New Directions

Introduction

by Ken L. Walker

The general anti-Louis Zukofsky consensus is not one of hatred or disgust, but it mainly seems to be centered around this notion that his work is difficult to pierce, that it inhabits a kind of flesh no reading needle is going to make bleed. I disagree. What “A” illustrates about the philosophical concept of the individual is that a direct connection to the historical movements that surround and encompass the individual are solidified mainly in being and observing. Zukofsky, in “A-6,” writes: “And to rise in the morning,/Like nothing on earth,”. There it is. An individual, separate but connected. An individual, whole in its body within another whole body. The pregnancy, the planet spinning.

“A” is a long work, epic-mocking but epic and filled with densely-crammed research granules from times and places lost, forgotten, overlooked, and repressed—an 806-page red mammoth, written chronologically (with one exception—“A-24”), accompanied by a nineteen page index of name and object. Its musicality does not overwhelm or encompass but meditates on the many miniature environments within and around it. This is a life’s work, research-based, a collage deeper than a canyon and bigger than New York. The perpetual processes of research that Zukofsky engaged came “out of deep need” and out of rotation and/or movement. Not only does a human being possess a bottomless need to make but a human being is vibrating, moving and sounding. Is it possible to put this all into one poem? Zukofsky certainly believed so and so did. The determination and the scale does not say more about “A” or make “A” any better; it simply acts as component.

If a poem can be a field, or an open grid and can be plotted, then the poet must ask the obvious question: how do I plot this? When to ask that question is even more important. Zukofsky was an intricate professional at this type of crusade, plucking ideations from innumerable sources (Karl Marx, Alexander Hamilton, Jonathan Swift, Vico, Henry Adams, thousands of newspaper articles, Spinoza, Appalachian subculture, Baudleaire, Wagner, The Buddhist Fire Sermon, etc.). A research-based poem does something that other poems do not seem to do as well—to connect the individual and society but to assert both equally, in chorus. Why is this important? Because the one is part of the many and the many is emptied of false meaning and practiced without a single one.

Barry Ahearn points out that Zukofsky preferred “to read American handicrafts as relics of labor processes best understood according to Marxist economic analysis,” but, also believed that such vestiges “reflect the lives and loving care of the individuals who made them.” One less ambiguous example of this happens when Zukofsky, in “A-10,” writes: “Credo I believe//Shame//Ashamed of all people put to shame/And all planets emit light/and indeed all bodies do.”

Zukofsky long claimed that “A” is “of a life,” one trying to revive the century with a panoply of collected objects. It’s clearly a misnomer that readers feel they cannot penetrate “A” ; all one is obligated to do with this poem is spend time with it, to enter into the same simple dialectical process that one enters into upon birth—the process of one letter becoming the use of language which is the same process of one object becoming the ability to use and be used. I’m excited to present this project with dedication pieces from many talented poets. This is a tribute, no doubt.

“Heimweh Funicular” by Adam Day

Two Poems by L.S. Asekoff

“Pulp” by Erika Moya

“Uppity Young Women Exit Your Zenana” by Michael McDonough

“This Boy is a Dead Man” by Seth Graves

“I’ll Bite” by David James Miller

“Dangling Modifier” by Ted Dodson

Two Poems by Marina Blitshteyn

The Questions of Men

Interview By Krystal Languell

***

On November 16, I interviewed Carmen Giménez Smith via Skype. For the majority of the conversation, I interviewed her as Charles Simic interviewed James Tate in the Summer 2006 issue of The Paris Review; basically, I used Simic’s questions. The goal of repurposing Simic’s questions was to uncover something unexpected, some information that an interviewer of Giménez Smith wouldn’t seek. I wondered also how this interview might problematize the form, uncovering the more predictable question-formation and response process. There’s something of the attorney in a conventional interviewer—in the sense that a question is never asked which s/he doesn’t already know the answer to. It is not the point at all to conceptually ridicule Simic and Tate but to ask questions for which I could not possibly predict the answers. The only rule for the conversation was that it had to take place in real time, not via e-mail, and I permitted myself to skip questions (from the Paris Review interview) that didn’t seem fruitful. I, also, occasionally chime in with addendums and further questions.

***

CS: What is the subversive quality in humor that everyone is worried about?

CGS: Most people think that art is serious and so being not-serious doesn’t often pass as art., and I think there’s a certain level of self-effacement, a sort of good humor, and there’s a way of accessing more base things that people are uncomfortable with and it makes people uncomfortable to be see both debasement and lightness.

What was it like being in college without having planned to be?

It was sort of amazing but I was unprepared for it. I was a really abysmal student. And I really hadn’t planned for it, it was something my high school teacher said maybe you should try it and I was like ok I’ll try it and so I was giving it a shot, right? Until I started taking creative writing classes and I thought oh, I think this is good, and creative writing classes were the only classes, well and my English classes too, were the only ones that I did well at. The other ones, they were all disasters.

What did you do during your summer breaks?

I worked. A lot. When I was a freshman I worked at Macy’s and then I worked in an optometrist’s office for five years. I was very good at my job. No, I was actually terrible at my job. I was good at teaching people how to put in contact lenses, though. That I was good at. I could do that right now. I could teach you right now.

KL: Would you?

Well, sure, you have to like hold the contact and make sure the edges of the contact are facing this way and not that way. You teach people having their eyes wide and looking away and putting it on and then rotating their eyes. It’s been a long time. It’s been 20 years since I knew how to do this. It’s still in me.

Were you publishing already?

Yes. When I was in college, I was. I mean sort of local stuff and really small magazines. But I was publishing in college. I thought that’s what you were supposed to do.

You must have been reading a lot. What sorts of poets did you disapprove of?

I don’t think I disapproved of anything. I liked everything. Even if I didn’t understand it. If I didn’t understand it, I thought I’ve got to figure this out. I wasn’t a huge Wallace Stevens fan until after graduate school, but I could go with anything. I had a great first teacher, Aldon Nielsen, who introduced me to crazy stuff like Harry Matthews and Keith Waldrop, so he set me on my path. I don’t think that there was anything I really hated. I mean even Robert Bly, I was like, whatever. I liked it all.

What about Federico García Lorca?

Yeah. Lorca was great. I liked Lorca’s story, that he was kind of a folklorist. I dug that he liked New York, because I like New York.

Did you try any of the composition strategies from the Surrealist writers, like automatic writing?

Of course I did. I was a graduate student. [Laughs] I think you have to if you go to graduate school, I think that’s required.

Do you collect your images in notebooks?

I don’t really go with images; I go with language, so I don’t collect images per se.

So images just pop up while you are writing?

Um, sure.

Who else were you reading in those years?

In college? I was reading everything. I was reading Li-Young Lee and I was really (and still am) into James Wright. What else was I really into? Carolyn Kizer and the Beats. I read a lot of fiction, though. Angela Carter was a big part of my education as a young college writer. I read a lot of Angela Carter.

Do you revise a lot?

Yes. I only revise. All writing is revision.

You’ve said that you spend three or four hours a day thinking about poetry.

At least. Yes. Yeah. When I’m awake. When I’m asleep it’s the whole time.

So it’s a form of meditation?

I’m too neurotic to meditate.

Were you always a reader of dictionaries?

Actually, I was, yeah. They’re good books. They have a lot of good words in them.

What about satire?

Satire. Yeah, I’m kind of a class warrior so the way I address that is through satire.

When did you first start enjoying jokes?

When I was two.

What makes things funny?

If I say them.

Is this the American condition?

Is what the American condition? This is the end of the American condition. This is it. It’s the end days. So it’s not the American condition anymore, it’s post-America.

Does that mean you don’t have a grand theory of where we went wrong?

Oh, I have lots of theories. But I think we just bought too much stuff and we’re getting fat and we don’t give a shit and that’s where we went wrong.

Do you believe in God?

Nope.

These poems have lines. But readers still wonder what is this? Is this poetry? What do we call it? How do we classify it? Can you respond to that?

Yeah: fuck off.

KL: What distinguishes this book [The City She Was] from your other recent work?

I like the tone of this book. I do think it’s funny and dark in a way that’s really exciting to me. It’s located. It’s about San Francisco in the early aughts during a time when the world was really changing and started feeling a little overwhelming for the speaker. And so it’s about the saturation of the city and being a young woman and trying to figure shit out and making a lot of mistakes. There’s a part of Ovid’s Poems of Exile and he’s lamenting—he’s in exile and it sucks, but he’s also lamenting the loyalties, his friendships, what it feels like to be away. When I started writing the book I thought it would be interesting to think of someone being in exile in the place she is. I mean exile is sort of a dark, charged political thing. But I think there are different kinds of exile, and this is like a psychological exile. And that’s what sometimes happens when you live in a city—you’re surrounded by people and you are kind of navigating it on your own, and maybe even trapped there.

KL: Is this a narrative book?

I don’t think that you could follow a story. Some of it is really fantastical and not-real. It’s pretend. It’s a figurative world, and a fabulist world sometimes. And a sinister world. And I mean, I’m a poet. I like figurative language so I think that plays a big part in how it works.

How does this book fit in to your body of work?

It’s a different book because I know more about writing since I wrote the first one, more about what I want to say and how I can say it. I keep working at it and I do things I wanted to do but wasn’t able to. The language is really different. I feel loosened away from this more traditional lyric and I’m trying to play with the lyric a little bit more. I think I’m going to be struggling and questioning and interrogating the lyric for the rest of my life and so this is just one experiment in that.

What does that mean for you — interrogating the lyric?

I’m thinking about time and subjectivity and how a speaker creates different subjectivities in the lyric. And also the more technical aspects and how you can push against it or resist it or create a kind of celebration of what I’m calling a writerly lyric, like Roland Barthes’ idea of the writerly. That’s vague, but those are the ideas I’m thinking about. Another manuscript I just finished [titled Be Recorder] is all about distilling the language and the idea of litany and meditation. So I’m thinking about what the next thing is going to be—maybe a bit elegiac. So the whole universe of it. I want to spend time in every galaxy. Are there galaxies in universes or is it the other way around?

I think you had it right. Well, and we don’t know about anything outside our universe so who knows?

The truth is out there.

Maybe. I don’t know. What does that even mean? Because of what I chose to omit from our model interview, the source of which I’ll reveal to you when we’re done, I’m wondering if in your life you feel that your childhood and your parents continue to have some impact on your writing.

Yes. Bring Down the Little Birds was the first volume of writing about my mom. The next poetry project I’m going to do is a book that deals explicitly with her Alzheimer’s. I feel like I’m processing stuff. I’m obsessed with my mom and that’s a big part of it. I think my autobiographical work gets coded or played with or I deal with it in my non-fiction. I feel that’s a more appropriate place for that.

This is a different book from the one you got the Howard fellowship for?

That’s something else. The Howard is for a book that I’m writing about failure and so that’s about my dad.

[Laughing] So the Alzheimer’s book is non-fiction?

Well, that one’s going to be a hybrid. I’m thinking of someone like Kristin Prevallet and also Susan Howe, Eleni Sikelianos. That kind of thing. Brenda Coultas. Those are the writers I’m thinking about when I’m working on the next poetry book.

I want to make sure I ask you about class identity and whether you feel you are a poet of the working-class. And also what you feel your relationship to the Occupy movement may or may not be as a poet.

I’m a professor. I’m part of the middle class. I’m not going to pretend that isn’t the case. I’m really fucking lucky that I have this great job and I’m able to support my family. But that’s not how I grew up, and so I’m really preoccupied with the idea of how lucky I am to be in this situation. But it seems to me we’re becoming like a South American country in which these huge disparities in class harm people. It’s upsetting to me.

The Occupy movement: I admire the ideas. It’s distant from me because I’m not there, I can’t see it. And I’m not doing anything about it. I mean sure I could post stuff on Facebook about it but that’s not really doing anything about it. And I’ve got to figure out how I can do something about it. I just haven’t figured that out yet.

***

Krystal Languell is the author of Call the Catastrophists (BlazeVox). She was a semi-finalist for the 2010 University of Akron Press Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2011 National Poetry Series. Founder of the feminist literary magazine Bone Bouquet, she serves as a collaborative board member for Belladonna* Series as well as editor-in-chief at Noemi Press.

***

I’m excited to present the next interview in this project of compiling American independent poetry presses into a singularly-formed database. My goal, herein, as hopefully came through with the O’Clock/CLOCK press interview, is to create a solitary space where poets, readers of poetry, archivists, publishers, etc. can all come for information and direct responses (straight from the publishers) regarding poetry, translation and, most importantly, the publishing process . Again, the end goal here is to compile a comprehensive Wiki-type database (by the end of 2012) of American, independent, poetry presses, in order to benefit poets seeking information about presses; but, as well, to produce an ever-growing electronic space for publishing information. The following interview, in particular, takes its stance with the three editors/publishers/poets of the wonderful Argos Books.

The founders of Argos Books (begun in 2010 in New York City) — Elizabeth Clark Wessel, Iris Cushing, and E.C. (Emily) Belli — have managed in the last year-and-a-half to publish more than a handful of amazing books, chapbooks, and broadsides. These texts have featured the multi-talented list of: Bianca Stone, Steve Hahn, Marina Blitshteyn, Guy Jean, Francisca Aguirre, Karin Gotshall, and (out in 2012) Safiya Sinclair. Argos has also published and distributed two anthologies. That’s a particularly strong resume for a mere eighteen months of business. All their releases appear ornate, classically simplistic and display a carefulness that hearken a different era. Artifacts, basically. Artifacts, now. The three women that began the press are poets, as well as, translators, ultimately concerned with language in the sense of task and in the sense of subjective-relation not to mention the sense of cultural-crossing. Their submission process seems to be open all year round but they are specifically seeking works of translation yet to appear in the English language. They view the press as a way to simultaneously express personally poetic viewpoints while establishing and furthering the community we all appreciate so much. Publisher, Elizabeth Clark Wessel, thinks poetry to be a “great place of freedom.”

***

KW:  What was the impetus to begin Argos Books?

IMC: When I met Liz at Columbia’s MFA program, one of the first things I learned about her was that she’d started a small press in Stockholm, Stray Dog Press. She’d published one book, the lovely and inimitable A Sky That is Never the Same by Steve Hahn, which featured a beautiful cover hand-stamped in such a way that no two covers are the same. As a lifelong bibliophile and lover of book arts, I was inspired by the obvious love that went into making the book. When Liz said she wanted to continue making books here in New York, I was pretty thrilled about teaming up and creating a new vision for our own press. We had a few very giddy meetings in the spring of 2010 about what to call it …Emily joined us around that time and it all kind of fell into place.

In a way, Argos was started as a response to everything we were experiencing around us: as poets, as women, as students, as translators. If I can speak for all three of us, I’ll say we all share a deep enthusiasm for work that transcends certain boundaries, such as those between languages, communities and “genres” of art and literature. We were all very passionate about books that were already pushing those limits. We started asking, “how can we get more of this out there?” That question quickly evolved into “how can we get our own particular and brilliant vision out there?” For me, it involved a lot of newfound self-confidence and generosity.

ECW: Part of the impetus for Argos was my longing to do a group project. I realized pretty quickly after doing that first book that publishing was not something I wanted to do on my own. Writing is such solitary act, so I feel like I get enough of that.  I wanted partnership and feedback. I heard Anna Moschovakis speak last year at AWP — how mall press publishing is a kind of long-term collaborative art project. I like that idea. That feels right.

Taking the long view, I suppose I’ve had, maybe still have, a kind of romantic notion of what a small press is.  I like the small print in an old book. I like the obscure, the anachronistic. My sense of literary history is that publishers and scenemakers are for the most part forgotten. I like that. I don’t know why. So Argos Books is also, for me, an attempt to be a part of that tradition: the supporter, the maker, the backer, the framer.

KW:  Tell me about the process of making and marketing some of the work?

ECW: The method of production of each book that we’ve done is completely different. Some books have been very DIY, done completely at home on our printers. Some were a combination of home production, with covers letter-pressed, or with the help of the great and kind people at UDP. Some were sewn with the help of friends; some we sewed at home while watching TV over a long period of time. Some were perfect-bound and professionally printed. The needs of each book were different, depending on the aesthetic requirements, timeframe, budget, and length. My husband, Mårten Wessel, is very involved in the design and production side of things. I love his book designs, and I think his eye really helps us to look a little more professional than we are. Most of our marketing is based on events (readings, release parties) and word of mouth. We do send out the books to reviewers as well, and we’re very thankful for those who’ve taken the time to read and write about our books.

EB : It’s a family affair. Liz and Iris are my hotline. I’ve made mistakes. And learning the marketing aspect of things is a trial by fire kind of situation. But the heart is there. And the work is really good. Somehow the final product ends up beautiful despite all the variables.

IMC: In my view, a book as an object has a huge influence on how its contents are read and received. The book-making aspect of this venture was one of its biggest draws, to me, perhaps because I find the experience of holding and reading a beautiful book so pleasurable. Perhaps I enjoy the power of creating that experience for other people. The communal aspect of book-making is wonderful. We’ve gotten to know so many people over the letterpress at UDP, and around Liz and Mårten’s kitchen table, scattered with books and string and sewing needles. The work we’re doing is so intimate; to me everyone involved somehow becomes a friend, and the dialogues that emerge from those friendships are just as much a part of the work as making the books.

KW:  What do you see is the biggest hurdle/dilemma for independent publishers?

EB: Money. Perhaps time too. In my case, I’m going to be contributing remotely for the next few years. So that is an impediment too.

ECW: I’m with Emily. Money. Time. I’d add finding readers to that list.

IMC: The time thing is an interesting hurdle. Most everyone I know who’s involved with a small press not only has some kind of day job, but is also a poet or writer of some sort, and spends time on their own writing. So much of the exciting and necessary work of having a small press can’t be too structured, timewise—it’s spontaneous (meeting people, reading) or it takes an indefinite number of hours (fiddling with subtle font changes). Having the time to make it work requires flexibility, and creativity, at least for me. And patience.

KW:  Tell me some great rewards, benefits, and/or advantages you’ve come across at Argos.

IMC: I’ve always felt a deep kinship with people who love to read and write, and so books are an essential part of that kinship. Making a book from start to finish is a deep and satisfying way to engage with work that I myself would want to read. It’s like loving tamales your whole life, then one day learning how to prepare, cook, and serve them really well. The affinity deepens. My appreciation for books has grown a thousandfold in the year and a half Argos has been around, as has the awe I feel for the work writers and editors and other publishers do. As a poet, it’s gratifying to spend so much time with work I admire, to read it so closely, and help it move into the world. It’s a way to directly influence the thriving of cool poems, of good ideas. It makes me feel more human.

EB: Having complete independence to take on projects that are close to our hearts is rewarding, as is correcting some of the omissions of the larger poetry community (that is sometimes reluctant to move forward and let in new work). I think there’s room for everyone. If the work is beautiful, ingenious, there should be a place for it. If we can help carve out little niches like that, we can leave a trace.

ECW: So far there have been a myriad of rewards — the process, the feeling of making stuff, the relationships formed with authors and other bookmakers. Positive reactions to the books feel fantastic.  Also, one unexpected benefit of working as an editor is that it’s given me some distance from rejection. Rejecting some really great writers, who just weren’t right for us, has expanded the way I view receiving rejections when I submit my own work.

KW:  What would be a good definition of a “poetry community?” (I ask this because I think you all are creating a micro-community while being parcel to the larger more over-arching one.)

EB: Despite using it often, I find the term “community” so abstract. Do you simply have to be writing to be part of the poetry community or do you have to be actively engaged? Different people have different understandings of what it means to belong to a community. And we need that range. In my case, I feel like I want to be a good steward of my peers, and promote the work of people whom I admire. I can’t imagine sitting happily in my corner. That would naturally make me more actively engaged. But we need hermits too! So I guess my idea of community would encompass people who are involved, and people who are less involved.

IMC: I live in Brooklyn and go to a lot of poetry readings. Oftentimes I’ll look around at the audience and realize that I’ve seen many of the audience members give readings, and many of them have seen me read. We may not know each other beyond that, but there’s a thrilling sense of closeness that we share because we know each others’ work. Many of the poets I know have a hand in editing, translating, publishing or teaching. Everything overlaps. It’s very rewarding to get to know people in all these different capacities, to realize the ways they’re all linked. Those linkages, for me, expand the experience of poetry so far beyond the fact of words on a page. They make it multi-dimensional, more of a way of life than an activity. People sharing that way of life in the same place and time—however you define place and time—constitute a community.

ECW: Community is indeed an abstract concept, yet I know it when I’m around it. Recently I went to a round table with the VIDA founders — Erin Belieu and Cate Marvin. The women and men around that table, all of whom are passionate about poetry, were building a community, talking about a community, trying to improve a community, in the same way the kids sleeping in Zucotti Park are trying to make things better for the vast majority of a much larger community. For me there is an ethical dimension to making books because there is an ethical dimension to life. I’m driven by the idea that what we make makes the life of this community of writers better. I know it sounds hopelessly naïve, maybe even pretentious—but then again, why else do it, because we’re certainly not getting paid.

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

IMC : That last question about community got me thinking about different poets I admire who acknowledge their community in their writing, such as Bernadette Mayer or Alice Notley. New York has a particularly rich history of poets getting together to define and explore aesthetics, tendencies, socio-political situations. It’s so interesting when the dialogue flows over into the actual work. When « real life » penetrates art and vice-versa. I think much of the work we’ve chosen to publish does that, in some way. Translation and collaboration are formal ways of setting up that kind of inter-penetration, but it’s happening all the time. I have long admired the sheer open-mindedness of Language poetry (poets like Lyn Hejinian and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge) and am interested in bringing the valences of translation and collaboration into a similar kind of wide-open space.

ECW: The work and attitude of the New York School writers (first and second generation) have always been very important to me, but I have a wide range of influences. Right now I’m very inspired by the innovative work being done by contemporary women poets (Maggie Nelson, Mónica de la Torre, Harryette Mullen, Eileen Myles, to name a very few). But I think there is so much exciting contemporary work. I love this moment. Also, I’ve always been very interested in and inspired by non-English language traditions, and publishing and supporting translation plays an important role in the ethos of our project.

EB: Woolf, Eliot color so many things for me. As far as contemporary work goes, I find Franz Wright hard to dislodge as one of the greatest poets of our era. His work moves between your fingers—it’s so alive—and yet it’s so ghostly. It’s infused with this soul. As a French speaker, I’d have to name René Char and Francis Ponge as touchstones. Jean Follain remains unmatched in terms of concision. I’ve also started discovering some wonderful new Swiss poets from my own country. I may want to introduce some work by them in the near future. It’s interesting because the whole country is multilingual you know. That must affect the relationship to language in a very precise way. Like, you’re never 100% at home in one language. One year you’ll speak German better, the next you’ll get to speak more French or Italian or whatever. There are also few female poets from Switzerland who get much attention. So maybe I’ll want to do something about that.

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)?

EB: I think poets work in the shadows sometimes. They’re not always visible but, in the end, I believe they have quite a big impact—because it’s the art that other writers (fiction, nonfiction writers) turn to when they get bored. Or look for some kind of answer. Often poetry can allow itself to be irreverent or curious or experimental because, by already being marginalized, it has nothing to lose. And to a certain extent, I think our limited reach can sometimes free us to do work that has no other purpose than to follow an instinct, to be inquisitive, to test some sounds, to pronounce aphorisms. It’s also very hard to label. The range of styles these days is indescribable. But some readers like to stuff things neatly in a box and put a tag on it. Well, that’s not us. We’re all over the place as a community. But if you can get behind that sort of diversity, you’ll see it makes things all the more exciting.

IMC: I like what Emily said about the freedom that poets have, because a smaller percentage of the “reading public” pays attention to poetry. That said, the folks who do pay attention pay very close attention. That seems, to me, to be the main difference between poetry and other arts: the depth of attention it commands, the way it can examine language on even the most microscopic level. I have always been a slow reader. I discovered about ten years ago that I enjoy spending a long time staring at the same tiny group of words. There’s a whole world that opens up inside, around, between words, letters and phrases. I love exploring that world, as I believe a lot of poets do.

That said, I’m really curious (with Argos in particular) about how poetry can work in tandem with other arts, to the point where they’re no longer separate. There’s a series I’m editing, the Side-by-Side series, that brings together poems and visual art. For the first book in the series, This Landscape, poet Paige Ackerson-Kiely and artist Adie Russell each made work in response to each others work. One didn’t “illustrate” the other per se; they managed to make this cohesive whole, in which the distinction between “poem” and “picture” didn’t matter so much. It became a third thing. I think of the collaborations from the 1950s between Ashbery, O’Hara, Koch, and artists like Larry Rivers—that work forms a cohesive whole, as does the visual/poetic work of William Blake. I know those are very exalted figures to evoke, but that’s the kind of work I get really excited about. I want Argos to be a venue for work on that level of innovation, in our particular cultural climate.

ECW: On a prosaic level, poetry is cheap. Pen and paper are easy to come by. Even the cost of making books is low in comparison to making a sculpture or a movie. Anyone can do it, and anyone does. And yet no one seems to be interested. Culturally speaking, we’re flying under the radar, and I think that’s exactly how it should be. It’s a place of great freedom.

Trilogy by H.D.

Oxford University Press 1944-46

“…little boxes, conditioned / to hatch butterflies.”

H.D.’s mytho-poetic epic Trilogy is an enactment of one woman’s quest for mystical verification of her own role as prophet and poet.  It is, as well, a radical revision of traditional spiritual imagery, which has been largely written, interpreted, and painted by men.  It is a poem that weaves worlds together, worlds as disparate as World War II London and pagan Egypt, the prophets of early Christianity and the Medieval troubadours of Languedoc, her own Moravian Church of Love and the Church of Love of Manichaeism, literal worlds and supersensory ones. H.D.’s process has been described by others as palimpsestic, a process of erasure, rejection and redefinition of images and sounds until words begin to yield not their initial accepted meaning but a new resonance: “they are anagrams, cryptograms, / little boxes, conditioned / to hatch butterflies.” It is a strategy based on a growing awareness of the authority of oneself as seer, in a world that will not grant that authority.  It is a battle with the forces which would undermine that quest, forces whose most formidable weapons are its forms of representation: “Our Lady of the Goldfinch,  / Our Lady of the Candelabra. // We see her hand in her lap / smoothing the apple-green // or the apple-russet silk; // we see her hand at her throat / fingering a talisman.”  Trilogy was written, literally, under siege; H.D. was living in one of the most heavily bombed areas of London during the Blitz. Although not published together until 1973, the three poems that comprise Trilogy—The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946)—were conceived as a sequence. (In fact, the entire poem is written in intensely crafted couplets—as she calls them,  ”broken hexameters”). The poem unfolds from the tiniest intuitions and prefigurations, through language, to deeper and deeper questioning: “so we must be drawn or we must fly / like the snow-geese of the Arctic Circle, / to the Carolina’s or to Florida / or like those migratory flocks / who still (they say) hover / over the lost island, Atlantis, / seeking what we once knew.”

–Melissa Kwasny

Find Trilogy here and here.

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Melissa Kwasny is the author of the acclaimed poetry collections The Nine Senses (Milkweed Editions 2011), Reading Novalis in Montana (Milkweed Editions, 2009), The Archival Birds (Bear Star Press, 2000), and Thistle (Lost Horse Press, 2006), which won the Idaho Prize in 2006. She is also the editor of Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800–1950 (Wesleyan University Press, 2004). Widely published in journals, including Willow Springs, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Bellingham Review, Crab Orchard Review, and River Styx, she was recently the Richard Hugo Visiting Poet at the University of Montana and a Visiting Writer at the University of Wyoming. Kwasny received the Poetry Society of America’s 2009 Cecil Hemley Award for a series of poems that appears in The Nine Senses. She lives in Jefferson City, Montana.

This is the launch of a new project, one in which the independent publishing process happening throughout microcosmic American poetry communities gets a focus. From broadsides to chapbooks to matchbooks, independent poetry publishing is an amazing silent preponderance and decentralized multitude. And, with self-publishing websites and bookstore gadgets becoming as ubiquitous as the “Big Four” has in the distribution of “literature,” independent poetry publishing is just as important now as it was when New Directions or Burning Deck or Graywolf first began; that said, it is also easy to mourn the end of so many others. So, here is the beginning of a database of “spotlights” that put a different indie poetry publisher under the microscope of a few introspective, slightly solipsistic questions. Hopefully, this will further the dialogue of who’s publishing whom and what quality of publishing they are engaging in.

First up on the docket are a couple of young men who recently graduated from Bard College and have started the O’Clock press as well as CLOCK magazine, whose first issue was released earlier this year and features poems from the likes of Macgregor Card, K. Lorraine Graham and Dawn Lundy Martin. The magazine, itself, as you will read, is handmade, hand-stitched, produced on a super-low budget and topped out at 100 copies. It’s lovely and arrived to the launch party at Brooklyn’s Unnameable Books in a myriad of colors. They have also, via the press, printed and published chapbooks and a play with plenty more to come, soon, including the second issue of the magazine.

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KW: What was the impetus to begin this magazine and press?

KS: We all read a lot of reviews and, speaking for myself here, wanted to craft one ourselves in order to try to take an active stance in the contemporary poetic discussion at large. Last winter, I began work on the O’clock Press chapbook series. Sometime early in the spring, Andrew asked me (in Latin class, of all places—I think we were reading Catullus?) if I wouldn’t like to join him in an effort to start a journal. So we joined forces, as it were. Over the course of the spring, we would meet at a diner in Red Hook once a week to talk over ideas, which got more and more serious, until finally we had an idea of what and whom we generally wanted to be working on.

AD: Out of the blue last February, Joan Retallack, a poet who’s been very supportive of me for a long time, suggested that I start a small press and journal so as to get my work and ideas out there. I thought immediately of Kit, and told him about an idea for a journal I had titled TANGO, which would feature 10 emerging poets in every issue. Keeping with the theme of the press, we changed the title to CLOCK, and upped the number of contributors to twelve. I asked my friend Allen Edwin Butt, who’s a brilliant poet living in South Carolina, if he wanted to help out, and he agreed—making us, finally, a team of three. We started throwing around some names, and I contacted a few poets (Ben Fama, Christie Ann Reynolds, Macgregor Card—none of whom I knew at the time) to see if they were interested in submitting. Once we saw how enthusiastic they were, we got the confidence to get this thing going.

KW: And what is Allen’s contribution, role, etc?

AD: I’ve known Allen for about five years now, and he’s one of the most important people in my life. I think of him as a kind of prophet. His input was and is tremendous—in both CLOCK and my own writing . . . Since Allen lives in South Carolina (and in Germany while we were putting together CLOCK 1), his contributions have been mostly editorial. We each have a different but sometimes overlapping set of poets we’re interested in publishing, so he brings his own point of view to the process. In the first issue, for instance, he contacted K. Lorraine Graham, a poet that neither Kit or I had ever read before. He’s also my closest friend in the world, and I’ve really grown up as a poet with him.

KS: Allen has an enormous knowledge of the history of the craft, and his awareness of contemporary poetry and poets is acute. Lautréamont once said, “Everytime I have read Shakespeare, it has seemed to me that I am shredding the brain of a jaguar.” While Allen has an enormous knowledge of the history of the craft, his awareness of contemporary poetry and poets is acute. He has had a great way of finding poets from all around that Andrew and I perhaps would not have thought of, or, speaking for myself now, would not have even known. As Andrew said, his stint as an ex-pat kept his role to that of an editor, but his input has definitely shaped the magazine – both its contents and the path we envision for it – and who know what will happen if he can get his hands on the publishing process.

KW: Tell me about the process of making and marketing the magazine.

KS: Making the magazine (along with the chapbooks) has been perhaps my favorite part of the experience with the press. I’m a sucker for making books. I won’t bore you with details of printing (although the ways in which I ended up having to use wooden blocks to manipulate the college printers—still free for a graduate—to print on 9”x18” paper were hilarious and border-line medieval), nor those of cutting, stamping, drawing, writing, etc. Just know that it took a long time, and that, during the stitching, there were a lot of Twilight Zone episodes and Rod Serling interviews being watched. All told, I tried to make the books and magazines as comely as possible—a sort of gesture against mass-market publishing, to say make no mention e-books. Not only did the focus on beauty make the whole process more satisfying, but I felt it would really show the respect we have for the work inside.

AD: I wasn’t very involved with the publication process (it sounds like hell every time you describe it, Kit!), but I’m about to for CLOCK 2. With Kit and Allen, I did editorial work, then moved down to the city before I could help Kit out with the physical production. My job was largely marketing and getting people interested in the magazine. That largely involved me meeting people, going to readings, telling people about CLOCK, setting up a Facebook, etc. It was great, and I had a lot of help from the contributors, who spread the news to their friends. Marketing was easier than I expected because people in New York are always so ready for a new magazine to come along. As soon as I mentioned it, people were excited!—and wanted to submit, of course, sight unseen.

KW: What do you all see is the biggest hurdle/dilemma for independent publishers?

KS: The costs of decent paper and printing, hands down. Though, if you get creative, there are ways around this. But if and when the money’s there, the biggest hurdle might just be getting through the noise of poetry’s extremely busy publishing world and somehow getting your books into the hands of people interested enough to read them. Finding readers (especially poets, not the richest “demographic”) willing to support your small press instead of the other zillions out there is still the most mysterious hurdle of them all—that hurdle doesn’t look so high until you’ve published a couple books and tried to distribute them yourself.

AD: I agree. Expanding your audience, getting people outside of your immediate circle, geographic location to pay attention to what you’re doing is very difficult. Most of us don’t have the kind of publicity apparatus of, say, FSG, so it’s difficult to get the work you publish (the work you love) out there and read. And, of course, we’re poor. But the Internet has made publishing better. I don’t even know how many people outside of Brooklyn and Boston know about O’clock and CLOCK. In the end, it just takes time.

KW: Would you ever consider electronic formats—saleable .PDFs, web-only content, e-reader material, etc?

AD: Probably not. But once a book sells out, I think we’ll probably post a .PDF online. But I don’t have anything against online publishing–if anything it’s a great way of getting work out there. And for many people who don’t have the resources to start a small press or journal, that’s the way to do. Some of my favorite journals–notnostrums, for example–are online, but I think the three of us are still interested in the book as an object. We like the challenges of producing a physical object, of holding it, mailing it. I think Kit might be more opposed to online publishing than I am.

KS: As far as I’m concerned, online publishing is a great way to get work out into the world for free. Thanks to the online archives such as Brown University and The University of Tulsa’s collaborative “Modernist Journals Project”, we can view the original copies of magazines long out of print: BLAST, The Little Review, The English Review, among others. Certain contemporary publishers, like Ugly Duckling Presse, make use of digitized books once the originals go out of print, and it’s something I think we should really appreciate and take advantage of. As for us, it seems to me this sort of archival use of e-publishing is the only publishing we would do. However, I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to e-publishing, were a poet to approach us with a compelling idea that demanded the electronic form. Given our limited technological capacity, however, I don’t know if we would be the best publisher to approach for such a project, anyway. Personally, I don’t see any problems in e-publishing, so long as the work is either distributed freely, or demands the form. Neither of these credentials are met by a project like Kindle, which centralizes the capital in publishing and, so far as I can tell, works against the interests of poets and writers at large. In the end, if you really want your work to be seen for free, legalities aside, why not print up poems on posters and paste them around your city? That way nobody pays, and everybody sees.

KW: What would be a good definition of a “poetry community? (I ask this because I think you all are creating a micro-community while being parcel to the larger more over-arching one.)

AD: Poetry communities emerge when friends start to write and publish one another. Sometimes those friends propose theories about one another’s work, but sometimes not. As far as what we’re doing, I don’t think we’re trying to propose a narrative or set of practices that could be collated into a unified poetry community. We’re interested in difference, and if that difference makes any community I hope it’s called American poetry. But as a poet, I am more narrowly interested in the community of poets living in Brooklyn. This includes the poets who publish and are published in journals like Agriculture Reader, jubilat, Supermachine, Maggy, notnostrums, even CLOCK. It’s so difficult to identify what immediately unifies that community other than friendship, but the work that’s being done there seems to me to be very vital right now.

KS: Simply, I would consider a poetry community a set of writers who are influenced by each other’s work, whether or not these writers are in personal contact with or close proximity to one another. More complicatedly, one could go into the way in which a poetry community works as a system of support both practically (helping with readings, publications, book-lending and -suggesting) and to be honest, emotionally (helping us not feeling completely isolated in a practice that could otherwise feel very isolating). What’s the rule of thumb, that we will all know someone with at most 5 degrees of separation, or something like that? Between poets, the rule should be adjusted to about 0.3 degrees of separation—max. The poetry world is small, and that’s perhaps why it’s so exciting: so much great work is being written by poets today who are, after all, friends, or at the very least, acquaintances within a community or mutual influence and support. Then again, it seems to always have been that way.

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

AD: I try my best to steer clear of these kind of temporal distinctions—they seem more like traps than opportunities for productive discourse. But I suppose, agreeing to the most common historical limits that academics have given Modernism, the Objectivists (and the movements they inspired, like Black Mountain and Language) are my favorite.

KS: To narrow it down off the bat, my sympathies lie most closely with French Modernism for its obsessive exploration of personal experience: inside and outside society and social conditioning, inside and outside selfhood, inside and outside language, etc. A poetry simply taken with dichotomy. Perhaps we can thank Arthur Rimbaud for that, whose koan “je est un autre” underwrites much of the poetry I’m alluding to. I would be hard-pressed to name a specific movement as a favorite, seeing as I try to focus on the work of individuals and avoid giving too much attention to the movements they have been assigned to, unless of course the relationship was deliberate, and thus unavoidable in reading. Stubborness aside, I am perhaps most moved by surrealism, but I only read a few “Surrealists” with any regularity: Benjamin Péret, Pierre Reverdy, Paul Éluard. The movement’s been so washed out by the popular imagination, which makes it rewarding to revisit. It’s a hard question, though. I can’t even tell if I’m telling the truth. Influences, in my case, change more often than clothes.

KW: Is there an essential quality to poetry that separates it from the rest of the arts?

KS: Poetry can, like music, expire in time, but only when read aloud. Like the plastic arts it can be experienced time and again as a spatial arrangement, but only when read on the page. (Pierre Alféri’s Cinépoèmes are especially interesting conceptually for their ability to, like film, make poetry expire both in space and time.) Like much fiction, poetry can recount a narrative, but only if the poet is interested in doing so; and like fiction that has shed its obligation to ‘tell a story’, poetry can do away with its devotion to time’s narrative arrow and really start fleshing out its specialty: investigating language as a primary means of experience, and not as a means of merely recounting experience. This, for me, is what poetry has that the other fields of the arts do not: the genre’s ability (obligation?) to force language into a space of nudity, in which it must speak for itself and not for the speaker using it. What is most fun about poetry is the way it rejoices in unforgivingly straining grammar to arrive at new spaces of experience; and moreover, the way it brings us to use our language self-reflexively, which allows us a clearer understanding of our relationship to and our subjective home in language. We can read as much philosophy of language as we would like, but until we put down our rational guard and allow the language on the page, and not the ideas behind it, to produce experience, we will not be dealing with poetic language.

AD: Charles Bernstein, quoting David Antin, once said that poetry isn’t a genre, it’s a supergenre—a practice that can collect numerous genre within it, including fiction, philosophy, epic, lyric, what have you. I think that he’s right—and that drive to include everything in a poem is what makes poetry so exciting. I think that any language- oriented practice can be poetry. In my own writing I’m interested in the ways the American novel can be reinvented as a poem. In fact, I want everything to be reinvented as a poem.

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A Ballad of Remembrance by Robert Hayden

Paul Bremen London 1966

“…one farewell image / burns and fades and burns”

A Ballad of Remembrance is about power and corruption, religion and need, family and identity, racism and murder. The iconic “Those Winter Sundays” and similar poems provide a remote, mournful melancholy, exploring the poet’s complicated upbringing and “greatest discouragement.” But mostly, Hayden explores the human need to presume, to value, to maintain faith at the expense of human rights or even basic logic.

A dense and lyrical vocabulary abounds. In chiseled cinema, Hayden draws up the actions of bejewelled, remorseless preachers and kings. He displays the “outrageous flair” of a superstar false prophet with “hypnotic no-words planned (and never failing) / to enmesh his flock in theopathic tension” (“Witch Doctor”); the compliance of an emperor’s petrified foot soldier performing “useless errand[s]” and living life to “curse the moon and fear the rising of the sun”  (“The Wheel”); the horrific pride of an an aging Klansman regretful that he can’t participate in a lynching with his Boy, who has “earned him a bottle– / when he gets home” (“Night Death, Mississippi”). “Middle Passage,” one of the most severe poems of the 20th century, chronicles the bloody voyage of the slave ship Amsitad. The long poem births America’s most central contradictions (“voyage through death / to life upon these shores”) and might be the best thing of its kind ever written.

The title poem is a tribute to the influential poet and critic Mark Van Doren, a noted influence on Hayden, the Beat Generation poets, John Berryman and others; Van Doren “arrived, meditative, ironic, / richly human,” stealing the poet away from magic and “hoodoo.” The book concludes with an elegy for Frederick Douglass, who was “superb in love and logic” and worked for “a world / where none is lonely, none hunted, alien.” A Ballad of Remembrance is a book about how everyone is an alien in their own skin; it is a book of great sympathy, but also an uncompromising indictment of human ignorance.

–John Deming

Find A Ballad of Remembrance here and in The Collected Poems of Robert Hayden.

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John Deming, a poet and musician, has recently released Eight Poems (Eye For an Iris Press 2011) and Tugboat EP (BozFonk Moosick 2011). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, FENCE, Verse Daily, POOL, The Best American Poetry Blog, Augury, Tarpaulin Sky and elsewhere. He lives in New York City and teaches at Baruch College and LIM College. He is Editor-in-Chief of Coldfront.

Barely Understood Forces

Interview by John Deming

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Dana Levin elegizes her mother, father and sister in her third book, Sky Burial. She explores mortality like a Gothic Buddhist in these new poems, assailing the body as temporary meat, but finding peace in the impermanence that permits one to bear witness. John Deming interviewed her by phone in May. The following is transcribed from the interview and edited by both Deming and Levin.

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Where did your interest in Buddhism come from and how did it develop?

At first, it was an aesthetic engagement. I just really loved the artwork that I encountered in museums, in calendars. It reminded me of tattoo art. Almost kind of psychedelic, too. So I responded to that, but I really didn’t do any investigation into it. And then after my parents died, I felt compelled to do further research into these images, and started to read a lot about Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism is really fascinating; it’s a mixture of Buddhism and this Shamanic religion called Bön, indigenous to the Himalayas. The Shamanic aspects, with the monsters and the deities and the oracles and the spells, got integrated into this Buddhistic philosophy.

My parents died so soon after each other. Six months. My dad died in January of ‘02 and my mother died in July of ’02. My mother’s death was shocking. She just dropped dead in the middle of putting on makeup. She had a massive heart attack. The EMT said she was probably dead before she hit the ground, based on the position of her body, or something. And you know, so much of Buddhism is predicated upon this idea that everything is impermanent. When people die, you’re like wow, it’s true. And you know it’s true intellectually, but I think it takes the death of close loved ones or sudden shocking deaths of close loved ones to jar you into “whoa, we really are all gonna die.” What does that mean? How are we supposed to live? Then Buddhism started to deepen for me, in terms of impermanence: we’re all going to die, so why not try to be kind to each other and to ourselves? That’s a religious creed I can get behind.

The very first poem in the book has the line “I’d been wanting to know if it was alright to live.” There is a kind of Whitmanic sense in here where death is a blending into atmosphere and universe, but also the conflicting sense that the perpetual, uncontrollable losses we experience yield a kind of meaningless devastation. What do you tend to think with regard to permanence vs. impermanence? We’re here forever on some level, but we are also not.

Ultimately, these deaths—it’s been weirdly calming. On my best days, I feel like the way to get through life is to conduct yourself like you’re a traveler through a foreign country. Because everything goes. Clothes fray, pets die, flowers fade, nothing lasts—and yet here we are having to live in this world where nothing lasts. So what is the appropriate relationship to phenomena? I sometimes think it is to be a traveler. If you were traveling through a foreign country, maybe you’d try to be open to new experiences, you’d try not to insult anybody, you’d try not to walk around with an arrogant attitude, and you’d really just try to receive the surprises and gifts of this foreign country where you are. And on my best days, I think that that’s the way to go through life. Now, I’m no saint, and I don’t always accomplish that, and neither does anybody. But I think that maybe the trick is to hold everything lightly. That doesn’t mean you don’t have passion for things and you don’t establish deep relationships with people and situations. But you kind of just have to say wow, nothing lasts, so for me to try to hold onto something is just a complete losing battle.

Every relationship ends, every life ends.  Is the fact that things are definitely ending the same thing that gives them value?

Absolutely. For sure. I mean, wow, what a gift. What a trip, you know, to have one experience for a while, and then it goes, and you can have other experiences. Some of them aren’t very pleasant. I don’t know why we have to suffer, why we die, I don’t know why we’re here and we’re put in these meat sacks that degrade. But that “not-knowing-why-and-having-to-feel it anyway,” that’s the central life mystery. I think that if someone said to me “what to you is god,” I would say “barely-understood forces.”

There are images of humans as meat in Sky Burial. You seem to indicate the body as a collection of separate objects that make it function, almost like a car. Where is there room for “soul” or “consciousness”?

Sometimes I have such an ambivalent relationship to being embodied, being much more “soul” oriented; and yet every once in a while I have to remind myself that I love the phenomenal world. I love staring at the ocean. I love hearing certain sounds. I love to eat. All of those sensory experiences are possible only because I have a body.

Worth it because you get to be here and see it?

Yeah I think so. The psychoanalyst C.G. Jung had this terrible illness where he almost died, and in the middle of the illness he was having all of these fever dreams, and when he got done with that experience—he was in his thirties—he was left with the unshakable feeling that the whole purpose of consciousness was to witness itself. That the phenomenal world needed witnessing and humans were the ones meant to do it.

The universe becoming aware of itself.

Yes, we’re the original “A.I.” (laughs)

Did losing so much immediate family so quickly make you recalibrate your awareness of being in the world? Who were you able to share these losses with?

You totally have to recalibrate your experience. I have an older sister, Caryn. Right after my middle sister, Laura, died, the image that I couldn’t shake, that encapsulated how I was feeling, was this: Caryn and I clinging to a raft in endless open sea. And that’s just really how it felt. And I am so grateful that Caryn is still here, and that we have always been very close, and have been walking this journey together. But everything has gotten recalibrated. For both of us it’s been mostly internal. Neither of us made hugely significant life changes in response to these deaths in terms of, like, moving to another geographical area or something. But internally, there have been lots of changes, psycho-emotionally, and for me, I realized I had to start taking care of myself in ways that I wasn’t.

Is there anything you would want people to know about these three family members who died and why they were so important to your life?

(Laughs) I would say that each of them were stubborn and fiercely loving. Sometimes to be fiercely loving means that you have difficult relationships with people that you know. Every one of them loved to have a good time, every one of them loved what human culture had to offer in terms of the arts, in terms of food, in terms of all of those kinds of pleasures. Each of them had a very strong will and had decided opinions about how one is supposed to be in the world. Interestingly, myself and my surviving sister were the oddballs in the family in terms of how we lived our lives and the choices we made for work. I mean, I’m a poet. My mother would look at me like “what does that even mean?” (Laughs) Both of my parents were first generation Americans and my grandparents were from Jewish peasant stock, the uneducated classes; they fled Russia and Poland right after the Russian Revolution, so this idea that someone would be a poet, and that would be important to them, and they would make life decisions based on that, was just utterly alien and caused some concern.

As to your being a poet – how do you work? Do poems take days? Years? Is it different every time?

It can be different, but in general I consider myself slow, though I don’t know who I’m comparing myself to. I’ve been publishing a book every six years. There are plenty of poems in Sky Burial that took six years to come to fruition. Every once in a while I have the experience of drafting something that feels finished to me within a couple of days, and I am always so excited when that happens, but it’s a pretty rare occasion. I take notes for a long time and sometimes I just have reams of notation and sometimes the process of putting poems together is just staring at these notes and seeing if there are any juxtapositional relationships that start to develop across disparate parts. The poem “Sybilline” in Sky Burial was composed that way: just various bits and pieces of thoughts I’d been having about the Delphic oracle, and then stuff that nothing to do with the Delphic oracle. Like, there’s material from a dream in the middle of that poem, culled from an old journal. Very often I riff through old journals and pick out language moments or images or dreams that seem like they have some juice and I put them all in one document and just sort of stare at this document and see if any of the pieces form what I would call a discovered narrative. There are also poems where I am definitely fascinated by one particular thing and I really want to do something with it and I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like. Poems like “Five Skull Diadem” and “In Honor of Xipe” were poems where I was definitely fascinated by something very precise. And I had to think about it for a long time and just let the poems develop.

Who are your influences stylistically?

I think that Jorie Graham and Sylvia Plath had a huge effect on me in terms of image and feeling. As a young college student, I was very enamored of William Carlos Williams—again, it was the image focus. Brenda Hillman is someone whose work I really love. I don’t know if one sees it in my work. Wallace Stevens is someone I read obsessively. I love his work so much. I think the syntactical urgency, the tonal urgency of Blake is definitely in my work, and he’s someone who I keep going back to. And weirdly now, a book that seems to be having a real effect on me even though we’re such different poets is Arthur Sze’s The Ginkgo Light, which came out in 2009. It seems to be having an effect on the stuff I’m writing now, post Sky Burial.

You certainly, like some of the poets you mentioned, like to engage with metaphysics, to mix the philosophical with the emotional.

Yeah, exactly, and when I say Jorie Graham, I really mean those first four books that she wrote. Erosion and The End of Beauty. The End of Beauty had a huge effect on me when I first encountered it. I think Louise Glück—not her approach to language, but her assi duous eye, the way she thinks through feeling—has had an effect on me as well.

There is a severity in your work, too, that reminds me at times of Glück. Who are some other long lasting influences on you?

I love the post-World War II Eastern Europeans. I love Vasko Popa. I love Tomaž Šalamun. I studied with Charles Simic informally at a crucial time before [my first book] In the Surgical Theatre came out. His work and teaching were important to me. I studied with the Czech poet Miroslav Holub as an undergrad. He was the first one who said to me “you’re a poet, you can do something with this.” And that was kind of a shock to me.

Sky Burial contains a lot of insect imagery and body imagery. Would you comment on this?

The interest in insects came from doing an investigation of what happens to the body after the spirit leaves it, and insects are a really big part of it. When I was looking into corpse disposal, I found The Body Farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, a one acre plot of land where students in the UT forensic anthropology program study corpse decay and insect/cadaver symbiosis. And then I was watching all of those forensic police shows where you find out, you know, that bee pollen can tell you how long a body has been dead. It’s totally fascinating, so I just decided that I wanted to learn about these bugs. Also it’s kind of in the Buddhistic spirit. The idea behind the Tibetan sky burial practice, where the corpse is dismembered and mashed into a paste with yak butter and barley, is that you are giving alms, you are giving charity to these vultures who eat it because you are basically providing them with a free meal. The same thing is true of these insects, and you know, they do a great service for us.

How do you first become interested in poetry?

I think about two formative events. One is weird. I had a book of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, maybe even before I could read. The thing about this book that fascinated me was not the poems, but the inside cover. In retrospect, it seemed very Paul Klee or Miro-like, with a black background with an undersea theme with these images of skeletal fish plants and figures and stick people, and this image gave me, at the age of three or four, the most uncanny feeling. It was disturbing, it was fascinating—I couldn’t quit looking at it, and I have associated that feeling of disturbed fascination with poetry ever since, even though at the time I couldn’t even read! Let alone a poem. The conscious moment was when I was in second grade. We used to watch films in the school cafeteria, and we’d have to come back and write a little thing about what we saw. I saw this film about this astronaut who was being pursued by this space monster, and when I got back to the classroom, I thought about all the words I could use to describe this film—space, race, chase—and I realized that all of them rhymed, and that meant that I wanted to write a poem. So I raised my hand and asked if I could write a poem, and the teacher said sure. It was in paragraph form. I didn’t know what lines were or anything like that. I just knew that because the words sounded the same, I wanted to write a poem. How I knew those things, I couldn’t tell you. That to me was the conscious moment of starting to write poems, I always wrote poems after that.

Why do you suppose your interest in poetry was stronger than your interest in other art forms?

If I think of this idea that the purpose of consciousness is to witness itself, then what a great way to report: poetry! Also—though this isn’t why I write poems—I get a lot of pleasure out of the idea that poetry is a completely subversive art form. Because it really can’t participate in a capitalist structure. It just can’t. It doesn’t make enough money. I mean sure there’s “po-biz” and all that kind of stuff, but the stakes are so small. It’s the one art form that is totally left alone by the vicissitudes of the market. So sometimes I tell my undergrads, if you really want to be a subversive artist, write poetry.

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Observations by Marianne Moore

The Dial Press 1925

“supertadpoles of expression”

Often undermining “plain American speech which cats and dogs can read,” Marianne Moore’s modernism is deeply complex and persistently beautiful, and Observations is possibly the best and definitely the least adulterated example of her exotic genius.  Moore’s American debut was also the first collection selected, edited and approved by Moore herself. It promptly received the Dial Award and subsequent acclaim.  Among the many truly great poems found in Observations is her mind-bending “An Octopus,” her early extended version of “Poetry,” and “Marriage,” a rumination on the subject that characteristically bounds from convolutedly prosaic (“This institution / perhaps one should say enterprise / out of respect for which / one says one need not change one’s mind / about a thing one has believed in”) to consonantal (“One must not call him ruffian / nor friction a calamity / the fight to be affectionate”) to humorously metrical (“He says, ‘What monarch would not blush / to have a wife / with hair like a shaving-brush’”).  Observations is a circus of a book, and Moore is its ringleader—sometimes smirking, sometimes serious, but somehow turning hippopotamuses, elephants, zebras, and octopuses into an important and inherent part of the American idiom, and despite H.D.’s early opinion of Moore as an anachronism, nearly every poem in Observations warrants mention, testifying to the unrelenting timeliness of Marianne Moore’s originality.

–PJ Gallo

Find Observations here and in Becoming Marianne Moore.

See all essentials.

PJ Gallo lives in Durham, North Carolina. His poems have recently appeared in Bat City Review, H_NGM_N, Independent Weekly, Roanoke Review and elsewhere. He is a co-editor of the weekly online poetry journal LEVELER.

Sort of Uncharacterizable

Interview by Seth Graves

***

Mark Nowak is a poet and political activist. He is the author of three books of poetry, including Shut Up, Shut Down (Coffee House Press 2008, with an afterword by Amiri Baraka), which chronicles disenfranchisement and government and labor union relations and features quotations from members of oppressed worker communities. He combines a cross-sampling of interview texts, photographs and images, encyclopedic studies of language and etymology, and mixed poetic forms — such as the haibun — to create the experience of the book as he attempts to articulate the loss of individuality in these telling moments of capitalism. His most recent book, Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press 2009), also mixed-media in presentation and a collaboration with photojournalist Ian Teh, documents the Chinese coal mining industry and the Sago Mine Disaster and its aftermath with photographs and testimonies of survivors and rescue teams.

Nowak’s approach reflects a gathering and “mixing” that is inherently ethnographic. The work combines arts and forms in a manner perceptively interdisciplinary. The challenge and reward of his works bring to mind a quote from Roland Barthes in his essay “Young Researchers”:

Interdisciplinary work, so much discussed these days, is not about confronting already constituted disciplines (none of which, in fact, is willing to let itself go). To do something interdisciplinary it’s not enough to choose a ‘subject’ (a theme) and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one.

Nowak, by adopting such a process of creating the “new object that belongs to no one,” creates his own world in each text—a polyphonic display of a culture—to be approached as an exciting single product.

In spring 2010, Nowak posted an entry on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog titled “Documentary Poetics.” In his explication of the term, he cites recent panels and presentations he and poetic colleagues have given on the subject of documentary poetry and the manner in which it is aesthetically applied to writing craft. He cites specifically avoiding calling it a “genre,” as it circumscribes all approaches, forms, and styles in poetry; instead, he refers to the term as a “modality”:

Documentary poetics, it should be said, has no founder, no contested inception, no signature spokespersons claiming its cultural capital; its practice is not limited to the pre-modern, modernist, or post-modern moments (it is as comfortable in musty historical archives or conversations with actual live individuals as it is with Google).

The term has entered conversation among academics and practitioners, and courses in documentary poetry have surfaced at colleges and universities. I interviewed Nowak to further investigate what defines “Documentary Poetics.”

***

***

SG: I want to talk about documentary poetics—and really to try to come up with even a definition for it. I was very interested in your discussion on the Poetry Foundation blog and in your work and what you have been exploring. I was wondering if we could start by going back to that blog entry and seeing how you define documentary poetics, and even if that’s really what you find yourself as being—or is that too isolated of a term?

MN: I say fairly regularly that I think that my own work, in particular, is more what could come under the term of social poetics rather than documentary, per se. Documentary to me seems to be more of an act of using reportage—news reports, testimonies, in some cases, though not very often in poetry, interviews, ethnography, et cetera—and then creating out from those sources, whereas my own work is really, in a sense, trying to use some of those techniques within kinds of collaborations—with trade unions, social movements, and other types of organizations. In that Poetry Foundation article, that was why I called it more of a modality within contemporary poetry rather than a new kind of genre. I think that documentary impulse is used by tons of poets. In a sense, you could widen the frame to say that almost everyone uses it. Or you could narrow it down to say that only a few people use it.

I remember I went to my first ever AWP this year, because it was almost right next door in [Washington] D.C. I went to a panel on research poetics; it was very interesting, but it was also a bit odd in the sense of discussing…well, one question I wanted to ask was, “What kind of poet doesn’t use research in one way or another?”

Was that with Ted Genoways?

No, that was the one with Susan Howe, Cole Swensen, Thalia Field, Jonathan Skinner, and C.S. Giscombe. Ted’s project with the Virginia Quarterly Review would be another example of that. He’s looking at how poetry can be another kind of reporting—a kind of journalism. So the things that he had been doing with that, and how it burgeoned out into Natasha Trethewey’s new book, the Beyond Katrina book, stuff like that, is another kind of example.

So in defining this sentiment—if it’s not a genre but perhaps a modality—do you think that you call for individuals to employ this practice more often, or do you think that your article just put the idea out there so that people can work with it?

I think that there’s sort of a pendulum, and there’s waves of it. There was a huge wave of the documentary impulse in the 1930s in the “Cultural Front” era. And I think there’s another wave of it happening now. I’ve seen people writing about everyone from Ezra Pound as a documentary poet because he’s using documents; that would make Charles Olson a documentary poet, Susan Howe a documentary poet—all of those individuals. So I think that maybe in part because, in the larger culture, documentary has gained so much strength. I live out in the country and have to get DirecTV instead of cable, and I have a documentary channel where I can watch documentaries 24/7. And if you go to movie houses now—independent movie houses—maybe a third of the films are documentaries now. I think it’s more that we’ve swung to once again being in an era in which documentary has got a bit of clout in the culture as a whole, and so it’s not surprising that poets are looking into it a bit more, too. I think, in part, maybe some of the new technologies make it possible, as well. Recent developments in technology in the last 10 to 15 years have made the documentary impulse something that could be explored in a way where you don’t have to lug around a big reel-to-reel machine and microphones, and so on. It’s more feasible now than maybe it was 20 years ago.

So you feel like you perhaps share a similar space to a documentary filmmaker?

Yeah. I’ve done interviews where I’ve said that. In a way, I find documentary filmmakers more inspiring than what’s happening in poetry these days, because I think that they’re engaging the social a bit more. A lot of the work that I do is around working with people in trade unions on a transnational level. I don’t know where to turn for that in poetry, but in documentary film there’s 15 or 20 examples that you could run through pretty easily of projects like that — Mardi Gra: Made in China, Losers and Winners, etc.

I’m really interested in the way that you can use ethnography to talk about the connections between individuals. One form of discovering ethnography is talking about “writing culture.” I know that in the piece you put up on the poetry blog, you were talking about other people you had been sharing this experience with, and there was a symposium at the University of Utah. Do you feel like there is a culture of individuals talking about this and discussing it that you’re sharing work with—or perhaps you guys are collaborating within poetry?

Yeah. I know that there’s in the works an anthology from Wesleyan, I believe, the Documentary Poetry Reader. That’s been in process for a while but hopefully will be out in the next year or two.

For me, I don’t want to do the kind of work that I do—with the people that I do it with and the subject matter that it’s on, which is pretty much working people and working communities here and elsewhere around the world—and then take that and remove it and produce it only within a community of poets and poetry. To me, it’s important that that work circle back within the community.

So, for example, with the most recent book, Coal Mountain Elementary, it was consistently tested and exposed and performed and produced first in that community in West Virginia, right near the Sago Mine—before it “went out” and everything else. When the mine disaster in West Virginia first happened, I was there about six weeks later doing workshops with students and community members when I first shot some of the photos. And then when I was working with the Sago testimony and working that into a sort of documentary play, the school—Davis & Elkins College, which is about 15 or 20 miles from the Sago mine—performed it. They did a staged reading of it. And then when the book came out, the book tour started there, and the theater department at that same college turned it into a play. And they did it at the University of Pittsburgh’s theater department’s black box theater; they did it as their spring production for a two- or three-week run at the college; they took it a little bit on the road in West Virginia and performed it at a cafe and performance space in central West Virginia. So it was really important for me that that work started out in its public sort of way, right near where the work is drawn from.

And how do you feel the communication was between the subjects you were speaking to and the members of the community and your work as a poet?

It was incredibly powerful to me. At one of the productions, in particular, I later got pulled aside by the director. She told me that several of the family members whose cousin and brother had been killed in the Sago mine disaster were there. They had been across the street in the Sago Baptist Church during the duration of everything that happened. They came to the production, stayed afterward, and wanted to speak to the director, the actors and actresses, and myself. The two things they said most strongly: One, they remarked on how difficult it was to sit through the production because it felt to them exactly how it felt being in the Sago Baptist Church across the street during the rescue operations at the mine site. Two, they said how happy they were after the media had just come in—Anderson Cooper and everybody were there for 72 hours, and then they disappeared, and everyone had forgotten about it—but because of this, perhaps it would be remembered in a particular and accurate way. I did a little op-ed piece in January this year, a couple months ago, at the fifth anniversary of the Sago mine disaster. There was one West Virginian newspaper blog about it, and that was the only thing that had come out about it being the fifth-year anniversary of this. And so I wrote an op-ed piece about it—about what it means to forget and what it means to remember.

Did you feel any resistance to the fact that this was poetry?

In the end, I don’t know that it is. So to me, I don’t know what you call Coal Mountain Elementary. Some people call it poetry, and there is one of those “lesson plans” in it where I do use line break and space—so there is poetry in that way. But to me, it’s also labor history. And it’s creative nonfiction. And it’s a play. And it’s phototext and goes back to that kind of big tradition in the 1930s and 40s of Richard Wright and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and all those sorts of books. And I like that. I like that the book is sort of uncharacterizable.

I also found a little bit of connection to Jacob Riis, and the way he was giving presentations to expose people to a condition.

Certainly—that whole social documentary tradition.

I was curious about your other book, Shut Up, Shut Down, where you employed some forms. You talked about the haibun. Did it feel important to combine of all of this gathering and then the use of that constraint, for poetry or for yourself?

In that book—well in both books—it’s an overall structure of the book that I’m looking for. If you look at the five pieces in Shut Up, Shut Down, they move back and forth between that working with the haibun form…I’ve been reading this poet Fred Wah, and he had done some pieces in a book called Waiting for Saskatchewan that I found incredibly interesting in lots of different ways. So I was working with those and trying to bring them into this labor context and seeing how they might work. So you have that sort of haibun form in photo texts in three of the pieces. Then in between those three, so pieces two and four, are the verse plays— “Francine Michalek Drives Bread” and “Capitalization.” Once I had one of each, I had the idea that if I had about five of these it would make a nice book-length collection—because I like something that’s a little bigger than the 70-page poetry book. I then decided I could do three of one and two of the other and alternated them, one to the other. It was a way of working out the larger form of the book to have a kind of a valence to me that felt most interesting. I’m the kind of person who lays out my books in Excel spreadsheets before I start. So I’m looking for a kind of structure. I think it comes from having been a musician before I was a poet and looking for a kind of score for the whole thing.

I was going to ask you how you came to doing this project. You mentioned music. What kinds of other things were you studying or reading or feeling influenced by?

I became in the early to mid-80s an electronic musician. I was in two- or three-person groups that used a lot of syncing of synthesizers and drum machines, and sampled sounds—things like that. There was a lot of programming and structure in that work, coming out of Kraftwerk and that early German Krautrock, and then being really influenced by really early rap and hip hop and seeing shows by a lot of those people. I wrote about that period in Buffalo in an essay that’s in Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke UP). So that kind of structure just became for me the kind of structure in which to make an artwork. Even when I went to graduate school, my MFA thesis was a multi-track recording of Jackson Mac Low-esque chance-generated text. So there really isn’t a paper copy of the thesis; there’s just a cassette. That was ’89 or ’90—something like that. So that just was the kind of milieu of the work. That’s how I put things together—through sampling, through multi-track recording. In certain ways, that’s what you continue to see in these books. You hear a sort of multi-track recording because there’s a boldfaced voice and an italicized voice and a normal font voice. And you see it sampled from various places. The images were definitely something we used to with our music, when we used to work with slideshow projections and things like that as part of the performances. All of that stuff from the early and mid-80s still continues to reverberate through the compositional process today.

I’ve heard described before the past 10 to 20 years of writing as being sort of the era of sampling, or where poetry is so outwardly influenced by a sampling culture. I guess other forms of sampling were also an influence, in other decades. You were talking about the 30s, which sort of had its own forms of sampling. Do you feel that this perhaps is more true to the self—this form of drawing different voices—in today’s era more than it would be in other times because of the Internet culture?

Well, I think it’s a pendulum. I think we go back and forth. Maybe today, but I don’t know. In a sense, what’s the difference between Marcel Duchamp and Kenny Goldsmith? Other than one is a toilet and one is text. So I think it’s just that pendulum thing. Certain ideas kind of come back, and they are slightly different because we have different technologies and we are in a different kind of cultural space, but in the end there are very clear similarities between those kinds of works. So that work is closer to a kind of conceptualism. There’s something like Rukeyser or Reznikoff or Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, which employs some of those techniques, which is closer to what I do. So you can probably map a lot of those strains from the late 20s to the early 40s on to various projects of people who are doing stuff today.

Do you feel any resistance in the poetry community? I’m not trying to get you to draw lines or name names, but do you feel that there is some resistance to this kind of form?

I don’t know about resistance, necessarily, but I think people like building their encampments and then walling them off. So I think that there are people who are very interested in establishing their group and then moving forward into history with that group, befriending old critics to grant the work a seal of approval, etc. That’s why, in that Poetry Foundation piece, I said I don’t really want to be a part of a “documentary poetry” group. I don’t want to edit a documentary poetry anthology. I don’t want to be known as a documentary poet. I don’t want to have that be my school, because I think there’s a dangerous way in which those become places of inclusion but also places of exclusion. I want to hang out with all of the groups. Or none of the groups, but I don’t want to be the documentary poetry person. That’s why, when I have these conversations, I always start off with, “Well, I see myself as more of a social poet working with organizations, institutions, NGOs, trade unions, etc.” Because it’s not a school. It’s not a movement. It’s none of those things. It’s just the social, collaborative work that I do.

When you say that you see yourself as a socially conscious poet working actively in a community, what kind of hope do you have for documentary poetics as a service to these communities? It seems like there has already been a lot of benefit in your work, but in what kind of other places could this be working?

Hopefully I leave that for other people to discover, but, for me, what I see is that people who aren’t poets or who don’t say, “I’m a writer who sends out poems and I’m going to be in an MFA program”—the people I’ve worked with who have been clerical workers, or nurses, or the workers at the Ford factory in Minnesota or South Africa: to them it becomes a very useful device, because it becomes a mode of reflection, a mode of speaking, of putting down, and getting out, and sharing what has been bottled up inside them that they have no way of expressing. For example, with the poetry dialogues between the workers in Minnesota and South Africa, they were able to discover their coworkers. A worker in Minnesota had no idea what a South African Ford worker’s life was like or job was like, and pretty much thought they were probably stealing their jobs in a lower wage  production system. And simultaneously the workers in South Africa discovered that when a Ford worker in America loses their job, this is not a land where everybody has college educations and lots of money and they just go on to something else. They learn much more about each other and discover it through this project. The people I worked with had never had an opportunity to make that kind of connection before.

Do you think that this kind of research makes making a social claim or an argument easier than just staying in the personal realm? Is this making it easier to have a conversation with a public outside of poetry?

Again, I think all the positions are valid. But for me, it has put me into spaces or conversations that I would have otherwise never been a part of. I think, in certain ways, it created connections that society as a whole, under capitalism, doesn’t want to happen. I went to the first place in South Africa—in the assembly plant in Port Elizabeth. The managers of the Ford plant had found out I was coming, and forbid any visitors to the Ford plant for the week that I was there. So the people in the union, NUMSA (National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa), had to scurry and find an off-site location to do it, simply because management didn’t want workers in several countries talking to each other. So I think that it does do something. It does something in a way that those empowered don’t necessarily want to happen. To me, it was an incredible demonstration of the power of this kind of work. You’re getting banned from entering the place where this was supposed to happen. And you would think, poetry? Who is going to be afraid of that? But this was an example of it, and it proved it for me.

*

Maybe that’s not fair. I guess all I can really tell you is what happened to me. First, I applied to eleven MFA programs and got into none. The rejection letters went to my parents’ house, where I didn’t live, and my mother had to call me every day and tell me that nothing had come or who had said no. I got a little confused. The next year I applied to sixteen programs. It was all I thought about. Not writing, and not going to a program, but the list of programs I was applying to. I kept adding programs, but for weird reasons: to balance out the aesthetic of the list or to add something a little quirky, as if the list itself was what I was creating a list for. That year, I got into seven programs. Full-funding at two schools I didn’t really want to go to, some funding at two schools I really did, and no funding at three. Though I never would have expected it, I ended up going to Columbia.

At that time, there had been no new ranking of programs in years, and the perception that MFA programs were unrankable still persisted. But in web forums and other places applicants discussed schools, Columbia was viewed as a good program, but one that you would be foolish to attend (or even apply to) because of the cost. I paid. Or rather, I borrowed. I was going to borrow anyway and it wasn’t that much more. I mean: I was twenty-four. So I saved some money and I sold my car. I went all in. When I got there, it turned out everyone else had gone all in too. No one ever skipped a workshop. No one ever said they didn’t feel like writing. We knew the exact amount we were paying for every hour of school and we held every one of our teachers accountable.

They delivered. My first workshop was with Richard Howard, who doesn’t run a workshop. Instead, he reads to the class once a week and students meet with him individually at his apartment: once a week and for at least one to two hours each time. By the end of my first year, I had spent over sixty hours in Richard Howard’s apartment talking with him about my poems. That’s insane. But it’s not just Richard. My workshop with Lucie Brock-Broido met six times after the semester was over, and for five hours each time. Timothy Donnelly met with me and read an entire manuscript of mine before I had even taken his workshop, which, incidentally, also met extra times and usually ran one to two hours over.

The essential explanation for why Columbia is such an expensive program is that it’s part of the School of the Arts and not the English Department. That also means every class I took there was in the School of the Arts and taught by a writer or by a critic who knew they were talking to writers. Besides the workshops I took with Timothy Donnelly, Lucie Brock-Broido, Richard Howard, and Mark Doty, I studied with Mark Strand, Ben Marcus, Marjorie Welish, Ilan Stavans, Richard Locke, Henri Cole, Mark Wunderlich, and Helen Vendler. Everything I did fed into my writing and that was what all my teachers wanted.

I didn’t get any teaching experience. But I’m finishing a PhD from University of Houston now, where I’ve gotten plenty. I went into debt. But, and I say this to the poets in particular, I wasn’t ever going to have any money anyway. Am I saying you should go to Columbia? Not exactly. Am I saying you should go into debt? No. I’m really not. It was probably a really stupid thing to do. But I loved it and I became a better poet because of my teachers and because of the incredibly amount of time and energy they put into me and my work.

None of this shows up in a ranking. Which is why this year’s Poets & Writers ranking of full residency programs puts 46 schools in front of Columbia. So forget fair: what I’m telling you is that’s absurd. But it’s also absurd that there are 46 schools that are better than the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, which ties with Columbia. There aren’t. I can tell you there are 29 professional baseball teams that are better than the Houston Astros, but not that there are 49 MFA programs better than Boston University, and certainly not that there are 59 schools better than the University of Maryland. Why? Because the Astros have actually lost more baseball games than anyone else in the league, but the Poets & Writers rankings are based on what people who haven’t actually attended these MFA programs think of their websites.

You’re not getting an MFA to get funded by an MFA program, nor to have a good teaching load, nor to move somewhere with an ideal cost of living. You’re getting an MFA to have your writing taken seriously by serious writers who you respect. There’s no way of knowing ahead of time if someone is going to be a great teacher and especially not if they’re going to be a great teacher for you. But I swear that anyone who tries to tell you teachers are not the most important part of an MFA program has been spending too much time on the internet. Don’t buy it. Put the rankings down.

Pick up the books of the faculty. Pick up the books of the alumni. Try to talk to people who actually go to these programs. They aren’t the ones voting in these rankings. But they are people who can tell you if a young faculty member is bright and full of energy or bewildered and doesn’t know how to handle graduate students. They can tell you if the Pulitzer winner is never going to learn your name or is going to keep meeting with you four years after you graduate. Read about the programs. Don’t go into debt—or do—but make your decision about your writing and the writers you want to work with first, and money after. Don’t buy these rankings. I mean really, don’t buy the actual rankings. Tell your friends not to too and hopefully, someday soon, Poets & Writers will stop printing them.