mary’s College of California. She has also written short stories which
appeared in Rampike, Alcatraz 3, and in the graphic-story
magazine, one of one, published by
Burning Books. In addition, she has written and produced radio dramas,
commissioned by New American Radio, including What is the Matter in Amy Glennon, which was nominated for the
International Prix Futura Award.
Joshua Edwards directs and co-edits
Canarium Books. He's the author of Imperial Nostalgias (Ugly Duckling, 2013)
and Campeche (Noemi, 2011) and the translator of Mexican poet María Baranda's
Ficticia (Shearsman, 2010). Currently a fellow at the Akademie Schloss
Solitude, he divides his time between Stuttgart, Germany and Marfa, Texas.
Megan Breiseth comes from Illinois and has lived in the Bay
Area for 13 years. She’s the author of the chapbook Zia and
the manuscript Fur. In addition to writing poetry, she also
teaches, coaches, and reads tarot cards.
Sara Wintz’s work brings together text and theater in a
practice that encompasses research, poetry, and performance. Ugly Duckling
Presse published her book about the twentieth century, WALKING ACROSS A
FIELD WE ARE FOCUSED ON AT THIS TIME NOW, in December 2012. 
