Posts Tagged ‘interview’

spotlight: Dana Levin

Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

Barely Understood Forces

Interview by John Deming

***

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.

***

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.

Tags: dana levin, dana levin interview, interview, interviews, sky burial, spotlight
Posted in features

spotlight: Ben Lerner

Saturday, January 1st, 2011

Interview by Ken L. Walker

To recall the first breach or encounter I had with the idea of a Ben Lerner poem: I was helping with a presentation on Angle of Yaw in my workshop at Brooklyn College and wanted to bring up the idea that poets should have more audacity—that too many seem too afraid. Lerner was firing shots at Reagan, breaking down the American response to 9/11 without pretense, cataloging the oppressive and repressive mannerisms of culture, demonstrating the blood-thirst of profiteering, and is pretty damn smart about how to attack each animal, offering up a fresh poetics to boot. Angle of Yaw wound up nominated for the 2006 National Book Award. His follow-up, the exceptional Mean Free Path, was released this year. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press and he teaches in the writing program at Brooklyn College.

Following many e-mail exchanges, Lerner and I compiled the following conversation.

***

***

KW: What was the impetus for Mean Free Path–that is, can you explain its pre-writing, forethought, thinking stages?

BL: I think I project the fiction of a book long before I have any concrete sense of how to realize it. Retrospectively, the fiction tends to replace the reality—that I had little idea where I was going, what formal problems and solutions would arise in the act of composition, etc. But the fiction is what allows me to keep going, because it feels like premonition. I do know that after Angle of Yaw, which mainly consists of prose poems, I wanted to turn back to the line. And I wanted to experiment with more personal forms of address, not just the détourned registers of (much of) Angle of Yaw. But there’s a big gap between having those vague concerns and finding their formal measure or correlative or whatever. I don’t have any articulate sense of how that happens. I mean, I think I began describing the “stutter” in Mean Free Path as expressing an emotion that goes beyond description, and as a central technique of the kind of love poem I was writing, after I’d already written several poems in which it appeared. I was convinced by that reading, and ran with it, but the point is I’m not sure it was initially the impetus behind the technique, so much as a way of narrating the significance of the form after it began to unfold. Then that narrative became part of the book.

You seem to be committing an important act in all your books, but especially in Mean Free Path, which is training the reader how to read the work as he or she traverses it. By the end, or in a second reading, a reader has not only been trained, but assimilated. Can you speak to this?

Assimilated—that sounds a little scary. The effects in Mean Free Path are accretive. I do think a lot of the formal procedures are only perceptible over time, and so in that sense, yes, a reader has to acclimate to the form, and the form has to both make that acclimation possible and keep it from becoming total, to establish recognizable patterns and then modulate their fulfillment and frustration so they don’t stabilize into predictability. This is how I read Valery’s famous dictum that order and disorder are equal threats to a poem. While I do think that Mean Free Path teaches you how to read it, I don’t really feel like the teacher. I’m not sure I had that much control. Writing the poems might actually have been closer to reading them in the sense that I had to figure out what was possible within the constraints I gave myself, and the poems are the record of that discovery more than a mode of instruction. I’m not Milton.

That said, you’re correct that the poems in Mean Free Path are often explicit about their procedures and the thematic significance of those procedures. So there is a didactic element in the book. But as I mentioned above, that narration of form didn’t necessarily precede the form.

Assimilation is a scary thing; it’s interesting that you say you didn’t have that much control. Did you not want that much control?

Maybe it’s more that I feel that there are multiple and potentially competing orders of control. You can establish a restraint, but that decision, that form of control, forces you to make all manner of adjustments in the act of composition that you wouldn’t otherwise make. Some artists have been interested in only making the initial decision that then generates the work more or less automatically (e.g. Sol LeWitt). They outsource execution. I’m more interested in how the drama of negotiating an imposed form can be thematized, becomes part of the meaning of the poem.

Explaining the formulas for “mean free paths” in ordinary language—the magnitude depends on the characteristics of the system—can also act as intriguing metaphor. This seems to happen often with normal rhetorical explanations of dense scientific theories, in corny ways with the galaxy but in highly acceptable ways with things like bee flight patterns or, again, “mean free paths.” The Wikipedia page for mean free path could read, almost, like a prose poem. Does/Did this attract your attention at all when thinking of the framework for the book, the title?

I am interested in how science uses metaphors, or maybe I should say in how it denies its dependence on metaphors in order to secure its claims to objectivity, but I selected this title because the concept struck me as an apt trope for the poems’ formal procedures, for the line as a space between collisions, for the line as measure. And of course the title gets swept up into a connotative field in which “mean” means all sorts of things, from signification to meanness, and “free” evokes the murderous cheapening of that word by American capitalism and its permanent wars. And so on. Using the scientific phrase as an organizing metaphor for a book of poems invariably places the discourse of objectivity under all sorts of destabilizing pressures, so that in “Angle of Yaw,” for instance, you hear angel and Yahweh, metaphysical echoes behind the physics. The title focuses attention on the procedures of the poems, their motion and energy and force, but any scientific specificity is dissolved in the play of meaning, I think.

A poet (especially) takes on the task of estimating the size of infinitesimal things. As in, when a measurement is damn near invisible, one has to approximate or compare its size. Is this, to a certain degree, what is going on in Mean Free Path?

I can think of ways in which that might be true. I mean, certainly part of the goal is to use poetry to track failures of representation—hesitation, fragmentation, doubling back—in a way that can measure the experience of feeling and thinking in time. So there is a kind of measurement taking place, and what’s being measured, if not infinitesimal, is not something I can capture in any positive sense. If the relevant emotion would be falsified by any definitive statement, then the challenge for the poems is making the failures of expression expressive. And any particular formulation in the poems has a sense of being provisional, always subject to being recycled and revised by the form, and so that might be analogous to an estimate.

I think, in that sense, Mean Free Path does a great job of cutting the primary part of a statement off at the pass (“I thought you were sleeping…”), as in, recycling but revising (as you say above). Was that an intention, to reform normal opening phrases into new entities, or at least, to twist them into new statements?

Certainly a major dimension of the book looks at how phrases, clauses, etc., can recombine (or fail to recombine) into higher units of meaning. One function of the recombinatory activity of the poems is to make it very difficult to identify the “original” usage of a phrase, clause, etc. in the book. (The way lines are out of order or belong to multiple orders at once has made some readers wonder if there was a prior, more linear version of the book I then cut up and rearranged. There isn’t—that is, there wasn’t an actual original that I then distressed—but I understand how the poems imply such a source, a kind of virtual hypotext.) I wanted to give a sense of language as found—that these phrases were being worked with, cut and pasted, not generated spontaneously, whatever that might mean. Even the most direct and emotionally charged statements in the book are made out of language that appears elsewhere in other configurations. This isn’t intended to ironize the statements, but to show how expression is always also construction, a working with materials that have a history (in the book and beyond). And to make that struggle to express expressive.

What does the “Dedication” piece do for the book? Why put it in?

The stanzaic pattern of “Dedication” returns in the “Doppler Elegies,” but it returns with a difference—this is the only poem in the book that has end line punctuation, and it’s certainly the closest thing to a discrete poem in the volume. Still, it’s part of the larger formal architecture of the book: each section of “Doppler Elegies” is eight pages. Each section of “Mean Free Path” is eighteen pages. “Dedication,” since it shares the stanzaic pattern of the “Doppler Elegies,” combines with those poems to make a sequence of eighteen pages. So there is a way that “Dedication” is both inside and outside the form, a part of the “Doppler Elegies” that pulls away to perform a different function. But its presence also balances the book, making another suite of eighteen, another multiple of nine (the number of lines in each stanza in the book, depending on how you count the lines at the end of “Dedication,” another way that poem hovers between fulfilling and violating the formal rules in the book).

I liked the idea of the dedication being part of the book, not something outside it. I mean, since the entire book is concerned with finding the right form for the expression of love, it seemed like cheating to just have a prose dedication external to the poems. And it is a dedication. The “for” begins as a coordinating conjunction in a litany of reasons for despair, but the way out of the numbness and solipsism and hopelessness becomes the modulation of that “for” into a preposition, into writing for another.

The line break in Mean Free Path becomes allusion for a culture of lost attention, for broken thought patterns, stuttering, things like that. Did you intend that to be a cultural reflection of some sort in order to create a more interesting poetics within the overall text?

I think poetic form always reflects a culture. Or refracts it. And of course I think of myself as reflecting my culture, and so the fragmentation and quick changes of direction can be poetic techniques and first person states and cultural characteristics all at once. I think the way thoughts “break up” in the book is part of my attempt to track what it’s like to be in time. Instead of editing out failures of communication, the book wants them to communicate what exceeds my powers of description. But it’s also true that the poems express some anxiety about the quality of contemporary attention. Distraction isn’t always bad, however. I mean, distraction sometimes masks a higher form of attention: “You’re not listening. I’m sorry. I was thinking/ How the beauty of your singing reinscribes /The hope whose death it announces.”

The poems here are less polished than your previous works. Was that done on purpose?

The poems are less polished than much of my previous work, where polish is associated with resolution. The poems make a drama of rejecting a certain kind of polish, a certain kind of facile closure. In the prose poems of “Angle of Yaw,” where I was often trying to inhabit, if only to expose as bankrupt, the language of advertising or political doublespeak, I wanted the closural effects of those discourses to be operative in my prose poems. And yes, the striation and fragmentation was certainly purposeful, and is often described in the poems:

I decided to work against my fluency
I was tired of my voice, how it stressed
Its quality as object with transparent darks
This is a recording. This living hand
Reached in error…

One way to read these lines is: “I was tired of my voice, how it stressed this is a recording”—that is, I was tired of the degree to which a certain fluency betrays the fact that the poem is staged speech, that there have been multiple takes, and that the “voice” is a textual object that’s been carefully worked. So that Keats’ living hand was never really living, the speech was never live. But these lines, like most of the lines in the second section of “Mean Free Path,” can be read in more than one order. And in fact the stanzas can often be articulated into orders that provide a high level of resolution or closure. But you’re right: the edges always show.

Tags: Angle of Yaw, Ben Lerner, Brooklyn College, interview, interviews, Ken L. Walker, Mean Free Path, Paul Valery
Posted in features

spotlight: Lisa Olstein

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Interview by Melinda Wilson

Lisa Olstein Lost Alphabet is a collection of prose poems. What appeals to you about prose poems?

The prose poem as a contemporary form certainly has particular charms (often relating to expectation, juxtaposition, tone, etc.), but I have to admit that these were not what informed my decision to write the poems in Lost Alphabet as prose poems. I was searching for a form that expressed the naturalist’s notebook sensibility of the work—the poems were written, and I hope they read, more like the speaker’s entries in a strange self-chronicle of internal and external experience and study, something between a diary and record, one devoted somewhat obsessively to intense observation. In this context, with this voice and its journeying, line breaks seemed too self-conscious both in the writing process and later in evaluating the final form of the work. This is funny for me to say, because I actually worship line breaks and their many nearly magical powers. Probably this devotion to them informed my decision not to use them in Lost Alphabet. I was searching for the most straightforward, unmediated means of letting the voice speak, because, for this particular project, the voice unselfconsciously revealing itself as it wandered into stranger and stranger territory was paramount.

The speaker in Lost Alphabet lives among and studies moths and butterflies. She becomes consumed by them, saying “When not studying specimens, I see their features everywhere.” Does the speaker’s obsession with her subjects affect her ability to care for them? In other words, can a “specimen” or subject of examination also be the recipient of one’s affections?

This confusion of category and intention is at the crux of what the speaker experiences, and of the narrative arc of the book. Obsession leads to new clarities and much blurring. Observation transforms expectation and interpretation. Experience replaces assumption. The speaker’s relationship to the moths moves from one defined by scientific distance—within which the moths are specimens to be collected, manipulated, killed—to one defined by intense empathy and closeness—within which the moths are individual beings to be discovered and interacted with, to be cherished and cared for. Affection is a key part of it, reached via fascination and also personal dislocation, a loosening of the boundaries and categories and definitions that previously shaped self and reality. It’s an incremental evolution, but in the end, affection does obliterate the possibility of the moths remaining specimens. The identities of the speaker and of the moths evolve away from their original manifestations.

The speaker in Lost Alphabet also deals with some type of painful affliction, but it is unclear what exactly ails her. Can you comment on the significance of this pain?

The pain is a part of the speaker’s general undoing. I leave it vague not to be tricky but to inhabit in my imagination the reality of the character. The speaker doesn’t know what the pain’s significance (or cause) is; the speaker experiences the pain directly and deals with the consequences. It’s a part of what makes up the shifting physical, emotional, and psychic terrain the speaker inhabits. It opens certain doors and shuts others. There isn’t a back-story that I bring to the situation but withhold from the character or from the reader, rather I know what the speaker knows—when the pain hits, how it affects things. A parallel to this is the way I approached the possibility of research while writing this book. Although studying images and seeking out language related to moths was key inspiration and fodder, I didn’t want to become an “expert” and then pick and choose what to let the speaker know—I sought external material only in support of the work of imagining through the speaker. That said, the element of affliction experienced by the speaker is certainly influenced by and infused with my own experience with chronic migraines. There was no master plan—the whole project was determined by a process of discovery-along-the-way—but once it presented itself, I was intrigued by the opportunity to put some of that lived strangeness and difficulty into a completely different context and see how it behaved there.

Can you further describe the relationship between the speaker and Ilya? Who is Ilya and what is her role in the speaker’s studies or observations? To what extent does Ilya’s character function metaphorically?

Ilya is someone from the village who becomes a companion to the speaker much like the speaker becomes an inhabitant of the village—proximity and happenstance coupled with a perceived but muted necessity, some mysterious and persistent compulsion. The speaker’s affliction and need coupled with the culture’s set of social obligations instigate the situation: “Slowly, the absence of pain arrives like snow falling. It was on a day like this, when, visiting, Ilya decided to stay. At least, never left. It is customary here to accompany the wounded. Whoever is able, and near.” The relationship is one of both closeness and distance, willingness and unwillingness, as I hope the poems describe: in some ways the two become partners in the work, in the life; in other ways Ilya stays very much outside of the speaker’s inward journey but witnesses it and sometimes assists, sometimes refuses to assist.

Much like I didn’t become an expert about moths and then pick and choose what the speaker would know, I didn’t develop but choose not to disclose a full back-story for Ilya. In the writing, I inhabited the subject position of the speaker, and so, as for the speaker, Ilya arrives in my imagination as an individual read through what is done, what is said. Stepping back just a little, of course, Ilya is a bridge: to another human being, to the human world that the speaker is losing grip of, to the culture of the foreign place where the speaker has landed. I was aware of and interested in historical, cultural, and literary clichés surrounding ideas of “noble savages” and “native wisdom”—both the terrible falseness and exploitation at the heart of these constructions and their pull on our sentiments and imaginations. In Ilya, I tried to move in and around this territory a little bit, to explore and subvert some of these tropes. In retrospect, I think the relationship serves as a microcosm for the issues of knowing/not knowing, foreignness/familiarity, discovery/limitation and overall paradox that inform the speaker’s relationship to the moths and to the world.

In addition to moths and butterflies, there are a lot of birds in this collection. What is the significance of winged creatures for the speaker?

The speaker here collects and studies moths specifically and devotedly. Over the course of the book, this fairly straightforward intention and practice sort of evolves/devolves into something different, something transformed by obsession and a shifting sense of reality. Birds function as another observable element of the landscape, along with horses, dogs, people, the river, the weather. They’re most comparable to the moths, though, in that along with insects, they’re the wild animals most available to us. Like any of us, the speaker comes in contact with domesticated (i.e. highly mediated) animals pretty regularly, and occasionally enters into proximity with the odd undomesticated animal. Birds are wild but all around, flitting in and out of natural and constructed landscapes. In this way, they’re a kind of link between worlds.

The speaker often poses questions related to identity. She asks in “[master thunder],” “Who am I here in this village? Who am I anywhere?” How might the speaker’s relationship with the moths and butterflies help her to answer these larger questions?

Rather than helping to answer them, the speaker’s relationship with the moths leads to more of these questions and makes answers to them harder and harder to find. Myopic and hypnotic study, isolation and outsider-ness, illness and the body’s heightened sensations, all of these lead to a destabilization of self and of identity. Conventional wisdom increasingly seems not to apply. Received notions of who one is and how things work, particularly the hierarchies of meaning and value we inherit so seamlessly, begin to unravel.

Could you explain the significance of the title Lost Alphabet?

It’s taken from one of the poems late in the book: “The wind wakes them; they wake me. Like a lost alphabet, they await decipherment. I read in them what I desire, what I bring to the silence like a meal.” Uncovering something that was always there but that remains inaccessible is emblematic, I think, of the speaker’s experience. So too the building block nature of an alphabet—individual letters are language at its most elemental. Fluency and all its implications are incipient, but not yet achieved. This is in keeping with the way perception and meaning—that is to say the speaker’s reality—are deconstructed down the bare bones, to elemental units.

In your previous collection Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, each section of the book begins with one of Sappho’s fragments. What made the Sappho fragments a good fit for the book? Do you have a particular affinity for Sappho?

I’ve read and enjoyed Sappho for years and I fell in love with Anne Carson’s new translations in If Not, Winter. Having read different translations over the years was also part of the draw. By virtue of their inevitable variability, translations point in their way to the slippery nature of seemingly static things—words, images, memories, etc.—and this is something the poems in the collection explore. I also like the strange power of the fragments, how they speak vividly to absence and rupture while at the same time evoking something newly affecting and whole. The fact that I lived in Greece for several years and that some of the poems in the collection refer to images and ideas gained there made using Sappho a personal treat, as well.

Are you working on anything new?

I’m in the midst of finishing a new collection of poems, so my brain is deep in final revisions and questions of order. That and learning how to be a mother to an almost two-year old amidst all the usual joys and challenges of a busy life.

[This interview was conducted via e-mail in April 2010]

Lisa Olstein is the author of Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (Copper Canyon Press 2006), winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, and Lost Alphabet (Copper Canyon Press 2009), named one of the nine best poetry books of 2009 by Library Journal. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Centrum. Her work has appeared recently in jubilat, GlitterPony, Indiana Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere.

Tags: interview, interviews, Lisa Olstein, Melinda Wilson
Posted in features

spotlight: Joshua Poteat

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Just over six months ago, a book refreshed my consistent need to electro-shock great Emersonian ideals, be it a squirrel trying its hand at evolution in Prospect Park or a cardinal singing at dawn in Alaska. Joshua Poteat’s Illustrating the Machine That Makes the World (2009, VQR Series, University of Georgia Press) does precisely that. Its pastoral qualities somehow awaken and enliven a spiritual fiber but not an evangelical abhorrence or a treehugger-boredom (and this, in an era of poetry where “pastoral” or “agrarian” are dirty words). The book sings a necessary tone in a world that speeds up transactions with inconvenient truths. I decided to (electronically) sit down with Mr. Poteat and ask him a bundle of questions.

— Ken L. Walker
———————————-

Do you draw, sketch, paint or make use of any artistic medium other than poetry?

Not exactly. I don’t quite have the talent…but I do make light boxes, which are mostly just any sort of box (metal/wood/etc.) that I hinge on a glass panel with a collaged image and backlight it with a bulb. I’ve sold a few on Etsy, at a few shows around Richmond, a few are in “private collections” (which means “sitting on my grandfather’s sideboard”), nothing fancy. However, last year my good friend Roberto Ventura and I concocted an installation proposal for a light-based art show called InLight here in Richmond. Rob is a designer/architect and we both know a couple of things about light/art/text, so we thought we could collaborate and make something reasonably viewable. We didn’t realize the show attracted a lot of national video/installation/light-based artists of great talent (we’re not trained artists), but we got in.

Our goal, beyond anything else, was to bring attention to the unmarked slave cemetery that lies under a downtown Virginia Commonwealth University parking lot by honoring those interred there, including Gabriel, the man who led the failed Richmond slave rebellion in 1800 and who was executed and buried along with 26 other slaves. So, in a huge, vacant, crumbling building, we built a temporary memorial with 13 concrete columns that contained two illuminated images each; 3 huge screens of burlap onto which we projected text from my poems about Gabriel/Richmond; various bird-oriented images of historic weight; a lovely, abstract video by Elizabeth Reinkordt of light through trees; and a large, spot-lit bird’s nest of sorts made from metal and sticks at the far end of the room. All of this was self-contained within a crumbling store. No one was allowed to enter. It was viewable only through the glass windows of the storefront. Outside, we set up speakers that played a loop of ambient, crackling voices from slave narratives recorded in the 1920s. The recordings were made on wax cylinders that had been digitized, so the voices themselves were crumbling and could not be understood. For a one-night-only show, it was tons of work, but we pulled it off. The main juror of the show, a curator from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, awarded us Best in Show.

Forgive the long explanation! This was so outside my normal process of creating, that it doesn’t feel like a part of me…thus I can ramble on and brag about it. All for Gabriel. Two white dudes coming together in the former capital of the slave trade and making a place for ghosts to relax.

Here are some photographs of our piece, taken by the wonderful Heidi Hess.

Tell me at least five of your favorite films . . .

Here are five randoms that I love:

George Washington/David Gordon Green

My Winnipeg/Guy Maddin

After Life/Hirokazu Kore-eda

My Life to Live/Godard

Days of Heaven/Terrance Malick

And likewise for musicians, bands, performers . . .

I played drums in assorted punk/hardcore bands over the years, then gradually as I got older was influenced by mellower and quieter folks, so quiet, in fact, that I have completely stopped playing drums. Bands I like range from Rites of Spring to The Smiths to Dananananaykroyd to Fionn Regan to Land of Talk to Jawbreaker to Maps and Atlases to Laura Gibson.

Where is your ideal place to live?

I’m extremely attracted to bleak landscapes…so probably Iceland (not as cold as you think) which contains many different versions of bleakness…or somewhere outside of Tucson…Bisbee, maybe (the cutest little town in Arizona). Or in any lighthouse.

I saw you read in Louisville, Kentucky as part of the Sarabande series and you read a poem about an abolitionist which I remember being very moved by. The man you wrote away from, about, evinced a feeling of John Brown.

I think you’re talking about my Gabriel poems. No John Brown poems for me, but they do share many characteristics. John Brown was born in 1800, the year that Gabriel attempted the slave rebellion in Richmond. Not sure if everyone knows Gabriel’s story, but if he and his group would have succeeded, it would have changed everything for the south…60 years sooner. He was planning to take the governor’s mansion, then the city, then the state. A huge storm came in the night of the rebellion and washed away roads and bridges, which slowed their progress, then some got cold feet, started to talk, told their “masters” and that was it.

I’ve always thought that Gabriel’s spirit was somehow passed to Brown. If not, Brown surely was inspired by Gabriel, due to his similar rebellion in 1859. These guys were not fucking around. Brown reportedly said, when referring to the pacifist movement against slavery at the time, “These men are all talk. What we need is action — action!” Some people still think of him as a terrorist. WWJBD? is a good question to ask yourself every now and then.

Not that you asked, but I wanted to mention Gabriel and how unbelievable it is to me that there is a parking lot a mere 8 blocks from where I type this…actual bodies underneath the asphalt…med school students driving their Mini Coopers over the graves…prescription pain medication spilling from their pockets…and no one with any power is doing anything about making this right. Richmond is full of endless layers of pain and history and blood and rage. The South is still not dead here. Drive down Monument Avenue and you’ll see it. Robert E. Lee is on his horse, facing south, along with J.E.B. Stuart, Jackson, and the rest of them. On Martin Luther King Day, which is called Lee-Jackson-King Day in Virginia, a group of Civil War re-enactors “guard” the Lee monument in honor of him. One day I will rent some Union uniforms and attack them and send them back to whatever time machine brought them here.

My next manuscript attempts to deal with all of this. Gabriel, the city, my own family’s history of slave ownership. Have I mentioned that one yet? It’s a sad road to travel, believe me. How do I write about the horrific nature of slavery from the “oppressor’s” point of view without stripping the dead of the dignity they deserve and without valorizing the crime itself…about history without merely using it for the sake of a poem…about suffering without simply using it as a subject for art…and attempt to treat suffering, and ultimately death, in a way that presents it honestly and with proper respect, while moving toward an understanding, a statement of what that death means, of why we should remember it? I have no idea.

You’re obviously influenced (and I hope inspired) by Larry Levis (as am I). How did you meet his work and why did you take so much away with you?

Larry is my guy. He always has been, even now. I had the chance to work with him at VCU. He’s the reason I came to Richmond, and maybe he’s the reason I’ve stayed. I think I was too young to really know what I was doing in grad school. I was 23, a little shy, from a small southern town, and mostly nervous, especially around Larry, who was brilliant and hilarious and beyond anything I could ever be as a poet. Now that I know he was working on the poems that became Elegy, I feel guilty for taking up his time.

He died my second year of school. A few of my classmates and I helped to clean out his house. It was strange for all of us. I wore a pair of his jeans for a few years. I still have his framed Albers poster…from a show at the Guggenheim in ‘88, and an old snare drum that had knife slits stabbed through the head. I was going through a box of random papers of his that day and found a checkbook. On the back of it, Larry had written, “the more you are, the cheaper death seems.” We took most of his stuff in my truck down the street to a Salvation Army. There are people all over Richmond that have Larry’s pants, shirts, pots, chairs. Who are those people?

I also had the chance to help put together Elegy. Well, by help I mean I photocopied his handwritten drafts to send to Phil Levine and David St. John. I stood over the English department copier weeping and reading those poems, trying to see through his horrible handwriting, because there was nothing else I could do.

Around the same time Larry died, both my father and my grandfather died. It wasn’t a good time for me. I graduated and didn’t write for a few years. Why should I? I worked extremely lame temp jobs…one at Philip Morris, the cigarette company (during Richmond summers, if we get a nice wind from the south, we can smell the sickly sweetness of tobacco being processed). I worked for a horrible man who had Crohn’s disease and loved model trains. Or maybe it was that he loved Crohn’s and had a model train disease. I forget. I created endless PowerPoint presentations for him. There is a small circle of hell waiting for me as I speak. After a few years of this, I picked up Larry’s The Dollmaker’s Ghost, then Winter Stars, then Elegy, and they brought me back to poems. Larry saved me.

And Mary Ruefle.

Mary Ruefle is a mostly new influence compared to Larry. My wife, Allison Titus (who is a better poet than I), got to work with Mary at Vermont College. She would send Allison wonderful letters and envelopes filled with dried flowers and acorns and seeds. I never met her, but found her work incredible. She pushes through to a new kind of lyric, irreverent and otherworldly. Her book of erasures, A Little White Shadow, suddenly brought me back to surrealist tricks at their best, and I used the same technique in my new book (in the first appendix). It’s nothing new, but it’s enjoyable, you know? At least for me. I need more joy in my life.

What are some of your rules for these three different forms (staggered line breaks, prose blocks, sparse spacing)?

I started working with a four-line stanza with certain indentations while finishing up Ornithologies, and it carried through to the new book. There’s no other explanation than aesthetics, how the lines look on the page. It just felt right. The placement. The space to breathe. The degeneration.

The prose blocks in Illustrating the Machine… are for my wife. She was getting tired of all the indents in the other poems, and thought I should switch it up a little. I’m not exactly happy with them. They don’t feel quite right to me, but the wife likes them.

As for the sparse spacing, those are the erasure poems! Surprise! They’re what I like to call the ruins of poems that appear earlier in the book. As if the poems had aged many years and this is what is left of them. A shell of sorts. Some may call it “editing,” but I ignore those people. The sparseness comes from cutting away parts of text to get at the text beneath it. Ted Genoways, the editor of the series, wanted me to lose that section, as does a lady in Tampa Bay who left a review of the book on Amazon. For the record, I don’t mean for these erasures to be seen as the final section of the book. It’s an appendix, similar to ones found in old science books. An addendum of sorts, set apart from the rest of the poems. As are the plates in the second appendix. They exist for reference only. The plates have nothing to do with the poems, really. It’s kind of nice that people care (well, two people), but what does it matter, when it comes down to it, that there’s a weirdo appendix with erasure poems in my silly little book? It can’t matter that much in the scheme of things. I mean, how many people are actually going to read this thing?! So it was nice of Ted to let me have my way. It’s how the book formed itself, and I wanted to stay true to it. Sorry, lady in Tampa Bay. Take heart, though, my dear, because we all lose in the end.

Did you have a particular audience in mind as you were compiling and sequencing Illustrating the Machine?

I’m not sure I ever think in terms of audience, at least not for this book. I had a feeling that some folks may take this as my “experimental” book (whatever that means), due to it veering away from the straight narratives of Ornithologies. It’s not, really. It’s stranger and maybe not as accessible, but it still has hints of my Levis fascination, and Charles Wright rip-offs. I see it as one long poem, but don’t tell anyone else that. What happened was…I found this book of scientific engravings, assembled by a German man named J.G. Heck in 1851, who died a few years after assembling the book. The engravings themselves are fine accomplishments, but the titles of the engravings are what got me, and this became my project. Writing poems to go with the titles. And imagining a voice for this anonymous J.G. Heck, who I could find out literally nothing about, and combining that imagined voice with my own. So the audience was me, is what I’m trying to say. And a lady in Tampa Bay.

Do you honestly think a machine “makes the world”?

Nah, ain’t no machine gonna make this place. But if you’ve seen the sculpture that the title is based on, The Machine That Makes The World, by Alice Aycock, you would think it could be true. She is absolutely wonderful.

Aycock is wonderful. Her work at the Storm King outdoor sculpture museum is pretty breath-taking. Her sculptures somehow remind me that the universe and/or cosmos is interconnected in the sense that nature, human beings, god, and whatever, are entwined in one entire system. But, is that true, or are all these things separate entities?

Oh boy. I have no freaking idea. I believe in very little, despite all the mentions of God in that book of mine. It would be nice if it was all connected, but I seriously doubt it. We’ve just invented lots of things to keep us occupied while we’re here, so we don’t notice that we’re not connected to anything at all. Like writing poems, for example. And sports. Soccer is my favorite distraction. It should be for everyone, as it is obviously the superior sport.

Would you (Facebook-wise) BECOME A FAN of American Transcendentalism if, in fact, you’re not already?

I’m not a current fan, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t be. The forced spiritualness of it all throws me off a little, but I like Thoreau. “To be awake is to be alive.” He’s hard not to like. Emerson, too.

I always feel unsure (which is what makes it such a transcendental notion) exactly what the term twilight means or refers to, aside from terribly-played vampires? What do you personally think of as twilight?

There are scientific explanations for everything, including twilight. There’s a strange little diagram/engraving in Heck’s book, entitled Illustrating the Theory of Twilight. Believe me, the title is better than the engraving. For me, it is the most beautiful time of day. I could live inside that color blue. That’s all I need to know.

You’re at a café with J.G. Heck . . . what the heck do you ask him?

First I would need to take German lessons. After that, I would ask him my favorite question to ask people: “How dare you?!” Actually, I’ve never really pictured him as anything human. I like to think of him as just a voice, behind the years and the machines and the bones and the bread.

Tags: interview, interviews, Joshua Poteat, Ken L. Walker, University of Georgia Press
Posted in features

spotlight: Jessica Bozek

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

Interview by Melinda Wilson

The Bodyfeel Lexicon is a captivating and unique first collection. It is quite ambitious. How did you first conceive of it?

Thanks! In the months leading up to the first poem I wrote, I was starting to find the one-off poem simultaneously daunting (how do you start over every time?, how do you have something new to say every time?) and suspicious (but, here, I may just mean the poem with a marked turn toward resolution). Something Graham Foust said when he read at the University of Georgia (during my MFA time) about how his poems raise more questions than they answer stuck with me. I liked the idea that the poem could be a thinking-space, more than a revelation-space. It seemed natural to work with the same ideas across multiple poems. And it’s truer to my nature besides – I often have trouble letting a thought go (even really annoying, nonsensical thoughts).

The book is centered around a fictitious correspondence between two lovers. You also have a chapbook with Eli Queen titled cor.re.spond.ence; correspondence or communication seems important to you. Can you elaborate on its significance in your poetry?

I’ve noticed how interactions, especially in-person interactions, have changed since the ubiquity of text messaging, Facebook, and smartphones. I’m not a Luddite, but I do sometimes miss the days when I had to make a plan and just show up somewhere at a specified time, when I was with a person and really with that person (not texting with someone else), when I ended up talking to my roommates’ family and friends because I happened to answer the phone when they called. I know two phone numbers right now – my own and my husband’s. I like it that my mom still memorizes phone numbers.

But how does any of this relate to poetry? I think that I use correspondence as a site of invention and attention. Wolf and Leo spin intricate fantasies for each other and make a game of long-distance communication (in the matchbook poems particularly). If they were physically together, they might just play Lexulous on their phones or sit side-by-side on the sofa, one laptop per lap.

What about the “Appendices” in the book? “Appendix C,” for instance, redefines certain words. For example, “correspondence / n. Claws across the sky.” How do these definitions, in particular, inform or modify the poems?

When I read from the book, I like to preface each poem with a definition from the lexicon. So, while a listener (or reader) might associate correspondence with letters, I like to suggest something a bit more desperate and transient.

The appendices in the original manuscript were probably twice the length they are in the finished book. I’d written what were essentially journal entries for Wolf and Leopard, but everyone who read the manuscript felt that they didn’t quite fit. So, most of those poems were published as part of the most recent Dusie Kollektiv, in a chapbook that Catherine Meng produced, called Other People’s Emergencies. I like it that the book has so many appendages.

The book is also filled with language and imagery that suggests transformation. For instance, in “The Leopard Transport” the speaker states, “The bone / lengthening, nose broadening. // Tell me if you are still you—not physically. Voraciously.” Or from “The Leopard’s Prayer”: “I gave up my body / in ever-renewing bits.” We spend our entire lives in the stages of transformation. Can you comment on the process or role of transformation for the speaker(s)?

Some declarations of transformation (such as Leopard’s “inventory at seven months: claws, not yet retractable; sensory whiskers; night sprints; the kind of raspy cough I once found attractive in you after so many cigarettes”) lighten the mood a bit. But, overall, though the book includes markers of physical transformation (including, quite literally, all the animal cell and bone images dividing the sections), I think that they function as distractions from the real, inner transformations happening – the realization that maybe, romantically, Wolf and Leo aren’t right together. They cultivate an elaborate system to map intimacy even as that intimacy seems to have failed. Their tires are flat, but they pedal along anyway.

Both Wolf and Leo appear solitary, isolated from each other, from human kind and at times, from themselves. From what might this solitude stem?

Their solitude is dramatic and (over-) dramatized—of this I am guilty. But it probably stems from the crazy-making that is removing oneself from everything familiar. Historically, I flee. After my father died, at the height of my mid-twenties crisis (everyone has one of these, right?) and a sad, absurd family soap opera, I quit my job, got my very nice roommate to watch my cats, and convinced a close friend to move to Barcelona with me. I was Me, but suddenly Me had trouble with foreign keys, announced that I’d been waiting in a long asshole (culo instead of cola), served bastard cheese on salad (queso de cabrón instead of cabra), shared a room, and started to write poems again after a five-year hiatus. I was humbled all the time. I watched MTV España, could sing along to Las Ketchup, ate lots of canned tuna, played ping pong with strangers at public tables, and gave English lessons to a 42-year-old man who: had one thing in his refrigerator (cod liver oil), still asked his mother to make him sandwiches for hikes, wrapped his arms around tree trunks to feel their energy, and wanted to be able to give motivational speeches in English (this is what we worked toward in our sessions). It was all so different from my regular life in Massachusetts, where I’d worked 9-5 as a project manager for a database publishing company and worn suits to medical society conferences in giant, freezing convention centers. Being away confirmed my sense that dislocation was crucial to seeing everything with fresh eyes. But there’s an attendant sadness in realizing that I’ll probably never cross paths with the amazing people I’ve met each time I’ve lived somewhere else. Of course, we continue to correspond, but it seems impossible for fleeting friendships to maintain their intensity.

Wolf and Leo share childhood memories with one another in their letters, and yet there seems to be little direct communication. In other words, their letters often do not answer or comment on the content of the previous. What function does their sharing serve?

Sharing stories with an absent other is one way of saying, “You still know me.” That the letters don’t quite correspond might suggest that whenever we’re not with someone in person, we have to use our imaginations to fill in the gaps.

The book also seems interested in classification, definition, particularly of the self. For example, the speaker in “[BOEING 757]” states, “I’ve never had a problem classifying others – .” The implication is that the speaker is attempting to “classify” herself but is having difficulty. In the context of this poem, as well as in a larger sense, is “classify” synonymous with “understand” or “know”?

I would say that classification is always an attempt to understand or know. Sometimes this is dangerous. We attempt to classify what we don’t understand, and classification can sell a thing or person short, at times omits more than it reveals. I continue to have trouble with “favorites” lists – I never want to settle on a single favorite or be stuck with that favorite forever. Whatever we like is just part of the story. The whole story is a myth.

The book contains many animal references, images and allusions. You also run a reading series called Small Animal Project, correct? Can you describe your fascination or relationship with animals?

I grew up with cats (liked their independence and aloofness) and had theories about dogs (or, rather, theories about how certain teenage boys exhibited canine behaviors). I believed that I must be a cat person, and I was for many years. But when my partner and his troubled little shelter dog, Ole, moved to Georgia with me, I started to perceive the world a bit differently. Ole was so attached to us and intensely loving, but he seemed to fear and need to menace just about everyone else (except the giant cockroaches that would come inside during the summer – Ole would protect those from our flip-flopped wrath by preemptively growling at us once he’d noticed one).

We tried behaviorists – one told us that if Ole had been bigger, he’d have been put to sleep already. Our last resort was the Tufts Behavioral Clinic. When I was flipping through my notebook, trying to come up with a name for the reading series, I came across the instructions given to me over the phone by the clinic. They told us to go to the Small Animal building. After Ole died, a few months later from congestive heart failure, and we adopted Clem, a sweet, well-adjusted stray, I started to think about the sadness of trying to change Ole’s behavior. It was miserable not being able to have people over for fear that he would bite them or bark the entire time, but there was something so endearing about his crankiness. He had a very clear sense of how the world should be, but we didn’t understand why he believed what he did. He was pretty much unfixable.

Maybe as a tribute to Ole, I thought of my favorite poems (and art in general) as what defies politeness, keeps me on my toes, refuses to behave the way I might expect, is unfixable. Now, though I grumble about having to take Clem out for hours everyday, I really appreciate the slowness that he brings to my day. I can’t check my email, I can’t grade papers, I can’t think about anything very important while he’s tugging me down the block or stopping to pee on a tuft of decorative grass. And I know so many of my neighbors (pretty rare in Boston) end up talking to strangers because they want to say hi to Clem. The pup, for me, is an entrance into other (animal and human) communities.

The Bodyfeel Lexicon was published by Switchback Books. What initially attracted you to Switchback?

I liked the idea of an all-women’s press, particularly one that’s inclusive in its definition of woman. I try to read and buy as many books as possible by women writers, not because there aren’t male writers I love, but because I want to support a demographic that hasn’t always been supported. In a similar vein, if I go to a reading and one of the readers seems like a jerk, I’ll be hesitant to spend time with his (or her) work. This doesn’t happen often, but my book budget is limited, and I want to use it on artists who seem like decent human beings.

I see you also have another chapbook forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Can you give us a preview?

The poems in this chapbook, called Squint into the Sun, are straightforward, line-broken, love poems set in Costa Rica, where I had the amazing fortune to teach in a tiny study-abroad program at a ecological research station in the cloud forest a few springs ago. These poems were the first project that stuck after The Bodyfeel Lexicon, which I’d just finished up and started sending out when I left for Costa Rica. While I was there, I didn’t write much beyond the activities I had my creative writing students do, but I spent lots of time looking and listening and marveling, squinting into the sun, I suppose. I also read a lot. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt healthier or that I’ll ever have another opportunity to become jaded by spectacular views. I wrote these poems nearly a year after I returned – it takes me a long time to process my surroundings. Or maybe it comes back to wanting to experience moments as they happen, without too much meta-commentary. So, my life is my life, and my writing is something else, something I do beside life.

[This interview was conducted via e-mail in March/April 2010]

Jessica Bozek is the author of The Bodyfeel Lexicon (Switchback Books) and several chapbooks, including the forthcoming Squint into the Sun (Dancing Girl Press). Recent poems appear in Action, Yes, Artifice, Fairy Tale Review, Guernica, P-QUEUE, and Womb. Jessica runs Small Animal Project, a reading series based in Cambridge, MA.

Tags: interview, Jessica Bozek, Melinda Wilson
Posted in features

snapshot: Wayne Miller

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Interview by John Deming

wayne miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you tend to remember your dreams?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When did you first begin writing poems, and why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: interview, John Deming, Wayne Miller
Posted in features

spotlight: Robert Fitterman

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Interview by Ken L. Walker

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

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

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

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

Is it funny? Seriously?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Avatar PG-13

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

2. Avatar 3D PG-13 3D

12:00, 3:30, 6:55, 10:25

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

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

4. Fantastic Mr. Fox PG

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

5. Ninja Assassin R

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This too is allegorical.

In one word, why is a word an object?

“‘Ontology.’”

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

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

Tags: interview, Ken L. Walker, Robert Fitterman
Posted in features

snapshot: Kate Greenstreet

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

Interview by DJ Dolack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I like to be surprised.

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

***

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

Tags: DJ Dolack, interview, Kate Greenstreet
Posted in features

Posts Tagged ‘interview’

spotlight: Dana Levin

spotlight: Ben Lerner

More and More NYC Poetry Readings: Storefront and Triptych

spotlight: Lisa Olstein

spotlight: Joshua Poteat

spotlight: Jessica Bozek

snapshot: Wayne Miller

spotlight: Robert Fitterman

snapshot: Kate Greenstreet

features

news

poets off poetry

reviews

song of the week

this morning

uncategorized

video

recent news

recent reviews

recent features

recent poets off poetry

the year in review

browse reviews

search coldfront