GARRETT CAPLES: You’ve recently had your selected poems, Trance Archive, published by City Lights; it goes back to your first book in 1987. What is it like, at this point in your career, to take a backwards glance at your trajectory as a poet? Do you see more disjunctions or continuities in the development of your work?
ANDREW JORON: My first poem was published three decades ago in a science-fiction magazine. In fact, I spent the first half of my career as a poet in the science-fiction field, an unusual trajectory for a poet. I regarded science fiction as a place where the Romantic imagination was still alive; the affinities between science fiction and surrealism informed my practice for most of that time. Eventually, my work exceeded the conventions of the genre, and I began to realize that the experimental poetry scene was much more conducive to the kind of poetry I was writing. So, in my late thirties, I abandoned the writing community I’d grown up in––science fiction––to join another. This leap was accomplished without a great shift in my practice: I was (and still am) writing what I consider to be a mode of “speculative lyric.” But this work has received a warmer welcome in the experimental-poetry scene than it ever did in science fiction, so I have never regretted “leaving home.”
GC: At a reading once, you claimed that many of your poems were secret biographies of letters of the alphabet. Can you elaborate on this?
AJ: I said that? Usually I think of language as a system coming to us from an Inhuman starry background, a kind of coding that appropriates our animal bodies. So I guess letters share the fate of our bodies––they’re arbitrary squiggles with the weight of the Ideal imposed on them. So poems participate in the fate of letters before words. Of patterns before meaning. This is one of the definitions of a hieroglyph. The science lies in seeing the hieroglyph (and by extension, the poem) as a complex system, overboiling its own parameters, and moving unpredictably toward an ontological rupture.
GC: What is the relationship between your work and anarchism, given your connections with philosopher Paul Feyerabend and surrealist mystic Philip Lamantia?
AJ: It’s probably naïve of me to think so, but I see a group of improvising musicians as embodying, in microcosm, the social relations of a liberated world: each musician is listening to––responsible to––the others as a way of energizing his or her own expressivity. Directional structures, “ideologies,” even leadership positions, arise only to be changed mid-flight, like the motion of a flock of birds. It will be a challenge to extrapolate this model to the techno-global world, but if the goal is the achievement of non-coercive, non-hierarchical social relations, it’s got to end up looking something like what Marx called “the free association of the producers.” This phrase resonated with the surrealists, for obvious reasons. Feyerabend taught me that “anything goes!” in the knowledge disciplines, and Lamantia provided me with a similar sense of permission in the poetic sphere.
GC: Why did you never take a literature course during your post-secondary school education?
AJ: This goes back to the nonlinear way in which I became a poet: in my college days I aimed to become a science-fiction writer. This was in the early seventies, a time when postmodernism had not yet taken over the academy. So science fiction was not taken seriously in the literature departments of most schools, including Berkeley. Instead of majoring in literature, I got my degree in the history and philosophy of science. Of course, along the way I discovered that I cared more about language as a speculative substance than about language as a platform for plot and character––and became a poet almost against my will. Beyond this, I have always felt stifled and regimented by the school routine. The library at Berkeley, with its millions of books, has been my real teacher, up to the present day.
GC: Would you characterize your playing of the Theremin as a literal poetics of the body?
AJ: The theremin is the quintessential musical instrument of science fiction, but it is also a Communist instrument, having been invented by the Russian engineer Leo Theremin in the wake of the 1917 revolution. In my prose-poem sequence “Constellations for Theremin” I call the theremin “the lyre of the Russian Revolution.” The design of the theremin is almost one hundred years old, but it’s still a vanguard musical instrument: it’s the only instrument, in fact, that’s played without being touched by the performer. Instead, the player passes his or her hands through an electromagnetic field generated by two antennas. The player’s interference in this field creates an ethereal musical tone. I feel that what results is not only the sound of my physical body caught in this field, but, in a moment of transfiguration, the emanation of my inner being undulating in the ether. The positions taken by my body while playing the theremin do indeed correspond to the shapes of letters in some futuristic language of the unsayable.
Garrett Caples is a poet who lives in Oakland, CA. He is the author of The Garrett Caples Reader and Complications, and is an editor at City Lights, where he curates the Spotlight poetry series. Wave Books will publish his pamphlet Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English in May 2010.
Andrew Joron is the author of Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010). After a decade and a half spent writing science-fiction poetry, culminating in his volume Science Fiction (Pantograph Press, 1992), Joron began to elaborate other forms of lyric speculation. This work has been collected in The Removes (Hard Press, 1999), Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003), and The Sound Mirror (Flood Editions, 2008). The Cry at Zero, a selection of his prose poems and critical essays, was published by Counterpath Press in 2007. Joron is also the translator, from the German, of the Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch’s Literary Essays (Stanford University Press, 1998). He lives in Berkeley.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Andrew Joron, Steve Langan and Music from Free Rein.
Friday April 2nd
7:00pm
Steve Langan is the author of Meet Me at the Happy Bar (BlazeVOX, 2009), Notes on Exile and Other Poems, and Freezing. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska, and on Cliff Island, Maine, and he teaches in the University of Nebraska MFA in Writing program. Langan's poems are in recent issues of Drunken Boat, Fence, The Iowa Review, MAKE, Notre Dame Review and Zoland Poetry.
Free Rein is an improvisational unit playing dark ambient/drone music. Its members consist of Andrew Joron on theremin and waterphone; Brian Lucas on 6-string bass, tapes, and wordless vocals; and Joseph Noble on wind instruments and percussion.
Andrew Joron is the author of Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010). After a decade and a half spent writing science-fiction poetry, culminating in his volume Science Fiction (Pantograph Press, 1992), Joron began to elaborate other forms of lyric speculation. This work has been collected in The Removes (Hard Press, 1999), Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003), and The Sound Mirror (Flood Editions, 2008). The Cry at Zero, a selection of his prose poems and critical essays, was published by Counterpath Press in 2007. Joron is also the translator, from the German, of the Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch’s Literary Essays (Stanford University Press, 1998). He lives in Berkeley.
Studio One Art Center
365 45th St
Oakland 94618
parking on street or in rear
entry by donation
libations and antics
7:00pm
Steve Langan is the author of Meet Me at the Happy Bar (BlazeVOX, 2009), Notes on Exile and Other Poems, and Freezing. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska, and on Cliff Island, Maine, and he teaches in the University of Nebraska MFA in Writing program. Langan's poems are in recent issues of Drunken Boat, Fence, The Iowa Review, MAKE, Notre Dame Review and Zoland Poetry.Free Rein is an improvisational unit playing dark ambient/drone music. Its members consist of Andrew Joron on theremin and waterphone; Brian Lucas on 6-string bass, tapes, and wordless vocals; and Joseph Noble on wind instruments and percussion.
Andrew Joron is the author of Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010). After a decade and a half spent writing science-fiction poetry, culminating in his volume Science Fiction (Pantograph Press, 1992), Joron began to elaborate other forms of lyric speculation. This work has been collected in The Removes (Hard Press, 1999), Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003), and The Sound Mirror (Flood Editions, 2008). The Cry at Zero, a selection of his prose poems and critical essays, was published by Counterpath Press in 2007. Joron is also the translator, from the German, of the Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch’s Literary Essays (Stanford University Press, 1998). He lives in Berkeley.Studio One Art Center
365 45th St
Oakland 94618
parking on street or in rear
entry by donation
libations and antics
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Studio One Summer Poets Workshop with Graham Foust, Dawn Lundy Martin, Norma Cole & Truong Tran
This is a fundraiser for our reading series and poetry programming. Sign-up for workshops with Dawn Lundy Martin, Graham Foust, Norma Cole, and Truong Tran.
Workshops are Monday June 14th through Friday June 18th from 10:00am to 12:30pm.
Afternoon panels and readings each day at 2pm.
Click to apply
Workshops are Monday June 14th through Friday June 18th from 10:00am to 12:30pm.
Afternoon panels and readings each day at 2pm.
Click to apply
Friday, February 26, 2010
Claire Becker interviews Lily Brown for Studio One's March 5th reading
CLAIRE BECKER: When I first got to know you, we were in workshops working on our MFAs, still in a very exploratory stage as to the nature of a poem and immersed in reading and in our peers' work. I like to think I'm still in that stage, but writing now sometimes can feel pretty different. Now that you've become an editor, completed a manuscript and started a PHD program in literature and creative writing, I'm wondering what's different when you sit down to write?
LILY BROWN: This is such a good question! I started thinking about it on a long car ride today and found myself doing something I often did when we were working on our MFAs: I took out paper and started writing on the steering wheel at stop lights. This habit's persistence alone may indicate that the material/habitual aspects of my writing process are similar to what they were five years ago. At that point in time, I was finally in this place I had been wanting to be in for years, which is to say, everything in my life was pointed towards and consumed with poetry (was this the same for you?).
But when I sit down to write now, I think what's different is that I trust language more than I did when I started my MFA. On one level, I'm not really interested in what "I" have to say as much as I might have been then. So while "I" probably emerges when I'm writing, I'm much more willing to see where the language takes me while I'm revising (which is really where writing happens for me), to make radical cuts to my poems, and to trust that something human emerges in a poem regardless of the first person pronoun. Writing a good poem--to me, anyway--usually means cutting all of those little moments where "I" sneaks in and tries to say something--where there's a bit of didacticism.
The change I'm describing came about because of good readers like you and our teachers at Saint Mary's, and because of a larger discussion we were always having about how language works in poems. I saw how elision and compression could open up possibilities in a poem in terms of meaning. At one point, I think in our workshop with Norma Cole, and when I had just taken an intensive class on Stevens with Graham Foust, I started thinking much more critically about the line. That concentration on form totally changed writing for me. I discovered that I could play with tones and resonances in words by breaking lines in specific ways, and that became a part of the compositional process. On a broader level, I guess I ceded control to my poems, and started to see them as separate from myself, as having to do with language rather than the self.
CB: In answer to your earlier question, yes, it was the same for me! When I go to on certain trails in the Oakland hills, I think of hiking up there with you and being able to think out loud about poetry. It was great to have a place to bare all my strange thoughts, ideas and poems--a place outside of the classroom, but with the classroom as a corollary. I'm glad you mention the importance of revising in your work. During my MFA, I also learned to revise, and I think that is why I'm still writing.
You say the writing really happens for you in revision, playing "with tones and resonances in words by breaking lines in specific ways." I'm sitting in a coffee shop reading and thinking about questions to ask you, when I hear a woman exclaim, "The ever-present line!" She is talking about the bathroom, but I agree about the line. Revision can feel like setting a machine to work--to tinker, cut, and shape each line--but I think what makes your poems really successful, is that you trust "that something human emerges," and it does.
At times, in your poems, it seems a consciousness gathers things and runs through them. As the speaker of the poem "In the Shins" states, "Hello—sorry // I lost the footing—even language pivots. / I address myself to the boats." Yet at other times, a physical presence is more obvious: "We close our eyes but I know // we're breathing. If my arms make / a cross. If our arms make a cross." More visceral, more present—the poem slows. Then in the next line, a consciousness views the physical, "There are stones stacked up the sky." Sometimes you offer images for losing the body, as in the poem "Nobody is in Cahoots with the Telephone Pole":
We don't speak: no one believes
one thing follows another:
the path between sun stalk
slicing wall
and wintered pavement
is deeply broken.
Sense this and I'll love you.
I turn into full sight.
There is no body.
Can you talk a bit about this divide and how a physical sense of the world enters into your poems?
LB: It's funny because that last poem you cited is the only poem in my book that I wrote in college. My sister read it and told me it was "totally different" from all of my other poems. I think it's a little different (more punctuated and more dramatic, maybe), but I'm also oddly attached to having it in the book. The origins of that poem are relevant to your question, actually. When I was a senior in college, I took a workshop with Jorie Graham, and I was sitting in her office one day and, if I remember correctly, we were discussing how poetic logic (distinct from rational logic, I suppose) can make people uncomfortable. One of us looked out the window and pointed out that the cracks in the pavement and the sun were related to each other. So that poem laments, in a sense, the lack of an intuitive relationship to the physical world in daily life. I don't mean "intuitive" in a wishy-washy way at all--I just mean that there's been a compression in the poem's logic of this human process (paving) that's interrupted and usurped by a natural process (the weather). So, I guess the sun stands in metonymically for the weather in that poem, while the pavement stands in for human interference.
I might also answer your question by saying that I tend, in my physical sense of the world, to make metaphors out of my visual experience. I think what you're noticing in the poems is the quick leaps the mind makes between reflection, a sort of metaphorical visual experience, and the interaction between those things. The present moment, when I'm writing, often triggers memory, reflection, imagination of the future, and so on. All of those things are compressed into the small space of the poem. I think of the poem as a thought process. As such, the poem is something to think through, rather than about. I have one poem in the manuscript with a line that goes "Birds heel the sky." That line is the direct result of looking up at the sky and seeing a flock of birds in the shape of a horseshoe, and the thinking that resulted from that comparison. I guess the poem, for me, is like a thinking artifact of a consciousness' experience in the world.
CB: When we were in school, I remember that you wrote a lot while you were reading, listening to poetry, or looking at art (and of course driving). Now that you're back in school, have you been exposed to anything lately that is influencing your poetry?
LB: Well, yes! Last fall for a final project for one of my classes I wrote a series of poems that I'm calling "Being One" right now (the title comes from Gertrude Stein). I had never written a series before--and in fact, I had barely written any poems for two and a half years--so this was a new experience. The project is made up of thirteen sections, and each section takes its title from one of the books we read for this course. I've never consciously worked to incorporate other sources into my poems before, but for this project I wrote out of what the titles I chose suggested to me. The funny thing about the process was that I'm usually dead-set against conscious "intention" entering into the composition process, but somehow it worked in this instance. I probably unconsciously chose "titles" that were evocative for me, and that caused my mind to wander (writing for me is usually a kind of mind-wandering-while-reading), so maybe that's why the process seemed seamless.
In general, though, I find that the more voices I have running around in my head, the more likely it is that poems are going to come out of me.
CB: I love this poem from "Being One," the series you mentioned:
(The Mercy of Chance)
The wall of her leaving,
the wallowing sieving,
the surrealists wake up to
a scene where she’s lacking.
Her male surface, a slab
without warming,
indelible, synthetic, disarming.
LB: Thanks, Claire! That poem is channelling Breton. I was reading Nadja and thinking about her character as more of an idea or a surface that the narrator projects himself onto, rather than as a living, breathing person. In a sense, that poem is my short attempt at doing a reading of the text through the medium of the poem.
CB: Right now, we're writing simultaneously in a Google Document. I work on a question, and I see writing appear on the screen as you work on an answer. I've been wanting to ask you about Facebook, Gmail, videochatting and how you think our rapidly changing relationship to technology affects poetry. One of the great things about being a poet today seems to be that we can have relationships with other poets around the country (or world) and interact daily in a somewhat meaningful way (although ideally we see people face to face whenever we can). Technological developments allow us to publish an email and online journal (RealPoetik, on which we collaborate from across the country) available free anywhere. (Look for some physical artifacts of RealPoetik coming soon!) What would you say about the influence of technology on you, your life, or your writing?
LB: I know that technology allows all of these things you mention--RealPoetik, google-chatting, using Skype to talk to Joshua (and our dog, Bella, who is utterly confused by video-chatting) when he's in Chicago and I'm in Athens. Facebook certainly seems to allow this dailyness to people's interactions that might not have been possible in the past. But sometimes I want to run in the other direction--I find myself sewing chapbooks with Joshua for Boxwood, or making chapbooks for my family and friends, or cooking (which seems oddly related to poetry to me) to honor the process of making and the physical artifact.
What I like about technology is what you point out about how it allows us to "have relationships with other poets around the country (or world)." What I'm troubled by in terms of technology, though, is what you pick up on when you say that these interactions are "somewhat meaningful." Sometimes I feel like I'm peeking in on people's private lives with Facebook, that I'm feeding into a sea-change in terms of how we view privacy and how we live on a daily basis, and for me that's not always meaningful interaction.
I tend to gravitate more towards email correspondence than towards Facebook, for example, because I like the relative privacy of email. I'm also easily overwhelmed by too many choices, and Facebook/the internet have that effect on me. I saw Susan Howe and David Grubbs do a Q&A today at UGA, and Susan Howe was talking about how in our culture, as soon as you become a cultural figure, a kind of murder takes place. She mentioned this in the context of Stein and Dickinson as cultural figures, but also in terms of how our culture is name-centered (with celebrities and so on). I started thinking about how the presentation of the self on the internet is like this--its like turning the self into a name. This is my own neurosis, I'm sure, but it's the way I feel.
All of that said, though, there are many great things about technology--getting to work on a journal with you, google-chatting with friends from across the country, being able to have an internet presence for small presses, which I think enables small presses to thrive in a way that might have been much more difficult before!
CB: It's been enlightening to talk to you in this more formal way about your work. I'm glad you'll be here in person soon, Lily live! Your first book Rust or Go Missing is coming out from Cleveland State University Poetry Center in the fall. Can you tell us a bit about what it was like putting that manuscript together? You also have several chapbooks out or forthcoming. How do you think of the chapbook as separate from or a part of the larger manuscript?
LB: Probably about 90% of the manuscript was written while I was at Saint Mary's. Our teachers there discouraged us from thinking about our theses until our final semester. So, when I got to my final semester, I put all of the poems I had written into a pile, and started working with my readers (Brenda Hillman and Graham Foust) to shape that messy mass of poetry into something more manuscript-like.
What resulted was a version of Rust or Go Missing. I've shuffled things since then, mostly in terms of making cuts and additions. I was sending the manuscript out for about a year with no luck at all. At that point, I changed the order of the book, and I started having more luck afterwards. I don't know if this was coincidence or what, but I wondered if the first poem was turning readers off, and put a poem in that position that I thought might be more compelling.
Your question about chapbooks stumped me a bit--I think chapbooks, for me, have represented discrete periods of time. I don't think this is the only way that chapbooks can function by any means, but for me, that's been the case. The Renaissance Sheet, which Octopus Books published, is made up of poems from my first year at Saint Mary's, while I wrote Old With You (from Kitchen Press) my second year. I have a little chapbook coming out at AWP from Doublecross Press that's called Museum Armor, and a lot of those poems are post-Saint Mary's. Because of the way I've organized my chapbooks, though, I do think the poems in each are stylistically similar. Museum Armor, for example, is full of little poems, which I think reflect an anxiety I felt when I graduated and was unsure of my next step. I kept whittling the poems down more and more, and as a result they're some of the most minimal I've written.
I also am obsessed with the object-ness of chapbooks. I'm really grateful to the people who handmade those books, and now that I run a small press, too, I know how pleasurable book-making is.
CB: You are a fan of Welsh Springer Spaniels and Boston Terriers, AKA dogs. Last spring, I was finishing work toward my teaching credential and, my 23rd year of school coming to a close, looking forward to less responsibility. I went to Chicago and spent a few days with you, Joshua, and Bella the Boston Terrier. By the time my plane landed back in San Francisco, I was thoroughly committed to devoting the next dozen years of my life to a dog. Can you explain what happened to me in Chicago? (My dog Mabel is presently ringing a bell indicating she wants to go outside.) What relationship do dogs have to poetry?
LB: I do like Welsh Spring Spaniels and Boston Terriers (AKA dogs). Here is my explanation of when you came to visit us and were soon devoted to a canine: dogs have the duende. And in this, I think they are related to poetry. Most of my communication with the dogs in my life seems beyond language (or pre-linguistic?), yet feels utterly natural to me.
As I write this, I'm reading Robert Duncan's essay "Towards an Open Universe," and I find he offers me some insight into this relationship between dogs and poetry. First of all, he reprints a poem in the essay called "A Storm of White" that mourns the death of a beloved cat: "O dear gray cat that died in this cold / you were born on my chest / six years ago." I realize this poem is about a feline, not a canine, but perhaps the connection he feels--the poem almost figures the speaker as having given birth to the cat!--is similar to that sort of elemental communication I think we can have with dogs.
In the same essay, Duncan writes "Our engagement with knowing...our demand for truth is not to reach a conclusion but to keep our exposure to what we do not know, to confront our wish and our need beyond habit and capability, beyond what we take for granted, at the borderline, the light finger-tip or thought-tip where impulse and novelty spring." Language is something we often "take for granted," but I think Duncan is right that poetry can engage us not by confirming what we already know, but by exposing us to "what we do not know." I write, read, and communicate with dogs in a state of unknowing, and I'm fascinated by the intuitive understanding we can have of both poems and dogs, I guess. This all makes me think of Stein--"I am I because my little dog knows me."
CB: Thanks Lily. I love that you ended on a sentence I feel like I have always known.
LILY BROWN: This is such a good question! I started thinking about it on a long car ride today and found myself doing something I often did when we were working on our MFAs: I took out paper and started writing on the steering wheel at stop lights. This habit's persistence alone may indicate that the material/habitual aspects of my writing process are similar to what they were five years ago. At that point in time, I was finally in this place I had been wanting to be in for years, which is to say, everything in my life was pointed towards and consumed with poetry (was this the same for you?).
But when I sit down to write now, I think what's different is that I trust language more than I did when I started my MFA. On one level, I'm not really interested in what "I" have to say as much as I might have been then. So while "I" probably emerges when I'm writing, I'm much more willing to see where the language takes me while I'm revising (which is really where writing happens for me), to make radical cuts to my poems, and to trust that something human emerges in a poem regardless of the first person pronoun. Writing a good poem--to me, anyway--usually means cutting all of those little moments where "I" sneaks in and tries to say something--where there's a bit of didacticism.
The change I'm describing came about because of good readers like you and our teachers at Saint Mary's, and because of a larger discussion we were always having about how language works in poems. I saw how elision and compression could open up possibilities in a poem in terms of meaning. At one point, I think in our workshop with Norma Cole, and when I had just taken an intensive class on Stevens with Graham Foust, I started thinking much more critically about the line. That concentration on form totally changed writing for me. I discovered that I could play with tones and resonances in words by breaking lines in specific ways, and that became a part of the compositional process. On a broader level, I guess I ceded control to my poems, and started to see them as separate from myself, as having to do with language rather than the self.
CB: In answer to your earlier question, yes, it was the same for me! When I go to on certain trails in the Oakland hills, I think of hiking up there with you and being able to think out loud about poetry. It was great to have a place to bare all my strange thoughts, ideas and poems--a place outside of the classroom, but with the classroom as a corollary. I'm glad you mention the importance of revising in your work. During my MFA, I also learned to revise, and I think that is why I'm still writing.
You say the writing really happens for you in revision, playing "with tones and resonances in words by breaking lines in specific ways." I'm sitting in a coffee shop reading and thinking about questions to ask you, when I hear a woman exclaim, "The ever-present line!" She is talking about the bathroom, but I agree about the line. Revision can feel like setting a machine to work--to tinker, cut, and shape each line--but I think what makes your poems really successful, is that you trust "that something human emerges," and it does.
At times, in your poems, it seems a consciousness gathers things and runs through them. As the speaker of the poem "In the Shins" states, "Hello—sorry // I lost the footing—even language pivots. / I address myself to the boats." Yet at other times, a physical presence is more obvious: "We close our eyes but I know // we're breathing. If my arms make / a cross. If our arms make a cross." More visceral, more present—the poem slows. Then in the next line, a consciousness views the physical, "There are stones stacked up the sky." Sometimes you offer images for losing the body, as in the poem "Nobody is in Cahoots with the Telephone Pole":
We don't speak: no one believes
one thing follows another:
the path between sun stalk
slicing wall
and wintered pavement
is deeply broken.
Sense this and I'll love you.
I turn into full sight.
There is no body.
Can you talk a bit about this divide and how a physical sense of the world enters into your poems?
LB: It's funny because that last poem you cited is the only poem in my book that I wrote in college. My sister read it and told me it was "totally different" from all of my other poems. I think it's a little different (more punctuated and more dramatic, maybe), but I'm also oddly attached to having it in the book. The origins of that poem are relevant to your question, actually. When I was a senior in college, I took a workshop with Jorie Graham, and I was sitting in her office one day and, if I remember correctly, we were discussing how poetic logic (distinct from rational logic, I suppose) can make people uncomfortable. One of us looked out the window and pointed out that the cracks in the pavement and the sun were related to each other. So that poem laments, in a sense, the lack of an intuitive relationship to the physical world in daily life. I don't mean "intuitive" in a wishy-washy way at all--I just mean that there's been a compression in the poem's logic of this human process (paving) that's interrupted and usurped by a natural process (the weather). So, I guess the sun stands in metonymically for the weather in that poem, while the pavement stands in for human interference.
I might also answer your question by saying that I tend, in my physical sense of the world, to make metaphors out of my visual experience. I think what you're noticing in the poems is the quick leaps the mind makes between reflection, a sort of metaphorical visual experience, and the interaction between those things. The present moment, when I'm writing, often triggers memory, reflection, imagination of the future, and so on. All of those things are compressed into the small space of the poem. I think of the poem as a thought process. As such, the poem is something to think through, rather than about. I have one poem in the manuscript with a line that goes "Birds heel the sky." That line is the direct result of looking up at the sky and seeing a flock of birds in the shape of a horseshoe, and the thinking that resulted from that comparison. I guess the poem, for me, is like a thinking artifact of a consciousness' experience in the world.
CB: When we were in school, I remember that you wrote a lot while you were reading, listening to poetry, or looking at art (and of course driving). Now that you're back in school, have you been exposed to anything lately that is influencing your poetry?
LB: Well, yes! Last fall for a final project for one of my classes I wrote a series of poems that I'm calling "Being One" right now (the title comes from Gertrude Stein). I had never written a series before--and in fact, I had barely written any poems for two and a half years--so this was a new experience. The project is made up of thirteen sections, and each section takes its title from one of the books we read for this course. I've never consciously worked to incorporate other sources into my poems before, but for this project I wrote out of what the titles I chose suggested to me. The funny thing about the process was that I'm usually dead-set against conscious "intention" entering into the composition process, but somehow it worked in this instance. I probably unconsciously chose "titles" that were evocative for me, and that caused my mind to wander (writing for me is usually a kind of mind-wandering-while-reading), so maybe that's why the process seemed seamless.
In general, though, I find that the more voices I have running around in my head, the more likely it is that poems are going to come out of me.
CB: I love this poem from "Being One," the series you mentioned:
(The Mercy of Chance)
The wall of her leaving,
the wallowing sieving,
the surrealists wake up to
a scene where she’s lacking.
Her male surface, a slab
without warming,
indelible, synthetic, disarming.
LB: Thanks, Claire! That poem is channelling Breton. I was reading Nadja and thinking about her character as more of an idea or a surface that the narrator projects himself onto, rather than as a living, breathing person. In a sense, that poem is my short attempt at doing a reading of the text through the medium of the poem.
CB: Right now, we're writing simultaneously in a Google Document. I work on a question, and I see writing appear on the screen as you work on an answer. I've been wanting to ask you about Facebook, Gmail, videochatting and how you think our rapidly changing relationship to technology affects poetry. One of the great things about being a poet today seems to be that we can have relationships with other poets around the country (or world) and interact daily in a somewhat meaningful way (although ideally we see people face to face whenever we can). Technological developments allow us to publish an email and online journal (RealPoetik, on which we collaborate from across the country) available free anywhere. (Look for some physical artifacts of RealPoetik coming soon!) What would you say about the influence of technology on you, your life, or your writing?
LB: I know that technology allows all of these things you mention--RealPoetik, google-chatting, using Skype to talk to Joshua (and our dog, Bella, who is utterly confused by video-chatting) when he's in Chicago and I'm in Athens. Facebook certainly seems to allow this dailyness to people's interactions that might not have been possible in the past. But sometimes I want to run in the other direction--I find myself sewing chapbooks with Joshua for Boxwood, or making chapbooks for my family and friends, or cooking (which seems oddly related to poetry to me) to honor the process of making and the physical artifact.
What I like about technology is what you point out about how it allows us to "have relationships with other poets around the country (or world)." What I'm troubled by in terms of technology, though, is what you pick up on when you say that these interactions are "somewhat meaningful." Sometimes I feel like I'm peeking in on people's private lives with Facebook, that I'm feeding into a sea-change in terms of how we view privacy and how we live on a daily basis, and for me that's not always meaningful interaction.
I tend to gravitate more towards email correspondence than towards Facebook, for example, because I like the relative privacy of email. I'm also easily overwhelmed by too many choices, and Facebook/the internet have that effect on me. I saw Susan Howe and David Grubbs do a Q&A today at UGA, and Susan Howe was talking about how in our culture, as soon as you become a cultural figure, a kind of murder takes place. She mentioned this in the context of Stein and Dickinson as cultural figures, but also in terms of how our culture is name-centered (with celebrities and so on). I started thinking about how the presentation of the self on the internet is like this--its like turning the self into a name. This is my own neurosis, I'm sure, but it's the way I feel.
All of that said, though, there are many great things about technology--getting to work on a journal with you, google-chatting with friends from across the country, being able to have an internet presence for small presses, which I think enables small presses to thrive in a way that might have been much more difficult before!
CB: It's been enlightening to talk to you in this more formal way about your work. I'm glad you'll be here in person soon, Lily live! Your first book Rust or Go Missing is coming out from Cleveland State University Poetry Center in the fall. Can you tell us a bit about what it was like putting that manuscript together? You also have several chapbooks out or forthcoming. How do you think of the chapbook as separate from or a part of the larger manuscript?
LB: Probably about 90% of the manuscript was written while I was at Saint Mary's. Our teachers there discouraged us from thinking about our theses until our final semester. So, when I got to my final semester, I put all of the poems I had written into a pile, and started working with my readers (Brenda Hillman and Graham Foust) to shape that messy mass of poetry into something more manuscript-like.
What resulted was a version of Rust or Go Missing. I've shuffled things since then, mostly in terms of making cuts and additions. I was sending the manuscript out for about a year with no luck at all. At that point, I changed the order of the book, and I started having more luck afterwards. I don't know if this was coincidence or what, but I wondered if the first poem was turning readers off, and put a poem in that position that I thought might be more compelling.
Your question about chapbooks stumped me a bit--I think chapbooks, for me, have represented discrete periods of time. I don't think this is the only way that chapbooks can function by any means, but for me, that's been the case. The Renaissance Sheet, which Octopus Books published, is made up of poems from my first year at Saint Mary's, while I wrote Old With You (from Kitchen Press) my second year. I have a little chapbook coming out at AWP from Doublecross Press that's called Museum Armor, and a lot of those poems are post-Saint Mary's. Because of the way I've organized my chapbooks, though, I do think the poems in each are stylistically similar. Museum Armor, for example, is full of little poems, which I think reflect an anxiety I felt when I graduated and was unsure of my next step. I kept whittling the poems down more and more, and as a result they're some of the most minimal I've written.
I also am obsessed with the object-ness of chapbooks. I'm really grateful to the people who handmade those books, and now that I run a small press, too, I know how pleasurable book-making is.
CB: You are a fan of Welsh Springer Spaniels and Boston Terriers, AKA dogs. Last spring, I was finishing work toward my teaching credential and, my 23rd year of school coming to a close, looking forward to less responsibility. I went to Chicago and spent a few days with you, Joshua, and Bella the Boston Terrier. By the time my plane landed back in San Francisco, I was thoroughly committed to devoting the next dozen years of my life to a dog. Can you explain what happened to me in Chicago? (My dog Mabel is presently ringing a bell indicating she wants to go outside.) What relationship do dogs have to poetry?
LB: I do like Welsh Spring Spaniels and Boston Terriers (AKA dogs). Here is my explanation of when you came to visit us and were soon devoted to a canine: dogs have the duende. And in this, I think they are related to poetry. Most of my communication with the dogs in my life seems beyond language (or pre-linguistic?), yet feels utterly natural to me.
As I write this, I'm reading Robert Duncan's essay "Towards an Open Universe," and I find he offers me some insight into this relationship between dogs and poetry. First of all, he reprints a poem in the essay called "A Storm of White" that mourns the death of a beloved cat: "O dear gray cat that died in this cold / you were born on my chest / six years ago." I realize this poem is about a feline, not a canine, but perhaps the connection he feels--the poem almost figures the speaker as having given birth to the cat!--is similar to that sort of elemental communication I think we can have with dogs.
In the same essay, Duncan writes "Our engagement with knowing...our demand for truth is not to reach a conclusion but to keep our exposure to what we do not know, to confront our wish and our need beyond habit and capability, beyond what we take for granted, at the borderline, the light finger-tip or thought-tip where impulse and novelty spring." Language is something we often "take for granted," but I think Duncan is right that poetry can engage us not by confirming what we already know, but by exposing us to "what we do not know." I write, read, and communicate with dogs in a state of unknowing, and I'm fascinated by the intuitive understanding we can have of both poems and dogs, I guess. This all makes me think of Stein--"I am I because my little dog knows me."
CB: Thanks Lily. I love that you ended on a sentence I feel like I have always known.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Lily Brown and Joshua Marie Wilkinson with Music by Sean McArdle on March 5th
Lily Brown's first book, Rust or Go Missing, is forthcoming from Cleveland State University Poetry Center is Fall 2010. She holds an M.F.A. from Saint Mary's College of California, and currently lives in Athens, where she is a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia.
Sean McArdle cut his teeth in the San Francisco Bay Area scene in the '90's with his own lo-fi recording project, Driving by Braille (Troniks Records) and with The Cost (Lookout! Records). The Cost’s album, Chimera, was released in 2002. When moving to Washington, DC in 2005, Sean turned down the volume on a new set of songs, and joined forces to record and perform with resident Dischord Records drummer Ben Azzara (Delta 72, Joe Lally) and Lida Husik (Alias Records). Northern Charms was mixed at Inner Ear Studios, in Arlington, VA. Completing a national USA tour in the summer of 2009, and a month in Europe in the winter, Sean is now back in San Francisco working on a new record and a short film.Joshua Marie Wilkinson's most recent book is Selenography, featuring Polaroids by Tim Rutili and published by San Francisco's own Sidebrow Books. He lives in Chicago and Athens, Georgia.
Doors 7
Readings 730, sharp
365 45th St
Oakland
94618
parking on street or in rear lot
entry by donations
Monday, February 22, 2010
MIKE YOUNG INTERVIEWS JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON FOR STUDIO ONE'S MARCH 5TH READING
MIKE YOUNG: My favorite aspect of your poetry is what I think of as its love affair with tiny things. Digger moths, clam shovels. There's also something about things getting into things—diamonds in forearms, fungus in windshields. Lots of pockets and burying and tucking and uprooting. There is also a heavy bent toward song, a strength drawn from singing's incantatory nature or power. Sometimes your poems will often command the reader toward incantation or song, and always your poems seem to assume—with great effect—that to mention is to make magic. Which do you like more: tiny things or the names of things? Is there something in the gesture of giving a tiny thing over that you believe in real life—perhaps in secret or perhaps outright—to be magic? As gifts go, is it better to give someone a live thing or a dead thing? Do you ever think of a poem as fundamentally a gift, or is that too sentimental? Those are all probably very different questions, so choose whatever you think is most interesting.
JOSHUA MAIRE WILKINSON: It’s funny you mention “digger moths,” as those ghosted in from one of my friend Noah’s poems. I think he made them up; moth experts feel free to confirm or repudiate here. Some of the things you mention resonate (pockets, concealment) and other things (uprooting, tucking) seem foreign to me, but I’m sure they’re there too in the writing. I love the names of things, the split between the word, the phonological presence it has and the objects they point to—however wobbly. The materiality of the voice is something that’s always lured me to poetry; the sounds of the words want their own life to body forth and hang in the air. I’m thinking of how Creeley talks about how long a rhyme might hang in the air as the lines go on. This haunting factor of the sounds of the words—their clumsiness, their arbitrariness—is something I’m forever messing with, reveling in, developing, honing. My students roll their eyes when I light up about amphibrachs and anapestic rhythms and such. I scan people’s language when they speak; I love doing this to find where their stresses fall.
I try not to let sound and the obsession with names function as the only guide in the work; for me, pun-heavy and sound driven poetry often falls short. But I’m a huge Basil Bunting fan. And Hart Crane’s lyricism is entrancing to me. I love, too, the bluntness of somebody like Oppen, where the fluidity is always thwarted. There is a heavily iambic Isaac Rosenberg poem that starts “Snow is a strange white word”—I love how that line breaks with the rest of the poem’s mellifluous iambic roll. Flow unto itself—or rhythmic stability—is usually boring to me. I love friction and interruption and collage more than an overarching fluidity, I suppose. The question about song is how can the poem incorporate all these and still have that spell-like incantatory propulsion of the best lyrics.
I’m not really a miniaturist, though. I don’t fetishize tininess for its own sake. But I do have an obsession with material objects. One of my favorite pages in my dad’s old college dictionary is the hammer page: with little diagrams of claw, riveting, boilermaker’s, bricklayer’s, and ball peen hammers. Working with my dad in his basement woodshop as a kid is here; I am basically inept with tools, you know, but one of my tasks as a kid was to fetch the “right” tool. I’m maybe seven or eight in this memory. What that meant was trying to resolve in my mind what a “ball peen” hammer might be at the wall where all the hammers, mallets, etc, were hung on nails. I would often—usually in fact—bring back the wrong tool. This became a fraught experience. Not traumatic, you know, just vexing. Maybe poetry is a way to re-enter that space and chart a landscape of desire where those terms can be arranged and adumbrated in a world whose stakes unfold as a result of those relations, as they’re articulated and sounded out.
I don’t think of poems as gifts, though I’m attracted to sentimentality in crude forms. Perfected sentimentality always seems like a hoax or a gimmick. I like it when it’s made manifest in more direct ways. Dorothea Lasky’s work stands out to me in this regard. Some of Anne Carson’s work, too, where the sentimentality is used as a passage to something else. C.S. Giscombe has ways of using these cliché song lyrics to operate so beautifully in the Prairie Style poems. Charles Bernstein, too, read these amazing poems for his daughter in Philadelphia all in this hyperbolic silliness that destroyed me with how the sentimentality (with the impassioned voice, no doubt) split a hole in its clumsy hilarity and broke onto something just indescribably sad and wonderful. Jeff Clark’s new book Ruins has poems that demolish me in their pathos and rawness. I don’t know what the best kind of gifts are. I read The Tale of Genji last fall and extracted all the appearances of the moon from this work. I then made a single chapbook for my girlfriend Lily, comprised only of Shikibu’s moons from Genji. It’s a conceptual poem, I guess. There’s no other language, just any and every sentence in that story where the moon appears—elided together, sentence after sentence, in chronological order. There are dozens of moons, and you can read it cover to cover as a kind of compacted (or synecdochal) version of The Tale of Genji. The chapbook came out to be more than 30 pages I think. That’s the best kind of gift I can think of. It’s not a kitten, but it’s alive.
MY: That sounds like an awesome gift. I'm interested in what you mean by "perfected sentimentality." I think I see what you're saying, and I agree, especially via the folks you mention. Is perfected sentimentality an especially confident/calculated sentimentality? Like a gesture that relies on perceiving the sentimental tendencies of the recipient/audience and then exploiting them—coldly, let's say—for effect/persuasion/whatever? Versus what's in the work you're talking about, which is good for being crude and clumsy and hyperbolic because it's risking the speaker themself being "accused" of sentimentality, being sort of "out" about it?
JMW: I think you hit it on the head. I'm reluctant to try and parse out what's a "pure" sentiment and what's schlock, but my point is that it's all artifice and I like when that artifice breaks the fold, when the corniness of old hyperboles is ruptured by the context and veracity and insistence, as with the Bernstein poems I heard. There is something about "calculated" sentimentality where it's presented as reverie, but it's just trite synonym poetry. "Let me find the 'perfect' way to express this banal sentiment" rather than let me see what other kind of variegated terrain of feeling language is capable of by incorporating the banality of experience. I think Dana Ward and Stephanie Young are wonderful at this. There's a kind of overdetermination that presents the contradictoriness of a subjectivity through lyric poetry. John Keene's Seismosis is a great example where the thinking and feeling meld. It's not really borderline sentimentality in Keene's work, but there's a fusion of desire, curiosity, reflection, pleasure, and processing that's lovely. Andrew Zawacki's and Christine Hume's poems I think do this, too, in a spectral way. Fred Moten's Hughson's Tavern is one of my favorite examples, where there's always an excess to the expression, and that excess is drawn out in humor, bleakness, fragment, tenderness, vituperation, awe, insane rhythmic spells, and zeal.
MY: Recently you and Noah Eli Gordon started Letter Machine Editions, a book press. I bought Travis Nichols's Iowa and Sawako Nakayasu's Texture Notes. Both rehearse a very new and careful-feeling reverence, an openness to succumb to mystery without pretending that you can't study and articulate that mystery. They're great. I also like the way they look similar, with similar trim and cover design. Is there any overarching aesthetic plan—content, design, both—behind Letter Machine Editions?
JMW: I like your reading of Iowa and Texture Notes, actually. Thanks for ordering them! I tire of presses whose “about” page says stuff about being “subversive” or “edgy” or what have you. It’s funny how that language—I guess, what? the language of counter-capitalistic consumption?—has become the flag of so much bland, uninventive writing out there on mastheads seeking only the “extraordinary” and “innovative.” We just wanted the books to speak for themselves—to present their own poetics. Nakayasu and Nichols and Sara Veglahn and Anselm Berrigan (our first four authors) all do this. I think we wanted to emulate the practices (in design and aesthetics) of presses we admire: Black Square, The Figures, AIP, Kelsey Street, Dalkey Archive, Edge, Leon Works, Essay Press, Turtle Point, lots of others. We also wanted to find first books by folks whose work we love and are challenged by: Juliana Leslie and Farid Matuk. Noah and I have really different tastes, and I think this is a good thing—as it engenders long conversations about what we think a particular manuscript is doing. Neither of us want to fill a “niche” and neither of us want a “unified” catalog of works. Disparity is good. Dissimilarity is good. Somehow most of our books are prose, but that’s inadvertent. Finally, I think we wanted to support a few authors who have been around a while by given them means to release a work they may not have considered publishing as an object unto itself. I’m thinking here of Anselm and short works forthcoming by John Yau, Renee Gladman, and Peter Gizzi, and of a big work by Aaron Kunin that we’re co-publishing with Fence Books.
MY: A follow-up—You've mentioned that you enjoy the idea and act of poetry editing. Are you a scrupulous editor of others? Do you have any editorial stories from working on Letter Machine Editions?
JMW: I guess it depends on how you define scrupulous. Noah and I both go through each manuscript by hand several times a piece and make comments, suggestions, cuts, and ask questions. This is a fairly slow, involved process; but it’s one of the things I love most about doing Letter Machine. Lily and I do the same thing with Boxwood Editions, it’s just on a smaller scale. We still try to select a small batch of poems that work together uniquely and edit a manuscript together, as carefully and closely as possible. We’ve published chapbooks by Lisa Fishman and Lauren Levin and have a fantastic longish poem by Claire Becker coming out next month called Young Adult.
MY: You do Rabbit Light Movies, which is an amazing project of video poetry readings. Why did you start Rabbit Light Movies? Do you see trends in the way contemporary poets in your circle perform their work? Do you have any opinions on these trends?
JMW: I started Rabbit Light on a lark, as a corollary to the first Octopus Books chapbooks that were about to come out in early 2007. Since my friend Julie Doxsee and I were among the first 9 chapbooks they published, I thought I’d make little movies of us reading and burn them onto dvds and give them out for free in the book fair at AWP. This was Atlanta. Since then it’s grown into a weird project that I still love doing. I don’t see too many trends, per se, as you suggest, but I try to coax writers I’m interested in—or interested in hearing more of—to send me audio or video to fool around with. Most of these folks I don’t actually know, or have met only briefly at readings and such. They sort of trust me to put some footage to it—hopefully neither illustrating the words nor distracting from them—that can stand in as a kind of visual counterpoint or landscape to the poems. Sometimes I just ask them to be filmed reading, and I enjoy this immensely. Eventually, I’d like to surrender it to folks around the country—and beyond—to film their friends, to make their own movies, to have local scene editors (like Fascicle’s old reports on cities)—to get it to grow way, way out beyond what I could possibly film myself. This is starting to happen already as Mathias Svalina and Jules Cohen and Zachary Schomburg, and others are already helping out on future episodes. So folks should write to me if they want to help out. God knows I’ll need it. There should be about 75 rabbits working on this.
MY: You finished your first book in your friend Solan's basement in Alaska. Can you talk about working in a basement in Alaska?
JMW: Man, that was tough. Whatever romance I have about writing is usually thrown into a serious fucking tailspin when I think back on that rainy, dripping summer in Juneau. First off, Solan was gone almost the entire month. There was just this little bluegrass guitar player named Mike—a high school math teacher—who lived upstairs. I had drifted into the “arena of the unwell”—as Withnail says, I think. I just didn’t know how to write the project I’d set out to write. (I’d been living in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and then uprooted to Tucson to try to assemble it all under the auspices of an MFA fellowship). And more and more “selves” and subjectivities and characters and phantoms and voices started to speak through the work. I look back on pictures of myself at this time—usually every time I move when I’m trying to figure out what to discard, what to repack—and these pictures (I was taking self-portraits each day with this half-busted analog camera) really seem to be of somebody else. I tried to figure out how the book would go from the outset—and that turned out to be a colossal mistake. The book needed to unfold differently—but how?—that’s what I had to figure out in Alaska. Everyday I was obsessively reading Wittgenstein’s Investigations, the Culture and Value notebooks, the notebooks on color, etc (classic poetry fodder clichés, by now, but amazingly rich stuff) (fortunately I knew slightly better than to get too bogged down in the Tractatus, but even that is staggering and generative). In some ways all the Wittgenstein was a ruse: to feign entry back into the poetry writing, but actually functioned to keep me from writing. It turned out to work somehow and helped me get that book into some semblance of being completed. I had been to Alaska several times previously, but it’s still a pretty mesmerizing place to work. I’ll be back up there this fall.
MY: I think Mathias Svalina told me once that while you and he and Zach Schomburg were touring the Midwest, you all took turns reading Frank Stanford's Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You in the car. This might not be true, but I like the idea.
JMW: It’s true. It was my idea. One of those books that all of us had copies of, but none of us had actually read, I think, until that trip in 2006 or 2007. We didn’t get through all of it, but I think read more than a third of it, or thereabouts, which we needed on the long hauls between Chicago and Minneapolis and Lincoln and wherever the hell John Gallaher lives in Missouri. It’s ghosted heavily into Selenography, my new book, and heavily—to my mind—into Zach’s second book, Scary, No Scary as well. I don’t know what this will do to Mathias. I am excited (and afraid) to see. In fact, Stanford himself took lots of car trips in America recording other poets with his friend. I think there was a lot of drinking and a perhaps a secret meeting with Alan Dugan.
Joshua Marie Wilkinson's most recent book is Selenography, featuring Polaroids by Tim Rutiliand published by San Francisco's own Sidebrow Books. He lives in Chicago and Athens, Georgia.
Mike Young is the author of We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough (Publishing Genius Press 2010), a forthcoming poetry collection, and Look! Look! Feathers (Word Riot Press 2010), a forthcoming story collection. He co-edits NOÖ Journal and Magic Helicopter Press. Find him online at http://mikeayoung.blogspot.com, offline in Northampton, MA.
See Joshua Marie Wilkinson read with Lily Brown on Friday March 5th at 7:30pm at Studio One Art's Center
JOSHUA MAIRE WILKINSON: It’s funny you mention “digger moths,” as those ghosted in from one of my friend Noah’s poems. I think he made them up; moth experts feel free to confirm or repudiate here. Some of the things you mention resonate (pockets, concealment) and other things (uprooting, tucking) seem foreign to me, but I’m sure they’re there too in the writing. I love the names of things, the split between the word, the phonological presence it has and the objects they point to—however wobbly. The materiality of the voice is something that’s always lured me to poetry; the sounds of the words want their own life to body forth and hang in the air. I’m thinking of how Creeley talks about how long a rhyme might hang in the air as the lines go on. This haunting factor of the sounds of the words—their clumsiness, their arbitrariness—is something I’m forever messing with, reveling in, developing, honing. My students roll their eyes when I light up about amphibrachs and anapestic rhythms and such. I scan people’s language when they speak; I love doing this to find where their stresses fall.
I try not to let sound and the obsession with names function as the only guide in the work; for me, pun-heavy and sound driven poetry often falls short. But I’m a huge Basil Bunting fan. And Hart Crane’s lyricism is entrancing to me. I love, too, the bluntness of somebody like Oppen, where the fluidity is always thwarted. There is a heavily iambic Isaac Rosenberg poem that starts “Snow is a strange white word”—I love how that line breaks with the rest of the poem’s mellifluous iambic roll. Flow unto itself—or rhythmic stability—is usually boring to me. I love friction and interruption and collage more than an overarching fluidity, I suppose. The question about song is how can the poem incorporate all these and still have that spell-like incantatory propulsion of the best lyrics.
I’m not really a miniaturist, though. I don’t fetishize tininess for its own sake. But I do have an obsession with material objects. One of my favorite pages in my dad’s old college dictionary is the hammer page: with little diagrams of claw, riveting, boilermaker’s, bricklayer’s, and ball peen hammers. Working with my dad in his basement woodshop as a kid is here; I am basically inept with tools, you know, but one of my tasks as a kid was to fetch the “right” tool. I’m maybe seven or eight in this memory. What that meant was trying to resolve in my mind what a “ball peen” hammer might be at the wall where all the hammers, mallets, etc, were hung on nails. I would often—usually in fact—bring back the wrong tool. This became a fraught experience. Not traumatic, you know, just vexing. Maybe poetry is a way to re-enter that space and chart a landscape of desire where those terms can be arranged and adumbrated in a world whose stakes unfold as a result of those relations, as they’re articulated and sounded out.
I don’t think of poems as gifts, though I’m attracted to sentimentality in crude forms. Perfected sentimentality always seems like a hoax or a gimmick. I like it when it’s made manifest in more direct ways. Dorothea Lasky’s work stands out to me in this regard. Some of Anne Carson’s work, too, where the sentimentality is used as a passage to something else. C.S. Giscombe has ways of using these cliché song lyrics to operate so beautifully in the Prairie Style poems. Charles Bernstein, too, read these amazing poems for his daughter in Philadelphia all in this hyperbolic silliness that destroyed me with how the sentimentality (with the impassioned voice, no doubt) split a hole in its clumsy hilarity and broke onto something just indescribably sad and wonderful. Jeff Clark’s new book Ruins has poems that demolish me in their pathos and rawness. I don’t know what the best kind of gifts are. I read The Tale of Genji last fall and extracted all the appearances of the moon from this work. I then made a single chapbook for my girlfriend Lily, comprised only of Shikibu’s moons from Genji. It’s a conceptual poem, I guess. There’s no other language, just any and every sentence in that story where the moon appears—elided together, sentence after sentence, in chronological order. There are dozens of moons, and you can read it cover to cover as a kind of compacted (or synecdochal) version of The Tale of Genji. The chapbook came out to be more than 30 pages I think. That’s the best kind of gift I can think of. It’s not a kitten, but it’s alive.
MY: That sounds like an awesome gift. I'm interested in what you mean by "perfected sentimentality." I think I see what you're saying, and I agree, especially via the folks you mention. Is perfected sentimentality an especially confident/calculated sentimentality? Like a gesture that relies on perceiving the sentimental tendencies of the recipient/audience and then exploiting them—coldly, let's say—for effect/persuasion/whatever? Versus what's in the work you're talking about, which is good for being crude and clumsy and hyperbolic because it's risking the speaker themself being "accused" of sentimentality, being sort of "out" about it?
JMW: I think you hit it on the head. I'm reluctant to try and parse out what's a "pure" sentiment and what's schlock, but my point is that it's all artifice and I like when that artifice breaks the fold, when the corniness of old hyperboles is ruptured by the context and veracity and insistence, as with the Bernstein poems I heard. There is something about "calculated" sentimentality where it's presented as reverie, but it's just trite synonym poetry. "Let me find the 'perfect' way to express this banal sentiment" rather than let me see what other kind of variegated terrain of feeling language is capable of by incorporating the banality of experience. I think Dana Ward and Stephanie Young are wonderful at this. There's a kind of overdetermination that presents the contradictoriness of a subjectivity through lyric poetry. John Keene's Seismosis is a great example where the thinking and feeling meld. It's not really borderline sentimentality in Keene's work, but there's a fusion of desire, curiosity, reflection, pleasure, and processing that's lovely. Andrew Zawacki's and Christine Hume's poems I think do this, too, in a spectral way. Fred Moten's Hughson's Tavern is one of my favorite examples, where there's always an excess to the expression, and that excess is drawn out in humor, bleakness, fragment, tenderness, vituperation, awe, insane rhythmic spells, and zeal.
MY: Recently you and Noah Eli Gordon started Letter Machine Editions, a book press. I bought Travis Nichols's Iowa and Sawako Nakayasu's Texture Notes. Both rehearse a very new and careful-feeling reverence, an openness to succumb to mystery without pretending that you can't study and articulate that mystery. They're great. I also like the way they look similar, with similar trim and cover design. Is there any overarching aesthetic plan—content, design, both—behind Letter Machine Editions?
JMW: I like your reading of Iowa and Texture Notes, actually. Thanks for ordering them! I tire of presses whose “about” page says stuff about being “subversive” or “edgy” or what have you. It’s funny how that language—I guess, what? the language of counter-capitalistic consumption?—has become the flag of so much bland, uninventive writing out there on mastheads seeking only the “extraordinary” and “innovative.” We just wanted the books to speak for themselves—to present their own poetics. Nakayasu and Nichols and Sara Veglahn and Anselm Berrigan (our first four authors) all do this. I think we wanted to emulate the practices (in design and aesthetics) of presses we admire: Black Square, The Figures, AIP, Kelsey Street, Dalkey Archive, Edge, Leon Works, Essay Press, Turtle Point, lots of others. We also wanted to find first books by folks whose work we love and are challenged by: Juliana Leslie and Farid Matuk. Noah and I have really different tastes, and I think this is a good thing—as it engenders long conversations about what we think a particular manuscript is doing. Neither of us want to fill a “niche” and neither of us want a “unified” catalog of works. Disparity is good. Dissimilarity is good. Somehow most of our books are prose, but that’s inadvertent. Finally, I think we wanted to support a few authors who have been around a while by given them means to release a work they may not have considered publishing as an object unto itself. I’m thinking here of Anselm and short works forthcoming by John Yau, Renee Gladman, and Peter Gizzi, and of a big work by Aaron Kunin that we’re co-publishing with Fence Books.
MY: A follow-up—You've mentioned that you enjoy the idea and act of poetry editing. Are you a scrupulous editor of others? Do you have any editorial stories from working on Letter Machine Editions?
JMW: I guess it depends on how you define scrupulous. Noah and I both go through each manuscript by hand several times a piece and make comments, suggestions, cuts, and ask questions. This is a fairly slow, involved process; but it’s one of the things I love most about doing Letter Machine. Lily and I do the same thing with Boxwood Editions, it’s just on a smaller scale. We still try to select a small batch of poems that work together uniquely and edit a manuscript together, as carefully and closely as possible. We’ve published chapbooks by Lisa Fishman and Lauren Levin and have a fantastic longish poem by Claire Becker coming out next month called Young Adult.
MY: You do Rabbit Light Movies, which is an amazing project of video poetry readings. Why did you start Rabbit Light Movies? Do you see trends in the way contemporary poets in your circle perform their work? Do you have any opinions on these trends?
JMW: I started Rabbit Light on a lark, as a corollary to the first Octopus Books chapbooks that were about to come out in early 2007. Since my friend Julie Doxsee and I were among the first 9 chapbooks they published, I thought I’d make little movies of us reading and burn them onto dvds and give them out for free in the book fair at AWP. This was Atlanta. Since then it’s grown into a weird project that I still love doing. I don’t see too many trends, per se, as you suggest, but I try to coax writers I’m interested in—or interested in hearing more of—to send me audio or video to fool around with. Most of these folks I don’t actually know, or have met only briefly at readings and such. They sort of trust me to put some footage to it—hopefully neither illustrating the words nor distracting from them—that can stand in as a kind of visual counterpoint or landscape to the poems. Sometimes I just ask them to be filmed reading, and I enjoy this immensely. Eventually, I’d like to surrender it to folks around the country—and beyond—to film their friends, to make their own movies, to have local scene editors (like Fascicle’s old reports on cities)—to get it to grow way, way out beyond what I could possibly film myself. This is starting to happen already as Mathias Svalina and Jules Cohen and Zachary Schomburg, and others are already helping out on future episodes. So folks should write to me if they want to help out. God knows I’ll need it. There should be about 75 rabbits working on this.
MY: You finished your first book in your friend Solan's basement in Alaska. Can you talk about working in a basement in Alaska?
JMW: Man, that was tough. Whatever romance I have about writing is usually thrown into a serious fucking tailspin when I think back on that rainy, dripping summer in Juneau. First off, Solan was gone almost the entire month. There was just this little bluegrass guitar player named Mike—a high school math teacher—who lived upstairs. I had drifted into the “arena of the unwell”—as Withnail says, I think. I just didn’t know how to write the project I’d set out to write. (I’d been living in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and then uprooted to Tucson to try to assemble it all under the auspices of an MFA fellowship). And more and more “selves” and subjectivities and characters and phantoms and voices started to speak through the work. I look back on pictures of myself at this time—usually every time I move when I’m trying to figure out what to discard, what to repack—and these pictures (I was taking self-portraits each day with this half-busted analog camera) really seem to be of somebody else. I tried to figure out how the book would go from the outset—and that turned out to be a colossal mistake. The book needed to unfold differently—but how?—that’s what I had to figure out in Alaska. Everyday I was obsessively reading Wittgenstein’s Investigations, the Culture and Value notebooks, the notebooks on color, etc (classic poetry fodder clichés, by now, but amazingly rich stuff) (fortunately I knew slightly better than to get too bogged down in the Tractatus, but even that is staggering and generative). In some ways all the Wittgenstein was a ruse: to feign entry back into the poetry writing, but actually functioned to keep me from writing. It turned out to work somehow and helped me get that book into some semblance of being completed. I had been to Alaska several times previously, but it’s still a pretty mesmerizing place to work. I’ll be back up there this fall.
MY: I think Mathias Svalina told me once that while you and he and Zach Schomburg were touring the Midwest, you all took turns reading Frank Stanford's Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You in the car. This might not be true, but I like the idea.
JMW: It’s true. It was my idea. One of those books that all of us had copies of, but none of us had actually read, I think, until that trip in 2006 or 2007. We didn’t get through all of it, but I think read more than a third of it, or thereabouts, which we needed on the long hauls between Chicago and Minneapolis and Lincoln and wherever the hell John Gallaher lives in Missouri. It’s ghosted heavily into Selenography, my new book, and heavily—to my mind—into Zach’s second book, Scary, No Scary as well. I don’t know what this will do to Mathias. I am excited (and afraid) to see. In fact, Stanford himself took lots of car trips in America recording other poets with his friend. I think there was a lot of drinking and a perhaps a secret meeting with Alan Dugan.
Joshua Marie Wilkinson's most recent book is Selenography, featuring Polaroids by Tim Rutiliand published by San Francisco's own Sidebrow Books. He lives in Chicago and Athens, Georgia.
Mike Young is the author of We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough (Publishing Genius Press 2010), a forthcoming poetry collection, and Look! Look! Feathers (Word Riot Press 2010), a forthcoming story collection. He co-edits NOÖ Journal and Magic Helicopter Press. Find him online at http://mikeayoung.blogspot.com, offline in Northampton, MA.
See Joshua Marie Wilkinson read with Lily Brown on Friday March 5th at 7:30pm at Studio One Art's Center
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Studio One and Calaveras Reading with Jenny Drai, Emily Kendal Frey, Zachary Schomburg and Barbara Claire Freeman
Friday Feb. 18th
Emily Kendal Frey is the author of AIRPORT (Blue Hour 2009). She teaches at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon.
Jenny Drai is from Chicago, Munich, and Oakland. She has work
recently appearing or forthcoming in Calaveras Journal, Court Green, H_NGM_N, Monday Night, and RealPoetik. She currently lives in Orange County, which is interesting.
Zachary Schomburg is the author of The Man Suit (Black Ocean 2007), Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009), and several chapbooks including three forthcoming collaborative chapbooks with Emily Kendal Frey: Team Sad (Cinematheque Press 2010), Feelings Using Wolves (Small Fires Press 2010) and Ok Goodnight (Futuretense 2010). He co-edits Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine. He lives in Portland, OR.
Barbara Claire Freeman is a literary critic and professor of literature who has recently turned her full attention to writing poetry. She is the author of The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction (University of California Press, 1998, pbk. 2000), among many other works of criticism and theory. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Harvard, she teaches creative writing for the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her poems have appeared in A Public Space, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Modern Review, New American Writing, Sycamore Review and Parthenon West Review. She is a recipient of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Award, the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize (Sarah Lawrence College, 2007) and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Incivilities, her first book of poems has just been published Counterpath Press (November, 2009). A chapbook, St. Ursula's Silence, is forthcoming from Instance Press.
Doors at 7
Readings at 730
365 45th St
parking on street or lot behind the building.
Donation for entry
Calaveras is edited by Alisa Heinzman and Sara Mumolo.
Read interviews with each of the readers, scroll down.
Emily Kendal Frey is the author of AIRPORT (Blue Hour 2009). She teaches at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon.
Jenny Drai is from Chicago, Munich, and Oakland. She has work
recently appearing or forthcoming in Calaveras Journal, Court Green, H_NGM_N, Monday Night, and RealPoetik. She currently lives in Orange County, which is interesting.
Zachary Schomburg is the author of The Man Suit (Black Ocean 2007), Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009), and several chapbooks including three forthcoming collaborative chapbooks with Emily Kendal Frey: Team Sad (Cinematheque Press 2010), Feelings Using Wolves (Small Fires Press 2010) and Ok Goodnight (Futuretense 2010). He co-edits Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine. He lives in Portland, OR.
Barbara Claire Freeman is a literary critic and professor of literature who has recently turned her full attention to writing poetry. She is the author of The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction (University of California Press, 1998, pbk. 2000), among many other works of criticism and theory. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Harvard, she teaches creative writing for the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her poems have appeared in A Public Space, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Modern Review, New American Writing, Sycamore Review and Parthenon West Review. She is a recipient of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Award, the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize (Sarah Lawrence College, 2007) and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Incivilities, her first book of poems has just been published Counterpath Press (November, 2009). A chapbook, St. Ursula's Silence, is forthcoming from Instance Press.
Doors at 7
Readings at 730
365 45th St
parking on street or lot behind the building.
Donation for entry
Calaveras is edited by Alisa Heinzman and Sara Mumolo.
Read interviews with each of the readers, scroll down.
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