There were many fine readings recently that I had the pleasure of attending. D.A. Powell visited on April 17th and the folks at Graywolf Press organized a reading at the Loft Literary Center in celebration of his newest book, Useless Landscapes or a Guide for Boys. Dobby Gibson introduced Powell to a pretty diverse crowd of readers. If you’d like to relive the experience in your own living room, here’s the set list. If you’d like to try to read it like Powell, himself, read at a calm pace, let your voice find the rhythm and flow, smile when you are tasting a nicely flavored phrase, and close your eyes when you know the next line by heart. Or, you know, you could just listen to the audio here.

1. Landscape with Figures Erased
2. Landscape with Sections of Aqueduct
3. Tender Mercies
4. Chicken
5. Bojangles
6. Funkytown
7. Boonies
8. Ode to Joy
9. Missionary Man
10. Mass for Pentecost
[Encore]
11. Landscape with Combine

Then, 10 days later at the Soap Factory, Rain Taxi Review and Coffee House Press welcomed Amanda Nadelberg into town for a reading celebrating her newest book, Bright Brave Phenomena. It was something of a homecoming for Nadelberg who attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota and once interned with Coffee House. She was introduced by poets Sarah Fox and Greg Hewett who read poems in her honor. Chris Fischbach, publisher at Coffee House, read to the crowd of 75+ people the first poem she ever sent him about gaps in memory recalling a party in Italy.

Perhaps the most revealing part of Nadelberg’s reading was a moment between two poems. As she finished the final line of “The Dinosaur Dreams its Colors into View”, she paused and said, “Did you guys hear that Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon renewed their vows in Paris?” and then announced the next poem. Was it funny? Sure, but no one laughed out loud because it felt perfect. Her poems drip into pop culture often and kind of fidget with their own sort of nervous internal logic. The Mariah-line was less non-sequitur and more of a connective tissue linking two poems.

Here’s what her set-list sounded like:

1. Our Vision of the Future
2. You Are a Thieving Joy
3. Powerage [Note from SW: She says read this one like an AC/DC anthem.]
4. Moby Dick Says you Cannot Hide the Soul
5. Here in the Space-Time Continuum
6. The Dinosaur Dreams Its Colors into View
7. Our Situation
8. Like a Tiny, Tiny Bird That Used to Make Us Happy
9. This All Came From a Box, Find a Bright Way Out
10. I Can’t Be Responsible for All That’s Behind Me

—Sam Woodworth, Twin Cities

Interview by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

I recently caught up with the always delightful Laura Straub of Vouched Atlanta. Vouched Books seeks to “promote small press literature.” Their strategy is three-pronged. First, they are masters of the guerrilla book store. They set up tables of books at various craft, art, and literature events. Here’s the catch:  They only carry books that they have read and love. Prong two is Vouched Presents, their reading series. Vouched brought Tyler Gobble, Melysa Martinez, Christopher Newgent, Amy McDaniel, Brian Oliu, Jesse Bradley, and Matt Bell to Atlanta last month. And, finally, is Vouched Online in which they keep Vouched followers in the loop with where they’re setting up and when readings are. They also maintain a consistent ethic in promoting work they enjoy online. Vouched is a real gem for both readers and writers.

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JS: How did Vouched Atlanta get started?

LS: Vouched Atlanta officially launched last July. After the success of the first Vouched table in Indianapolis (operated by good friend and Vouched Founder, Christopher Newgent) I began to toy with the idea of launching my own table–a desire rooted in wanting to become more involved with Atlanta’s lit scene as well as wanting to help independently published literature in front of new audiences. Christopher agreed it was time for Vouched to colonize and Vouched Atlanta was born!

Interview by Ken L. Walker

Harmony Holiday‘s 2011 Motherwell Prize-winning book Negro League Baseball inhabits an incredibly unique prosody, reflexive of an intellectual gaze directed toward rhythm as relic yet rhythm as embodiment. One phrase in the poem “Lonely Vessel” goes: “your charm hinge on your gimme, gimme, chest in your arms, jumping, like a famous junkie.” The book, not so ironically, comes with a CD of collage-esque remix tracks that puts a pharmacopeia of sound on display: interviews, film clips, jazz riffs, hip-hop backbeats, pieces of acapella, more. It’s great accompaniment to a book that, as Margo Jefferson claims, examines “language, thought and feeling” as “polyrhythmic and polyphonic” devices. As a younger person (many of my students call it “elevator music”) who absolutely loves Jazz — or, Black Classical music as Nina Simone terms it — and jazz history and funk and blues, I think a book like Negro League Baseball is incredibly refreshing at this moment in the dialectical process when certain scholars are stealing the obvious veneer of American racism and attempting to re-terminalize it away from the unfaded paradigms that Carmichael and Hamilton developed not even fifty years ago. Harmony and I, in the following, discuss various issues centrifugal to her work, and do so via a myriad of video clips. The YouTube intersperses were justifiably integral to the interview process and to discussing all the components that leaf through her poetry and thought. They are the centering force of the interview itself.

Of note, Harmony is performing Saturday night as part of a highly intriguing event curated by the great Terrence Hayes (and also featuring Jen Bervin, Major Jackson and Michael Dickman).

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KW: Eric Dolphy is one of the best modal soloists in jazz history, pretty underappreciated too. Mingus’s presence is ridiculously encompassing. And, Dannie Richmond is smoking and playing the drums, simultaneously. Two birds, one stone. Watching this clip reminded me of when you write the phrase “deconstruction via duplication.” I think, via brevity, that is a fantastic way to sum up precisely what 50s era jazz was doing, deconstructing modes and duplicating them and then extending them via solo-istic improvisation. How can prose do that?

HH: To me this clip is a rebellion, an act of dis-integration, and since this music stemmed from Dolphy and Mingus discussing the false integration that was pending in the southern states in the early 60s, Dolphy comparing the situation to concentration camps and Mingus responding with a composition that he hoped would serve as “wire cutters,” I consider this the literal continuation of that conversation between two men, both native to Los Angeles, Watts specifically, where rebellion would erupt just a year later in ‘65.  They had undergone parallel migrations as they followed their music wherever it took them and it usually took them along the frontlines of dis-integration into a kind of displacement that made them more acutely and intuitively aware of the dynamics of race in North America from region to region.

This clip also stokes thoughts about how style and aura function in the black community. Here, aloofness, or an erotic distractedness is to black America as casualness or an appealing accessibility is to white America, as a matter of entitlement but also a matter of the soul’s affinity. There is no room in 1964 for a casual negro, the atmosphere pervading the community is one of relentless seriousness, an intensity so crucial it is rejoiced in and coveted as a form of beauty (just look at Miles and the aesthisization of his pain), balladed, allegroed, never abandoned  urgency like a thin wire of grief being  tapped and misconstrued as unprovoked hostility by the monstrous media feds, and whoever else can’t relate.

And so out the door with Peter Pan Syndrome, the jazz aesthetic, which is the aesthetic of collective improvisation within the black community, demands that one look effortlessly sharp and original while on the bandstand. It just goes with the territory, which is a good way to segue into some discussion of the cover of Negro League Baseball which I chose in hopes that it would fuel ideas about the role of performance in the lives of black Americans or so-called negroes. I personally feel like it follows me everywhere (the duty to do something performative and then maybe subdue it so it’s versatile), there are few contexts within which my performed otherness doesn’t feel more hospitable than my actual…Sameness? Consistency?

So the cover is a candid document that the tastes were changing faster than the laws were.

And stages were the first quasi-safe places to be black and ‘free’ in this country, so we stay on ‘em, build ‘em around ourselves like fortresses, whatever it takes. And since my dad was a performer in that context and my inquiry into what that might have felt like in the 60s and what it did to his psyche, informed a lot of the book… It seems to me when I watch clips like this that a collective improvisation/having a team or a unit and a telos alleviates some of that pressure and codes performance in a way that makes it productive and kinetic again for the performers. A prayer. A collective, not just a gauntlet lain down on one soloist. Not just showmanship or cooning cause something new is being produced.

When Dolphy passed away later that same year Mingus renamed this piece “Praying with Eric” in homage. In the music and the attitude upheld while playing and creating it, grace, virility, patience, demand, the integrity/integration is achieved, not yet in society. In the United States it is mediated, and, on certain days, depending on my mood, I might argue that all blacks are forced in one way or another, to be entertainers, not that it’s an entirely negative thing, in the case of the these Meditations it allows a story to be communicated with absolute bravery and love.

As for writing, and how to reach these heights in prose, it’s hard to improvise alone, until you remember that the psyche is fragmented (we are every character in the dream) and stop being afraid of letting it communicate with itself.. so in prose, to achieve anything close to what Mingus, Dolphy, and company achieve here it feels like you have to be your own foil, your own sidekick, disagree with yourself without going against and violating yourself, ‘get you some discipline’ (as Sun Ra puts it) and master them so that the imagination isn’t hindered by human laziness or unpreparedness.

In order to improvise in some of the poems in the book I treated memory as accompaniment or instrument and played it, played with it, wishing it omni-directional. The poem, “Certain Ballads,” for example, is loosely based somewhere between my father and Mingus, both of whom struggled with a sort of dejected charisma and hyper-sensitivity/clairvoyance, that sometimes threatened their very sanity. This clips makes me think a lot about the battle between extreme composure and desire to just fuck shit up cause nothing was improving fast enough; this is another theme that runs through the book and settles in some of the poems as they go from direct address, to solipsistic stream of consciousness, to a ‘please be everywhere’ mentality.

What do you think of this one:

I am thinking about a interestingly positive connotation between Watch the Throne’s “Sweet baby Jesus/We made it in America”  lines. In this case, the “it” ain’t money. And in the case of Sun Ra, it’s more like making it in and through space. He takes tense out of it, like a large representative of non-time. That would be a hell of an intriguing poem, to represent non-time, something like Schopenhauer says when he writes that the present shouldn’t matter so much because it’s always noticed in passing. Finding something else. Lose yourself in a night of drunkenness, etc. I never forget that moment in Space is the Place when a man gets killed. The murder is possible! That murder is possible destroys your present-hood, basically.

How beyond just about every concrete construction Sun Ra really is/was. In a time of heightened Black Consciousness, he required formats of humanity and non-humanity to rise above seeing things in those sets of normalized ways that absurdly help us to survive. When direct and indirect (covert and overt) oppression and repression occurred in a myriad of locations and methods, he saw places where repression and oppression were un-born. And the places he constructed, clearly, were not to be visited or observed but lived. As did Albert Ayler and Alice Coltrane.

You write in the poem, “Ambassador:” 

Bafflement and its quotient climate, apathy and its quotient climate

Can you talk about that ideation in lieu of this clip: 

Langston wrote: Trouble mellows the golden note. Then Rita Dove went on: Fact is the invention of women under siege has been to sharpen love in the service of myth. These things come to mind as I watch Billie sing this version “Strange Fruit” and the question, who else sang this song ?  Her bravery and her frailty are so inextricably linked that it’s almost vicious of her, to be so versatile, generous, fierce, tender. Taurus in the arena of life © Charles Mingus. A Queen without her court, in the words of Abbey Lincoln. Everyone has something to say about Billie Holiday. Sometimes her legacy is co-opted to the extent that her work is seen as relic, like the time I was dating a guy who said ‘no one really listens to Billie Holiday,’ as if she is pure idea or an advertisement for the idea of listening to her music. The lines you asked about regard that type of legacy statuing and how it undermines so much of our oral history. Especially throughout black America. I want people like Billie to be kinetic and dynamic figures we can relate to, not frozen into interpretation by the idea they cast until no one really listens. “Ambassador” addresses the crossing of deep admiration for someone’s spirit and ways, particularly the spirit and mode of a musician, in contrast with the fear/hagiography/catacresis of that person’s stature that accounts for ignorant questions like ‘does anyone really listen to…’ I hope everyone really listens to “Strange Fruit,” the raw ache in Billie’s voice (and stance) as she sings it, and begins to think about who the real ambassadors are, the real soloists, maybe sharpening myth in the service of love (and its quotient climate).

You should speak to this:

I remember reading tributes to Weldon Irvine the day after he died because he was, then, still so obscure to me — this multi-instrumentalist and teacher-man. I bought his record Liberated Brother in Louisville, Kentucky after reading that he taught Mos Def how to play drums and showed him tricks on the keys. Then, I saw pictures of those two gentlemen just kind of figuring stuff out while in the studio during the recording of Mos’s (Yasiin Bey’s) Black on Both Sides. Critics called Weldon Irvine a mentor. But, he played like six instruments for Nina Simone! And, then the Lorraine Hansberry love-thing. My god.

That reminds me of a Nathaniel Mackey line: “I wake up mumbling, “I’m/not at the music’s/mercy,”  You write something similar (and I know the referent is different but I like to think that lines can be broken and broken down, a Coltrane-type thought) in the poem “House to House”:

dress up but to mean time has come//rendered like a banded possession

 Weldon Irvine strokes and kind of brutally tickles the tightly-strung and then returns and the whole comeback of hand from within piano descends to keys but there may as well be two pianos. The time in between is what kills us.

I think, on a different note, you should tell your ex-manfriend, that most Sunday mornings I really (try, at least, to) listen to Billie Holiday. And, in the middle of these listening sessions, I think about how we (white folks) tend to co-opt like it’s an organic process. Then again, to uncover the veil of things exposes the privileges. Within naked negativity is the possibility of positivity. So, in another regard, the Billie Holiday thing brings up a more interesting topic. Now, I know I should be concerned that you throwing a Weldon Irvine video at me means that you may have wanted to talk about hip-hop, or lead up to it, but this paradigmatic thing happens there, too (aside from Jean Grae or Nikki Minaj) but women in jazz  history and exterior conversations revolving around jazz — even the Coffee House Press anthology, Moment’s Notice — the ladies are absentees. That’s  a product of so many things that overwhelm me. You write:  

heteronyms for near to you I am a woman some far away lady your gaze approaches

Here’s something to dress that:

That’s a great Mackey line. I think it sort of does the work and answers some of the questions we’re posing, in the sense that, let’s say he were to admit, in some safely muted parallel biosphere, or in the benevolent confines of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes where hearing and ‘testifying’ would be pure and intrepid, that he is at the music’s mercy, that that mercy makes him servant, mercenary, proselytiser, both muse and obsessor in a tantrically linked binary that enhances the erotics of a refusal. That’s sort of what I want to admit with the lines you mention from my own work. That’s my bias. I think that as a woman I have the luxury of being less afraid to admit the elements that drive and lead me, less afraid of not being sovereign arbiter of what I create, more willingness to remain at the music’s mercy even as I try to assemble my own words as music. This may be due to the simple fact that women are used to being objectified in the history of the music be it blues, gospel, jazz, soul, hip hop, sonnet. Even an interview I read of Mahalia Jackson (as sanctified as it gets) opens with a description of her looks. When something is as powerful as the music is, resistance and acceptance serve the same function, they admit its power. On the other hand there is something defiant about the vulnerability of both postures. As if the goal is to fall, get back up, and assume the same position with the same amount of reckless abandon as the first time. I sometimes talk with a close friend who is a musician about how I want my poems to “wobble,” the way some of his songs do, to take that same wavering flight over the depths the music takes at its best. Last but not least, in his chapbook Who are the Tribes , Terrance Hayes has a great poem called “The Antidote to Invisibility.” I really like the title, and some twist in it reminds me how sometimes I think women are lucky to get dissed and punked nonstop as authorities on and practitioners of the music, cause in many I think the antidote to invisibility is invisibility. A modal take on hiding in plain sight.

Here’s a cascade of clips that come to mind:

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Oh man, Sergei P! His movements of instantaneously-changing identities remind me of the idea of your new project which is very intriguing–both conceptually and ideally–centered around, at least, the name of Madlib’s made-up altered ego. And ego (speaking of Lil B) is huge in hip-hop but to alter the ego and make more you’s of you and to make myths . . . 

HH:  The Autobiography of Malik Flavors is an exploration of the true myth, a response to Sun Ra’s daintily lain gauntlet “show us your myths.”  So dainty it gouges. He was speaking to black Americans and, in my opinion, specifically to black males in the United States , and even more specifically, to black male entertainers. He was addressing these men from the crackling mindframe of the Dumas poem “Thought” which reads: One of the greatest roles created by Western man has been the role of “Negro.”  One of the greatest actors to play the role has been the “Nigger.”  He was saying: nigger, make some shit up to get out of this mess, dig, take the vernacular and throw it against store-front glass and start a riot the way the white man “used myths to justify white supremacy” create some of your own myths to overturn it, and don’t stop there, create the true myth of your own love supreme, not just in The Music, and verbal units beyond the utterance, write it down, in the words of Stevie “tell your story fast, if you lie, yeah it will come to pass.” “The truth is dangerous.” Mobilizing all of those contradictions toward an essence and ‘ensemble time’ this factlesss autobiography explores the psyche of a fictional jazz nass player who becomes the tragi-triumphant foil of his inventor, and how the outcome of such successful self- mythologizing is a loss of self, or a sacrificing of the ego to the commons where it is mutilated and returns as soul, hopefully.

But, thinking in the terms of the Dumas poem’s rigged syllogism:The nigger refuses to be destroyed, the negro never existed, we need a new order of being, a modal blackness that can sustain the end of blackness as we know it– as we know that familiar end of familiarity is coming in this golden age of the apocalypse. The book is also a love story, a personal account of the role a woman plays in the central figure’s transformation and a look at the kind of terrorism true love and devotion can be, weather between a man and a woman, a man and his craft, a man and his image (of himself),  no matter what betweens, in a society that teaches the black man to doubt and hate himself,  his romantic love can become a very childlike fascination steeped in the pain of longing even when it’s requited, at once up close and dislocated like a prayer. And what is the recipient of that type of love to do to make it sustainable for herself, that does not shatter all of her lover’s myths? Where does intimacy enter and disrupt the mythos with its irresistible… disruptiveness? Through words and images and sections on everything from ‘work-for-hire’ recording contracts to the Wu-Tang Clan to Frued’s Aesop, etc.. I try and flesh out some of these topics in a fractured-to-be-holistic way. I’m trying something different and releasing one section of the manuscript entitled “Interviews Transcribed from Memory” as a sort of primer for the full text, early this summer, just to introduce Flavors’ aura into the ecosystem while it’s warm. I think a myth needs to arrive gradually and so that it kind of feels like a friendly but not-playing ghost that’s been there the whole time.

Interview by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

(photo by Julie E. Bloemeke)

This month, Atlanta poet and photographer Julie E. Bloemeke’s series of abandoned buildings photos and poems are featured in Deep South Magazine. The project was a multi-year conversation between poetry and photographs featuring abandoned spaces in and around Alpharetta, Georgia.  Alpharettan Julie E. Bloemeke chose to shoot the majority of the series in film, in part to document–and highlight–a medium also continually influenced by abandon. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, Bloemeke’s poetry has recently appeared in the collaborative chapbook Jasper Speaks: Download, in print and online literary magazines including A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine, Qarrtsiluni, Mason’s Road and Pebble Lake Review and is forthcoming in a number of anthologies including The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume V: Georgia  (Texas Review Press, fall 2012).  She is currently working on her second poetry manuscript.

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JS: What prompted you to focus on abandoned houses?

JEB: I have always been fascinated by what we choose to abandon.  Sometimes there is not much choice—natural disasters, foreclosures—but many times there is.  Having spent most of my adult life in the south, I am captivated by what is left behind, particularly in regard to generational land.  (And here it is important to note that I grew up in Toledo, Ohio, a city that has been largely shaped by abandonment, a city that I have chosen, geographically at least, to abandon, but that is another book entirely.) In graduate school at the University of South Carolina, I drove to a small–nearly non-existent–railroad town called Chappells.  Under the years of kudzu and pine needles, there were rows of houses, derelict, yet still, though the weeds and neglect, suggesting a story in their details.  Framed pictures hanging on the walls.  Furniture still covered in a sitting room.  Canned peaches, labeled, on a pantry shelf.  It was as if time picked up and left this one odd moment, stilled in the woods, waiting to be found.  I was captivated by these elements especially, by that jar of peaches.  I thought about the person that picked them, who boiled the jars, readied the lids and sealing wax, prepared the fruit, whose handwriting was so carefully poised on that label.  What prompted this family to leave what they left behind?  Why would they have left something seemingly so personal, intimate, essential?  We could never know, only guess, the myriad of reasons.  And in the resonance of those questions is the essence of story; it is what remains with us, gnaws at us.

Did you take the photographs knowing poems would accompany them?

I wanted this experience to be organic, dynamic.  My hope is that the poems and photos are in conversation, not overly literal or rigid.  What I did while working on this project was listen to my instinct for the day.  At times, I photographed abandoned places I never felt compelled to write about.  Others pulled me to write about them but either did not captivate me photographically or might have been too hard to shoot technically for a multitude of reasons.  Often there were snakes, buzzards, hornet’s nests, decaying floors and collapsing ceilings, all elements of danger.  Sometimes I took the risks; sometimes I did not.  And there was the human risk as well.  I quickly discovered that a woman alone with a notebook and a camera on a rural Georgia property raises a lot of questions.  I drafted about 10 poems in the series, but only about 4 of them are ready for the wider world.  After a year or so of shooting and writing I began to step back, curious at how the poems and photos would riff off of each other.  I am incredibly grateful for the seeming randomness of the beginnings of the project, the feeling of being called to buildings or spaces just to listen, to take in their energy.  After the birth of my children, when so much of my world was multi-tasking and dense in the intensity of mother, I was energized by these moments of solace, reflection, of a returning of the self to art.  These derelict spaces helped me to integrate my two lives, to remind me not to abandon one for the other.  A story about my process: I shot frames of the dilapidated swingset mentioned in Pokeberry; the only color in all of the green overgrowth was the shock of the red swing seat.  Yet somehow, pairing this photo with the poem seemed too obvious or stilted; it begged for something more nuanced, and so I chose photos from another building entirely, rusted nails and rotting wood from a barn wall, which I hope lends a far more intricate experience of the poem.  Colorwise, alone, the photo and poem almost seem a contradiction, an antithesis.  But is that only at first read?  These are the questions that I hope the couplings raise. With Mailbox, the photo pairing was definitely more literal, but in that case it seemed that the poem (and photo) called for it.  And given the posture of that mailbox, the way it served almost as sentinel, it seemed to be the portrait of something almost human to me.  The angles in that shot, the regal stature of that mailbox still interest me.  And, little did I know at the time, but that mailbox would serve as the impetus to my second poetry manuscript which explores (in part) how our evolving communications are causing dis/mis/reconnection in ways that a pre-tech world could have never conceived.  Speaking of technology, I do not call myself a photographer—I think too many people easily do– but rather a snapshot artist of sorts.  Some of the mechanical/analytical aspects of photography have largely alluded my tendency toward free-associative thought—there is so much to learn about light alone!—but I attempt nevertheless.

What do you hope the poems and photos offer?

Ultimately, I hope the poems and photos offer further internal conversation: What do we pass by daily that we often forget to truly see?   How does the repetition of seeing allow blindness?  How are these abandoned spaces resonant with the abandonment in our own lives, our choices of what to keep and what to let go?  What emotions do the lost, the left behind, the neglected raise in us: nostalgia, regret, relief, indifference, grief?  There are countless stories out there to photograph, to write, that only a few of them ever make it to the page is arguably another loss.  We live in such a makeover/remodel culture—think of home improvement reality shows alone—that I don’t think we pause enough to consider what is left behind.  I like to think that sometimes these places and spaces held their stories, and still do, through storm and snow, waiting just to be released from wilderness and seen, if only for a moment, before they slip quietly into decay, as if they had never been.  I am incredibly grateful that they invited me to listen.  I hope I have honored their voices.

The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich

W.W. Norton 1978

“…a whole new poetry beginning here.”

Rereading Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language is like listening to a favorite album from my youth: I’m tempted to sing along. In my teens I probably recited these poems aloud in my sister’s off-campus apartment as frequently as we played Ella in Hollywood on the turntable.

Six more volumes of classic and enduring American lyric poetry, including a Selected Poems, followed Adrienne Rich’s 1951 debut A Change of World. But the publication of Diving Into the Wreck in 1973 changed everything, signaling a new urgency, awareness, and fearlessness in her poetic voice. Rich followed this National Book Award-winning tour de force with a compilation of selected and new poems in 1974 and with her first nonfiction book, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Not until 1978 did we get a new, completely original volume of verse with The Dream of a Common Language, and the wait did not disappoint. This book is the logical but unpredictable deepening of the exploration begun with Diving Into the Wreck. As Olga Broumas noted in Chrysalis at the time, Rich paradoxically enfolds the personal (“dream”) into the public (“common language”). Dream shattered the conventional dialectic approach in poetry, documenting the search for a lexicon of true connection between women even while creating one.

Rich’s work in the seventies was an antidote for the disillusionment of the Watergate generation. The Dream of a Common Language was poetry for community, poetry meant for use, poetry meant to be marked up in the margins, poetry meant to be read over the phone. After this generation’s witnessing of the prostitution of language in media and politics, readers hungered for a sense that language itself was real and that expression could be trusted. How fortunate that Rich’s poetic talent answered this call. Like the enduringly innovative recordings of Nina Simone referenced in this book’s Twenty-one Love Poems, The Dream of a Common Language is both a benchmark of its era as well as the precursor of many poetic approaches to follow—including the more politically varied content of Rich’s own work as well as the fragmentary, polytonal, and caesura-filled work of many contemporary poets publishing in journals today.

–James Cihlar

Find The Dream of a Common Language here and here.

See all essentials.

James Cihlar is the author of the poetry book Undoing (Little Pear Press, 2008) and chapbook Metaphysical Bailout (Pudding House Press, 2010). His new volume of poetry, Rancho Nostalgia, is forthcoming in 2013 from Dream Horse Press. His poems, interviews, essays, and stories have been published in American Poetry Review, The Awl, Coldfront, Court Green, Smartish Pace, Mary, Lambda Literary Review, Verse Daily, and Forklift, Ohio. His work appears in the anthologies American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice (New Village, 2011), Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Writers on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry, 2011), and Divining Divas (Lethe, 2012). The recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship for Poetry and a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, Cihlar is a Lecturer at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a Visiting Professor at Macalester College in St. Paul.

I first met Jennifer Woods in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky while she was working for Sarabande Books. I constantly popped into the Sarabande offices to see friends and it quickly became apparent that whatever space Jen occupied was the room that everyone should have been in, or, wanted to be in. Right after I moved to New York for graduate school and Jen left (on good terms, of course) Sarabande, she began publishing a letterpressed magazine devoted to new poetry called Lumberyard. The magazine, due to its high-quality letterpressing and edgy, sometimes twisted, mostly moving poetry, took off. And, recently, Jen and her brother Eric (designer/printer) have been putting energy into two other projects — the ever growing Typecast Publishing and the web magazine Sawmill. That process led the Typecast team and the Tuesday: An Art Project crew to publish the anthology Oil & Water in the wake of the utter epic failure that BP earned in the Gulf of Mexico; Oil & Water went the true distance where many anthologies fall short, not only in its repertoire of poets (Matthea Harvey, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and John Keats), but in its packaging of letterpress factoid cards and recycled thin-board slip covers. The acumen of Typecast is the root of the uncovering and further enveloping and discovering of great American poetry with such a consistent casting of writers — Adam Day, Fritz Ward, Chris Mattingly, Matthew Lippman, Matt Hart, Catherine Wing, Sherman Alexie, Jessica Farquhar, Allison Hutchcraft, Jessica Jacobs, Russell Dillon, Amanda Smeltz, and so many more. I know Jen Woods to be one of the most endearing and patient poetry readers around; this statement will hopefully go a long way with those readers wishing to submit to the press, but also in the sense that so many magazines are becoming worse and worse at actually reading their slush piles or gathering new talent from said piles. Typecast certainly does, however, and they do it with a cleansed ethic and hard-work-pays-off-for-everyone mentality.

***

KW:  What was the impetus to begin Lumberyard and, then, at what point did Typecast Publishing come into the fore?

JW: The inspiration for Lumberyard was pretty simple: I was dissatisfied with what I felt was a resignation in the literary world, in particular that poetry was “a lost cause” to our culture-at-large and there was no hope that publishing poetry could be a self-sustaining, profitable enterprise. With a new presentation, one that considered the habits and preferences of the modern world, I felt confident people of all stripes would willingly digest and enjoy poetry in the same way humans have for hundreds of years, especially if the marketing behind it refused to accept conventional wisdom as truth, going after pockets of readers written off by the literary community long ago. After all, I certainly didn’t come from a family of academics, nor did I have any friends growing up who loved poetry, and yet I do. What sold me on poetry was poetry itself—nobody had to teach me to love it, I just always did. Surely I wasn’t that much of an anomaly.

My brother was about five years into effectively building a letterpress and design studio, Firecracker Press, and his work made me think we could combine our two loves and produce something really amazing—after all, we both worked in “print” at the end of the day.  So, I immediately called him with this idea and we began brainstorming (which continued for nearly a year before the first issue of Lumberyard was ever released). The nature of his very specialized printing business served as a model to show how the application of thoughtful, creative business practices can and do affect the trajectory of a for-profit enterprise. And listening to advice from those who had a defeatist attitude towards the arts—or those who felt uncomfortable mixing the arts and business—was a surefire way to fail at what I had in mind. Honestly, his guidance and advice in the beginning proved to be my personal saving grace. He said many smart things to me in those early days that I still keep in the forefront of my mind.

Typecast Publishing came along after several years of successfully producing the magazine and watching our numbers grow at the same time the economy was tanking. I was employed at a nonprofit press, and everywhere around me arts organizations were preparing for the worst, as fears that grant money and private donations could dry up if the recession didn’t make a quick recovery. I had to hedge my bets, and I took a gamble on what we were building. I left my editor job behind and decided to expand our efforts with Lumberyard into a full-fledged publishing company. One that would take a diligent approach to how the business was built as well as the quality of work published. Sink or swim, I had to test my theories about the publishing business and see where it was failing because of the economy or the digital revolution, and where it was failing due to negligence or lack of research and development.

KW:  Tell me about the process of making and marketing the books, the magazine, and any other print materials.

JW: This is the joy of working with a sibling—that we’ve known one another and understand where the other is coming from so well we can entertain this difficult and creative dance several times a year and usually get what we want from our efforts. This dance is hard to describe, but I’ll give it a go.

First of all, we take our time to fully develop every step required in making a book, from editorial to execution. We’ve had projects that spent more than a year in the planning stage, before we ever begin to typeset one line. We start by talking in generalities about the project, mainly: what is the emotion we are hoping to produce in the consumer when they pick up a Typecast product? The answer to that question is the cornerstone from which everything else is built. And once we have a final manuscript the designers are given carte blanche to attack the project in the way they see fit. I’m an editor, a word person, and while I have confidence in my ability to create a “concept” I am not an aesthetic professional. When we give Firecracker freedom to steer the visuals-ship, we get back great work. And once a solid proposal for the book object is presented, the hardest part begins. We have to fit our idea within the confines of a budget. Here we rule nothing out, deconstructing the book-making process down to square one with each project. We take no aspect of printing or binding for granted. And while it can take months, sometimes, to realize our concept in an affordable fashion, this challenge is where we come up with our best and most innovative ways to make a luxurious thing for our readers.

Finally, as far as the marketing goes, our modus operandi is this: while we love our readership from card-carrying members of the contemporary literary movement, we don’t focus the bulk of our marketing muscle into wooing that demographic. The reason is simple; if we spend all our time preaching to the choir we’ll never reach our larger goal of bringing new readers into the joy that is the discovery of compelling voices in literature today. Since we are for-profit, building new readers is not just a line in our mission statement; it is our bread and butter. I love that pressure of having to succeed. And it has made me love business in a way I never knew I could.

KW:  Since, then, you all are a for-profit, how do you market outside the realm of the literary which begs another question: How do you feel about the (mis)statement: everyone knows that only poets buy poetry, as I presume you intend to do something about that.

I have to fundamentally disagree with the statement “everyone knows that only poets buy poetry.” That’s completely untrue. But often we’re the only literary-minded group reaching out to those other communities of people. My favorite example was when Lumberyard was asked to go on Road Dog Trucking, the largest trucking satellite radio station in the US, to talk about why truckers should read more poetry. There’s a million reasons why, I just happened to be the only person suggesting that conversation. We made an issue of the magazine just for lonely nights on the road, and dedicated it to the trucking community. We have truckers that subscribe to the magazine to this day. Now, as you mentioned, we are for profit, so I’m not gonna cough up all our trade secrets when they’re openly available to anyone willing to do the work. Audiences are waiting if you’re willing to go get them. There’s so much to love about poetry, why would we ever assume that only a niche audience would be interested in it? Poetry is one of the oldest art forms; it is in our DNA. And you underestimate poetry at your own peril if you don’t believe that. So, what I intend to do about the statement is never buy into it — ignore the hype.

KW:  What are some great rewards, benefits, and advantages you’ve come across since you began?

JW: The greatest reward for me is that every day I get up and work with a small entourage of creative people—artists, writers, craftspeople—who are passionate about and talented at what they do. I get to know their individual creative processes intimately. When I was a girl, I fantasized about how great writers almost always had a group of creatives around them to bounce off ideas, or talk late into the night about whatever mystery their artistic expression was attempting to solve (this is what happens when you grow up in a rural setting, pre-internet, and you are a bit of black sheep). To think that such activity is what’s required of me now to do this job well, this literally is a dream come true. Although I spent a good portion of my childhood dreaming about this responsibility, every day that this is my reality is still a happy surprise.

KW:  You all have published some great people . . . Do you use the magazine as a barometer for the books – what’s the in-between process there?

JW: We’ve found some great poets through the magazine, no doubt. Matt Hart was a stranger to me until he submitted an oddball little poem for our second issue. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure I liked or understood it—I just knew I couldn’t stop rereading it. There was a music within that wouldn’t stop pestering my brain. When we accepted the poem into the final pieces for that issue, Matt wrote me one of the first “fan letters” I ever received. I began seeking out his work to find out more and the rest is history, so to speak. I’ve spent many years now trying to unravel the mystery that is Matt Hart’s brain, and this journey has been one of life’s most rewarding.

But we don’t only consider poets who’ve appeared in our magazine—hell, not every book we publish is poetry anymore. The main thing we seek is authenticity. If the writer is authentic to him/herself, the readers will feel that from the page. They will invest. And we need books that encourage and nourish that investment. If the writer risks nothing of the self on the page, we probably won’t risk putting muscle into the project.

KW:  What do you see as the biggest hurdles and dilemmas for independent publishers?

JW: The biggest hurdle right now is having the courage and willingness to reinvent what being a publisher means. You’ve got to be flexible and ditch the urge to be reactionary as inevitable change continues to wash over the industry. Not to sound like a total jerk-off, but it’s true I no longer see hurdles or dilemmas as much as I see opportunities to solve problems. As an industry, publishing became a sleepy giant adverse to change, and as a result, other business-minded people have taken advantage. Now those same publishers like to bitch about Amazon being the devil, etc, and maybe they are. But it doesn’t answer the question, “Why did you let the devil catch you sleeping?” If people who care about books aren’t at the forefront of the industry, I’m not sure what publishers expect. Luckily, and more and more each day, I meet publishers like O/R who aren’t afraid to try new approaches, and when I’m fortunate enough to talk to those publishers I begin to feel optimistic that the future is as bright as it always was. The future, it turns out, depends on what you do with it and not so much the temporary circumstances of today.

KW:  What would be a good definition of a “poetry community? I ask this because I think you are creating a micro-community while being parcel to the larger more over-arching one, a huge part, at that, being connected to other publishers.

JW: I think a poetry community should be any group that makes you feel inspired about poetry, whether it’s writing, reading, or publishing. With Typecast, we try to create a space for as many people as want to come along and have a good time with poetry. While we can’t possibly publish all the work we like, we do like to make everyone feel they are welcome to have a seat and hang out, enjoy the ride.

KW:  Is there any difference within region – that is, do you see yourselves as an American publisher or a Midwestern or a Southern publisher, etc. Is this Ohio River Valley poetry?  What are, if any, the issues of place-basedness?

JW: Well, since I’m rural, and throughout my adult life, southern, I guess I’ve heard a lot of rubbish about how you have to be from here or there to make it in the arts. I’m not denying that a New York zipcode doesn’t make it easier in some respects, or that as a youngster I didn’t have fantasies about the day I would move to the big apple and start my life. But, as it turns out, I quite love where I live and would never downplay our roots to appear different than we are. Part of our appeal, I suspect, is that authenticity, which stems from a desire to allow our readers to feel comfortable and at home when they interact with our products. Last time we had an event in Brooklyn, half the audience came up to me after to talk about Kentucky—how they were from here, too, or had been to the Derby, or had an aunt that lived here and they loved to visit, etc. Clearly they were telling me things they usually kept quiet, since the conversations were all whispered as if to say, “I don’t usually admit this but….” I’m a firm believer in just being who you are, and so if our southern-ness identifies us in some way, I wouldn’t be very conscious of it I don’t think, beyond this sense from time to time that our geography does something to make people feel at ease. You might have better luck getting an answer to this question from our readers than from me. But, all that said, I see Typecast as a distinctly American publisher––proudly based in the south.

KW:  Are there any poetic, say Modernist or contemporary, movements that inspire you?

JW: Movements are like colors. There are shades within each that I love, yet a full spectrum of color is the best. More than a school or movement, I want bullshit-free expression. I don’t care if you’re a formalist or a dog-catcher, if you’re risking something every time you publish a poem, I’m going to read the work and try to get the most from that experience. For me, inspiration comes from a new point of view that I myself have never considered, a new way of looking at a blackbird, a wheelbarrow, a war, a broken heart.

KW:  Is there an essential quality to poetry that separates it from the rest of the arts (as in, the craft and practice, itself; but, on the publishing side, as well)?

JW: I’m of the school that all the arts have more in common than not. If you’re a serious artist, the creative process behind such a person is fairly universal, no matter the medium. We choose different signifiers as artists, but the signified is still the same: some parts of life are so big, strange, scary, fantastic, confusing, uplifiting, that only some abstract form of communication can get the point across in a way where a group of people can investigate it together (which is what happens anytime you read a book or attend a performance or walk the halls of a gallery). If you’re a dancer, a painter, a poet, an architect, and the work comes from an innate need to express from within, you’re going to practice, practice, practice. Chances are, you’ll think that the practice (or in the case of a writer, revision) is never done. You’ll wear yourself out, forfeiting most other things at one point or another, for the space to continue creating. You’ll never consider doing anything else. Everything else is just details.

*

Interview by Krystal Languell

Krystal Languell likes to taunt the interview for its formative textbook ways in the sense that she composes conceptual acts full of accidents and incidents which seem, in a simplified and intriguing way, to beg the questions: what should the interview do, is the interview a transcribed performance, and, is the interview its own medium or genre? That does not, in any way, make the conceptual Q-and-As she’s offering to readers any better than a traditional or mainstream interview; but it does spread a sheen on the inherent and implied boredom that can occur when two literary egos collide and force one another into their respective corners. Her project (which we’ll hopefully see more of) consists of electro-shocking an older set of questions which two different literary figures have already offered one another and then re-presenting away from its original centrifugal manner of fame, notoriety, authority, and (perhaps most importantly) patriarchy. She remixes the questions. This next batch takes a step past her previous interview in that it sets its framework less obtusely — this time, she takes on Jean Stein and William Faulkner. The interesting conspiracy behind this famous mid-twentieth century interview is that Stein offered it to The Paris Review in exchange for an editorial position there. Stein, then, got the job. Here, the wonderful Kate Schapira wears Faulkner’s loafers while Languell dresses, in part, as Stein. The following also reflects something else — that Krystal Languell is editor-in-chief of Noemi Press, which published Schapira’s poetry collection, The Bounty, in 2011.

***

JS: You were saying a while ago that you don’t like interviews.

KS: One of the reasons I don’t like interviews is because after the interview is over I start thinking about all the things I should have said or could have said better. How I could have given insight into my work instead of just babbling about bacon or trees or something. But I like this method of interviewing much better than the e-mail method, where it’s long-form and not really an interview.

JS: How about yourself as a writer?

KS: I think my self as a writer is my most alert, most thoughtful, most conscientious, most excited and most questioning self.

JS: Isn’t perhaps the individuality of the writer important?

KS: I think it is important but I also like to think about where a writer is in the honeycomb, and what are the cells that are touching the cells of your cell.

JS: And your contemporaries?

KS: I read my contemporaries maybe more than I read my non-contemporaries. I’ve definitely learned a ton from them, but when people ask me, “Who are your influences?” or, “Who do you love to read?” of course I can never think of anybody. I think if you look at my work you can detect my contemporaries in the DNA of it.

JS: Is there any possible formula to follow to be a good novelist?

KS: No.

JS: Do you mean the writer should be completely ruthless?

KS: No! The opposite. I feel that the writer should almost never be ruthless—well, I take that back. I should never be ruthless. I don’t know if I get to tell other people whether to be ruthless or not. But I think that ruthlessness presumes a kind of –if you’re going to be ruthless you’d better be very, very, very sure that you know enough to get to do that.

JS: Could the lack of security, happiness, honor be an important factor in the artist’s creativity?

KS: Those seem like a really different batch of things. Honor is really different than happiness and security. Happiness and security have to do with what you gather around you or what you have available to you. Honor seems very much restricted to what you strive for in what you do rather than what you strive to have. Security and happiness are so largely a matter of luck. I certainly don’t think they produce bad or good writing automatically. Honor in the sense of scrupulousness is very important.

JS: Then what would be the best environment for a writer?

KS: Any environment where people aren’t actively treating you like shit is probably a good environment for a writer.

JS: Bourbon, you mean?

KS: Yeah, bourbon is probably a good environment for a writer.

JS: You mentioned economic freedom. Does the writer need it?

KS: I don’t think anybody really has economic freedom in a world where money is used. No matter how much of it you have, I don’t think you’re ever free from getting ahold of it and being influenced by how it’s moving around and how much of it you have and if you have less of it than you had last week, or you have more of it than you had last week. Being constantly anxious about money is probably not that great for a writer in the same way that being constantly anxious about love or constantly anxious about your mom or something is probably not that great. Being constantly in one state is probably not that great either.

JS: Can working for the movies hurt your own writing?

KS: Probably.

JS: Does a writer compromise in writing for the movies?

KS: I think they would have to compromise something, so it would be a question of what.

JS: Would you like to make another movie?

KS: Yeah, I’d love to make a movie.

JS: How do you get the best results in working for the movies?

KS: I think you’d have to decide what compromises you’re going to make and decide that you weren’t going to care about anything else. Because of how much you can do in a movie that you can’t do on the page, you have to try to see in that way and hear in that way and let go of the things that make something work on the page, and be alert to how things could work. For me, avoiding things that are super trite would be tough if I were making a movie.

JS: Would you comment on that legendary Hollywood experience you were involved in?

KS: I refuse to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate me.

JS: What technique do you use to arrive at your standard?

KS: I can answer that in two ways. I can talk about how I create my standard, which is partly by trying to be very scrupulous, very alert: to create something that reflects scrupulousness and alertness. That’s my standard: I want to be scrupulous; I want to be alert; I want to be generous. And I want to be genuine, which I know is kind of a weird and somewhat fraught word in talking about writing. How do I do that? I try to listen to all the things the words I’m using are actually saying.

JS: Does that mean an artist can use Christianity simply as just another tool, as a carpenter would borrow a hammer?

KS: I think a writer can use anything like that that she wants, but in order to do that you’re necessarily choosing its ground and it has its own things going on. If you enter that framework it seems you are stuck with some of the things that are built into it, which some writers might like.

JS: How much of your writing is based on personal experience?

KS: One third.

JS: Some people say they can’t understand your writing even after they read it two or three times. What do you suggest to them?

KS: Do some other things and then come back to it.

JS: Would you include inspiration in a list of things that are important for a writer?

KS: I never know how to answer this question and it’s one that as a teacher I get asked a lot. If by inspiration you mean something that makes you want to write, then I think that’s great. You should seek out the things that make you want to write. You should identify them, notice what they are when they happen, and then go try to get more of them.

JS: As a writer, you are said to be obsessed with violence.

KS: I am obsessed with violence because I don’t understand it. I understand anger really well because I feel it a lot. But I don’t understand violence well at all so a lot of the writing that I do is interested in how people come to that place of perpetrating or causing violence.

JS: Can you say how you started as a writer?

KS: I started writing stories and telling stories to myself when I was pretty little. I got a lot of praise for writing in elementary school, grown-up praise, and I loved that so I wanted more of that. I started working on my writing when I was around fourteen. I was at an arts summer camp and I had a couple of counselors who said, “No no, it’s not enough just to do it. You have to do things to and about it. You can change it and make it better; you don’t have to have it be the thing that you wrote and it’s done.” That’s when I started working on writing, and a lot of the things I do now that make me feel good about my own work come from that time.

JS: Do you read your contemporaries?

KS: Yes.

JS: And Freud?

KS: I don’t have an awful lot of dealings with Freud. I read parts of The Interpretation of Dreams and there were some great lines that I used as poem titles. People use the word ‘Freudian’ really loosely, but I don’t actually have a sense of what comes from him versus what gets attributed to him.

JS: Would you comment on the future of the novel?

KS: I hope that the future of the novel is not boring. I hope that –hold on, my office thinks I’m dead. . .It just creeps me out because the lights go out when I haven’t moved for a little while.

JS: Could you explain more what you mean by “motion in relation to the artist”? 

KS: Again, I can think about that in two ways. There is the artist and there is everything else, and everything else is swirling around the perceptions of the artist—what she notices and what she’s thinking about, how she is moved by the things, the motion in which she exists or is caught up or how she resists that. Maybe that’s only one thing. The motion that the artist can be moved by / caught in and goes with / resists / recognizes / doesn’t recognize, or looks back on and says, “Whoa, I have been carried along.”

KL: Would you say a little bit about your newest book? 

KS: How We Saved the City is mostly about Providence, which is where I’ve lived for the past eight years. More particularly, it’s about overlapping Providences: the overlapping paths and cities of which Providence is made, which don’t always connect or come to pass each other. Occasionally, there’s a rupture and you’ll have to deal with someone from one of the other Providences because they’re all inhabiting the same ground. The ways the different Providences operate on each other and which ones have more or less gravity to affect the others and what kinds of gravity. There’s a lot about places changing. The “we” in the title is a different “we” at different times, in different situations. 

KL: Can you talk about what you’re working on right now?

KS: I’m working on a few things, including an essay about waiting that has to do with The Trojan Women by Euripides. I have a very methodical project that’s in columns that is about inheritance: inheriting ways of seeing the world, where we get those ways. It’s also about global warming and deciding whether or not to have a kid. Another piece I’m working on that may or may not be part of the same thing is something I just call THE WAD. I don’t know what THE WAD will be yet. It also has something to do with seeing and vision, and also one’s obligations as a person. But I don’t quite know yet. And I also just wrote a series of poems about fungus.

KL: That’s a lot of things. That sounds amazing. 

KS: Don’t be too impressed yet because only a few of them actually exist. There are words, it’s not just in my head, but some of them are pretty modular words.

Woody Allen’s movie Midnight in Paris is up for some Oscars tonight. Allen has made more than 40 movies and they contain a bounty of literary references. Here are eight great poetry moments in Woody Allen’s work.

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 - 7 - 8    >

1. Dickinson in Shadows and Fog

My personal favorite Woody Allen poetry reference comes in Shadows and Fog when an arrogant artiste clown (John Malkovich) runs into a young, wealthy student (John Cusack); the clown is in search of his girlfriend (Mia Farrow), a sword swallower who fled the circus when she found the clown fooling around with a trapeze artist (Madonna). The student has just slept with the sword swallower at a brothel and pines for her. Here’s how their conversation begins:

Clown: Oh, mercy. We never know when we have a good thing. We always have to ruin it.

Student: I know exactly how you feel. The earthly paradise known as woman.

Clown: All we’ll ever know of heaven.

Student: All we need know of hell.

They are referencing Emily Dickinson’s two stanza poem #1732:

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

***

This is the third interview in a long-term project to compile a database of valuable information provided directly by independent American poetry presses which should, in time, hopefully document the ever-changing use of print media and New Media formats being used by countless poetry presses and publishers throughout the country. I’m excited, this go-around, to present the in-depth responses of most of the crew over at Forklift, Ohio — a press that produces a highly engaging website, magazine, and number of books. Forklift’s aesthetic targets the direct, the wry and the flame-throwing while not shying away from honest emotion and offering a fresh intellect. They publish the well-established as much as the never-seen. What is, perhaps, most assaulting and intriguing about Forklift is that it is an entity managed, run, etc. (for the most part) out of Ohio. I think the implications there speak volumes about  the lack of an American epicenter (beyond New York City’s plethora of history and reading series) regarding poetry’s contemporary practices. By this, I mean that not even fifteen years ago, one had to migrate to the heartbeat of the thing — Seattle for music, New York for arts, Paris, etc. I think that is no longer a thing an artist, poet, or musician has to do. Things have changed and, herein, we have a bit of proof. This interview offers the perspectives of three of Forklift’s multiple-member staff — Eric Appleby, Matt Hart, and Amanda Smeltz.

***

***

KW:  What was the impetus to begin Forklift,Ohio?

MH: Eric (Appleby, Forklift’s designer and publisher) and I met during an Ethics course at Ball State University in 1991.  We were both Philosophy Majors.  We sat in the back row.  We were serious, but not very serious.  We both liked nonsense.  Joked back and forth about the course material, and were skeptical of the ridiculous jargon-y language philosophers use to try and pin ideas to the wall (without understanding—or being willing to acknowledge—that since it’s all abstraction, there is no wall). We soon found we shared an interest in language and poetry in particular, which doesn’t depend for its effects/affect on scientific reasoning or the facts or certitude.  And while we certainly couldn’t have articulated it then (and probably only barely now) we knew somehow that poetry, unlike other uses of language—other “language games,” to borrow from Wittgenstein—was a means of short-circuiting the facts, logic, certitude and capital T-truth.  But rather than merely cutting the power and leading to meaninglessness/nihilism, it lead out beyond the denotative communicative particulars and into the atmospheric fireworks of metaphor, image, connotation and association.   It was a blast!  And the people who were doing it seemed to be the people who were having the most fun.  They weren’t sitting around growing their beards on mountaintops ratiocinating, they were  and messy and contradicting themselves and everything as a way to make a new thing, banging on the clanging in the streets at all hours, proving their humanity and connection to the particulars of living at every second, no matter how painful or muddled or small.  There was a great community of poets in Muncie then—Patti White and Tom Koontz in particular were wonderful mentors.  One thing lead to another and with a bunch of other folks we started a journal called Nausea Is the Square Root of Muncie to publish ourselves and the community of poets we’d somehow inserted ourselves into.  It was nuts.  We had no resources and really had only just started writing and reading poetry, but suddenly we were poets, accepted by the community and having a ball publishing our friends, hosting and giving readings, taking (gulp) English classes.  (We stayed in Philosophy, which for all my seemingly negative criticality about it was a lot of fun and certainly intellectually stimulating, if only as a foundation to undermine or resist it.)

Fast forward to 1994.  After a grand detour to grad school in Philosophy at Ohio University, I moved to Cincinnati in 1993.  Eric and I were in a band at the time, so he moved to Cinci, too, when he graduated from Ball State that May.  Forklift came together in the Fall of ’94 more than anything else as a way to recapture the great fun and spirit of collaboration/community we’d had in college.  We were new in town and didn’t know anybody, and we were both writing and reading everything we could get our hands on.  It was a no-brainer to do a new journal, both as a way to continue what we’d started atBallStateand as a way to get to know our new hometown.  I suggested we call the journal Forklift.  I was really into big, awkward machinery at the time (and also, I’m embarrassed to admit, there was a Pavement song called “Forklift”) so the word was in the air.  But Eric said Forklift’s not enough.  We need to locate it, make it a place rather than a thing, so Forklift,Ohioseemed obvious and perfect.  The decision to do poetry, cooking, and light industrial safety was sort of immediate, too.  Poetry we’d been doing, and we loved the sort of absurdity and beauty of juxtaposing it with industrial rules and regulations, the equipment, the mechanics, but we’ve also always been into cooking and there’s something deliciously poetic about the recipe as a form—the list of ingredients, the colors and flavors and smells they evoke, and the instructions, the notion that if you follow them you make something you can eat, but if you follow them with imagination you’ll maybe make something unforgettable.  It was only later that someone else pointed out that “fork lift” is also what one does when one eats, and that (what was for us an) unconscious connection is exactly the sort of thing we’re trying to activate in the journal itself.

We’ve now done twenty-three issues with #24 out this spring.  The only real difference between the start of things and now is that we have more help.  Tricia Suit (who also went to Ball State with Eric and I) is our Managing Editor, i.e. Test Kitchen Manager, Social Media Mogul, and Keeper of the Stun Gun.  Merrill Feitell, who joined us around issue #18 is our Fiction Editor.  And the newest addition to the team is Amanda Smeltz, who took over as Poetry Editor, after Brett Price, who’d been with us since issue #16, stepped aside to do his own awesome thing, American Books/Steck Editions.

Logistically speaking, the journal is still funded and assembled with a combination of found, purchased, begged, stolen and otherwise borrowed (forever) materials.  We don’t advertise.  We’re not affiliated with a school or other institution.  We don’t apply for grants.  We do gladly take donations.  We would love to have a patron or a Forklift manufacturer as a sponsor, but not if we have to do anything to make it happen or be accountable to them in any way.  In short, we love doing the journal on our terms, and I think that’s part of what’s kept it fun, surprising, and interesting/maddening all these years. In addition to the journal, we’ve also started doing chapbooks and this spring we’ll do the first Forklift Books book, Chad “Juan” Sweeney’s Wolf’s Milk.  We’re now officially 17 years in without a lost time accident. 

KW:  Tell me about the process of making and marketing the chapbooks, the books, the magazine, and any other print materials.

EA: Well, naturally, it’s an assembly line of sorts. Not a terribly efficient one, though as Matt just mentioned we do have an excellent safety record.

The big handoff to “production” comes once all the work has been selected by our editors. I generally don’t read the material until it’s all been chosen, at which point I dive in and start “chunking” the pieces. I begin by making stacks based on arbitrary affinities among the poems, stories, and recipes; though, in truth, it’s just as often some tension, opposition, or other absurdity that provides an organizing principle. Occasionally, fragments of this process are preserved and remain/become visible, but generally not by design. I see my mission as a designer, first and foremost, as getting out of the way of the work, but at the same time, creating possibilities for the pieces to interact with one another, with the found images and recipes and other design elements.

I collect old shop manuals, home economics texts, food pamphlets, and other early 20th century books that touch on related topics. I like to find texts that cover very narrow topics in great depth (I have one called “The Potato“)—though, to be useful, they need to have illustrations or strong textual elements that we can (ahem) appropriate for design purposes. I maintain the “Forklift Library”—which is a section of bookshelves in my house—and have received many fine donations for it from friends and family. I have a number of these pocket-sized reference manual/catalogs that were carried by tradesmen—steamfitters, plumbers, electricians—which provided the original inspiration for the current form factor of the journal.

As for marketing, it’s probably the less-interesting answer since both the managing editor, Tricia Suit, and I have the word “marketing” in our day-job titles. You’d think that would mean that we’d have some kind of killer marketing plan, but the reality is that Forklift is what we do for fun. It’s the old saw about the shoemaker’s barefoot children…

Over the years, we’ve grown gradually from making a couple hundred copies per issue to our current run of 500. The biggest share of growth has come from participating in the annual AWP bookfair and a few smaller, regional events. We’ve been fortunate—most of our publicity is word-of-mouth, and it’s been enough to completely deplete our stock of back-issues and increase our run with every new issue.

AS:  The books I’m less involved with, as my main role is with the journal, the reading /editing / selection process with submissions. You know, poems. But the magazine is definitely made with a visual, physical emphasis that we hope echoes and converses with the content. Reclaimed materials, odd things cast off. Appleby found some weird insulation for the cover a few issues back that’s still shedding little white Styrofoam dots all over my desk. You know, it’s a journal of cooking and light industrial safety, too, which is quirky and quotidian and specific. So as far as marketing goes, it’s just like – hey, are you a weirdo? Great. Us too. Ever driven a forklift? Even better.

KW:  What are some great rewards, benefits, or advantages you all have come across since you began?

MH: Oh that’s easy: It’s all about the people, both their work and who they are.  It’s such an honor and privilege, not to mention an inspiration, to be able to consider and publish the work we do.  And I really mean that sincerely, whether it’s someone established like Mary Ruefle or Nate Pritts or relatively new like Chris Mattingly, Kevin Shea, or Carrie Lorig.  We read everything multiple times.  There’s no slush pile (We don’t believe in a slush pile).  Our job is to read the work as best we can on its own terms and, if it moves us, try to make it fit.

Often people ask me about our submission policy, which requests that people query the editors before sending work.  That’s not so that we can weed people out.  It’s because we’re not always reading submissions, but we still want to hear from folks (and we’re terrible at updating the website).  Additionally, it keeps the submission bombers away—the people who send out the same submission to a hundred random journals at once.  We’ve found that they won’t actually go to the trouble if they have to query first.  That’s why we do what we do.

Anyway, when a new issue comes out, it’s always wonderful to be a part of something that we actually had a hand in helping to build, but it’s just as great to be reminded (by the issue itself) that it’s the culmination of work by numerous people that makes not only Forklift, but so many other D-I-Y journals possible.  Our longevity has more to do with the people that read and contribute to Forklift than it does with us.  It takes a warehouse.

AS:  My understanding of publishing is as a vehicle for conversation and relationships, art feeding a group. Working with Forklift is to enter into a vivid conversation with a wide range of writers, from the very established to the very young, excitable, inexperienced (like myself). The conversation is the sustaining thing – that whole gaggle of poets we know and put forth usually have in common a marked singularity. Several times I’ve found myself reading things I haven’t seen before ever, that remind me of nothing, and that is a delight. Surprises! Matt also knows dozens more contemporary writers than I do, which has had the humbling and lovely side effect of me reading poems and remarking on them when absolutely I should know the poet, but I’m a doofus and don’t yet… it keeps me very honest in my responses to work. Also perpetually embarrassed and learning. Benefits all!

KW:  You all have published some great people — Dean Young, Kiki Petrosino, etc. Do you use the magazine as a barometer for the books? What’s the in-between process there?

MH: Using the magazine as a barometer for the chapbooks is a good idea, but we don’t actually do that.  It’s a lot more willy-nilly.  Usually it’s just a case of knowing somebody’s work and hearing that they have a chapbook manuscript available.  I actually asked Alexis Orgera to write a chapbook just for us, which turned out to be Illuminatrix.  Chad Sweeney’s The Lost Notebooks of Juan Sweeney de Las Minas de Cobra came out of a drunken story he was telling me about riding on the tops of trains in South America and jokingly telling people all over the southern hemisphere that he was a “famous American poet named Juan Sweeney”.  Russell Dillon’s been a favorite of mine for years.  Michael Schiavo had published some of the Ranges poems in Forklift, and I asked to see the whole manuscript.  I thought it was terrific, so I asked him to select a chapbook for us.  The same sort of thing happened with Kiki.  Dean Young’s 31 Poems was hatched with Dean and Dobby Gibson over beers as an under the radar “new and selected.”

It goes on and on like that, and the plan is to do the books the same way—no contests, no submission period.  The plan is just to publish books by people who we think are deserving and whose work we’re excited about.  It’s organic and sort of random, and that’s the way we hope to keep it. We have a new chap coming out in March by Stuart Dischell called Touch Monkey, and there’s one other thing in the works that I’m not yet at liberty to discuss.  Stay tuned…

KW:  What do you see as the biggest hurdle or dilemma for independent publishers?

MH: Maybe Eric can speak more to this, but I don’t really see any hurdles or dilemmas.  If you want to be an independent publisher, be one.  And don’t worry for an instant about doing it the right way.  There is no right way.  The right way is probably to be a corporate publisher, and who the fuck wants to do that?  Then you have to deal with real big money.  Money (and I’m sure I’m shooting all of us in the foot here) turns everything to shit.  So, yes, maybe money is the biggest hurdle/dilemma.  Get away from money as much as possible – the end.

AS:  There’s a risk of stagnation, I think, if a publisher’s following remains too narrow. You want a group of people who feel connected to what you’re doing, who value what you value, but you don’t want the conversation to only matter to three dozen people in one town, you know? Insularity bores me. One hopes for both tight-knit community but also wide readership. Practically, questions of distribution and exposure are large hurdles to widening that circle. Where do we get to show this thing? AWP? How else do we do that? Forklift has been around long enough that there isn’t a huge worry about whether or not anyone cares about it, but that fresh and varied people all over the place are newly discovering it matters to me.

EA: It has to be the astonishing rate at which the essential “means of production” keep becoming more and more accessible. Technology is, of course, what comes to mind–from desktop publishing and duplication to E-readers and new media–but I also mean the attendant economic and social shifts, the forces that create and destroy the audiences, the venues, the vehicles and opportunities (ahem, “markets”) for the printed word. Yep, the stuff is amazing and an awful shame. It’s a victory for democratization and the hopeless cheapening of literature, it’s giving voice to those who need to be heard (The homeless have a newspaper!) while inviting the blatherers of the world to spew mountains of crap.

But, seriously, I’m not judging here; we avail ourselves of the latest tools in the creation of Forklift. We’re not Luddites. If anything, we could be accused of being sentimental. Basically, this dilemma means that we’re continuously challenged to re-think and re-invent what it means to “publish a literary journal.”

Forklift started out on tabloid-sized newsprint–and they don’t even crank up those web presses for fewer than 1000 copies, but even so, it only cost us a few hundred bucks to publish an issue back in the 90s (though it seemed like a lot more money back when we were just out of school, probably because we hadn’t signed mortgages yet). I remember how our good friend Nate Pritts put out the first couple issues of his journal, H_NGM_N (a la Ted Berrigan’s C Press, among others), using an actual mimeograph machine (and if you know what that is, then you remember how good it smells) before going to his current online format.

Which reminds me to mention another part of this dilemma: the “means of consumption.” Today more than ever, it is a consideration that is tightly coupled to the production (have you seen the competing e-reader standards?). Nonetheless, I still feel weird talking about it with regard to publishing since, throughout most of its history, the same object occupied both sides of the equation. Reading a book wasn’t like listening to music on the radio or phonograph, where you had to buy a new piece of furniture to enjoy it (comfy chair and lamp optional). That you could fold it up and put it in your bag or pocket has long been the joy of the newspapers and trade novel. This was—and is—the positive aspect of “accessibility.”

We could lament the disappearance of print shops and binderies and such, but the fact is that we’re benefitting from technology as much as anyone. But if you ever worked at a newspaper or magazine, then you’ll probably join me in cringing at the suggestion that blogs and cameraphones have turned everybody into journalists. This same topic has been beaten to death in the music industry—blah blah pristine digital recordings blah blah someone’s living room blah blah, and everyone’s a rock star. Without the long journey and staggering expense that was once required to get from demo to album, or, from manuscript to book, one can argue that quality control isn’t what it used to be (I believe Matt correctly referred to this as the “Steve Albini” argument).

But it’s worth re-visiting this shift in the music business because we’ve had a few years now to get some perspective on how the change from vinyl/tapes/CDs to downloadable digital media has actually changed the way that artists create and release their work. This is a timely conversation, as e-readers seem to have come into their own in the past couple years (I’d place the exact moment somewhere in 2011, between the release of the iPad 2 and the launch of Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire this past holiday season).

Paradoxically, these same trends have made a fetish of their respective physical media. For example: vinyl records are having a sort of renaissance thanks to audiophiles (who prefer the “warmth of vinyl”), collectors, and DJs who use actual turntables. Likewise, you’ll find recording studios promoting their collections of vintage gear, sweet-sounding rooms and “good vibes” to draw musicians out of their home studios.

This brings us back to Forklift. Our answer to the question has been (so far) that we’re definitely of the 20th Century “artifact” school of publishing, though more Henry Ford than book art. We cut, collate, staple, bind, tape and glue the thing together by hand so that our readers don’t have to recharge anything before enjoying the anachronistic sort of “multimedia” experience (since it really does have poetry, cooking, AND light industrial safety—not to mention awesome short fiction and other miscellany). I can’t speak from experience, but I’d assume the biggest hurdle as a full-time Independent Publisher is making a living.

KW:  What would be a good definition of a “poetry community”? I ask this because I think you are creating a micro-community while being parcel to the larger more over-arching one, a huge part, at that, being connected to other publishers, etc.

AS:  There are a bunch of people between the two covers of each issue that have some things to say to each other, and we’re there to lasso and corral them, feed them whiskey and eggs, make them take the train together. I mean that proverbially and literally. I want you and your poems to wake up hungover on my couch tomorrow. That’s how we want writers to commune. I have no idea how Forklift is related to the big-house, national poetry world, but I’m hopelessly myopic.

MH: I don’t think I have any idea how I would define a “poetry community”—I mean, I want it to be open to possibility, change and augmentation, even fragmentation.  Definition seems counter-productive as it puts a wall around something that I want to be inclusive rather than exclusive.

EA: I’m happy to say that the population of Forklift,Ohiois ever-growing and peopled with some of the most remarkable characters you’ll meet. But I’d also resist to calling it a “poetry community” for reasons similar to Matt’s. It’s not a “poets only” or “poetry fans only” place. There are any number of people who’ve made valuable contributions that wouldn’t classify themselves as either. I’ve come to see our subtitle as a reminder that poetry is something we do (read, write, and publish) alongside the other necessities of life—eating, working—and it’s far from the only thing that binds us.

KW:  In that case, is there any difference within region – that is, do you see yourselves as an American publisher or a midwestern publisher? What are, if any, the issues of place-basedness?

EA: I like that construction: “place-basedness.” The short, boring answer to your question is that “place” is probably more of a trope than a particular location that we strongly identify with. It’s the soup pot in our kitchen, wherever it may be. Back when Matt and I first met, there was another group of students atBallStatethat ran readings and called themselves “The Smaller Midwestern Poets.” The idea that they named themselves–like a band or something–was part of what inspired us to organize, to take our nonsense seriously and put a name to it.

As he described earlier, the process of naming Forklift was completely ridiculous and borderline-embarrassing (well, at least for Matt). It should be explained that the title of our first journal, “Nausea is the Square Root of Muncie,” came out of one of our Philosophy classes, though I think it was originally supposed to be ”Chicago.” I think it was as an example to show how a statement can be valid (syntactically correct) but neither true nor false. The other one I remember was a recurring reference to “the present king of France.”

I think I can speak for both Matt and myself when I say this: though we’ve spent most of our lives in theMidwest, we’ve spent more than a little of that time feeling out-of-place. I don’t say that because we don’t like where we are (because we do). For me, it’s always been more about the people around me than the place–and I think I’d apply that equally to Forklift: the people make the place. Forklift exists because of the people that believe in it–many of whom happen to live inOhio, but just as many elsewhere. The best map is the “Inventory” pages of any issue.

AS:  I know the journal was founded as a way of making an outpost in a country where it seems all the exciting conversations happen on the coasts. I know I’m sometimes embarrassed of my east coast parochialism, so working for friends based inCincinnatifeels like a good counterbalance to theBrooklynpoetry environs. The journal is post-industrial in heart, which says to me that we like the burned-out, rusty, humble. But we publish people from all over; the authors are always spread pretty evenly across the States.

KW:  Are there any poetic, say Modernist or contemporary as a summation, movements that inspire you?

MH: We’ve always loved the Dadaists and Surrealists artists, but there’s also The Beats and the New York School poets, Fluxus and early-industrialized culture and value.  In general I think we like the early 1900s up to the 1960s.  Oh hell, but then came punk rock in the 70’s, the DIY ethos and mess of which are super important to us. Okay, so we’re inspired by pretty much everything that happened in the 1900s before we were born, 1971 and 1969 respectively.  At least, I can see the 1900s to 1960s fingerprint all over what we do.  Disciplines were crossing.  Materials were being juxtaposed, the clashes of cultures and values were extreme, innovation and invention was everywhere apparent.  Codified institutions were being challenged and dismantled.

And yet we also like the now a lot, too, both for its presence in the present and for the way it drifts into the past and shifts (sometimes violently) into the future.  And while we don’t have the same sense of progress and faith in universals that (some) people had at the beginning of the last century, there is a sense that things are changing.  The water is boiling.  It’s devastating and surprising and “a joy forever.”

AS: I think Matt and I do place an emphasis on the ever-evolution of poems, the kinetic, the risk of showing your guts a little. I like technical proficiency but never at the cost of all that’s surprising or downright honest in poems. Does that relate our aesthetic to a movement? The free-association of Surrealism, maybe? The kinda-adolescent energy of Futurism? Who knows. Movements muddle. Movement in poems does not.

KW:  Is there an essential quality to poetry that separates it from the rest of the arts (as in, the craft and practice, itself; but, on the publishing side, as well)?

AS:  On the publishing side, I see no essential difference between poetry and the other arts, only circumstansial: representation on the page, questions of visual design, issues of distribution and market and exposure. But all those questions come up with visual art, live performances, music. In the practice I’d argue otherwise: there’s no other art whose material consists solely of language, primal forum of being. There’s no other creative process that happens so spontaneously in the self – also in the Other – because of that “material,” language. It’s very weird. And very normal. Perhaps that’s why publishing will always feel funny. I can memorize a poem and have it written inside my mouth, needing no physical vessel but my vocal chords and tongue. Like a song. But here I am, putting it on pages so I can physically hand it to other people, inhabit it without external sound. Here it is! I put this forklift squarely between the poet and the person.

MH: On the poetry side, the short answer is that language is the only artistic material that can be used to talk about itself.  Poetry isn’t just the words, it’s the words and the music at the very same time, and the materials one uses to make it, are exactly the same ones (employed and deployed in a different context) we use to talk about it, make sense of it, and push ourselves out beyond (or deeper into) where we happen to be currently.  Nobody would ever think of using paint to make sense of—to understand—a painting (at least not in that clearly delineated way we usually mean to “understand” or communicate something).  And the reason for this is that our primary conceptual framework is linguistic/metaphorical—not visual, not auditory.  Language isn’t primal, but it’s primary once one learns it.  There’s no going back to the darkness of the pure sensations (whatever that even means) of the pre-linguistic as much as we may try to do that.  Certainly poetry, because it’s made of words, doesn’t get as close to the pre-linguistic as maybe music or Abstract Expressionism once did, but it does remind us that language is weirdly positioned—built for and functioning in and as multiple contexts—while at the same time carrying with it the power to make sense of both its own context and every other, both artistic and otherwise.  This is not to say that with language everything can be explained and understood, but that where things can’t be explained and understood (rationally) we can find ways using language to make the mystery more mysteriously unsayable and sensible—in terms of the mystical or the contradictory or the expressive, what have you.  They’re all—the mystical, the contradictory, the expressive—linguistic concepts.   Poetry wants to be as big as the world, and it’s the only art that may actually be able to accomplish it, as language functions one way or another in, and as, any context one can imagine.  And when and where it doesn’t function, it can say that too.

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This piece began as a writer’s experiment with simple substitutions to examine rhetorical devices. It can be hummed to the tune of Anis Shivani’s Can Creative Writing Be Taught? Therapy for the Disaffected Masses.

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Yes, of course, light bulbs give light, and that light can be really helpful. The light bulb might be the most successful invention, if success is measured by stated goals. As for “improvement,” yes to that too, if by “improvement” we mean seeing better after the sun sets. Dramatic and measurable improvement are [sic, subject-verb agreement] not only possible but happen all the time.

Now, having gotten the provocative answer out of the way, let me be clear, for isn’t clarity what light bulbs claim to bring to our lives? Light bulbs are not sunlight, as has been understood for all of the history of light. The light bulb is a subset of daytime, with the same essential modalities—except, like everything else in our culture, it comes in a stripped, dumbed down version that partakes little of the rigors of celestial mechanics. More appropriately, we might call the light bulb the Oprahfied device of the darkness. Illuminating life and the stuff of it are always just behind the decision to turn on the closest lamp in a darkening room.

Sunlight as we have known it through history springs from the sun—heaven forbid, I refer to something beyond our planet. By definition no light bulb consumer can give official sanction to the true light source in our solar system. And so, every time a person puts batteries into a flashlight, just in case of emergency, that’s an affront to the galaxy. Not just our sun, but to all the stars in the Milky Way and beyond. Light bulbs can only flourish in the darkness we perceive temporarily and fear. Light bulbs are used with this single most important premise: don’t worry whether or not there’s a sun because you can see whatever you want no matter what time of day.

In a falsely lit room, people talk with each other as if it’s not dark outside. Thinking they have something to say is a big part of it—sharing some new information, suggesting a resource that might answer a question, heck, even asking questions—in other words, conversation.

Conversation is a revealing term, as though talking were a matter of figuring out what you have to say that is worth saying and thinking about who’s listening. In that sense, light bulbs can absolutely foster communication. It’s just that they’re not the sun.

The sun is about having, first of all, a really big nuclear reaction, something not manmade, something that’s mostly hydrogen and helium and spherical, something that exists before and after humanity that is utterly unique, except for the other stars out there with which it shares common features, making it not exactly “unique” by definition.

The sun is not about you, even when you’re basking in it or growing vegetables under its warmth, but about the difference between apparent and actual rotation—more than two days—and confronting that rotational challenge not with a light bulb but alone in the dark until you’re drowsy enough to sleep.

None of that can ever be implied by a light bulb, whose whole purpose militates against such a bright, rather than human and useful, method of seeing.

The purpose of the light bulb has not yet been thoroughly critiqued. It is a mild form of dehumanizing, as officially sanctioned removal of the human being from the natural world in which people eagerly participate. The writer or reader sits quietly while the table lamp shines, someone turns on an overhead light without the other’s permission as the television’s blue light shines from someone else’s window across the street. All kinds of political subtexts create distractions about incandescent versus fluorescent. Which is really the more environmentally friendly? What bulb’s on sale? How long will a light bulb last? Those questions reveal the ignorance night owls have about the real issues.

The ways of the light bulb lead to “improvement” by addition—since by definition the dark can’t have a whole lot of light in it. So you work with what Thomas Edison (who benefited from folks like Louis Lumiere and helped quash Nicola Tesla’s ideas) has given you, and you make the inherently dark time of day look a little lighter—make it conform to the daylight model—by adding electromagnetic radiation from about 390 to 740 nm in wavelength as if that makes it daytime.

It’s not a coincidence that insomnia became so popular after Edison, or that people didn’t crawl into bed at dusk in the last several decades; this is the period when the light bulb really became commonplace, unquestioned, taken for granted. All light bulb use leads to a type of insomnia, even if not strictly in the sleeping sense. For example, everything to do with night must be expunged, since Oprah probably doesn’t sleep much either because, if she did, she couldn’t have built her empire.

What can we agree upon, and therefore use to see in the dark? Celestial bodies—the moon or starlight—give off some light: the moon reflects the sun’s light at night, and other stars give off their own light just like the sun. You can see well enough from that natural nocturnal light—and that’s okay. Or fireflies. You can even call them lightning bugs. As long as it’s natural light.

We might make the case that light bulbs are what stop signs ought to be, in showing the way on the road. Light bulbs also function in opposition to socialism, where everybody just gets the same sunlight as everybody else no matter how much money they could spend on light bulbs (if light bulbs actually existed, which they do) (if the sunlight hit the earth in the same way in all places, which it doesn’t).

The remarkable thing—but it shouldn’t be so in our age of conformity—is how even I use light bulbs. Yes, I’m typing this on a computer, whose screen gives off light, and I have my desk lamp turned on, its bulb tilted toward the keyboard. Even I am socialized to use light bulbs, and my work under my desk lamp is validated (but not really, because it’s not actually dark outside yet) and I pretend that the light from my desk lamp will suffice (even as I’m sad it’s not the sun, but not really because I wouldn’t want a nuclear explosion to happen on my desk).

It’s perhaps an excuse to lower my risk of skin cancer (which is when I worry about not getting enough Vitamin D), as I tell myself that everyone else is using light bulbs way more than I am. No wonder light bulbs are the most popular item in the lighting section of the home improvement stores. Save your eyesight, don’t go to bed as soon as you get home from your day job, turn the light off when you leave the room so you don’t waste electricity. Come to think of it, Thomas Edison, that conniving inventor, isn’t all that different from what I’ve been doing (except that I didn’t use parallel structure so I compared a person with an activity). I just need to be a little more innovative. Maybe in my next essay I’ll invent something better than a light bulb.

Yes, light bulbs can be used to add some light to the dark. And the sun gets fucked out of a lot of respect because of it.

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