features

Interview by John Deming

Your poems are full of still lifes that also seem to contain action or motion – still, dark rooms that wait to be lighted, tire tracks in snow that “leave the driveway.” How does the tension between pause and the perpetual passage of time inform your poetry? 

The passage of time is an essential and unavoidable subject for poetry—at least on some level—since a poem itself must be experienced temporally for it to have its meaning(s). Without time, a poem’s just a collection of symbols organized in a certain shape on the page. It’s moving through those symbols in their order that lets us read the poem. Yet, when we’re done reading, the poem is exactly as it was when we started it—though it’s changed, and will continue to change upon further readings, for each of us personally. Thus, poems themselves—or at least our experiences of them—are both still and in motion.

I think what draws me repeatedly to the particular kinds of scenes you describe above is this sort of paradox—the stillness and motion concurrently at work in our apprehension of a poem and of the world. In this way I’m in agreement with Cleanth Brooks about the essentialness of paradox to poetry—though I didn’t know that until I read Cleanth Brooks, quite a while after I started writing poetry with any seriousness.

Your poems contain philosophical conceptions, but also carefully rendered images and sometimes, scenes; often as in “Walking Through the House with a Candle,” an “idea” is enacted in the action of the poem (“The bay window reflects my light / back into this shifting space, // of which I am for the moment / so indisputably the center.”). Is it difficult to create poems that contain ideas without letting the ideas overwhelm whatever else is being enacted in a poem?

What you describe is what I tend to like in many of the writers whose work I admire, so I’m flattered by your description of my work. Thank you.

I guess I’m not very interested in poems that operate as something close to pure philosophy—at that point, why not just read philosophy? But at the same time, poetry is a poor medium for conveying pure images—photography is much more effective. (And, while I’m at it, I’m not particularly interested in straight narrative poetry—which, unlike fiction, is so often grounded in the idea that an experience matters because it’s true in a narrow, literal way.)

What I often love most about poetry is its capacity to give the reader an image or a scene and, at the same time, allow the reader access to a mind at work interacting with (or inside) that image or scene. I guess I buy into the Rilkean notion that if you look hard enough at something it will give up some essential thing about itself. In many of the poems in The Book of Props, the speaker is seeking that sort of connection or experience with the world around him.

There is a light touch in these poems, an ear for measure reminiscent of poets like William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Robert Creeley. Could you describe your revision process, and in particular, how you negotiate line breaks?

I can’t say how much I appreciate being called “reminiscent of” Williams, H.D., and Creeley—thanks again.

I’m an obsessive reviser—I work on poems for weeks and months after I finish a first draft. The image I have when I think about revision is that of a slide puzzle—that little plastic toy with letters or images on little tiles that you can slide around until you get a word or picture or whatever. Sometimes you get a corner done, but then to get the whole puzzle finished you have to take that corner apart before you can put it back together again. When I’m revising, I feel like the poem in front of me is one of those slide puzzles. I keep shifting words and phrases around, changing a letter here, a line break there, until the whole thing finally feels set.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I also record myself reading my poems out loud: I record, walk away for a while, then come back and listen. Often the wrong word choice or the wrong piece of rhythm in the language immediately jumps out at me.

In terms of line breaks particularly, I like the idea that the line operates as an independent unit of thought—as does the stanza, as does, potentially, the poetic section, etc. And all these units cut across the thinking conveyed by the poem’s sentences. It’s these multiple units interacting with each other that give us much of a poem’s multiplicity and surprise, that allow a sentence as it unfolds to complicate itself across a line break.

Sleep comes up often in The Book of Props and in your first book, Only the Senses Sleep. What about sleep appeals to you as a subject for poetry?

I’m not sure, exactly. I don’t personally like sleeping all that much. I find it boring—I’d rather be up and about.

So maybe that’s it. I’m interested in the way sleep removes us from the sensory world—disconnects us from our thinking in time, and thus makes us vulnerable. It seems to me that we know ourselves best not when we turn inward but when we turn outward—when we interact with the world around us. From early on in my reading I was attracted to Georg Trakl’s “emotive landscapes” for this reason, and I like the Socratic notion that we don’t really know what we know until we put it into action—into language—in conversation with those around us. Sleep, in contrast, unlatches us from the world so that we swing, disconnected, beneath it—and that’s both a wonderfully calm and, at the same time, vulnerable place to be.

Do you tend to remember your dreams?

I had a wonderful poetry professor, Stuart Friebert, who insisted that his students keep dream diaries. Very quickly I remembered just about every dream I had. (I was amazed at how soon I had trained myself to hook my dreams as I was waking up and reel them into consciousness.)

But I also found that I wasn’t all that interested in writing about my dreams. They almost never seemed particularly interesting for me as material for poetry. Consequently, I haven’t kept a dream diary since I was in college. These days, I guess I remember my dreams just like anyone else—which is to say: sometimes.

In a short article in The Washington Post, you wrote that “Nude Asleep in the Tub” was on some level inspired by Pierre Bonnard’s paintings of his wife bathing. Could you describe the relationship between poetry and painting?

For me, some paintings—or photographs, for that matter, or simply spaces in the world—present an image that feels freighted in a way I don’t yet understand. Writing the poem is generally an attempt to figure out what “meaning” is buried there.

With those Bonnard paintings, my initial discovery was that looking at them made me feel like I was inside the bather’s thoughts in that contained space—of the painting, of the bathroom held inside it—which so effectively appeared to be filled with watery light. (Perhaps it was the light’s lambency that made the room feel like it reflected the flickering movements of thought.)

Later, I realized I felt similarly when I was in the room with my girlfriend while she was in the bathtub—and that strange spacial entanglement felt to be a particularly strong representation of domestic intimacy. But those paintings were moving and meaningful to me before I drew those later, more personal connections.

The Book of Props contains a section called “What Night Says to the Empty Boat (Notes for a Film in Verse).” Explain what you mean by “film in verse”; what drew you to the concept?

As I see it, that subtitle can be read one of two ways: “notes in verse for a film” or “notes for a film in verse.” I guess I like that both of those possibilities are there.

More than anything, in that sequence of 23 poems, I was trying to play with narrative while still writing poems that were clearly lyrics. I’d been trying to write some fiction and failing miserably, but the impulse toward narrative was still in me, and this project was an outgrowth of that. Also, my friend, Brian Barker, who’s a wonderful poet, had said to me one night that my poems always seemed to be about an individual sitting by himself just to the side of some sort of action—and he wondered if I could write poems in which people interacted with each other more directly.

Thus, the film conceit gave me a way to introduce many of the things I can’t stay away from in my poems—light, space, image, stillness—while still self-consciously writing poems that were more social than my previous work. And I also got to play with building a narrative through-line while writing lyrics that attended to image and scene. Perhaps, now that I look back on it, the film conceit was like a set of training wheels as I tried out new types of poems.

Was it important to tell a story, or to create characters whose stories are ambiguous, or are any person’s story? Do the characters’ names have any particular significance?

Yes, the desire to tell a story was important—and in my mind there’s a definite and complete narrative down there beneath the surface of these lyrics. (I think of the “notes for a film in verse” sequence as Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” enacted across lyric poems.)

Regarding the names: The two male characters—Clarence and Andy—are based very loosely on people I knew. I didn’t want either of them to feel particularly literary, so I gave them names that didn’t have famous antecedents in literature (at least that I could think of). In contrast, Justine—as the object of both Clarence’s and Andy’s affection—is intended to possess an aura of “specialness” that I thought I could intimate by giving her a literary name. “Justine” seemed a good choice, since my character Justine also strives to be virtuous, doesn’t manage to be wholly so, and is a touch naïve about the effect she has on the men around her. Those men, though, aren’t roguish, cruel, or unduly lascivious, so the reference to Sade is clearly there and, at the same time, a little ironic. (It also isn’t lost on me that “Justine” echoes my partner’s name—Jeanne—though I wasn’t consciously thinking about that when I wrote the poems.)

In what ways does life in the Midwest inform your writing?

I’m from the Midwest—that is, if you consider Cincinnati the Midwest, which folks on the East Coast surely do and folks in Kansas City mostly don’t. I think that growing up in a city that’s been in decline more or less since the Civil War—with all the history and dilapidation that entails—informs my work in that I’m often drawn to a kind of decaying urban environment that Cincinnati has in spades.

But I also traveled a lot when I was growing up. Between the time I was in grade school and when I went to grad school my dad lived in Houston (Texas), Anchorage (Alaska), on Long Island, in D.C., and in Tampa (Florida)—and I visited him a lot. Also, when I was five my parents and I lived in Rome, Italy, for a year; most of my first memories, in fact, are in Rome.

So I’ve always had one foot planted in the Midwest and the other relatively unplanted. As such, I feel both at home and a little out of place in a sleepy Midwestern city such as Kansas City.

In the Post piece, you mention that you used to live in New York. Is this New York City? If so, could you describe any difference in the way that the Midwest informs your writing and the ways that New York City informed your writing?

I lived in Brooklyn between college (in Ohio) and graduate school (in Houston), during which time I worked as a paralegal in the Appeals Bureau of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. I also spent a lot of time in New York when I was growing up—my grandparents lived in Ridgewood, Queens, where we visited many summers, and later on, as I mentioned above, my dad lived out on Long Island, in Hampton Bays. To this day I feel very at home in New York.

But in my mind, much of what informs The Book of Props—the sense of dislocation that hovers beneath the book—has more to do, I think, with moving from big cities (New York and Houston) to the small, rural Missouri town of Warrensburg, where I teach. I felt absolutely derailed and isolated there, and I lasted for all of ten months before I moved into Kansas City and started commuting out to work.

Now that I live in KC—in relatively urbanized Midtown—I don’t think the things that spark my imagination are all that different from those that excited me when I lived in Brooklyn. While Kansas City surely isn’t New York, it still has more in common with New York than it does with rural Warrensburg, just fifty-five miles down the highway.

When did you first begin writing poems, and why?

I guess I started writing poems in high school. I had an outstanding English teacher who sometimes brought contemporary poetry into the classroom, and that showed me that poetry was a living, breathing art. Many of the poems (terrible poems!) I wrote in high school I wrote for the same reason lots of young people write poems: I was heartbroken and wanted to give dignity to that emotion.

When I went to college, I knew I wanted to go somewhere I could study creative writing, though I wasn’t sure what that would mean. I ended up at Oberlin College where I studied writing, history, and literature. My writing skills, coupled with a research project on the post-Soviet mafia, got me the paralegal job at the D.A.’s office, thus taking me to New York.

But, as far as I’m concerned, it was when I was in New York, working 9 to 5, that I first felt like I was maybe, just maybe, a poet. I didn’t have any assignments or classes to push me, and yet I was writing more than I ever had before. I was also reading a ton of poetry, and I felt like my work was developing on its own. It wasn’t long before I was looking to get away from a steady workweek schedule and go to grad school so I could have more time and space to write.

 *

 [This interview took place via e-mail in January 2010]

*

Wayne Miller is the author of two collections of poems, The Book of Props (Milkweed, 2009) and Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006), which received the William Rockhill Nelson Award. He is also translator of Moikom Zeqo’s I Don’t Believe in Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2007) and editor (with Kevin Prufer and 22 regional editors) of New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). The recipient of the George Bogin Award, the Lucille Medwick Award (in 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2009), and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, as well as a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the Bess Hokin Prize from the Poetry Foundation, Miller lives in Kansas City and teaches as the University of Central Missouri, where he edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

*

Read John Deming’s review of The Book of Props here and Scott Hightower’s review of Only the Senses Sleep here.

*

Interview by Ken L. Walker

Many people seem at a loss for what exactly to “call” the state and various creations within the current of American poetry.  Robert Fitterman (along with Vanessa Place) has harvested a project called Notes On Conceptualisms which provides twelve general principles in regards to Conceptual Poetry and what its attempts and executions are.  The book is delightfully humorous, perceptively aware and fairly informing.  NoC begins at the point of “allegory,” discerning allegorical writing from symbolic writing, testifying that “Conceptual writing is allegorical writing.”

*

Do you own a “Pavlovian dinner bell?” If so, do you use it?

No, but I do have a dinner bell—figuratively, metaphorically and allegorically.        

Was it a pre-meditated decision to make the book so delightfully funny or did it come out accidentally, arbitrarily?

Is it funny? Seriously?

I’m glad you find it funny. I think it’s funny. I know a lot of people don’t find it funny. I think Vanessa is funny, but her writing is generally not funny. She probably thinks I’m funny. We thought parts of the book were funny as an afterthought and we made parts of the book funny beforehand.

The book tries to straddle a space where the ideas can be presented artfully and playfully and… like my father says: “between a hard rock and whatever.” It’s not a straight-up scholarly book and it’s not a straight-up institutional critique of a scholarly book. What is pre-mediated, then, is a conceptual gesture towards both.

Recently, Vanessa and I made an impromptu film that pokes fun of Notes on Conceptualisms. It’s titled: “Notes on Conceptualisms: eastcoast/westcoast” and it rips the 1969 Smithson & Holt film titled “East coast West coast.” Below are the links to both of them:

http://www.ubu.com/film/smithson_east.html
http://ubu.com/film/fitterman_conceptualisms.html

What are your top five favorite bands/musicians? (off the top of your head…)

In the mid-90s, the lovely and brilliant poet Kim Rosenfield interviewed Jackson Mac Low for SHINY magazine, and she asked Jackson what his favorite color was. Jackson’s answer: “I don’t pick favorites.” My taste is broad and indelicate.

What are your top five favorite films?  (off the top of your skull…)

1. Avatar PG-13                                               

            12:45, 4:15, 7:45, 10:50  

2. Avatar 3D PG-13 3D

            12:00, 3:30, 6:55, 10:25

3. Did You Hear About the Morgans? PG-13           

            12:20, 2:50, 5:20, 7:50, 10:20  

4. Fantastic Mr. Fox PG                                            

            12:30, 2:40, 4:55, 7:00, 9:15

5. Ninja Assassin R                                                     

            12:55, 3:20, 5:45, 8:10, 10:40

Is it “allegory” that is the central/thesis factor regarding Conceptualisms? Or is “allegory” the centrifugal factor?

Vanessa writes that “allegory is, by nature, centrifugal.” As such, the term does begin and end the Conceptualisms essay. But it isn’t intended to be a central thesis to the essay—there is none. The essay is more exploration than assertion. The nice thing, though, about kicking it off with allegory is that the term is comfortable to writers, especially, as we try to distinguish conceptual writing from conceptual art. To paraphrase Steve Zultanski’s straight-forward definition: in conceptual writing, the most “poetic” or artful element might not be the text itself. That “might not be” extends our traditional thinking about allegory to include a post-Duchampean relationship to allegory.

Do NON-allegorical writers utilize/make use of the “full array of possibilities?” How would that work?

Firstly, I don’t see “allegory” and “conceptual” as synonymous. There are many poets working with allegory in different ways, and in dialogue with different lineages. Matvei Yankelevich’s new book, Boris By The Sea, is an allegorical fable of sorts, but I don’t think he would consider it a text of conceptual writing. If you mean non-conceptual writers, I would say that leads to an unnecessary bifurcation. The range of conceptual possibilities is very much in flux, and part of our effort with the book is to encourage the strategic “possibilities” of this spectrum. I think there’s a misconception that materiality is on one end and conceptualism is on the other… I think this is a mistake. In Conceptual Art of the 60s, there was a clearly stated objective that ideas should take precedence over materiality. Conceptual writing retains some of that spirit, but without the hierarchal claim. Why? Conceptual writers are not reacting to commodification in the art market, but to the inundation of text that floods our lives. Conceptual writing strategies—especially appropriation, durational texts, archiving, researching, etc.—speak to these concerns. Traditional verse, of course, might address these concerns via content, but without the formal strategy that mimics our rapidly changing relationship to technology and the written word.

What percentage of currently-working poets would you estimate write/operate conceptually?

I don’t think it matters… but I’ll answer the question anyway. Poets are a tiny piece of the culture-making pie, and progressive/innovative poets make up an even smaller unit, so you can see where I’m going with this. Still, I would say that there are probably 40 or so poets around my age who would consider themselves “conceptual writers”. I’m excited about so many younger poets who would consider themselves to be coming out of this tradition, such as: Lawrence Giffin, Marie Buck, Kareem Estefan, Danny Snelson, Diana Hamilton, Patrick Lovelace, Eddie Hopely, Steve Zultanski, Brad Flis, and many others. Also, I was recently invited to a poetics conference in Norway, and there were several young writers from Scandinavia who consider themselves “conceptual writers”. So I guess it adds up.

But, here’s why I said it doesn’t matter… experimental poetry has a long shelf life. Even if the community is small, the conversation could be vital to the future of the art. In a way, the audience is always the future and the argument about accessibility is a red herring. Beyond the numbers, what’s crucial is to articulate, foster, and engage in a conversation that speaks to the dialogues of the day (and there may be many). The number of soldiers is not the point, as evidenced by The Objectivists or The Situationists.

If “failure” is “the goal” and editing appropriated material is “impure,” where does “success” fit in?

Failure for the writer means success for the reader. As we say in the essay: “failure in this sense acts as an assassination of mastery.” We have witnessed the “success” of an official verse culture poem, and the qualities that have been heralded by the creative writing workshop. In Notes, we write about failure as a way to violate the text from within with the hope that “this invites the reader to redress failure, hallucinate repair.” This relationship to failure is aligned to a position L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers usefully articulated—they sought to achieve this through broken syntax, while many conceptual writers use normative syntax (albeit often readymade) to the same end. 

If poets want to enter the arena of culture-makers, they might want to consider the dialogues that are happening in the culture around them and create works that speak to those conversations. In the other arts, the audience is especially active as part of this dialogue, and that’s where the “success” in failed art works is more inviting that the perfected or packaged art work that is recognizable as such. This “arena” is a place where radical ideas can be exchanged and one either believes there’s good in that or not. As such, the action is on the receiving end, and I say “action” because the more I think about “success” the more nauseous I start to feel. Doesn’t the whole success thang have a distinctively American feel to it? The editing of appropriated materials is not “impure” as I see it, but the term “impure” was what we used to describe a conceptual project that chooses to trip up its own making—more sampling and less readymade. In terms of LeWitt’s idea of conceptual art making—where the artist must not interfere with the preset idea—one might see this sort of editing as a rupture or impurity of that more rigid form of conceptualism. My own work tends to be more on the “impure” side of the equation, so I’m certainly not suggesting a hierarchy here, and I think that might be a problem with the term “impure” for some readers.

 

Do you, personally, think the Capitalist system will continue, as it has, to swallow “art” with its rhinoceros mouth? 

Yes.

As we claim in the essay, Capitalism has the capability to absorb even its own critique. Think of Citibank ads with line breaks or disjointed phrases. The most challenging conceptual writing, often critiqued as lazy or boring or unreadable, will probably be commodified down the road.  But, on some level, this is what appropriation of popular culture in poetry is all about. Here’s a quote we use from Buchloh: “The allegorical mind sides with object and protests against its devaluation to the status of a commodity by devaluating it for the second time…” Doesn’t this predict that very same Capitalist absorption where replication is a form of resistance?

“Hybrid” (in the sense of the newest Norton Anthology and informal discussions) seems kind of bullshit or made-up-out-of-thin-air for something particular yet hard to pin down with one thumb.  Your thoughts?

I agree that the term “hybrid” is too slippery or vague. For our essay, I wanted to borrow Tim Davis’s term “kinda conceptual” or use “muddy conceptual” but those terms didn’t seem quite right either. In other conversations, like the Norton Anthology cited above, doesn’t it refer to hybrid forms and genre-blurring? That’s a very different use of the term. In our essay, we use the term to mean part-appropriated, part-conceptual, part original text, etc.  We imagine a spectrum of conceptual writing strategies so that “hybrid” strategies could be seen as falling into that spectrum. In this way, “hybrid” has a fairly narrow or specific definition as it opposes the more “pure” or systematically prescribed pre-text strategies.

In visual art, Post-conceptualism and Appropriation Art are akin to this notion of the “hybrid” as we define it in the Notes essay. The conceptualism is more muddied and the procedures are more sloppy and interrupted (often by a re-emergent subjectivity).  I’m interested in the permissiveness of this muddy conceptual model and how it might echo more chaos.

I think the “Institutional Critique”/institutionalism section is quite possibly the most compelling and interesting part of the book. What are your thoughts of the MFA experience?  A friend and I, both with MFAs in poetry, joke about it being a fungi on the craft.

It is not surprising that poetry has not had very much Institutional Critique because we don’t have the same kind of institution that the art world has. Still there are several examples, ranging from Charles Bernstein’s poem Recantorium, to Gary Sullivan’s erasures of literary magazine rejection letters, to Rachel Zolf’s The Tolerance Project (a direct critique of the MFA experience where Zolf uses other poets’ material to compose workshop poems). Additionally, a lot of poets are using the performance space of the poetry reading as an Institutional Critique of the “Poetry Reading.”

I think we’ve driven the “craft of poetry” into the ground. After all, Kraft is just bad cheese. I’m optimistic at my core, and rather than belabor the obvious about the moderate modernism of MFAs, I’m hoping that we’re starting to see a new breed of programs, where poets are treated like artist and culture-makers who are engaged with the most challenging ideas of our day. Otherwise, we’re stuck with our cultural exemption status and delegated to several more decades of greeting card relevance.

I’ve been working on re-crafting old, rather “useless” or “outdated” science books into love poems by a process of erasure, deletion, etc.  Constellation-making. Is this an example of conceptual-art-meets-poetry; what I mean is, are there processes that apply conceptually but do not execute conceptually?

For me, this is an example of conceptual writing, but you’d have to decide how much the erasure and appropriated source material is fore-grounded. In the Introduction to Notes, I begin by talking about erasure techniques because it is such a common practice of late and very much relevant to conceptual writing. The very act of erasure brings meaning to the piece, as well as the act of appropriating source texts. As a writer, one then has a whole range of choices as to how much one wants to point to these strategies. One might hide all of that and create a “successful” poem with no real trace of these strategies. As such, there isn’t much of a conceptual element there because the author is pulling us into the completed text. On the other hand, if the erasure and source texts are fore-grounded, then the reader has that concept or idea to work with as well. In this way the reader is pulled to ideas outside of the text. To repurpose or constellate devalued or “useless” language is a common strategy in conceptual writing, especially as it draws attention to this very process of repurposing.

To  repeat myself: ours is an age not of invention but inventory.

This too is allegorical.

In one word, why is a word an object?

“‘Ontology.’”

*

[Interview conducted by e-mail in Nov/Dec 2009]

*

Robert Fitterman is co-author (with Vanessa Place) of Notes on Conceptualisms.

Interview by Melinda Wilson

 

[The following is transcribed from an interview held in Sims's office in Manhattan on December 16, 2009]

Let’s start with the book’s title. The book is centered around the death of the speaker’s mother. So, at first, it seems that “stranger” wouldn’t accurately reflect the relationship between the speaker and her mother, but rather the relationship between the speaker and the world as it exists without her mother in it. How does the book’s title inform the reader about the collection?

That’s a really interesting reading of the title. I actually hadn’t thought of it in that way before, but I like it, and I think it’s perceptive. I personally think of the title primarily as a reflection of the speaker’s relationship with her mother. Even if my mother had lived – I guess I should say the “speaker’s mother,” but oh well – it’s so hard to really know your parents, and since I lost my mother when I was 19, there are a lot of gaps and blanks in my memory and knowledge of her. I have some stories that she told me, photographs, family home movies, and then I have what remains of my memories. But that doesn’t make a whole person, so part of writing the book for me was an attempt (primarily abortive) to put together a more complete picture of her and also to reflect on how much I didn’t know, and how painful that is to realize this person that you love, who is the most important person in your life, is in many ways a stranger – especially when they leave your life so early. And then, of course, there is death as the stranger, since a lot of the second half of the book is exploring what I conceived of as her death and her experience of death and the afterlife.

That’s really interesting, the idea that you can never really know another person, particularly your parents, because you know them in such a specific way.

Right. They’re not real people.  At age 19, I was on the border between childhood and adulthood, and now, looking at how some of my friends’ relationships with their mothers changed when they reached their twenties and thirties, I can see that I missed out on that entirely – getting to know her as a person, not just a parent. 

I also noticed that the book is divided into five separate sections. Though each section is titled, the titles – for example, “Another Country,” and “Elsewhere” – are somewhat evasive. They seem to suggest the unknown or at least the unfamiliar. What do these titles represent for the speaker?

I think they represent the unknown and/or the unknowable, just as you’ve said. Even as you’re trying to write about death and trying to delineate the experience of grief, there’s so much that remains beyond certainty, beyond human experience, so the titles gesture towards saying, “actually, this is more about what I don’t know and what I can’t know than it is about what I know.”

Are those sections purely chronological?

I think that they are now. When I was first putting the book together, they weren’t.

How did you decide on their organization?

My editor, Rebecca Wolff, was really influential in saying, you need to put this in chronological order because it’s already so abstract and suggestive that the lack of linear(ish) movement gets in the way of reader comprehension. And I agreed. 

The poems themselves are deeply fragmented and sparse. There’s an abundance of blank space on most pages. How does the form the poems take reflect the narrator’s consciousness? What does the blank space indicate?

I definitely think that both the fragmentation and the blank space are – again, like the titles – indicative of this unknowable quantity, the blank spaces in our knowledge of life and death. At first, I was trying to write what I conceived of as a kind of memoir – this book has been around for fourteen years for me, evolving through different forms – but even though it started as something more recognizable as a memoir, it began to seem like a lie to tell it that way. My experience of her death was not this whole, satisfying narrative; it was fragmented and confusing and full of awful blanks.

Your mother passed away in 1992; this book was published in 2009. When did you begin writing about her, or when did you begin conceiving a book like this?

I started writing about her death while she was still alive, but very ill. And then in 1994, I wrote a series of poems about her death for my honors thesis in college – I think I called it “Offering” – cheesy! – and that was the first step down this very long road to writing Stranger. 

Can you name some of the collections that influenced that first version?

Most of the books I read were by confessional poets; at the time, I didn’t know much beyond that kind of aesthetic in “modern poetry.” Robert Lowell’s Life Studies; Michael Harper’s Nightmare Begins Responsibility, about his infant sons’ deaths, and Frank Bidart’s Golden State, to name a few. A few years after graduating from college, I took the poems of “Offering,” or rather the idea behind them, and turned them into prose, so for many years I was working on this as a prose manuscript. And it still wasn’t quite right for me, and then in 2006 – this was after a long time of playing with it – I tried to make it into more fragmented prose pieces, and finished a whole prose manuscript, called List, but I still wasn’t satisfied, so I took List and used it kind of as a found text and wrote the poems in Stranger from those. And wrote new poems to supplement them as well.

That’s quite a process.

Yes. It was very long.

At any point did you just put it away and not deal with it for some time?

I think through those years I definitely did a couple times, but it was always there, in the background. I couldn’t let it go.

You mentioned some other collections that you felt influenced by. Who would you say are your influences?

Well, in general, especially in the last ten years, my influences have included Barbara Guest, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Rae Armantrout, C.D. Wright, Cole Swensen and Robert Creeley, to name a few big ones.  Stranger in particular was really influenced by prose writers, too – David Markson’s brilliant tetralogy beginning with Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams were very influential.

Yes, I felt a similarity between your work and Armantrout’s. I also noticed that one of the blurbs on the back of the book mentions Nietzsche’s belief that “Only that which does not cease to hurt remains in memory.” There’s a lot of memory in this book, or memorializing. There are photographs; there’s filming. The poems are elegiac. First, do you agree with Nietzsche’s statement? Secondly, can you elaborate on the function of memory in these poems?

I do agree, but it’s tricky because at the point – in 2006 or so – when I was finally forming the book as it is now, the raw hurt, for the most part, had abated. But I was working with material that had been written when I was still experiencing the acute pain of loss and grief, so the emotion is there in the lines, it’s just that I was manipulating the material at a kind of remove.

Memory functions in these poems in a number of ways; the shards of preserved memories – glimpses, moments, phrases, feelings, etc. – are crucial, of course, but on the flipside, the fragments, blank spaces, and uncertainties reveal those memories to be questionable at best. The failure of memory is foremost. This ties back, of course, to the idea that what is unknown is larger and more present than what is known. Memories are lost, or parts of memories are lost, leaving you with ideas of a lost person that are false or full of holes.

Memory is flawed.

Yes, very flawed.

Well, one poem that seems to speak directly to memory is “In her holiday dress for the world” on page 4. Would you mind reading the poem aloud, and then I’ll ask a question?

[Sims reads the poem]

In her holiday dress for the world

Whitewashed for her

 

[Her father filming the primitive living room dance]

 

With gravity

Worn like a bonnet of lead

 

Above the world, the plain, and the barrow

 

[Still for a moment]

 

In pictures come softly, blurry and sweet

at the edges. She gets so close to the lens that her face

… 

dissolves. What’s left is a red-and-white blur by the tinseled pine.

And her mother’s grin.

And her father directing her: backwards, forwards, a bit to the side. She

grows

Up.

How am I?

 

 Now? 

It’s funny because what most readers think of as the second part (beginning with “dissolves”) is really (in my mind) a separate prose poem, but it’s impossible to express that on the page; they just blur into each other. But that’s as it should be, really.

I was going to ask you about that because as a reader the poems are complex to navigate. But my question here is about the distinct change in voice in the last few lines of the poem. The syntax of the line “How am I?” is surprising. What is the speaker experiencing in these final lines?

I think a lot of it is about the speaker’s (the mother, in this case) relationship with her father. This section of the book, called “Blank,” is supposed to show her development from early childhood to adulthood, so I was trying to show her at this very crucial point where she is becoming a young adult, becoming a woman. In those last few lines, she’s growing up, but she is also still seeking that approval that she gets very firmly in the first part from her father. She is still needy and uncertain about her identity, about who she is and if she is the way she’s supposed to be, according to him.

The book becomes an exploration, but more specifically, an exploration of death, and the speaker contemplates, maybe even attempts to resolve, some large questions. For instance, what happens to one’s essence after the physical body has expired. To what extent does the death of the body bring the death of one’s whole being?

I think that’s what I’m trying to figure out in the second half of the book in general. And of course there’s no answer. I think there is a hope present in that section of the book that the death of the body does not necessarily mean the death of the whole being, but the images of the afterlife in the poems aren’t exactly appealing, either. So there’s hope, but it’s mingled with fear and uncertainty, as it must be.

Let’s go back to the mother-daughter relationship for a minute. The mother-daughter relationship in this book is compelling. Can you speak about the significance of mother-daughter relationships?

Sure. I think that it’s the essential bond – I mean the mother-child bond – but that it can be especially potent (for better or worse) when you have mother-daughter, because they’re the same sex. It makes for another degree of closeness. For me, that was the primary relationship in my life for many years. I was an only child, and grew up with my mother alone after my parents divorced. She remarried when I was about 9, but until then we had each other. So yes, the relationship is significant, and when it is lost, especially at a relatively early stage, it can have devastating consequences.

Your mother was, as you said, the primary relationship in your life – you didn’t have siblings. Does that change the relationship, make it stronger?

Absolutely. When I was 6 and my mother started dating the man she’d marry a few years later, I remember (and here’s a tricky memory moment – I “remember” because my mother told me) telling her that she shouldn’t have any more children, but if she did, “it” would have to sleep outside. I had no interest in sharing my mother, and even my stepfather had a hard time winning me over. We had an intense bond.

You mentioned the word “border” earlier, and I’m very glad you did because many borderlands are established in the collection. For instance, crossing from life into death, from childhood into adulthood. The speaker finds herself facing a world without her mother; she finds herself suddenly on the front lines, without that protection, without that relationship. How does the loss of a mother or mother figure differ from the loss of others in one’s life?

I think, again, it goes back to the strength of that primary bond; nothing can compare with losing that, and in losing it you’re thrust into adulthood. I wasn’t that young when she died, but after her death I certainly felt older than most of my college friends who came from complete homes and still had that buffer protecting them. I envied them. A loss like that can throw you off track – instead of getting thrown off track, though, I threw myself into my schoolwork, and got very involved in school activities. I think of that time now as a kind of frenzied refusal to lose myself in her death, although I certainly grieved.

In the poem “What breaks,” the following lines appear: “From the public mind // Into wilderness.” Here is an example of a borderland that I was referring to. Can you describe that transition for the speaker from the public mind to wilderness?

It’s passing from life into death or whatever is beyond death, the afterlife. This is the moment of her death.

So, is that transition or that crossing of that border one that takes place solely for the mother? Does the speaker experience a similar crossing into new circumstances in her life?

Well, sometimes the speaker is the mother – and sometimes the speaker is the daughter, or both, or possibly someone else. In this poem, the mother is experiencing that particular transition. 

There is constant awakening and reawakening in this collection, or interpretation and reinterpretation through different lenses. It almost seems as though the speaker is trying to decide on a specific interpretation that she feels comfortable with, that works for her. The following lines, “It stuns me / It stuns me to be alive / It stuns me to be alive in the waffle house” use repetition, but each line adds more detail. Would you call this an awakening for the speaker, and what might she be awakening to?

Yes. To the reality, the awful reality of life right after her mother’s death. It’s funny — that moment has lasted through every revision of the manuscript since 1995.

How about the poem on page 17? Would you mind reading it?

[Sims reads the poem]

 

[Is this what life

And then I existed

 

 

The universe

 

Yoked

 

To the stairs

 

  

At the back of my head]

 

This poem reminds me of Mark Strand’s “The Night, the Porch,” but much more intimate, personal. It seems to speak of an intrinsic connection between the speaker and the universe, a connection that exists before birth and after death, through all time. How do you characterize that connection?

I think that’s beautifully put. This poem hopefully resonates with the first poem in the book, “Seemed to have crossed a dark lake,” which gestures towards the mother’s birth. I wanted to express this sense of coming from something eternal, something that exists before and after life, and the speaker (the daughter, then) is trying to reconnect with that something (desperately) in the “Elsewhere” section, later in the book.

The poems in the book are very human, and therefore easy to relate to. In the poem “Those not worthy are scattered wide,” you write, “Everything went on as usual, outside // I craved a great earthquake.” The speaker’s frustration is understandable; she feels alone in a difficult experience, but the poem allows the readers to share in the experience, so it seems that the poem itself might help to bridge that gap. In other words, how can poetry be an effective tool in working through loss or other hardships?

I’ve had really lovely personal responses to the book from people who have experienced some type of grief – which is most people – who say they identified with it or that it really captured what they were feeling, too. I think that’s possible, even though the experience is different for everyone. Hopefully there is something universal about going through loss and grief that people can identify with in Stranger, but that shouldn’t leave out people who haven’t experienced it…yet. As Elizabeth Robinson says in her blurb on the back: “…into experience that we all know, or will.” No one escapes this particular experience, unfortunately.

And the writing of the poems…I mean again, you spent so long with this particular material. Was it a useful tool for you?

It was. I think it was necessary, and it’s not like I sat down and said, “I’m going to work through this by writing,” but that’s what I did. It did help.

Will you read “She felt”?

Sure.

[Sims reads]

 

She felt

Those hidden things
 
From the pervious

Margin

 

*

 

I looked for myself

In myself

 

And the woods were vocal

 

Oh my

Divided mind

 

Made 
 

*
 

In the grudgingly unified

Tower

 

A face

 

The face

I made

For you

The second section of the poem especially demonstrates some internal conflict for the speaker. Is it possible to truly know oneself? We’ve talked a bit about the nature of relationships with others, but what about oneself?

It is very difficult to know yourself – and when you’re struggling to know yourself, especially if you’re an adult with relationships and responsibilities, you can’t exempt yourself from maintaining your interpersonal relationships, either. So here, the speaker (the mother) seems to be experiencing an identity crisis in the midst of a much larger crisis, but she has to, or thinks she has to, continue presenting a unified self for her daughter’s sake. I was trying to imagine how hard it must have been for my mother to put on a “brave face” when I know she was terrified and confused. I think it is very difficult, and maybe impossible, to fully know yourself, and that a crisis like this necessarily brings your identity into question – what has it meant to be “me” this whole time? And what am I now that I’m about to die? And, finally, what will I be?

How can that “knowing” be achieved? Or how do our experiences or inexperiences shape our understanding of ourselves?

I think life experiences, especially the big ones, good or bad, can help you – or force you to – understand yourself. For me, the primary way I “get to know myself” is through writing – what I feel, what I think, etc. It’s also a way to solidify that self-understanding – putting it down in words is reassuring.

Throughout Stranger the speakers are constantly attempting to absorb their own emotions, again, to make them understandable, knowable in some way. In an essay about Rae Armantrout, Stephen Burt writes, “there is no…uncorrupted language reserved for true sentiment … We do not make up the words we use; instead we take in and send out language in mostly unexamined pieces.” And I felt that the quote was not just applicable to Rae Armantrout’s poetry, but here as well. When writing poetry, do you find this statement to be true and how do you overcome or employ the ordinary or what we might refer to as “everyday” language?

Yes. I do find it to be true. Most of the language I use is what I’d consider “everyday” or “ordinary,” for that very reason: there is no unique, utterly original way to express “true sentiment.” However original we think we’re being, we’ve received the language from somewhere outside of ourselves, and it’s important to acknowledge that, especially if you’re a writer. Everyday language is the most appropriate language to use for these poems, anyway, because this is an everyday experience, really – as tragic and alienating as it seemed to me at the time, the loss of a loved one is one of the most common human experiences. So what better way to translate the experience than by using ordinary language?

It seems like some of the fragmentation in the book lends itself to making the language seem new and totally different. For me, that was one way that it felt so different, so unlike that everyday language.

Yes, I think repetition helps too, those little (but essential) techniques. They help denature the familiar language so the plainness of it is disrupted, which hopefully makes it new and unsettling for the reader. 

Your poems in Stranger are remarkably compact, but at times they feel more like scraps or tiny transmissions of consciousness. Why did you choose to employ those short, sparse lines throughout?

Well, that’s really how I write these days – I’m not sure I can claim having made a conscious choice there. But the sparseness also came from my writing/editing process – I was dissatisfied with the book in prose because I felt there was too much language around what I really wanted to say, so I would pare down the lines to what I felt was essential, which usually left a short, spare line. The prose also seemed wrong because of the nature of the book itself – the fragmented, spare line reflected the dissatisfaction and uncertainty at the heart of the book, whereas those blocks of prose always looked too confident and solid.

It’s interesting that the less explaining you do, or the less language you have, the stronger the experience comes through, isolating some of those really important moments. Just to satiate my own curiosity, on page 32, is the line “The world is stuffed” at all derived from or inspired by Berryman’s Dream Songs?

No, but I love The Dream Songs. Is that a line from one of them?

It’s in the voice of Mr. Bones, and he says “is stuffed, / de world, wif feeding girls” in Dreamsong #4. It reminded me of the Berryman line not because of any of the experiences being discussed, but just the line itself – so I was curious.

That’s funny. Maybe I stole it unconsciously. I was trying to capture the aftermath of a traumatic experience – the speaker feels like she’s underwater – her vision is blurred and she’s temporarily deaf and dumb. 

How did your relationship with Rebecca Wolff and Fence Books begin and develop?

Let’s see…I submitted to the Alberta Prize several times, and one year I was a finalist, another year I was a semi-finalist. I don’t know why I kept sending; I should have probably given up, but I didn’t. I’m stubborn. Then the third or fourth time I submitted, I got the Alberta Prize. That’s how it started. When I was finished with Stranger, I sent it to Rebecca and we wrote back and forth about it for a while. I made a lot of changes, and after about a year of doing that, she was happy with the manuscript (and so was I). Rebecca’s a great editor – she has particular ideas about what she likes and wants, but she’s always willing to hear me out and can be flexible if I’m not comfortable with a suggestion.

Do you have any readings coming up or are you done reading for this book?

Well, I’m reading in January, in Hartford, Connecticut, but I’m reading from newer work.

Is your new work anything like this in terms of tone or voice?

Maybe voice, a little. But it’s also quite different. I just finished a manuscript of poems about murder. I like to tackle all the happy topics. Some of the poems are told from the perspective of the murderers, and I’ve used a lot of found language from actual testimonies and letters that murderers have written.

Have poems from that collection been published?

Yes. They’ve been published recently in Aufgabe, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Raleigh Quarterly, and A Sing Economy (Flim Forum Press).

Is there anything else you’d like to say about Stranger? 

Yes – it’s hard to say anything about this book, because it’s so personal. But I’m very happy that I finally finished it and that it’s out in the world – it was something I needed to write, and although it doesn’t adequately memorialize my mother, at least it’s a gesture toward doing that. She comes across in the book only as a shadow or as slivers of herself, but in life she was vibrant, beautiful, and kind – and a wonderful, loving mother. 

*

Laura Sims is the author of Stranger and Practice, Restraint, which won the 2005 Alberta Prize. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in Boston Review, New England Review, Rain Taxi and The Contemporary Review of Fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, and teaches writing at Baruch College in Manhattan. Read Melinda Wilson’s review of Stranger here.

*

Best New Book of Poetry

Versed, Rae Armantrout
Planisphere, John Ashbery
Take It, Joshua Beckman
The Dance of No Hard Feelings, Mark Bibbins
A Village Life, Louise Glück
The Last 4 Things, Kate Greenstreet
The MS of My Kin, Janet Holmes
Yeshiva Boys, David Lehman
The Book of Props, Wayne Miller
Chronic, D.A. Powell
Speak Low, Carl Phillips
Stranger, Laura Sims
Archicembalo, G.C. Waldrep
Sestets, Charles Wright
Museum of Accidents, Rachel Zucker

Best Translation

With Deer, Aase Berg (translation by Johannes Göransson)
If I Were Another, Mahmoud Darwish (translation Fady Joudah)
Before Saying Any of the Great Words, David Huerta (translation Mark Schafer)
World’s End, Pablo Neruda (translation William O’Daly)
Poems from the Book of Hours, Rainer-Maria Rilke (translation Babette Deutsch)

Best Selected/Collected

If I Were Another, Mahmoud Darwish
Selected Poems, Thom Gunn
Selected Poems, Geoffrey Hill
Selected Poems, Dara Wier
31 Poems, Dean Young

Best Anthology

Visiting Wallace: Poems Inspired by Wallace Stevens, editors Dennis Barone and James Finnegan
The Oxford Anthology of Latin American Poetry, editors Ernesto Livon Grosman and Cecilia Vicuña
The Best American Poetry 2009, editors David Lehman & David Wagoner
Poems from the Women’s Movement, editor Honor Moore
Essential Pleasures, editor Robert Pinsky

Best First Book

Perpetual Care, Katie Cappello
It is Daylight, Arda Collins
The End of the West, Michael Dickman
Rising, Farrah Field
The Certainty Dream, Kate Hall
Star in the Eye, James Shea

Best Second Book

The Dance of No Hard Feelings, Mark Bibbins
The Last 4 Things, Kate Greenstreet
Slaves to Do These Things, Amy King
The Book of Props, Wayne Miller
Stranger, Laura Sims

Best Book Cover

Never-Ending Birds, David Baker

 

 

 

 

It is Daylight, Arda Collins

 

 

 

Selected Poems, Geoffrey Hill

 

 

 

 

Reading Novalis in Montana, Melissa Kwasny

 

 

 

 

Scary, No Scary, Zachary Schomburg

 

 

 

 

Best New Book by a Canonical Figure

Versed, Rae Armantrout
Planisphere: New Poems, John Ashbery
A Village Life, Louise Glück
Upgraded to Serious, Heather McHugh
Sestets, Charles Wright

Best Short Poem in a Collection

“Vehicles,” Rae Armantrout (from Versed)
“Dilemma,” Mark Bibbins (from The Dance of No Hard Feelings)
“Nude Asleep in the Tub,” Wayne Miller (from The Book of Props)
“cancer inside a little sea,” D.A. Powell (from Chronic)
“Future Tense,” Charles Wright (from Sestets)

Best Long Poem in a Collection

“The Devil You Don’t,” Mark Bibbins (from The Dance of No Hard Feelings)
“Yeshiva Boys,” David Lehman (from Yeshiva Boys)
“The Listeners,” Jennifer K. Sweeney (from How to Live on Bread and Music)
“Storm, lustral: unevensong,” Andrew Zawacki (from Petals of Zero Petals of One)
“More Accidents,” Rachel Zucker (from Museum of Accidents)

Book-length Poem/Sequence

Commuter, James Bellflower
Free Cell, Anselm Berrigan
I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, Karyna McGlynn
Bluets, Maggie Nelson
The Mad Song, Michael Schiavo
Transcendental Studies, Keith Waldrop

Best First Poem in a Collection

“Bring Us a Souvenir from the Next War,” Mark Bibbins (from The Dance of No Hard Feelings)
“Trillium,” David Baker (from Never-Ending Birds)
“On Purpose,” David Lehman (from Yeshiva Boys)
“Who is Josquin des Prez?,” G.C. Waldrep (from Archicembalo)
“Turning and Running,” James Shea (from Star in the Eye)

Best Final Poem in a Collection

“The Devil You Don’t,” Mark Bibbins (from The Dance of No Hard Feelings)
“A Village Life,” Louise Glück (from A Village Life)
“The Under World,” Melissa Kwasny (from Reading Novalis in Montana)
“In the Poem He No Longer Lives In,” Wayne Miller (from The Book of Props)
“The Death of Everything Even New York City,” Rachel Zucker (from Museum of Accidents)

Best Opening Lines in a Collection

from “Alcove,” opener for John Ashbery’s Planisphere:

Is it possible that spring could be
once more approaching? We forget each time
what a mindless business it is, porous like sleep,
adrift on the horizon, refusing to take sides, “mugwump
of the final hour,” lest an agenda—horrors!—be imputed to it,
like a hold dug in sand. It’s breathy, though,
you have to say that for it.

from “ABC Plus E: Cosmic Aloneness is the Bride of Existence,” opener for Mary Jo Bang’s The Bride of E:

A pack of young flirts was patrolling the party,
They were cultural outsiders, consumed with … what?
Their own notion of beauty as reflected in the shine-more mirror
Of a man’s pants? Or nothing
But midnight and no one is counting.

from “Sleep Suite,” opener for Wayne Miller’s The Book of Props:

Light pressed to the tangle of birds
and branches and parked cars,

shop mannequins pinned
to the street (the street floating
like oil there in the glass—);

light striking the faces
of dogs and passersby, the leaves,
the radiator, the whitewashed sill;

light ringing them into existence…

from “Speak Low,” opener for Carl Phillips’s Speak Low:

The wind stirred—the water beneath it stirred accordingly…
The wind’s pattern was its own, and the water’s also. The
water in that sense was the wind’s reflection. The wind was,
to the water, what the water was to the light that fell there,
or appeared to fall, spilling as if the light were a liquid, or as
if the light and the water it spilled across
were now the same.

from “The Day I Lost My Déjà Vu,” opener for Rachel Zucker’s Museum of Accidents:

The box is like this today.
The box I live in.
Today: like this.

And though similar, so achingly alike,
ad infinitum, line over the nine, again,
it’s always
nothing like
before,

nothing, not even the surprise
of another, so similar day of box living.

Best Closing Lines in a Collection

from “Fact,” closer for Rae Armantrout’s Versed:

The full force
of the will to live
is fixed
on the next
occasion:

someone
coming with a tray,

someone
calling a number.

*

Each material
fact
is a pose,

an answer
waiting to be chosen.

“Just so,” it says.

“Ask again!”

from “The Devil You Don’t,” closer for Mark Bibbins’s The Dance of No Hard Feelings:

                    Abominable fancy, slide us across
                                           the burning lawns.

            That which doesn’t kill us
                    is merely waiting;
                             it will.

Flattery will get you started, boy.

                     Hell is coming.

                     Hell is here.

from “A Village Life,” closer for Louise Glück’s A Village Life

In the window, the moon is hanging over the earth,
meaningless but full or messages.
It’s dead, it’s always been dead,
but it pretends to be something else,
burning like a star, and convincingly, so that you feel sometimes
it could actually make something grow on earth.

If there’s an image of the soul, I think that’s what it is.

I move through the dark as though it were natural to me,
as though I were already a factor in it.
Tranquil and still, the day dawns.
On market day, I go to the market with my lettuces.

from “We Are Great Songs,” closer for Amy King’s Slaves to Do These Things

…but turns out to be
the cost of plunging
every ounce of gold
that drove you
to the brink of security,
to toe beneath logs, speak
leviathan orbits, hold
out for missing persons,
sketching lines
that reckon the dead,
untying wrists
you know aren’t yours,
not in name or by word
but by the jugular
of an etched-over dream that
you bare them with,
Goliath-inspired
by gibbous oceans &
opal tree lines, happy, in fact.

from “corydon & alexis, redux,” closer for D.A. Powell’s Chronic:

guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out
dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs and brush

what was his name? I’d ask myself, that guy with the sideburns
and charming smile
the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I’d expire with him on
my tongue

silly poet, silly man: thought I could master nature like a misguided
preacher
as if banishing love is a fix. as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy
eyes

Best Chapbook

Spy Poem, Samuel Amadon
From Orange to Pink, Jordan Davis
Voir Dire, Justin Marks
Night-Sea, Rachel Moritz
Sent Forth to Die in a Happy City, Keith Newton
El P.E., Thibault Raoult

Best Physical Artifact

Take It, Joshua Beckman (Wave Books)
Poems from the Book of Hours, Rainer-Maria Rilke (New Directions)
Escape from Combray, Rick Snyder (Ugly Duckling Presse)
Selected Poems, Dara Wier (Wave Books)
31 Poems, Dean Young (Forklift, Ink)

*

Special thanks to this year’s reviewers for helping pull it all together: Hansa Bergwall, Graeme Bezanson, Jason Bredle, Stephen Burt, James Cihlar, Jackie Clark, John Deming, Caroline Depalma, DJ Dolack, Stephen Fellner, PJ Gallo, Joseph Goosey, Dustin Hellberg, Cindy Hochman, Steven Karl, Molly Sutton Kiefer, Daniel Magers, Rick Marlatt, Mike McDonough, Rachel Mennies, Ben Mirov, Cate Peebles, Jason Schneiderman, Matt Soucy, Bryan Stokes II, Daniel Story, Mathias Svalina, Ken L. Walker, Melinda Wilson

*

Interview by DJ Dolack

The fact that there are no real edges to the poems in the first section of the book (no titles, traditional markers, etc.) seems to be in contrast with your other art, photography, and even the films you’ve made to accompany the book. How does framing a ‘poem’ compare with framing an image?

In the case of The Last 4 Things, the frame is the book. The book contains the text and the space around the text and the blank pages.

I think that most photographers, whether they present their work full-frame or crop it, are saying something like: “What’s inside this border is what is important. This is what I saw and what I want you to see.” I’m not exactly coming from there. Sometimes I’m not even looking when I make a shot, for instance. I’m a lot more interested in seeing what I didn’t see.

One of the things I like to do when I’m on the road is to make new poems out of the material in the book. I’ll read a few lines from one page, say, then flip to another page and read the last paragraph there. Even though The Last 4 Things is a finished book–the arrangement I’ve decided on–the word-blocks can be stacked in different ways. Every rearrangement tells a different version of the story (or whatever’s being told).

I found that I could piece together nonlinear and broken narratives throughout the book, which led me to think about your writing and editing process. I wonder how you saw these poems at their birth vs. how they’ve settled on to the pages.

I’m not sure how I’d identify the moment of a poem’s birth. The first section of the book is one long poem (”The Last 4 Things”) that came to itself over the course of three years. Many versions got tacked to the studio wall during that time. The second part of the book (”56 Days”) I wrote in less than three months. While I was writing the second section, I was working on the second movie and a character began to emerge. My sense of the book’s narrative was dragged to the surface by that character. 

Can you talk about the idea of ‘fire’ as a character and a personality in the book?

I think fire predates character or personality. What’s it doing in the book? Heating things up, being set, being feared, making noise and smells–signaling violence, mortality, urgency, and maybe a level of frustration that makes a body feel like bursting into flames, destroying the container.

What the hell does the term ‘abstraction’ mean right now?

I don’t know, maybe the opposite of “no ideas but in things.” Do you find my work abstract?

What did you learn about yourself as a writer in the time between case sensitive and The Last 4 Things?

Although I care about how a poem looks on the page (and I think the look carries meaning), in the time between books I realized that the main question for me is: how do I feel when I say it? The second question seemed to be: how far would I be willing to go in order to have people hear me say it?

What do you wish you saw more of in the poetry being published today?

I like to be surprised.

[Interview conducted by e-mail in November/December 2009]

***

Kate Greenstreet is the author of case sensitive and The Last 4 Things, as well as numerous chapbooks, including This Is Why I Hurt You. Find out more at kickingwind.com.

*