A Conversation: Brenda Hillman and Frances Richard

A Chain of Holes

A Conversation with Brenda Hillman & Frances Richard

Brenda and Frances, thank you for taking time to answer our questions and for your work, which provides a way out of our “consensual mass hallucination that’s mistakenly referred to as ‘reality’” (Rob Breszny). These questions arise from conversations we’ve had together about your work and about your latest books—Brenda: Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (Wesleyan, 2013); and Frances: Anarch. (Futurepoem, 2012) and The Phonemes (Les Figues Press, 2012).

By immersing ourselves in your work, we have come to feel grounded in the irreducible and thus our hope is that these questions will help to further differentiate each of your thoughts and feelings about “ecopoetics” without imposing a need to explicate the diversity of the field via the singularity of definition.

—Sheila Davies Sumner & Casey McAlduff

NOTE: We would also like to thank Evelyn Reilly, whose poetry, thoughts and opinions helped inform the trajectory of this conversation. Her presence is throughout.

  

On The Imagination—

Sheila Davies Sumner & Casey McAlduff: In our readings and discussions of your work, we came to understand it as originating from the imagination and the belief that the imagination—because it doesn’t belong to ‘us’ but rather to a collective unconscious of all life— allows us to access a post-human-centered consciousness.  This breakthrough into the beyond-human has led us as readers to the beautifully shattering confrontation with our “species-position” (Reilly) and to embrace a “sensibility that doesn’t consider the human as somehow the keeper or steward of something that was given to us” (Hillman, from Angela Hume’s “Imagining Ecopoetics”). 

With these realizations (anti-hallucinations?) also comes the acknowledgement of our pervasive complacency and the artistic “imperative to work against the grain of what is complacently or autocratically given,” in order to “form a center of fierce desire—to refuse false choices” (Frances Richard, from a conversation with Anne Waldman, BOMB). 

These statements seem founded in a kind of personal coming-to; they point toward a time over which you each came to recognize that we have been terribly wrong.

Can you talk more about this moment or shift in your own consciousness and how it affects your daily life?

Brenda Hillman: Maybe most people are drawn to poetry by moments brought about by intense experiences — things that take you beyond the limitations of consciousness to an “other” or group of “others” or to a mysterious thing you wish to define; these experiences have seemed humbling and are often accompanied by the realization that one just has no access to experiences these “others” have—whether those others are humans, fish, imagined tribes, rocks, books, the dead or molecules. Maybe it is the conviction that we are, if we are ego-bound and impose our will on others, just much more terribly limited.  When we are tiny children we try so hard to feel we exist and are not threatened by everyone who comes along and many humans don’t leave that stage… But what does it mean to realize we are everything and yet cannot know anything beyond our own skin with any certainty?  Nobody has complete access to another’s experience—we go there with a kind of hopeful empathy or projective imagination, and even then, we are profoundly limited. i was just out for a pathetically slow run along a busy road and i saw a squirrel that had just been struck—it had just died and the blood coming out of its neck seemed unearthly beyond magenta—not even red but almost glowing toward pink, a color nearly outside the concept of red, and really shocking. i had no idea what the squirrel’s experience was. i had just been studying Olson’s “The Kingfishers” for my Ecopoetics class and realized the squirrel’s and Olson’s experiences were inaccessible but at least Olson has words. 

Frances Richard: I never had a breakthrough moment when I stopped thinking that we (humans? Americans? English speakers? post-industrial global-networked capitalist-realist polluters?) were right, and understood instead that we are wrong. I never thought “we” were “right.” Last night, before the reading, I was talking with Brenda, Evelyn (Reilly), and Angie Hume about language and self-consciousness as human adaptations… Compared to adaptations that allow other creatures to read and respond to their environments and one another, humans are comically under-equipped. No echolocation like bats and whales; no internal magnetic compass like foxes and dogs; no inner electricity like rays and eels; no scent/dance math like ants and bees; no stamina compared to hummingbird or polar bear; no adaptability to drought and fire like succulents and redwoods. Certainly no perdurability like rocks; no scope like oceans. Etc. etc. etc. What evolution cooked up for humans is the reflexive, symbol-making mind. It’s very cool. But elephants’ minds also appear to be—insofar as we can know them, which is not well—incredibly impressive, and if “mind” is the wrong term for the nimbus of possibility generated by and between the brains of shrews, chameleons, bower birds, dung beetles, doesn’t this make “mind” a human-solipsistic term? We don’t understand even ourselves well. We act racist and jingoistic and fundamentalist, violent and selfish and foolish with catastrophic frequency. We’re stuck in language, stuck in the human perceptual apparatus, stuck, currently, in the 21^st century. We damage each other, and we damage the mind-boggling array of energy-forms and matter-forms existing with us. Mind so boggled can’t be all that great.

This affects my daily life in that…. I try to write and teach from this perspective. I turn to the art I like best for help in thinking/feeling my way through it. I am often baffled, afraid, angry; overwhelmed by it; slightly less often but still often suffused by a mundane, proprioceptive, minorly ecstatic awe. I try to understand what ethical behavior is, and to behave accordingly. This feels dumb to write in discursive prose. I am reading a biography of Wittgenstein, who insisted that ethics could not be said, only shown, and also (enigmatically, maybe kind of infuriatingly) at least once turned his back and read Rabindranath Tagore out loud instead of lecturing on logic. Poetry is useful because to de-center our own minds is an irrational process, a chain of holes. It requires aporetic tools.

(While writing this, tutelary friends—liked, followed—have been hovering my thoughts: Eileen Myles, and ability-courage to call out cant =great word= and social abusiveness. Alice Notley, and embrace of vatic rage. Dana Ward, writing about his baby daughter. If a cyborg Eileen-Alice-Dana-insect-rock-fox wrote this, it would be better.)

SDS & CM: Can you also talk about how the imagination can lead us ethically and how, as innovation becomes corporatized, we can continue to distinguish between imaginative acts that further a post-human consciousness in a creative rather than a destructive way [fracking, for example]? How does your poetic work incorporate both forces?

Brenda Hillman: So, i’ve answered this question so much i worry that i’ll repeat myself and just want to refer people to one long discussion of this on the Poetry Society website (thanks, Brett Fletcher Lauer!):

Imagination is not good or bad in itself. In fact, i’m not even sure, as a concept, “imagination” makes the earth better—we have no way of knowing what would have happened had we not had The Tempest, Picasso or Tu Fu or…the “bad imagination”— the atomic bomb...As the concept of imagination applies to art, we just want it to be boundless and unfettered.  It’s inevitable that when you start falling in love with an art like poetry, it feels good to allow for a somewhat anarchic zone. It’s rarely useful. When i think about values i’ve gotten from the practice of poetry, however, there are several things that certainly don’t hurt daily life: being able to put oneself outside the limits is one thing; being able to bear uncertainty and be flexible in a state of doubt is another. Extrapolating from the squirrel moment to all other moments i don’t understand, it is very hard to know how to behave ethically, what to do or not to do in relation to other species except to assume a zone of unknowing another. Most theories we are supposed to live by are ultimately unsatisfying, and i have become increasingly reliant on intuition, as Shelley says, better that poets remain ‘unacknowledged legislators.’ i tend to react unpredictably when things are not going well around me and i learned under stress as an activist in the last decade that i didn’t really know what i would do in the next moment; if students are being beaten, i forget what i said i was supposed not to do. In any case, imagination is a strange word that comes with a lot of baggage. There is something like a postmodern soul concept that seems capable of distributing reality among plants, animals and even cops at a protest. When i say soul i don’t mean the floaty filmy thing.  i mean that whether you are acting in a political situation or a purely poetic one, you act as if something in your experience could reflect a process without a center, could make meaning of that process even as it is going on. There is something about the intricacy and intimacy of those moments that is done by what used to be called the soul, and it’s all right to say that takes place in people. It is very tied with imagination and if you are trying to make meaning in relation to an other you know it is not ok to plot to bomb them or spray them.

Since most kinds of knowledge of spiritual and physical properties—sounds, sights— we will never have in this lifetime, we must imagine them. Poetry is one way of getting there.

Frances Richard: I tried above, imperfectly, to speak to “how the imagination can lead us ethically” (or how my own and other poets’ imaginations sometimes lead me ethically). How can the poem be used reflexively to think through the relations of, say, fracking to itself, the poem?

Q: How can interplay of

a) radically dispersed consciousness

b) semiotic/lexical structures

c) lyric introspection and awkward passionateness

d) absurdity

e) interdependent co-arising with the nonhuman and nonlinguistic

f)  active engagement of history and lineage

g) good-faith attempts to respond to technopolitics

x) x-factor

get into the poem without hysterically over-burdening the weird, fragile, protean thing a poem is?

A: fall off the cliff. (See individual question below).

A: Read Angie Hume and Laura Mullen’s “Trash” issue of The Volta and see what all those smart people have to say.

SDS & CM: And lastly, how do you enact imagination on the page? (We’re thinking of Stevens & Creeley here, and the poem as an enactment of the mind.)

Frances Richard: Layout and negative page-space—lexical/visual analogues of silence, rest, being-at-a-loss, reverie, bodily experience—are important. And: Make things up! If you need a word or word-like device that isn’t to hand, mock it up on the spot. But this is another long essay, and I’ve already said so/too much. For now, otherwise, perhaps: See below on real fall from pretend cliff and abstaining from A.B.C. language.

On Specificity and Multitude: the “problem” of Occupy—

SDS & CM: The imagination of your work seems also to be deeply integrated with the idea of negative capability and to be driven by an ecological engagement with variance, diversity, juxtaposition, spontaneity and the many. This reach toward a multivalent consciousness—toward an “intense, unpredictable poetry” (Hillman) coupled with the inherent difficulty in trying to define “ecopoetics” — reminds us of the complaints issued against the Occupy Movement by the dominant media.

Brenda Hillman: Humans seem to love certainty. The marketing culture, the corporate culture—they really love certainty. Sometimes writers participate in this desire for certainty when they crave definitions and packaging for something like Occupy or for literary concepts. i am not bothered by the multivalent and chaotic conversations around a word like “ecopoetics”—nor am i bothered by the notion that it may cease to be a useful or an interesting term. The important thing is to have conversations around the terms—whether it is “ecopoetics” or “wilderness” or “environment” or the now-whipping boy, “nature.” Poor nature—such a rich word, with so many Greek and Roman roots and now everyone is mad at it. And here we are, fracking one kind of “nature” (the cruddy deep resistant shale-oil) with another—water mixed with x, y and z. 

SDS & CM: As the Occupy Movement grew and engaged a more diverse populace, the demands of the movement justly diversified in response. That said, Occupy was nailed by the media as having a “lack of focus”; it was criticized as a movement that did not know what it wanted. 

As Evelyn Reilly asks so astutely ask in her essay “Environmental Dreamscapes and Ecopoetic Grief” while pondering the multiple forms of definition the term ‘ecopoetics’ has been subjected to: “do these calls for ‘everything’ risk being ‘nothing’?”

Furthermore, do you think that Occupy changed the discourse on ecopoetics? And if so, how?  

Brenda Hillman: Lack of focus is my favorite flavor, so they came to the right place—ha ha! Occupy is essentially anti-capitalist but not exclusively so. Most of the activists i know blame toxic capitalism not only for the illness of humans but also for the death of species and the discourse of ecopoetics often harks back to anti-capitalist poetics movements like SF Renaissance poetry of Rexroth and so on.  i think ecopoetics—inclusive and formally inventive poetry redefining relationships to environments— was probably helped by the work of Occupy—since neither is a protected, packaged movement/concept-- and it helped with those poetic values i mentioned above: indefiniteness and uncertainty and openness. i’ll say something more irreverent here: Occupy was started by disillusionment and if it created more of it, that may be a good thing; there is no reason at all for people, especially young people, to believe in the unfair practices of the current economic system. The current economic system is insane, is not good for most people and is destroying the planet—so Occupy made the connections for sure. It’s not all disillusionment, however; there are many hopeful things that came out of Occupy— truckers and young people and homeless people and very far left people and libertarian people got out into the streets, collectively, because they were disgusted.  Many remained disgusted. We must not let up our activism even though the movement dissipated. The concepts did not dissipate and i believe the refusal-energy is alive.

Frances Richard: When Evelyn writes of “updated nature writing, ruined-landscape writing, over-earnest science-inflected writing, call to arms writing,” I feel self-recognition. I’m engaged in some ways with all these things. This makes me feel worried: is what I’m doing too neatly codified, signed on to a preexisting trend or shtick? It’s interesting, however, to observe myself turning recognition into discomfort so speedily, since I’ve spent many years writing poems that, it seemed, belonged to no school or discussion, that felt somewhat illegible even in the communities in which I take part. After all, it is in some ways wonderful to identify with a school or movement or bunch of people sharing vocabulary.

The hybrid forms, meditative premises, and urgent social/sensorial investments tending to show up in work that gets called “ecopoetic” make sense to me for multiple reasons, not least of which is that I think artists should endeavor to deal with their times. Through the portal of “eco-” these poetries attempt to grapple with geopolitical power; the material world of technology and its debris; information saturation and speed in the society of the spectacle; post-industrialism and post-colonialism; ideas of the fragmented, dispersed self hanging on from Romanticism; ideas of a fragmented, collaged and sampled culture hanging on from high Modernism. This is a lot. It’s the lot we’ve got in this generation. But I don’t think it’s “everything.” How could it be? Also, probably, art-making always risks being “nothing.” Certainly in capitalist-reality this is true, because art risks being capitalist-worthless.

Do you think that Occupy changed the discourse on ecopoetics? And if so, how?  

[Frances Richard]: About ecopoetics I don’t know specifically, and I don’t know more generally how or if Occupy will sustain/continue to reinvent itself long enough to…. help us again politically, let alone poetically. Eirik Steinhoff’s A Fiery Flying Roule and the People’s Library at Liberty Plaza gladden(ed) me in that the powers I experience in poetry seem(ed) to be spreading a little, sharing themselves with people who might not normally turn to poetry as a wellspring. The huge demonstrations I was in in NYC were the most intense and…. (real)…. that I’ve ever experienced, bold and fearsome, joyous, not kidding. But then the demonstrations and encampments stopped. But then what Occupy Sandy did in NYC last fall was incredible and beautiful. I hear of amazing activism in Detroit. More power to the Rolling Jubilee. My undergrads in art school have been (a little bit) radicalized. So: uncertain verb tenses and parentheticals…

Individual Questions—

Question for Brenda Hillman

Sheila Davies Sumner: Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (Wesleyan, 2013), your new book of poems, and last in a tetrology, seems like a sentient blueprint of that element. Everything of fire belongs––its colors & light, combustions & heat, and flash-points of volatility. A conflagration can happen within a single poem; a subterranean burning might spread across several poems; domesticated fire becomes urban or planetary or galactical, and also resides within the “alchemist’s bowl” where “reality burns at different rates.” In nearly unrepeatable patterns of diction, syntax, and punctuation, the movement of your linguistic flame is unique and durable and precise in the way it mirrors fire. Under this heat, the psychic life inside of words seems to pop open and letters scatter everywhere, germinating like jack pine cones (Pinus banksiana ) –– again making an "intense unpredictable poetry" (the other part of imaginative activism). In the poem, “When the Occupations Have Just Begun”, a more humid affinity with heat comes up –– “obdurate cliffs drop into the sea / as tears pour from your heart’s / intricate oddity.” Crying moistens the fire, adds an “extra kindling” of heartburn. There’s a chemistry of risk here that reminds us of something else you’ve said: "One of the things ecopoetics tries to do is reconfigure the poem so as to include some of the endangered forms of thought." Would you talk about how the practice of animating and reanimating letters might relate to this? Are words, as constituents of thought, also endangered because of dead meanings or overuse?

______________

Brenda Hillman: First of all, thank you for your readership and for those wonderful remarks. Like much of my other work, this book came out of a twinning of defiance and love—especially the love i feel for existence, for life on earth, for all of the invisible realms, and for a dream nature (pun intended) that will keep the soul alive in time of war and economic struggle. i am not sure where the physical features of the flaming letters came from except, i think, from some of the more gnostic elements of the Judaic and Christian traditions. It felt good to work with fire as it was inner, outer and very flexible. In general, i want to carry archaic traditions forward in time and to keep modernist and postmodernist practices very versatile with ancient myth as well, with an emphasis on different kinds of material including the invisible realms.  i am very fond of this idea of letters crossing the realms in Walter Benjamin and wanted to bring a liveliness to that. The main thing i hoped to do in this book was to present to its readers the idea that there is no limit to reality and that all realities can coexist. i have always believed this, and it has always cheered me up. It makes me happy if a little of this sense comes through in my poems.

Question for Frances Richard

Sheila Davies Sumner: Your poems are shaped with "aural shadows". In The Phonemes (Les Figues Press, 2012), there's a sort of drizzling of typographic sound designs throughout the book that works to subdue harshness while also amplifying conflict and bringing a restorative lexical delight. Anarch. (Futurepoem, 2012) is also rich in sound-sense and cognizance. You disperse the I/subject throughout texts, in a kind of hide-and-seek poetics. There are structured associations written into these "speed of dark" poems which track shifting images and reveal their accumulative thought processes. In “Blush Alarm”: “People experience memories in a brain / uninvented by movies”; and “blown like flowers / The dove going backward / Erasure takes a while / Put my tongue to taste the grain of darkness / coming forward”. Syntax breakage and juxtaposition are going on everywhere, at breathtaking speed, and seem to be foundational in both of these books. In this vein, what happens to developing emotional states that often need to slowly coalesce through continuity –– how much interruption can they withstand (before a tipping point is reached)? We’ve noticed your ability to work with the edge –– to exert a fine control in seemingly chaotic environments. In the poem “Universally Accepted Definition”, you write of the “instinct-injured”, and describe a visual fusion –– “from Chinese-painting fog, egg-yolk sun sets / into ashen clouds––I know according / to this cliff.” How do you navigate the cliff, the brink, without going over or into it?  In this context, we think of the ego as humanity’s psychic instinct for survival; not ego as an immense and central sun, but as one small star –– possibly the north star –– among many. How does your north star locate you?  What is the responsibility of the word to feeling? 

______________

Frances Richard: I like these descriptions: “typographic drizzling” (synaesthetic in haptic as well as aural terms)... “restorative lexical delight” (the fantasy that writing and reading can repair damage at cellular and/or geopolitical levels is outrageous, grandiose, pathetic and at the same time, we’ve all had our emotions, politics, epistemologies transformed by reading. (See Occupy question.) Plus of course the sheer pleasure of reading when it soaks into your body... “hide-and-seek poetics” (meaning and representation as hide-and-seek or fort/da games)… “breakage as foundational” (from mitosis to cutting the umbilical cord to Adamic fall to Lacanian mirror stage to the rhetoric of revolution to how a foundation is in fact built, by first breaking ground.)

what happens to developing emotional states that often need to slowly coalesce through continuity –– how much interruption can they withstand (before a tipping point is reached)? How do you navigate the cliff, the brink, without going over or into it?

Great question. For me this is a political/ethical as well as an emotional/psychological issue. How is coherent meaning possible if all parameters are constantly in wild quantum flux? Without baseline significance and identity that track over time and can be relied on as given, the individual tips into aphasia or psychosis; without some basis for shared belief or accepted premises, no instrumental communication—hence no organization (“movement”) between people is possible; without terms in which to name, relate, and differentiate, no discernment or judgment can be made, no stance taken. On the other hand, fixed, unnuanced beliefs and uninterrupted assumptions are usually a nightmare. There is no immutable line between the radically, psychotically dispersed and the adamantly, fascistically hard. How much interruption is the right amount? If we knew, wouldn’t we also know how to make brilliant art; wise, compassionate, happy people; just and effective societies; totally perspicacious judgments? As it is, you (I) just fail all the time. Find the line by tripping over it, fall off the cliff constantly. You navigate the cliff by going over it and surviving.

(In Are You My Mother?, Alison Bechdel paraphrases Winnicott’s object-relations theory: “The subject must destroy the object, and the object must survive that destruction.” The cliff is intersubjective paradox. You are yourself, not somebody else; but know that only by being in relation to others. Including relation to the nonhuman—creaturely, geological, chemical, topographical, meteorological, technological, etc. Or you navigate by creeping to the edge of the abyss on your belly, peeking over, and wriggling away. Like the scene in Lear where Edgar, as Poor Tom, leads blinded Gloucester up to an imaginary cliff so he can commit notional suicide and re-feel the value of being alive. Each element in this scene is compromised, untrustworthy—Edgar disguised, Gloucester impaired, cliff pretend. But the despair is real and so, therefore, is the retrieval from despair.)

In this context, we think of the ego as humanity’s psychic instinct for survival; not ego as an immense and central sun, but as one small star –– possibly the north star –– among many. How does your north star locate you? 

You are, I think, getting at what I’m trying to articulate above about small ego as failure-prone. The absurd in-between self, as opposed to armor-plated immense and central sun. Less a North Star in all the purity and heroic road-to-freedom that implies, and more the compass needle, jittering and yawing off course; not a natural, extra-cultural entity but a piece of a built device; yet still magnetized to something elementally bigger than itself (which would be… what? The minerals embedded in the intersubjective or cooperatively eroded cliff… i.e. small ego navigates via the experience of losing and re-finding itself in the struggle to exchange meaning productively with other egos who are also chronically getting lost or acting compromised—and/or with nonhuman living things and forces that require us to be in relation but don’t exist for us or speak our language.)

In a poem, at least, I locate myself musically/sonically, and by how the lines look on the page and sit in white space, and by a balance between direct, discursive statement and vocabulary and syntax (and image) under pressure of estrangement.   

What is the responsibility of the word to feeling?

I don’t know, but that isn’t a good answer. What system of ethics or powers determines this responsibility? To what extent are feelings in fact separable from words or words from feelings, since both exist as brain-functions? None of us grappling with this question on this blog are pre-verbal infants; we’re all in the realm of language, and we don’t know what our feelings would be like if language were stripped out of us. At the bottom of this distinction is the chimera of mind/body split.

But obviously word and feeling are not identical either; feelings resist articulation all the time; ecstatic experience is defined partly by being inimical to description, and so is traumatic experience. A certain kind of writer would say (I project), “the responsibility is not to lie.” And that would sound (to me) infuriating—as though one could judge confidently which utterances—and intentionally artificed aesthetic utterances at that—measure up to some inner state of feeling that is itself solid and stable enough to be gauged by an officially ratified (by whom?) ruler. (See Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages. Wittgenstein also talks about a ruler “made of very soft rubber.”) What would such an inner life be like? At the same time, There is a responsibility not to lie, if that means not to use flaccid, unconsidered language, language serving unexamined, coercive power-relations or flattened out by corporate-nationalistic fondling, language that plumps up narcissistic, passive-consumerist ideas of self and denies fear, confusion, rapture, rupture, selflessness, contradiction, hunger, nonsense. I remember, from grade-school, the gross-out category of A.B.C. gum—“already been chewed.” In my notes-to-self lexicon, there is a category of irresponsible language as A.B.C.—a warmish, gray lump spit into your mouth from somewhere else along the line, used up, all sweetness and freshness chewed out by advertising, by the hopelessness of neoliberal political discourse, by emotional ignorance and bad attention. Poet’s responsibility is not to valorize pre-chewed feelings given shape in pre-chewed language.

(Flaw in this metaphor is that the flavor of gum is essential-oil-of-advertising to begin with.

This points, perhaps, toward Conceptualist poetics and what Kenny Goldsmith calls “uncreative writing,” admitting that in our language, and therefore in our articulable feeling, we’re constantly already interpellated by hypercapital, and so the task of the writer is to mouth the gum for all to see in its shocking-pink/blue-raspberry relentlessness-banality-toxicity-comedy-bubbliciousness. I have a lot of sympathy with this work. But it isn’t work I know how to make, because, a) it also seems to me to flirt with another, inverted purity or absoluteness, and b) I’m interested in the synaptic, libidinal, irrational, inconsistent elements of language, what Kristeva calls the semiotic, that hum inside and under symbolic language. The rhythm, including the ache, of the chewing jaw, or the pattern of chemoreceptors firing in the taste buds, or how the pink dye breaks down into molecules, and those molecules are part of your body now.)



Bios—

Brenda Hillman has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, and EmPress; she is the author of nine full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Practical Water (2009) and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013). With Patricia Dienstfrey, she edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003).  Hillman teaches at St. Mary’s College of California where she is the Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry; she is an activist for social and environmental justice and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. http://www.blueflowerarts.com/brenda-hillman.

Frances Richard is the author of Anarch. (Futurepoem, 2012), The Phonemes (Les Figues Press, 2012) and See Through (Four Way Books, 2003), as well as the chapbooks Shaved Code (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008) and Anarch. (Woodland Editions, 2008). She writes frequently about contemporary art and is co-author, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, of Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates” (Cabinet Books, 2005). She has been a visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and is the recipient of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a research grant from the Graham Foundation. Currently she teaches at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

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. She is the Staff Writer for the Studio One Reading Series.

Casey McAlduff is the curator of the Studio One Reading Series.  

Friday, March 14 @ 7:30, featuring Judith Taylor, Ben Mirov and Diana Arterian

Join us on March 14 at 7:30 p.m. for a special second Friday reading w. Judith Taylor, Ben Mirov and Diana Arterian

Beverages and snacks will be served

Admission is FREE

Judith Taylor is the author of three poetry collections, Sex Libris (What Books Press, 2013), named by Cal Bedient as one of the best books of 2013 in The Volta, Curios (Sarabande Books), and Selected Dreams from the Animal Kingdom (Zoo Press), as well as the co-editor of Air Fare: Stories, Poems and Essays on Flying  (SarabandeBooks). She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. Taylor’s photographs have been published in Lana Turner, The Writing Disorder, and The World is a Text: Writing, Reading, and Thinking about Visual and Popular Culture. From 1975-91, she was on the faculty of UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, and now teaches privately.  Taylor is a founding editor of POOL: A Journal of Poetry and has managed and co-edited the journal since its inception in 2002.

Ben Mirov is the author of Hider Roser (Octopus Books, 2012). He is also the author Ghost Machine (Caketrain, 2010) selected for publication by Michael Burkard, and chosen as one of the best books of poetry in 2010 for Believer Magazine's Reader Survey. He is one of the founding editors of PEN America's poetry series.

Diana Arterian was born and raised in Arizona. She currently resides in Los Angeles where she is pursuing her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Diana is a Poetry Editor at Noemi Press, and creator and Managing Editor of Ricochet, a publisher of poetry and prose. Her own chapbook, Death Centos, was recently published by Ugly Duckling Presse, and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, TwoSerious Ladies and The Volta, among others.

Friday, February 7 @ 7:30, featuring Jane Gregory, Raina J. León and Joseph Bradshaw

Please join us on Friday, February 7 

@ 7:30 p.m. for a reading with 

Jane Gregory, Raina J. León and Joseph Bradshaw

Admission is FREE

Snacks and beverages will be served.

Jane Gregory is from Tucson, Arizona.  Her book, My Enemies, was published by The Song Cave in 2013.  She lives in Berkeley, California.

Raina J. León, CantoMundo fellow, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006) and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, has been published in numerous journals as a writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction.  She is the author of two collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols and Boogeyman Dawn.  She has received numerous fellowships and residencies including the Macdowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale.  She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latino and Latina arts.  She is an assistant professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California.  

Starting in Caldwell, Idaho, Joseph Bradshaw has lived in 33 houses, apartments, duplexes, hostels, cars, and/or trailers in various places around the country. He now lives in Brooklyn. Joseph began writing poetry about a decade ago when a friend lent him Leslie Scalapino's THE FRONT MATTER, DEAD SOULS. In 2011 Shearsman published his book IN THE COMMON DREAM OF GEORGEOPPEN. His new work is in recent issues of Aufgabe, Elective Affinities, and Elderly.  

 

Sunday, January 26: The Lana Turner Glamour Reading (#Six release)

Come celebrate the release of Lana Turner #Six on 

Sunday, January 26 from 7-10 p.m. 

Hosted by the journal's co-editors: 

David Lau & Calvin Bedient

Admission is free.

Beverages & snacks will be served.

Featuring:

Brian Ang's current poetic project is The Totality Cantos, for Atelos. He edits ARMED CELL in Oakland.

Rusty Morrison's Beyond the Chainlink (Ahsahta) is just published (January 2014). After Urgency won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize, the true keeps calm biding its story won the Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, the N. CA Book Award, the DiCastagnola Award from PSA. Her first book, Whethering, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poems are anthologized in the Norton Postmodern American Poetry 2nd Edition, The Arcadia Project: Postmodern Pastoral, Beauty is a Verb, and elsewhere. She is co-publisher of Omnidawn.

Andrew Joron is the author of Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights Books, 2011).

Juliana Spahr:  In addition to Commune Editions, Juliana Spahr edits the book series Chain Links with Jena Osman and the collectively funded Subpress with nineteen other people. With David Buuck she wrote Army of Lovers; she has done other recent collaborative work with Stephanie Young, Joan Retallack, Claudia Rankine, Joshua Clover, and Chris Chen.

Brenda Hillman teaches at Saint Mary's College where she is Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry; her most recent collection is Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire.

Geoffrey G. O'Brien is the author of 4 books of poetry, most recently People on Sunday.

Alli Warren's first book is Here Come the Warm Jets (City Lights, 2013). New work can be found in The Emerald Tablet, Elderly, and Compost. 

Michael Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969. His most recent collections are Active Boundaries (Selected Essays and Talks) (New Directions, 2008), Madman With Broom (selected poems, with Chinese translations by Yunte Huang, Oxford University Press, 2011) and Thread (New Directions 2011). A new collaboration with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Times Bones, will have its San Francisco premiere in April 2014. He has taught at various universities in the United States, Europe and Asia and published translations from a variety of languages, in particular French, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese.

Lauren Levin is from New Orleans and lives in Oakland. She wrote Working (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), Song (The Physiocrats), Keenan (Lame House Press) and Not Time (Boxwood Editions). She co-edits the Poetic Labor Project and Mrs. Maybe.

Joshua Clover has appeared in every issue of Lana Turner. He has collaborated on poetry, critical writing, and conferences with Chris Nealon, Chris Chen, Aaron Benanav, Annie McClanahan, Louis Schwartz, Jasper Bernes, and Juliana Spahr; with the lattermost two, he edits Commune Editions. 

& the editors:

David Lau is co-editor of Lana Turner. He is the author of a recent chapbook, Bad Opposites (speCt! Books), and a collection of poems, Virgil and the Mountain Cat (UC Press, 2009). He teaches writing at Cabrillo College and UC Santa Cruz.

Calvin Bedient is the author of four books of poems, the most recent being The Multiple (Omnidawn Publishing) and Days of Unwilling (Saturnalia Books).  He is co-editor of Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion.

A Conversation: Tanya Olson and Phillip B. Williams

A Conversation: Tanya Olson and Phillip B. Williams

written in response to the YesYes Books reading at Studio One on Friday, December 6

“I am rarely satisfied with a single representation of something, with a single idea.” 

- Phillip B. Williams

“…we use repetition to build our sense of self.” –Tanya Olson

Tanya Olson: I've had the good fortune to read Burn (YesYes Books, 2013) and some individual poems of yours; Last Friday (at our reading together at Studio One on December 6^th) was the first time I got a chance to hear you read though. One thing that struck me about your work, both on the page and in your reading it, was the move from high to low in it. The language is often very elevated, you have a very formal kind of reading style, but dropped in to these poems are real low-culture moments— pop culture figures like Chaka Khan and Smokey Robinson and things like hopscotch, greens, and roaches pop up in the middle of all this grandness.

It's a lovely pairing and makes your poems far-seeing but understanding. Could you talk a little about this high/low pairing and movement that you do— are you conscious of it? What work do you think it does? 

Phillip B. Williams: O Tanya, your reading was a fortunate event for me as well. I suppose, to answer your question, that it has been considered a flaw of mine that I mix registers.  We spoke briefly about poetry workshops and how useful and detrimental they can be simultaneously. It is something that I do naturally, as I talk that way and I have no interest in creating a world in my poems that is not reflective of the world of my mind. The argument against it is that it reminds readers they have a poem in front of them, that heightened language is a way of saying "look what I can do". In some aspect, I cannot imagine anyone ever forgetting that they are reading a poem. From my experience, just having line breaks and rhyme make it impossible to get lost in a poem the way I get lost in a novel. I look for what makes a poem a poem. I enjoy poems that splurge on language. I'm all for beauty and mix notes and chance-taking that is incredibly unsafe. When I include "low culture" (don't you just hate that we have no other name for this?) moments, it is simply me trying to tell the reader that this is what I know: I know Chaka Khan and I know playing softball with a balled-up jacket as first base. To separate the high from the low seems disingenuous and why write a poem that I don't believe in just to make it more convincing for someone else?

"What other work do you think does this?"— Music does it, in particular jazz (playing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in the middle of a composition for instance), but the assumption would have to be that jazz is considered a high-art, and high to whom? For what reason? I see it in a lot in ballets by Ulysses Dove and Alvin Ailey, how they have this hyper-technical footwork paired with really soulful, intuitive body movements that aren't articulated for the sake of perfection and beauty but as a way to get emotion and empathy translated from their bodies to the audience.

Tanya, what I really enjoyed about your book—Boyishly (YesYes Books, 2013)— was the fearlessness of repetition and hearing you read versus hearing myself read created a sense of "Yes, that is right" that I rarely get. "Notes From Jonah's Lecture Series" is a fascinating example of how I feel you and I read the poem in similar ways: quickly, with a slant of humor in the voice that softens into pathos every so often, ignoring line-end pauses and periods. It helps that the word whale is repeated 29 times (but drops out of most of the final stanza). I would love to hear more about how repetition works for you: what are your intentions, if any, when using it? Does reading your repetition-heavy poems aloud open up new possibilities/interpretations for the poem that you were unaware of? Who have you read that taught you how to do this so well or is this a natural instinct of yours? 

TO: How interesting that your fluidity between low & high (unfortunate terms, indeed) is sometimes read as a weakness. I really love it, because, as you note, it is life. And I think your elevated language doesn't read as "poetic" (in the alienating sense) but as poetic in the lifting sense. I like your comparison to dance—good dance does that—you remind us how dance is all around us, how we are already art. 

So to answer your question— I think of repetition as little handholds throughout the poem. I imagine someone rock climbing, the way your hands & feet must find resting & lifting places to move, to get from one place to another. That's what I imagine the repetition does—it provides those places to grab on, to rest, to move from. 

I first came to love repetition in Beckett. As an academic, I wrote about his 1970s women plays— Footfalls, Not I, Rockaby—that are really almost only repetition. They are beautiful, tender pieces that also show how we as humans use repetition to build our sense of self. As a poet, I love Stein & her repetition when she uses it to build meaning instead of hide meaning.  So while I'm less enthralled by Tender Buttons, I love the Making of Americans. That's a great piece to read aloud. I also love the way Van Morrison worries a word or line, repeats it over & over & over as a way to get inside a line. 

My next question for you is also an "influence" one. I like your "after" poems, especially “See No Evil, after Patricia Smith.” Could you talk about what the "afters" mean to you. After style? Subject? Theme?  

PBW: I see my poems that are "after" someone performing for me the task of training. I am copying theme or style, but usually it is a mix of copying form and structure when I say "after". I want the information in my poem ordered similarly as the poem it is after. With "See No Evil", I wrote a crown of sonnets after Smith's heroic crown "Motown Crown" and also kept the theme of soul music going. I learn my favorite techniques by writing after other poets and pushing past my limits that way. I also see the "after" poems working as homages to poets who have inspired me in some way.

I wanted to know how you mix these many voices and personalities with what I call the open-political in your poems, poems that seem to have a message that leans towards something social and aware but open enough to be interpreted differently by the reader. Some of your speakers and characters so to speak are Muhammad Ali, a "retarded astronaut", wild animals, Jonah, a young girl names Rose, and Captain Coffin. Some lines that led me to the term "Open-political" are: "Decapitated mountains are the price/ we are willing to pay for in America" from your poem "My Love is Green, America" and the following lines from your poem "Gates of Beauty":

“The People's Act of Love is for the people.
The People's Act of Love never has enough people.
The people ask for more from The People's Act of Love
but The People's Act of Love is exhausted, frankly,
if you don't mind The People's Act of Love being frank.”

How do you control the voice and the content? How do they team up in your poems to leave something very nuanced and, in that nuance, very welcoming, to be read in numerous ways? 

TO: Hmmm, that's a really interesting question. I have to say it doesn't feel very controlled while I am writing it, but maybe I am thinking of “controlled” differently than you mean it. They don't feel controlled because the voice is what drives the poem and the poem's contents, its innards. The People's Act of Love is weary of all it does for the people; the speaker in My Love is much more lecture-y. But they each have the things they need to say related to that voice. 

Why are those things they need to say political or at least political in nature? I guess because that is how I see and understand politics— as a series of small decisions we make individually and then collectively. And since I understand politics that way, the voices in the poems do too. (This I would say is consistent across all my poems— people analyzing their choices in regards to bigger forces. And I know not everyone understands themselves or the world that way, so I am willing to say that shared characteristic probably originates in me more than it originates in the actual voices themselves.) The voices don't think of their choices as political choices but they understand they have implications outside themselves, bigger than themselves. Often the way their choices resonate is in children, in the next generation. So people tell stories about things that have happened, stories they think are important to keep alive. Children interpret those stories into their play. I will say, I like the term "open-political"; that seems accurate.

My final, written-down question for you is about what I think of as the "falling" nature of your poems. I like the way your poems use lists and the way those lists fall from item to item, in rhythm, in sound. It's lovely and I think lends itself to the formality of your work (I'm really thinking of the “Adam and Eve” series here) and drives the reading of your work. Are you aware of that? Do you consciously construct work that way? If so, how? If not (or if so), why do you think that happens? What do you think it does? It's a great technique.     

PBW: I had to reread those poems you mentioned. The “Adam and Eve” series is one of the longer series of poems in that chapbook and I was curious about looking for "falling" patterns in a series of poems about The Fall haha. I am aware that I make lists in my poems but I do not do so consciously. For me I am rarely satisfied with a single representation of something, with a single idea. I want to include everything that crosses my mind and for the images to be unstable because that is how they are to me; creating lists is a way of recreating the blur of my thinking. I see it mostly in the poem "Minutiae" where the details gather until the violence of the poem unfolds in a kind of narrative of accrual. Nothing really happens but there is a sense of building toward a climax that happens because of the list nature of the poem. I think it adds speed to the poem to have one thing move toward something else over and over again. What I hope is that it translates how my mind is not interested in the singular image, but interested in creating an emotional landscape through many images and juxtapositions. That I do not use this technique consciously intrigues me, because it is not that I have not tried, rather when I have tried to purposely create a list it always fails by rambling.

My final question for you is what were the most enlightening aspects of creating a book? What did you learn about your writing habits and poetic eye that you may not have been fully aware of? This has been great and I thank you for chatting with me about poetry, yours and my own.  

TO: It's a funny but good question. I'm not sure what I learned by making the book. 

I learned things about individual poems and presumably about myself— what ideas I worried again and again over the years, the way my understanding of the world and myself shifted slightly as I got older. I guess the most important thing I learned is that I had to be in the right head-space in order to be ready for the book, that a book is like a relationship. You might have books (and relationships) before you are ready, but you, the poet, the person, has to do the work to get ready for the moment the real one, the important one comes along. I believe that doors open and close and if you aren't ready to step through (or are too frightened to) then that opportunity is gone. There might be different opportunities, but that one will never come the same way again.

So I slog through, doing the day to day grunt work, the thinking the writing the reading, hoping I will recognize the door and its opening, hoping I will have the bravery to leap through it when it does.

Which seems like a lovely place to stop on this, the first day of 2014. Thanks so much for this conversation. It makes me even more intrigued to see what you produce in the future.

PBW: Thank you so much Tanya and thank you Casey for the invitation.

           

Tanya Olson holds an M.A. in Anglo-Irish Literature from University College, Dublin and a Ph.D. in 20^th Century British Literature from UNC-Greensboro.  Her first book, Boyishly, was released by YesYes Books in May 2013. Her work has been published in Boston Review, Beloit Poetry Review, Southword (IRL), PANK, Cairn, Fanzine, Bad Subjects, Main Street Rag, Pedestal Magazine, Elysian Fields, and Southern Cultures. In 2010, she won a Discovery/Boston Review prize and was named a 2011 Lambda Fellow by the Lambda Literary Foundation.

Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois native. He is the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc., 2011) and Burn (YesYes Books, 2013). He is a Cave Canem graduate and received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anti-, Callaloo, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, The Southern Review, West Branch and others. Phillip is currently a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis and is working on his MFA in Creative Writing. He is the poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry.